Jewish Russian Telegraph

Some People Just Don't Get It: Denmark Welcomes Back Islamic State Terrorists

JRT: As the Islamic State continues to prove what depths of evil they are capable of reaching, some in the West - like Denmark - still feel the answer is to make nice and hope we can all just get along. With Westerners being beheaded, heads on spikes paraded through Islamic State-controlled areas and actual territory falling into terrorist hands, such naivete has never been more scary.

From the Washington Post:

AARHUS, Denmark — The rush of morning shoppers parted to make way for Talha, a lanky 21-year-old in desert camouflage and a long, religious beard. He strode through the local mall with a fighter’s gait picked up on the battlefields of Syria. Streams of young Muslim men greeted him like a returning king.

As-salamu alaykum.

Wa alaikum assalaam.

In other countries, Talha — one of hundreds of young jihadists from the West who has fought in Syria and Iraq — might be barred from return or thrown in jail. But in Denmark, a country that has spawned more foreign fighters per capita than almost anywhere else, the port city of Aarhus is taking a novel approach by rolling out a welcome mat.

In Denmark, not one returned fighter has been locked up. Instead, taking the view that discrimination at home is as criminal as Islamic State recruiting, officials here are providing free psychological counseling while finding returnees jobs and spots in schools and universities. Officials credit a new effort to reach out to a radical mosque with stanching the flow of recruits.

Some progressives say Aarhus should become a model for other communities in the United States and Europe that are trying to cope with the question of what to do when the jihad generation comes back to town.

For better or worse, this city’s answer has left the likes of Talha wandering freely on the streets. The son of moderate Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, he became radicalized and fought with an Islamist brigade in Syria for nine months before returning home last October. Back on Danish soil, he still dreams of one day living in a Middle Eastern caliphate. He rejects the Islamic State’s beheading of foreign hostages but defends its summary executions of Iraqi and Syrian soldiers.

“I know how some people think. They are afraid of us, the ones coming back,” says Talha, a name he adopted to protect his identity because he never told his father he went to fight. “Look, we are really not dangerous.”

Yet critics call this city’s soft-handed approach just that — dangerous. And the effort here is fast becoming a pawn in the much larger debate raging across Europe over Islam and the nature of extremism. More and louder voices here are clamoring for new laws that could not only charge returnees with treason but also set curbs on immigration from Muslim countries and on Islamic traditions such as religious circumcision.

In a country that vividly remembers the violent backlash in the Muslim world after a Danish newspaper published cartoon images of the prophet Muhammad in 2006, many here want Aarhus to crack down on — not cajole — extremists.

“They are being much too soft [in Aarhus], and they fail to see the problem,” said Marie Krarup, an influential member of Parliament from the Danish People’s Party, the country’s third-largest political force. “The problem is Islam. Islam itself is radical. You cannot integrate a great number of Muslims into a Christian country.”

Continue reading here

posted by: jrtelegraph

In Chaos of Ukraine, Dnepropetrovsk Again Stands as a Beacon

The Dnepropetrovsk Jewish Community's Menorah Center rises above the city.

By Dovid Margolin - Chabad.org:

DNEPROPETROVSK, Ukraine—From the viewing deck on the 18th floor of the gleaming, seven-tower Menorah Center in Dnepropetrovsk, Rabbi ShmuelKaminezki points to the courtyard of a red brick building far below.

“That is the last address where Rabbi Levi Yitzchak lived in this city,” explains Kaminezki, referring to Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson—the mystic, scholar, and father of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—who served as the city’s chief rabbi until his 1939 arrest by Soviet authorities. “It is not an accident that this building stands over the site of his arrest by the NKVD [the KGB’s predecessor] for strengthening Judaism in this city.”

A great rabbi in his own right, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson holds a revered place in Chabad-Lubavitch. He and his wife, Rebbetzin Chana, moved to Dnepropetrovsk in 1909 when he was appointed Rabbi of Yekatrinislav, as the city was then called. It was here that the Rebbe grew up together with his two brothers, Dov Ber and Yisrael Aryeh Leib.

These days, signs of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s presence can be widely felt. Some 700 children attend Chabad’s Ohr Avner Levi Yitzchak Schneerson Jewish Day School, and its affiliated yeshivah and girl’s school, and his former synagogue on Mironova Street now serves as an orphanage for Jewish boys.

With refugees from the war and violence in eastern Ukraine flooding into Dnepropetrovsk—Donetsk is less than 250 kilometers away—the orphanage is additionally hosting refugee families in its facilities, as are at least three other Jewish communal buildings in the city.

“Over there,” Kaminezki says, pointing to a building visible in another direction, “is the headquarters of the NKVD, where Rabbi Levi Yitzchak was tortured and held after his arrest. Our educational campus, the school,cheder, yeshivah and the machon (center for Jewish learning) for girls is located right near it.”

And on yet another side, surrounded and nearly engulfed by a modern, European-style shopping center, sits a tiny synagogue building. “That is where he prayed after his synagogue on Mironova was closed down by the government. It was the only synagogue to remain open through all the years of communism.” In fact, he notes that it was still functioning when he was first sent here as a Chabad emissary in 1990.

The three-story brick building that served as Rabbi Levi Yitzchak and Rebbetzin Chana Schneerson’s last home in the city.

The sites he distinguishes reflect a time when traditional Jewish life was on the run in Dnepropetrovsk—attacked and vilified by Communist authorities—and its remnants driven underground.

