Hope in the Mideast?

Mortimer Zuckerman's new commentary at U.S. News suggests the possibility of a diplomatic breakthough on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. His defense of Israel in the opening segment is a nice primer on the Jewish state's moral legitimacy, a point that bears reiteration following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York and the ongoing Palestinian campaign to undermine Israel's right to exist:

This campaign of repudiation cuts deeply into the Israeli psyche. The Israelis know that the Jews have lived in the land of Israel without interruption for nearly 4,000 years. They know that, except for a short Crusader kingdom, they are the only people who have had independent sovereignty on this land. And they are the only people for whom Jerusalem has been their capital.

They are not a foreign occupier because the State of Israel is the child not of European colonialism but rather of Ottoman decolonialization. It was that Jewish historical bond that led the League of Nations 85 years ago to establish the right of the Jewish people to reconstitute a Jewish homeland on all the territories west of the Jordan River, all the way to the Mediterranean. That same right to a national home was sanctioned again 59 years ago by the new United Nations. After an Arab invasion 40 years ago, the U.N. passed a resolution affirming Israel's right to "secure and recognized boundaries." As Winston Churchill noted in 1922, "The Jews are in Palestine by right, not sufferance." The refusal of the Palestinians and of Ahmadinejad to recognize this has, for decades, undercut Israeli confidence in their true motives.

Read the whole thing. Zuckerman suggests that November's proposed summit between Israelis and Palestinians - to be held under the good offices of the United States - might bear fruit should moderates forces, such as new Palestinian Prime Minister Salaam Fayad, succeed in shifting the Palestinians away for their perpetual strategy of victimhood to one of honesty, pragmatism, strength, and institutional performance.

Zuckerman's a realist, though, and he's careful to point out the wisdom of keeping expectations reasonable (especially with reference to Mahmound Abbas).

The Case Against Ahmadinejad at Columbia

While monitoring the continuing controversy over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York, be sure to read Caroline Glick's phenomenal essay outlining the moral case against the Iranian president's speech at Columbia.

Glick lists all of Iran's outragreous actions and statements, on the Holocaust and Israel, on human rights, on regional security, and so on. These actions - which represent Iran as the true international pariah that it is - make a clear justification for denying Ahmadinejad a platform. But Glick's objections go further, to an even more fundamental ethical issue in the controversy:

THE PROBLEM with Columbia's action, the reason that there can be no moral justification for the university's decision, is because by inviting Ahmadinejad to campus, Columbia has made the pros and cons of genocide a legitimate subject for debate. By asking Ahmadinejad challenging questions, Bollinger has reduced the right of the Jewish people to live to a question of preferences.

No doubt, Bollinger prefers to see the Jewish people remain alive. But this is beside the point. The point is that by debating the issue with Ahmadinejad, Bollinger just put the right of the Jewish people to exist on the table.

Here it is important to note Ahmadinejad's uniqueness. It is true that in supporting the annihilation of Israel, Ahmadinejad is no different from his terrorist underlings Hassan Nasrallah, Khaled Mashaal and Farouk Kaddoumi. Moreover, Ahmadinejad's desire to wipe the largest concentration of Jews on earth off the map simply because it is Jewish is shared by all of his colleagues in the Iranian regime and most intellectuals and religious leaders in the Arab world.

But still there is a difference between Ahmadinejad and all the others. Through his words and his deeds, Ahmadinejad has become the symbol and the leader of the growing international movement which supports and engages in activities to advance the destruction of the Jewish people. Through his words and his deeds, Ahmadinejad has become the poster boy for genocide.

As a result, what was said yesterday at Columbia is of no consequence whatsoever. What matters is that by inviting Ahmadinejad to its campus, Columbia University announced that supporting or opposing the genocide of the Jews is a legitimate topic for discussion. In so doing, as an institution Columbia has taken itself beyond the pale of legitimate discourse. As an institution, Columbia has embraced depravity by renouncing the intrinsic sanctity of human life.

Glick argues finally for the resignation of Columbia's Lee Bollinger, for campus alumni to end their financial support of the university, and she urges students to rise up in a campaign of moral indignation against this depravity.

This is a powerful essay - indeed, one of the most penetrating analyses on moral right I've ever read.

I still can't help thinking that there remains a free speech issue here in that no matter how despicable an idea, airing a view makes the idea compete in the marketplace of ideas and values. As any truth-thinking person knows, the existential essence of the Jewish people - the fundamental matter of Jewish life - is not a matter for debate. Thus, for the world to hear Ahmadinejad once again state his views - that the Holocaust "needs more research" - the West will be able to continue to build the case it needs to topple the Iranian regime, which kills Americans in Iraq, supports the annihilation of Israel, continues apace in its nuclear development program, and massacres in citizens in a brutal campaign of massive human rights violations.

There's no redeeming value in what Ahmadinejad spouts, but his words are on record in the international court of public opinion. I'm convinced that we'll hear and see more of Iran's evil deeds, all the more evidence justifying preventive strikes on the state's nuclear program, and ultimately the decapitation of the regime.

Ahmadinejad Calls for More Research on Holocaust

Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered his highly contested speech at Columbia University today, where he renewed his controversial statements about the Holocaust. The Washington Post has the details:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was greeted with student protests and withering public criticism during a visit to Columbia University Monday in which he defended his government's human rights record, denounced Israel and rejected U.S. efforts to restrict Iran's nuclear program.

Speaking to students and faculty at Columbia a day ahead of his scheduled address to the United Nations General Assembly, the hard-line Iranian president also asserted that his people, including women, "enjoy the highest levels of freedom," and he claimed that homosexuality does not exist in his country.

