From the Editor

Scorecard on President Bush

Thus far, on the whole, it's thumbs up on President Bush's performance when it comes to Israel. In last month's Outpost, Ruth King called for abolishing the special section of the State Department devoted to Israel. Little did we think that within a month Bush would have done so. Moreover, Bush has pulled the plug on the CIA's involvement as mediator between Israeli and Palestinian security services, an appalling program that saw much U.S. covert aid go to the Palestinian Authority and had deputy CIA director George Tenet shuttling between the two (he traveled to the area at least ten times after 1996). A Bush spokesman said bluntly: "Our experience is that the best security talks are those that occur between Israelis and Palestinians directly." Most important, Bush, unlike Clinton, has no obsession to "solve" the Israeli-Arab conflict and no grandiose vision of himself garnering a Nobel peace prize. (A practical man, Bush probably recognizes that the conflict produces endless Nobel peace prizes but no peace). We do see a domestic danger, described in this Outpost by Debbie Schlussel, of the President's well intentioned "faith-based initiatives" fostering Moslem hate groups.

Bush's hands-off attitude on Israel gives Ariel Sharon space and opportunity to do what needs to be done. Will he do it? Steven Plaut weighs in pessimistically in this Outpost. The optimists think Sharon is waiting to act until the Arab summit is finished (which it will be as this Outpost goes to press). It will all too soon be obvious whether Sharon is another Netanyahu (i.e. fatally flawed) or the genuine leader Israel so desperately needs.

More Peres Profundity

"Drivel of the month" from Israel's painfully embarrassing Foreign Minister. Promoting joint economic ventures with the PA at his Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation, Peres declared: "I think violence is the intervention of the past in the attempt to change the future."

Bizarre Human Rights Activists

Ever wonder what happened to some of the most radical anti-Israel and anti-American activists and apologists for the most repellent regimes of decades past? We can attest here to the career trajectory of two of them--they are "recognized" human rights experts! Naturally, Israel-bashing is still high on their agenda.

Take Joe Stork. In the 1970s, Stork was a founder and editor of MERIP Reports. At that time the chief problem of MERIP (the Middle East Research and Information Project), described in B'nai Brith's Facts of November 1972 as a "propaganda mill of the Far Left," was in deciding with which branch of the Palestinian revolution to identify. Its sympathies clearly lay with George Habash in his tactical struggle with Arafat, but it "evenhandedly" sent out publications of both Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. When terrorists gunned down Israel's athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich and even the Communist Daily World condemned the action, MERIP issued a flyer declaring that while it was "regrettable" when people were killed, "We should comprehend the achievement of the Munich action...It has provided an important boost in morale among Palestinians in the camps." In a book review (MERIP Reports No. 23), Stork lamented that The Transformation of Palestine, edited by Ibrahim Abu Lughod (a member of the Palestine National Council), was not in paperback, "because it could help immeasurably to correct the collective amnesia that has characterized Western consciousness about the origins of the state of Israel and its war with the people of the Middle East." Predictably, at that same time, Stork was a panelist and recommended speaker for the Association of Arab American University Graduates, which in 1975 saluted the United Nations "for correctly identifying Zionism as a form of racism."

Today Stork is Washington director of the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch, a "mainstream" organization with pretensions to genuine concern for human rights. On February 22 of this year, Stork issued a statement on behalf of Human Rights Watch accusing Israel of using indiscriminate force in response to Palestinian gunfire.

And then there is Richard Falk, heavy with legitimacy as professor of International Law at Princeton. Falk too has a long record of anti-Israel activism. A de-

(Continued on p.11)

Outpost               - 2 -               April 2001