Now Home to Many Refugees

Towering over these places today is the Menorah Center, a 500,000-square-foot edifice that sits adjacent to the Golden Rose synagogue. Inside the enormous structure, marble-lined hallways lead visitors to kosherrestaurants, a kosher supermarket, Judaica store, florist and other stores. A flight of black granite stairs brings visitors into a two-story Holocaust museum. The complex includes two hotels, a concert hall, two convention halls and offices—one of them housing the city’s Israeli consulate and not all of them necessarily Jewish.

Yet only a few hours east of this city of 50,000 Jews—a city that has since the fall of communism experienced a remarkable Jewish renaissance culminating in the construction of the largest Jewish center in the world—a war rages. Shells and mortars fall on both military positions and civilian neighborhoods, and the Ukrainian army and pro-Russian separatists battle for control. Thousands of Jewish refugees from Donetsk, Lugansk and Mariupol are now in Dnepropetrovsk, among them the elderly and many families. This school year started with some 70 children from affected areas attending the city’s Jewish schools.

Rabbi Shmuel Kaminezki, chief rabbi of Dnepropetrovsk, prepares a ketubah together with the groom, seat at right, for a Jewish wedding taking place at Menorah Center.

“We have, of course, welcomed in many refugees. We are the closest big city to the conflict; we have many, many refugees here,” acknowledges Kaminezki. “A 95-year-old woman was brought here recently from Donetsk; doctors in our clinic saved her life.”

Nevertheless, Kaminezki does not believe that the war will hit Dnepropetrovsk.

“I think most people here are not in panic mode,” he says. “I would say that in August, people were more worried than they are now. Now, those who are panicky have become more used to the uncertainty, and others don’t think about it. But there is a lot of business being done in this city; it is a very big business town, and people are investing, putting money down. We think the worst of it has passed.”

Ukrainian Patriotic Fever

Property development in Dnepropetrovsk has transformed this industrial city from a drab, post-Soviet factory town into a shiny, almost European showcase city, with modern apartment buildings, office complexes and shopping malls. One unlikely spot of blight on the contemporary skyline is the old shell of the Hotel Parus, a project that was stopped midway through construction years ago and stands abandoned on the banks of the Dnieper River. For years, it served no purpose; now, an enormous yellow-and-blue Ukrainian coat of arms covers 16 of its floors, painted by a team of young volunteers in May.

The wedding party under the chupah. Rabbi Kaminezki personally officiates at all community weddings.

Although situated itself in mostly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, Dnepropetrovsk has embraced Ukrainian patriotism. In March, a statue in the city center of Bolshevik Revolution leader Vladimir Lenin, which many saw as a symbol of Moscow’s former grip on the area, was toppled, and the name of the square surrounding it changed from Lenin Square to Heroes of the Maidan Square.

The Jewish governor of the region, Igor Kolomoyski, who together with fellow philanthropist and president of the Dnepropetrovsk Jewish Community Gennady Bogolyubov funded construction of the $100 million Menorah Center, is strongly pro-Ukrainian. He is also credited by much of the city for heading off any possible separatist activity in Dnepropetrovsk.

“Here, a few months ago, there was also a strong fear that things would go [the same way] as the rest of eastern Ukraine,” explains Zelig Brez, stirring his drink at a table in the Menorah Center’s Coffee Life, a Starbucks-like Ukrainian coffee chain that has its only kosher branch at the center. “I have to give credit to the governor, Igor Kolomoyski, who is also a member and a founder of the Dnepropetrovsk Jewish Community, who really put all of his abilities and resources to make the region peaceful. You can’t imagine how popular his image is among all the people, which is a wonderful bridge that removes barriers from the old Soviet state-sponsored anti-Semitism. Here, everyone—Jew and non-Jew—prays for his health and success.”

Zelig Brez, director of the Dnepropetrovsk Jewish Community, shows off the smaller of the Menorah Center's two halls. The larger one can fit thousands.

A city taxi driver seems to echo Brez’s pronouncement, pouring blessings on Kolomoyski and crediting him for keeping the city secure. The driver, a Georgian by nationality but a long-time resident of Dnepropetrovsk, says that he has moved from country to country before, and would rather he be the one moving and not the city he is living in. “If I want to live in another country, I pick myself up and move there. I don’t decide to make a revolution to change my whole area into another country.”

Both Kaminezki and Brez say that instability could have occurred in the city had the situation not been brought under control from the outset. However, they add, Dnepropetrovsk could only have been destabilized as a result of outside forces because separatism has little or no support locally.

Brez also speaks of the thousands of refugees taken in by the community, and explains that it’s not the first time that his hometown has found itself in the position of a city of refuge. “There is a historical irony in the fact that exactly 100 years ago, the Jewish population of Yekatrinoslav doubled in a few months when tens of thousands of Jewish refugees flooded into the city from Lithuania as a result of World War I.”

One of 12 facades of former synagogues in the city featured in a hallway in the Menorah Center.

Among those who took in those refugees (“bezhentzi”in Russian) were none other than Rabbi Levi Yitzchak and Rebbetzin Chana, whose home became a crowded hub for the refugees. Rebbetzin Chana would stand at the stove cooking while her three sons, the Rebbe among them, served as waiters.

“Sadly, a century later, we are experiencing a similar situation here,” says Brez, “but we are definitely continuing the tradition of accepting refugees with open arms.”

A few minutes later, he rises to join the outdoor chupah ceremony of a young couple who met at the community’s Shiurei Torah/Lubavitch Youth Club and are getting married at the Menorah Center.