Before his speech, he came under unusually harsh criticism from Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, who condemned what he said was the Ahmadinejad government's expanding crackdown on dissent, its persecution of the B'hai religious minority and homosexuals, its support for the destruction of Israel and its pursuit of a "proxy war" against U.S. forces in Iraq.

"Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator," Bollinger told Ahmadinejad from a podium across the stage. He said the Iranian's denial of the Holocaust might fool "the illiterate and ignorant," but that "when you come to a place like this, it makes you quite simply ridiculous." Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust suggested he was either "brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated," Bollinger said.

The university president's caustic comments were met with cheers and sustained applause from the roughly 700 people in the audience, most of them students.

Ahmadinejad called the introductory speech insulting and said Bollinger was misinformed. But he went on to repeat his assertions that the Holocaust should be researched "from different perspectives," and he denounced the punishment in Europe of "a number of academics" who were "questioning certain aspects of it." He also said Palestinians should not be "paying the price for an event they had nothing to do with."

The New York Times quotes Ahmadinejad as saying there is insufficient research on the truth of Nazi Germany and the Jews:

He said that as an academic he questioned whether there was “sufficient research” about what happened after World War II, referring to the Holocaust.

I'm going to read the full transcript of the Ahmadinejad speech later, but from what I see in early reports, his statements confirm the argument I made yesterday. As witnessed today, Ahmadinejad has reaffirmed Iran's denial of the Holocaust, and his speech continues the Iranian regime's campaign to weaken the legitimacy of the Israeli state.

As the Los Angeles Times reported today, Ahmadinejad's resistance to Israel and the United States has built the Iranian regime a growing following among Arabs in countries like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia:

...Ahmadinejad's intense distrust of the U.S. and hatred of Israel have elevated him to mythical status for the frustrated Arab mechanic, taxi driver or lawyer seeking a pure, forceful message.

The Times article notes further that Arab public opinion holds Iran up with Hezbollah and Hamas as a glorious Middle East underdog, battling larger, insidious Western forces. It's clear among large segments of the Arab street that Iran's well-suited - with its aggressive intentions and growing nuclear capability - to lead a revisionist challenge to Middle East regional order.

Much of the blogosphere is up in arms over Columbia's decision to sponsor an Ahmadinejad lecture. The anger is fully understandable, but in the long run I think the Iranian president's words will provide additional support for a firm stand against Iran's drive to weaken international security.

Further, the left blogosphere's noxious defense of Iran - not to mention the left's continued statements of moral equivalency between Bush administration and the Iranian regime - will further discredit the radical political agenda and ideology in current debates over U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Suicide of Reason? Radical Islam and the West

I picked up a copy of Lee Harris' new book yesterday, The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West. I've just read the preface thus far, but I thought I'd share a blurb from the book jacket with readers. This is what John McWhorter had to say about the volume:

Once again Lee Harris throws cold water on thinking Americans' tendency to view Islamist terrorists as noble freedom fighters in the vein of black Americans during the civil rights movement or East Timorese throwing off the Indonesian yoke. Harris understands that we are faced with an ememy who seeks not reasoned negotiation but the destruction of the Western way of life, and that holding to self-critical, multi-culti pieties during this crisis will spell self-sabotage.

I'm familiar with some of Harris' other writings. He's also the author of Civilization and its Enemies.

Plus, his article in Policy Review, "The Intellectual Origins of Anti-Americanism," is a modern classic. Here's a great quote from that article, dissecting blame-America ideology, which holds the United States as the source of evil in the world:

America-bashing is anti-Americanism at its most radical and totalizing. Its goal is not to advise, but to condemn; not to fix, but to destroy. It repudiates every thought of reform in any normal sense; it sees no difference between American liberals and American conservatives; it views every American action, both present and past, as an act of deliberate oppression and systemic exploitation. It is not that America went wrong here or there; it is that it is wrong root and branch. The conviction at the heart of those who engage in it is really quite simple: that America is an unmitigated evil, an irredeemable enormity.

Harris' stuff is great. Happy reading!

Appeasement in Middle East Studies

Cinnamon Stillwell's got a great article up today at American Thinker, "Appeasement Finds a Home in the Academy":

Instead of providing moral clarity in a time of war, too many academics busy themselves inventing strategies to get along peaceably with genocidal terrorist groups and the governments that aid and abet them. Among the appeasers, three professors of Middle East studies stand out: the University of Minnesota's William O. Beeman; Boston University's Augustus Richard Norton; and Harvard University's Sara Roy.

William O. Beeman, professor and chair of the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, as well as president of the Middle East section of the American Anthropological Association, apparently thinks the bloody, belligerent Iranian regime can be placated by politeness. In a recent article (scroll down), Beeman counseled the U.S. to negotiate with Iran using "language" that is "unfailingly polite and humble."

Humbleness toward a regime hell-bent on building the bomb, funding terrorists worldwide, threatening to wipe Israel off the map, seizing U.S., British and Canadian citizens as hostages, and supplying weapons that kill American servicemen in Iraq?

"Politeness," is hardly the best tactic for dealing with opponents who clearly hold strength in the highest regard, but such is Beeman's recommendation. Unfortunately, it's advice that the Bush administration, and the State Department in particular, appear to be following, and the lack of desirable results thus far point to its ineffectiveness. The recent decision to consider classifying Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization provides hope that realism may yet prevail.

Read the rest. Norton and Roy are calling Hezbollah and Hamas "complex and nuanced," and they suggest that we can work with these groups.