The Blessing of Beis Baruch

A 20-minute drive from the center of town is the Beis Baruch Retirement Home. Named after Bogolyubov’s father and built in partnership with Combined Jewish Philanthropies in Boston—Dnepropetrovsk is its sister city, as part of the former Partnership 2000 program—Beis Baruch is airy and clean, with medical and dental clinics in-house to care for its residents. Their doctors and nurses have traveled to Boston to learn from some of the world’s greatest medical experts there. In short, it’s a home not many in the twilight of their lives once living in the former Soviet Union could have ever dreamed of.

Shacharit (morning services) at the Golden Rose synagogue.

Ida Tzipkina, 92, has lived at Beis Baruch since it opened in 2002. Born and bred in Dnepropetrovsk, she’s lived in the city her entire life, save for World War II, when she and her family were evacuated to Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, in Russia Tzipkina proudly tells of her school years, where she graduated with honors, narrating her life all the way to the present. She says she loves Beis Baruch, the care she receives and the warm Jewish atmosphere it fosters.

“We have Shabbat here every Friday night, and we sing Yiddish songs,” she relates proudly. “We have a choir, too; we started it right away when we moved in. We may not be that young or very healthy, but we like to sing. Every holiday, we get together and sing songs in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian and Ukrainian. August 24th was Ukrainian Independence Day, and we sang in Ukrainian.”

Sitting in a wicker chair near Tzipkina, Beis Baruch’s head nurse adds that whenever Tzipkina sings A Yiddishe Mamme in its original, everyone weeps.

Since the beginning of the summer, however, the residents of Beis Baruch have been joined by refugees from the east—an emergency expense, Kaminezki notes, helped greatly by contributions from CJP in Boston. In one room lays Yelena Kimbanovsky, a 78-year-old who broke her leg at home in Donetsk and only with great effort was spirited out of the war zone there. Plans are being drawn up to transport her to Israel, where she will be operated on and eventually resettle.

Yelena Kimbanovsky, 78, broke her leg in Donetsk, made it to Dnepeprotrovsk for care and plans to relocate to Israel. Beside her is the head nurse from Beis Baruch.

Asked whether she has been treated well at Beis Baruch, and her weary face breaks out into a smile: “And how!”

But along with fellow seasoned citizens, Beis Baruch is now home to multiple families as well. There were, at last count, 41 refugees living at the home, and Beis Baruch’s residents are not used to the sounds of children running through their hallways.

It’s evening, and on the second floor Ania, from Lugansk, is chasing one of her three children, attempting to finally get the little girl into bed after a long day.

“On Shavuot, there was shooting right under the window of our home,” Ania recounts, after giving up on catching her daughter for a few minutes. “The next day, nobody came to the synagogue; they were afraid. That Monday after the holiday, we left.”

Ania and her husband, David, and the kids went by train, leaving their car in Lugansk. Thinking they would be gone for only a week or two while the storm passed, they brought with them only summer clothes.

“Now, it’s cold. Our friends drove to Lugansk recently and brought out some of our things. We have no idea when we’ll be able to go back. They’re saying the gas and lights are back on, but who knows when they will go out again.”

For the time being, their two daughters are enrolled in the Jewish community’s preschool, with their youngest, a boy, still home with Ania. As for her family’s future, Ania says returning to Lugansk is not just a matter of waiting for the shooting to stop, but of a real government to assume control of the area.

“Even without shooting, it’s lawless there. There’s no government; there’s no one to talk to. We think we want to leave, but it’s hard to decide.” 

posted by: jrtelegraph

Bret Stephens on Obama's Ideological Destruction of the Existing World Order

JRT: Commentary magazine has just published a monumental piece by Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens on the effects - both intended and unintended - of President Barack Obama's world view. Was it the circumstances that Mr. Obama inherited that led to the disintegration of the existing world order? Is it stupidity? Arrogance? Mr. Stephens concludes that in the end, it is Mr. Obama's ideology, what is fashionably called progessivism, that has caused this:

Above all, progressivism believes that the United States is a country that, in nearly every respect, treads too heavily on the Earth: environmentally, ideologically, militarily, and geopolitically. The goal, therefore, is to reduce America’s footprint; to “retrench,” as the administration would like to think of it, or to retreat, as it might more accurately be called. 

With ISIS on the march, Russia ready to pounce on its neighbors at any given moment, and Iran at the cusp of gaining a nuclear weapon, will we really safely make it to 2016?

Bret Stephen, writing in Commentary:

In July, after Germany trounced Brazil 7–1 in the semifinal match of the World Cup—including a first-half stretch in which the Brazilian soccer squad gave up an astonishing five goals in 19 minutes—a sports commentator wrote: “This was not a team losing. It was a dream dying.” These words could equally describe what has become of Barack Obama’s foreign policy since his second inauguration. The president, according to the infatuated view of his political aides and media flatterers, was supposed to be playing o jogo bonito, the beautiful game—ending wars, pressing resets, pursuing pivots, and restoring America’s good name abroad.

Instead, he crumbled. 

As I write, the foreign policy of the United States is in a state of unprecedented disarray. In some cases, failed policy has given way to an absence of policy. So it is in Libya, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and, at least until recently, Ukraine. In other cases the president has doubled down on failed policy—extending nuclear negotiations with Iran; announcing the full withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

Sometimes the administration has been the victim of events, such as Edward Snowden’s espionage, it made worse through bureaucratic fumbling and feckless administrative fixes. At other times the wounds have been self-inflicted: the espionage scandal in Germany (when it was learned that the United States had continued to spy on our ally despite prior revelations of the NSA’s eavesdropping on Chancellor Angela Merkel); the repeated declaration that “core al-Qaeda” was “on a path to defeat”; the prisoner swap with the Taliban that obtained Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl’s release.

Often the damage has been vivid, as in the collapse of the Israel–Palestinian talks in April followed by the war in Gaza. More frequently it can be heard in the whispered remarks of our allies. “The Polish-American alliance is worthless, even harmful, as it gives Poland a false sense of security,” Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister and once one of its most reliably pro-American politicians, was overheard saying in June. “It’s bullshit.”

This is far from an exhaustive list. But it’s one that, at last, people have begun to notice. Foreign policy, considered a political strength of the president in his first term, has become a liability. In June, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that Americans disapproved of his handling of foreign affairs by a 57-to-37 percent ratio. Overseas, dismay with Obama mounts. Among Germans, who greeted the future president as a near-messiah when he spoke in Berlin in the summer of 2008, his approval rating fell to 43 percent in late 2013, from 88 percent in 2010. In Egypt, another country the president went out of his way to woo, he has accomplished the unlikely feat of making himself more unpopular than George W. Bush. In Israel, political leaders and commentators from across the political spectrum are united in their disdain for the administration. “The Obama administration proved once again that it is the best friend of its enemies, and the biggest enemy of its friends,” the center-left Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit noted in late July. It’s an observation being echoed by policymakers from Tokyo to Taipei to Tallinn.

But perhaps the most telling indicator is the collapsing confidence in the president among the Democratic-leaning foreign-policy elite in the United States. “Under Obama, the United States has suffered some real reputational damage,” admitted Washington Post columnist David Ignatius in May, adding: “I say this as someone who sympathizes with many of Obama’s foreign-policy goals.” Hillary Clinton, the president’s once loyal secretary of state, offered in early August that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, warned in July that “we are losing control of our ability at the highest levels of dealing with challenges that, increasingly, many of us recognize as fundamental to our well-being.” The United States, he added, was “increasingly devoid of strategic will and a sense of direction.”

Read the rest at Commentary.

posted by: jrtelegraph

A Time to Rethink Abbas as Peace Partner and Other Enlightened Ideas

JRT: In 2005 Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip. Those on the Left, and even many on the Right, pronounced the withdrawal to be the only way forward for the Jewish State, a step that would give Israel a measure of real legitimacy on the international stage, and give Palestinians a chance to building something of their own. Today most observers see how off the mark the Gaza disengagement was, and countless pundits who championed it at the time have since admitted their mistake. Gaza is not a little Switzerland on the Mediterranean coast but a terrorist stronghold. Now, as the doomsayers had predicted in 2005, Hamas missiles can hit Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Which leads to the next question: Given how wrong conventional wisdom was regarding disengagement from the Gaza Strip, what other policies and ideas being hailed today are actually dangerously wrong? Take the idea that Mahmoud Abbas is the best partner Israel has ever had for peace. Abbas claims the Jews and Zionists themselves were responsible for the Holocaust and actively collaborated with the Nazis to further their goals. His dissertation at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow was on the subject, and he has yet to repudiate it. Is this man really Israel's "best partner for peace"? 

What about the two-state solution, is that really so obvious today? Seeing as we do what the Palistineans did when they got Gaza, knowing that Abbas has no qualms with forming a government with a terrorist organization like Hamas, maybe it's time we rethink such enlightened positions as the two-state solution as well, lest the lessons post-Gaza be forgotten. A mistake Israel continues to pay too high a price for.

Many pundits who supported Sharon and his Gaza disengagement took their words when they saw what happened there. Here is the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephen's recantation from 2012:

The Truth About Gaza

I was wrong to support Israel's 'disengagement' from the Strip in 2005.

Sometimes it behooves even a pundit to acknowledge his mistakes. In 2004 as editor of the Jerusalem Post, and in 2006 in this column, I made the case that Israel was smart to withdraw its soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip. I was wrong.

My error was to confuse a good argument with good policy; to suppose that mere self-justification is a form of strategic prudence. It isn't. Israel is obviously within its rights to defend itself now against a swarm of rockets and mortars from Gaza. But if it had maintained a military presence in the Strip, it would not now be living under this massive barrage.

Or, to put it another way: The diplomatic and public-relations benefit Israel derives from being able to defend itself from across a "border" and without having to get into an argument about settlements isn't worth the price Israelis have had to pay in lives and terror.

That is not the way it seemed to me in 2004, when then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to pull up stakes, reversing the very policy he had done so much to promote as a general and politician in the 1970s. Gaza, I argued, was vital neither to the Jewish state's security nor to its identity. It was a drain on Israel's moral, military, political and diplomatic resources. Getting out of the Strip meant shaving off nearly half of the Palestinian population (and the population with the highest birthrate), thereby largely solving Israel's demographic challenge.

Withdrawal also meant putting the notion of land-for-peace to a real-world test. Would Gazans turn the Strip into a showcase Palestinian state, a Mediterranean Dubai, or into another Beirut circa 1982? If the former, then Israel could withdraw from the West Bank with some confidence. If the latter, it would put illusions to rest, both within Israel and throughout the Western world.

Finally, I argued that while direct negotiations with the Palestinians had proved fruitless for Israel, Jerusalem could use its withdrawal from Gaza to obtain political and security guarantees from the United States. That's just what Mr. Sharon appeared to get through an exchange of formal letters with George W. Bush in April 2004.

Things didn't work out as I had hoped. To say the least.

Within six months of Israel's withdrawal, Hamas won Palestinian parliamentary elections. Within two years, Hamas seized control of the Strip from the ostensible moderates of Fatah after a brief civil war.

In 2004, the last full year in which Israel had a security presence in Gaza, Gazans fired 281 rockets into Israel. By 2006 that figure had risen to 1,777. The Strip became a terrorist bazaar, home not only to Hamas but also Islamic Jihad and Ansar al-Sunna, an al Qaeda affiliate.

Palestinians in the West Bank protesting Israel's operations in the Gaza Strip on Monday. EPA

In late 2008, Israel finally tried to put a stop to attacks from Gaza with Operation Cast Lead. The limited action—Israeli troops didn't go into heavily populated areas and refrained from targeting Hamas's senior leadership—was met with broad condemnation, including a U.N. report (since recanted by its lead author) accusing Israel of possible "crimes against humanity."

Read the rest here.

posted by: jrtelegraph

Putin is Prisoner of His Own Propaganda

From Julia Ioffe at The New Republic:

Did you know Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was full of corpses when it took off from Amsterdam? Did you know that, for some darkly inexplicable reason, on July 17, MH17 moved off the standard flight path that it had taken every time before, and moved north, toward rebel-held areas outside Donetsk? Or that the dispatchers summoned the plane lower just before the crash? Or that the plane had been recently reinsured? Or that the Ukrainian army has air defense systems in the area? Or that it was the result of the Ukrainian military mistaking MH17 for Putin’s presidential plane, which looks strangely similar?

Did you know that the crash of MH17 was all part of an American conspiracy to provoke a big war with Russia?

Well, it’s all true—at least if you live in Russia, because this is the Malaysia Airlines crash story that you’d be seeing.

As the crisis surrounding the plane crash deepens and as calls for Vladimir Putin to act grow louder, it’s worth noting that they’re not really getting through to Putin’s subjects. The picture of the catastrophe that the Russian people are seeing on their television screens is very different from that on screens in much of the rest of the world, and the discrepancy does not bode well for a sane resolution to this stand-off. 

Western media has been vacillating for days between calling Putin a murderer and peppering their coverage with allegedlys, telling the heart-rending tales of the victims, scrounging for anonymous leaks to link the Russians to the downed jet, and punditizing about exit ramps.

But in Russia, television—most of it owned or controlled by the Kremlin—is trying to muddy the water with various experts who insist that there is no way that an SA-11 missile system could possibly have downed a plane flying that high. And, mind you, this is not part of a larger debate of could they, or couldn’t they; this is all of Russian television and state-friendly papers pushing one line: The pro-Russian separatists we’ve been supporting all these months couldn’t have done this. Watching some of these Russian newscasts, one comes away with the impression of a desperate defense attorney scrounging for experts and angles, or a bad kid caught red-handed by the principal, trying to twist his way out of a situation in which he has no chance.

And that’s when they’re not simply peddling conspiracy theories, which have become a kind of symbiotic feedback loop between state TV and the most inventive corners of the Internet. The best of the bunch is, of course, an elaborate one: MH17 is actually MH370, that Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared into the Indian Ocean. According to this theory, the plane didn’t disappear at all, “it was taken to an American military base, Diego-Garcia.”

Then it was taken to Holland. On the necessary day and hour, it flew out, bound for Malaysia, but inside were not live people, but corpses. The plane was flown not by real pilots; it was on autopilot. Or take-off (a complicated procedure) was executed by live pilots, who then ejected on parachutes. Then the plane flew automatically. In the necessary spot, it was blown up, without even using a surface-to-air missile. Instead the plane was packed with a bomb, just like the CIA did on 9/11.

The theory also notes that the passports of victims at the crash site all look brand new even though there was an explosion and a fire. “That is, the passports were tossed in [after the crash].” And, most damningly, all the victims’ Facebook pages were created in one day and the media is not showing any of the victims’ families, just the crash site. Though this is not true of Western media, Russian television has not featured any of this. “There’s very little talk about the human cost of this catastrophe,” says independent television analyst Arina Borodina, formerly of the prominent Russian daily Kommersant. “Instead we’re seeing these unbelievable versions. For example, that someone had actually been hunting for the president or that some of the locals saw parachutists coming down from a height of 30,000 feet.”

But though it may look unconvincing to us in the West, that is because we have seen and read other things that contradict it. The Russian media space has become so uniform and independent voices so cowed and marginalizedthat there is no counterweight and, when there’s no counterweight, if you repeat a thing often enough, it becomes the truth...

Read the rest at The New Republic.

posted by: jrtelegraph

Bernard-Henri Lévy: Putin, Europe, and the Spirit of Munich

Bernard-Henri Lévy

JRT: An Op-ed by the noted French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy on the risks Europe and the world face if they do not hold Vladimir Putin responsible for his actions in Ukraine. Here is a recent profile of Mr. Lévy.

Printed originally in the New York Times:

TANGIER, Morocco — IN eastern Ukraine, Vladimir V. Putin has been playing with fire.

He has mobilized the worst elements to be found in the region.

He has taken thugs, thieves, rapists, ex-cons and vandals and turned them into a paramilitary force.

He has permitted ad hoc commanders of separatist groups to kill or chase off intellectuals, journalists and other moral authorities in the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk.

He has watched as a vodka-soaked rabble army destroys or takes over public buildings, hospitals, schools and municipal offices of the country it is pretending to liberate.

He has allowed a veritable gang war to take hold — without caring that he is losing control of the forces that he has unleashed, with rival bands pitted against one another and carving out fiefs amid the growing anarchy.

Most troubling of all: To this underworld without structure or discipline, to these undisciplined louts who know only the law of the jungle, to this new brand of fighting force that has only the dimmest idea of war and no idea, God knows, of the laws of war — to this motley collection Mr. Putin, the Russian president, gave a terrifying arsenal with which the amateur soldiers were unfamiliar and with which they have been playing, like kids with fireworks.

We know that Russia supplied vast quantities of heavy weaponry to the separatists and trained them to use the SA-11 surface-to-air missile system — the kind believed to have been used to bring down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17...

...We know what happened.

Whatever the outcome of the eventual investigation — an investigation made well nigh impossible by these dogs of war who follow no creed and no law, who, as they horrified the world by leaving the bodies of their victims abandoned in fields or heaped in poorly refrigerated train cars, as they reveled in their 15 minutes of fame by deploring before the news cameras of the world that the 298 lost souls had had the bad taste to “land” on people’s houses or in reservoirs used for drinking water, were also purloining the plane’s black boxes, organizing the export to Russia of possibly compromising debris, and casually stripping the bodies of objects of value — whatever the outcome of the investigation into all of this, an undeniable result was carnage, a war crime, an attack on Ukraine, the Netherlands and Malaysia all at once.

For all of these reasons, it was hard not to side with Ukraine’s president, Petro O. Poroshenko — who, it is worth noting, has shown in the terrible days since the crash the qualities of composure, dignity and authority that he exhibited during his campaign for office — when he asked the international community to classify as terrorist organizations the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Lugansk.

It is also hard not to agree with Mr. Poroshenko when, several hours after the tragedy, speaking unemotionally and with no trace of hate, he reminded France’s president, François Hollande, that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had been blacklisted by the world for his suspected involvement in a similar attack on a commercial airliner, Pan Am Flight 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988.

Faced with this new Lockerbie, will we in the West do no more than beg Mr. Putin to provide “free and complete” access to the crash site and offer “full cooperation” in the recovery of remains?

Have we not a moral obligation to draw logical conclusions about a crime for which, because of his incendiary and irresponsible policies, deeply unworthy of the president of a great power, Mr. Putin is, in the end, wholly responsible?

Under the circumstances — with Mr. Putin having not yet agreed to back off in Ukraine, much less in Crimea — how can France morally justify its plan to deliver to Russia two Mistral-class warships, now being fitted out in the western port of St.-Nazaire? Do we want them to become the crown jewels of a Russian fleet off Sebastopol and, perhaps, Odessa?

To see the European Union acting so pusillanimously is very discouraging. France wants to hold on to its arms contracts for the jobs they are supposed to save in its naval shipyards. Germany, a hub of operations for the Russian energy giant Gazprom, is petrified of losing its own strategic position. Britain, for its part, despite recent statements by Prime Minister David Cameron, may still not be ready to forgo the colossal flows of Russian oligarchs’ ill-gotten cash upon which the City, London’s financial district, has come to rely.

In European parlance, this is called the spirit of Munich — appeasement. And it is a disgrace.

Read in its entirety here.

posted by: jrtelegraph

Is Obama Boycotting Israel?

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz poses in his office before the oil painting he commissioned of Mr. Reagan giving the Brandenburg Gate speech in which the president declared: "Tear down this wall." Melissa Golden for The Wall Street Journal

JRT: What kind of message, asked Texas Senator Ted Cruz on Wednesday, was President Obama sending Israel when he allowed the FAA to suspend flights to Israel, thereby completely isolating it? Even more than just giving Hamas a reason to celebrate their surface victory, did Mr. Obama launch the first truly significant economic boycott of Israel? As of now many European airlines have followed the FAA's lead, and with the announcement that the FAA has reversed its decision, it is important to note Mr. Cruz's observation that the damage may have already been done, regardless of what happens next. 

Press release from Sen. Ted Cruz's website:

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, today questioned the Obama Administration’s decision to ban flights to Israel while, at the same time, announcing continuing aid that will be funneled to the terrorist organization, Hamas.

“Aiding Hamas while simultaneously isolating Israel does two things.  One, it helps our enemy.  Two, it hurts our ally,” said Sen. Cruz.

He added, “The facts suggest that President Obama has just used a federal regulatory agency to launch an economic boycott on Israel, in order to try to force our ally to comply with his foreign-policy demands.”

Sen. Cruz is asking the Obama Administration to answer five specific questions regarding the FAA’s decision to suspend flights to Israel.

Sen. Cruz’s full statement is below.

“Today, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that it was extending its ban on flights by U.S. carriers into Israel.  The rationale was that because one Hamas-launch rocket had landed in a field one mile from Ben Gurion International Airport, the ‘potentially hazardous security situation created by the armed conflict between Israel and Gaza’ necessitated this extreme action that has so far cancelled some 160 flights and left tens of thousands stranded.

“Obviously, no one wants to place civilian travelers in harm’s way, and the recent downing of Malaysian Airways flight 17 by pro-Russian militants in Ukraine is a stark reminder of the dangers posed by regional unrest.  But security concerns in Israel are hardly breaking news, and given the exceptional challenge Israel faces, Ben Gurion has rightly earned the reputation as one of the safest airports in the world due to the aggressive security measures implemented by the Israeli government. 

“Given that some 2,000 rockets have been fired into Israel over the last six weeks, many of them at Tel Aviv, it seems curious to choose yesterday at noon to announce a flight ban, especially as the Obama Administration had to be aware of the punitive nature of this action. 

“Tourism is an $11 billion industry for Israel, which is in the middle of a summer high season already seriously diminished by the conflict initiated by Hamas.  Group tours have been cancelling at a 30% rate.  This FAA flight ban may well represent a crippling blow to a key economic sector through both security concerns and worries that additional bans will down more flights and strand more passengers.  It hardly matters if or when the ban is lifted. At this point, the damage may already be done.

“Even given the remarkable resilience and prosperity of its economy, Israel has always been vulnerable to economic blackmail.  In the 1970s, we saw the Arab League boycott, which tried to punish any financial institution that did business with Israel. 

“Today we have similar noxious efforts by the Boycott, Divest, Sanction or ‘BDS’ movement, which seeks to punish Israel for the fact that the militant terrorist elements embraced by the Palestinian Authority make any peace deal an intolerable security risk to Israel at this time.  But the Obama Administration has refused to robustly denounce this effort to undermine our ally. 

“Instead, Secretary of State John Kerry issued a veiled threat last February when he encouraged boycotts of Israel and said that absent serious Israeli concessions at the negotiating table, Israel’s economic prosperity was ‘not sustainable’ and ‘illusory.’ Secretary Kerry unfortunately reprised this theme just this April, when he threatened that Israel risked becoming an ‘apartheid state’ if Israel did not submit to his chosen solution to the Israel-Palestinian crisis.

“Taken in the context of Secretary Kerry’s comments, yesterday’s action by the FAA raises some serious questions: 

• Was this decision a political decision driven by the White House?
• If the FAA’s decision was based on airline safety, why was Israel singled out, when flights would be permitted into Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen? 
• What was the FAA’s ‘safety’ analysis that led to prohibiting flights to Israel, while still permitting flights to Ukraine—where a commercial airline flight was just shot down with a BUK missile?
• What specific communications occurred between the FAA and the White House?  And the State Department?  Why were any such communications necessary, if this was purely about airline safety?
• Was this a safety issue, or was it using a federal regulatory agency to punish Israel to try to force them to comply with Secretary Kerry’s demand that Israel stop their military effort to take out Hamas’s rocket capacity?

“When Secretary Kerry arrived in Cairo this week his first act was to announce $47 million in additional aid to Gaza, which is in effect $47 million for Hamas.  In short order, this travel ban was announced by the FAA.  Aiding Hamas while simultaneously isolating Israel does two things.  One, it helps our enemy.  Two, it hurts our ally. 

“Until these serious questions are answered, the facts suggest that President Obama has just used a federal regulatory agency to launch an economic boycott on Israel, in order to try to force our ally to comply with his foreign-policy demands.  

“If so, Congress should demand answers.”

posted by: jrtelegraph

Who Has a Track Record of Shooting Down Civilian Airplanes?

 

JRT: With the news that an airplane was shot down over Ukraine this morning came denials from Ukraine, as well as accusations from Russia. Part of Ukraine's immediate case has been the face that they have no Buk missiles in the eastern part of the country, while Russian media reported just last month of rebel takeover of an anti-air installation, and the Russians have been getting testy when asked about them. Additionally, Russian "separatists" have apparently taken the downed plane's black box, and Russia Today (RT) is now reporting, in all seriousness, that Ukraine was likely targeting President Putin's plane and got the wrong one.

You can listen here to Russian seperatists discussing downing a plane, in Russian.

At this time, it is healthy to remember that one of these countries has a track record of shooting down civilian planes with no regard to human life. It is also useful to see how a real leader reacts in such situations. Above we present President Reagan's comments following the Soviet attack on KAL 007 in 1983. 

posted by: jrtelegraph

Hamas is Part of a Civilization That Wants to Die

JRT: David P. Goldman has written some fascinating analyses of the current Gaza war and the situation in general. Read his well articulated explanation why a one-state solution is the only viable future here. 

David P. Goldman, originally posted on PJ Media:

It's like the old joke: Why do Jewish men die before their wives? Because they want to. Civilizations for the most part die because they no longer want to live. That is the nub of my 2011 bookHow Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying, Too).They cease to believe in their own future and distract themselves from the prospect of extinction as best they can. Hellenistic Greece was the first universal demographic disaster; it gave us prototypes of the steam engine and the computer (via Hero of Alexandria) as well as the modern literary forms. But even wealthy men exposed their daughters and the population imploded. When Aristotle taught that men naturally seek the good, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence had already turned against him. Most men seek nothingness. Soon the last surviving remnants of the classical world will disappear. In another generation, more people will speak Hebrew than Greek.

Hamas wants to die, obviously and visibly. That thought horrifies Westerners. As a number of Israeli commentators observe, Hamas doesn't particularly care about having a Palestinian State. It wants to destroy the Jewish State and is willing to die in the process. It wants to die in such a way that Israel will die, too. There is something utterly surreal to Hamas crowding civilians around military targets, and Israeli pilots declining to attack them...

Hamas, to be sure, proposes to die in an accelerated time frame and a particularly disgusting fashion, but it should be kept in mind that self-willed extinction is the norm. West of the Indus, Israel is the only survivor among the thousands of little nations that flourished between 10,000 BC and 600 AD. To be sure, there have been plenty of small tribes that wanted to live but were trampled by conquering hordes. The rule, however, is that civilizations die of their own disgust with life. Most of the industrial nations are dying, some very quickly. Most of the Muslim world would rather die than accommodate modernity (although some of it may choose to cease to be Islamic).

I do not mean to sound cruel, but the best thing you can do for victims of a dying culture is: Don't be one of them. Individuals who want to live have the option of changing cultures. I do not mean that Israel (or anyone else) should go about killing off enemies in order to satisfy their death wish. God forbid: life is still sacred to us even if it is repugnant to them. Neither do we have to commit suicide in order to accommodate our crazy neighbor's death-wish. We might try to talk him down from the roof, but we are entitled to step aside when he jumps. It is not in our power to persuade suicidal civilizations to carry on living. Ultimately it is our job to contain the damage to ourselves. We cannot help but accept some civilian deaths while engaging an enemy that seeks the maximum number of civilian casualties.

All of this is anathema to liberals, whose premise is that human agency can fix all problems. Enlightenment materialism posited a natural man who either sought self-preservation (Hobbes) or naturally pursued his own best interests (Locke) or was inherently good before corrupted by civilization (Rousseau). Satanic laughter from around the Levant drowns out the squeaky, thin voices of the Enlightenment. One no longer needs to read about it in books. The Middle East has become "How Civilizations Die: The Reality Show."...

Read the rest at PJ Media

posted by: jrtelegraph

Who Are You Mahmoud Abbas?

Ambassador Yoram Ettinger writes:

Unlike Western policymakers and public-opinion molders, Arab leaders never doubted Mahmoud Abbas' core ideology. Therefore, they deny him adequate financial support, while the Arab oil-producing countries provide Egypt multibillion dollar assistance. Similarly, during the 1980s, Saudi Arabia provided Afghanistan's Muslim rebels a billion dollars in annual aid, while extending Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yassir Arafat a mere $100 million annually, which was cut off following Arafat's and Abbas' betrayal of Kuwait in August 1990, when they collaborated with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's invasion of the sheikhdom. Moreover, Arab countries did not support the PLO and Hamas during their grand confrontations with Israel: the first and second intifadas, the Lebanon War and the series of wars in Gaza.

The Arab attitude towards Abbas is driven by Abbas' track record of intra-Arab subversion and terrorism. For example, during the late 1950s, Abbas and Arafat fled Egypt because of their subversive and terrorist activities, carried out as key Muslim Brotherhood operatives. In 1966, they fled Syria to Jordan, following their murders of a number of Syrian intelligence officers. In 1970, they were expelled from Jordan to Lebanon, following their attempt to topple Jordan's Hashemite regime, which ignited a brutal civil war. By 1975, they had plundered large parts of southern Lebanon, attempting to overthrow the central regime in Beirut, which triggered the Syrian invasion of Lebanon, a series of civil wars and the destruction of Lebanon. In 1990, Palestinian intelligence cells in Kuwait and Palestinian battalions in Iraq facilitated Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, which since 1960 had been the preferred safe haven for 300,000 Palestinian relatives and allies of Arafat and Abbas. As a result of that egregious betrayal, Kuwait expelled over 200,000 Palestinians. No Arab leader protested that expulsion.

While Egypt is cracking down on Hamas and its affiliates, Abbas -- an ally of Saddam, North Korea, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela -- provides Hamas with a vital tailwind.

On March 15, 2013, Abbas, the Russian-speaking graduate of KGB courses and Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, the former steward of PLO ties with the ruthless East European communist regimes, and (since 1993) the lead PLO negotiator with Hamas, told Russia Today TV: "As far as I'm concerned there is no difference between the policies of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas." The frequent attempts to form the PLO-Hamas axis are based on their common strategic goal, while maintaining their tactical differences. Abbas' strategic goal (the eradication of the Jewish state) and tactics (gradually, via diplomacy and terrorism) are specified in the 2009 Fatah platform, the PLO's 1974 Phased, Step-by-Step Plan and the 1964 PLO Covenant (two thirds of its articles are dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state). Both terror organizations are chaired by Abbas, who -- according to the 1993 Oslo Accord -- derives his power as the chairman of the Palestinian Authority from the PLO, which is the highest Palestinian authority. Fatah was established in 1959 and the PLO in 1964, before Israel reasserted itself in Judea and Samaria and before the establishment of the first modern-day Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria. Thus, the strategic goal of Abbas has been directed at pre-1967 Israel. On November 29, 2012, Abbas told the U.N. General Assembly that "occupation" and "injustice" began in 1948, not in 1967.

Abbas highlights the claim of return to the "1948 occupied areas," which explains his insistence to represent and release Israeli Arab terrorists. Being a devout Muslim, and a former top Muslim Brotherhood activist, Abbas adheres to cardinal principles of Islam. For example, Waqf, the supposedly divinely-ordained Muslim right over any area previously controlled by Muslims, including the Land of Israel. Also, the Hudaybiyyah Treaty, which considers agreements concluded with "infidels" a pragmatic, provisional agreement to be breached whenever possible to bring the infidel" to submission, and not to peaceful coexistence.

To achieve the strategic goal, Abbas has spoken softly, while carrying a horrendous stick of hate-education in schools, mosques and media, brainwashing Palestinian society: the most effective production-line of terrorists. One's education is the most authentic reflection of one's values, ideology and strategic goal. Hence, the popularity of the anti-Semitic "Mein Kampf" and "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" on the Palestinian street. Thus, the Abbas-driven Palestinian conventional wisdom: It's not the size -- but the existence -- of the Jewish state that is the crux of the conflict with Israel.

The central role played by terrorism in shaping Abbas' worldview is highlighted by his demand to release Palestinian terrorists, who deliberately and systematically murdered, maimed and intimidated Israeli civilians; by providing monthly allowances to families of terrorists; and by naming streets, squares and soccer tournaments after terrorists; and by featuring terrorists as role-model to Palestinians.

Germany and Japan were transformed from hateful -- to peaceful -- countries by uprooting hate-education and terror regimes, not by engaging and funding them.

Should the U.S. taxpayer continue funding the hate-education system of Abbas, who caused the flight of Christians from the Bethlehem area, and is known as "Mr. 20%" for his corruption?

Should Israel accept Abbas in view of the ferocity of Hamas terrorism? Only if Jack the Ripper's vicious style made the Boston Strangler an acceptable member of society.

posted by: jrtelegraph