From the Editor

The absurdity of the report, whose chief aim seems to be a PC efffort to make believe today's terror has little to do with Muslims, goes beyond Israel. As Daniel Pipes has pointed out, one way the report does this is by counting damage to property the same as damage to people (except in Israel, where damage to either does not count). So of the 346 terror incidents the State Department logs in 2001, over half are on a multinational oil pipeline in Columbia, making South America the chief source of world terror. Incidents are documented by where they happened, not who did them, with the result that the attack on the World Trade Center is an example of North American terrorism! Since the vast majority of terror attacks in Israel are simply ignored, the Middle East comes out as one of the most terror-free areas in the world -- behind the U.S., Africa, Asia, and Latin America!

No wonder there are calls in Congress for an independent, honest report on terror to replace the dangerous nonsense submitted by the State Department.

The Christian Right

For two decades, while so-called "mainstream" Jewish organizations like the ADL vilified the Christian right, AFSI has been working with Christian friends of Israel in the evangelical community and has emphasized that these are the best friends Israel has. Now the Wall Street Journal, in a front page article, talks of the "extraordinary political alliance that has burst into view during the current Mideast crisis." We are particularly pleased at the way the article emphasizes the role of AFSI's long time good friend Ed McAteer in mobilizing rightwing Christian support for Israel.

Fence Madness Continues

Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer announced on May 20 that he had instructed the security establishment to construct a fence 362 kilometers long, at a cost of $200 million, separating Judea and Samaria from the rest of Israel. Readers of Outpost will be familiar with the many reasons this is an insane project. Indeed, it is so stupid that even the New York Times was prompted to publish an editorial pointing out the failure of "walls" throughout history. An additional (ignored) voice of sanity comes from Brigadier-General (res.) Aharon Levran, a former senior IDF intelligence officer, who says "By putting up a wall, you're letting the other side have full rein to do what he wants."

But perhaps the most telling comment on the folly of "separation" comes from none other than Ariel Sharon, in his Jerusalem Post column of January 27, 1995, written when an earlier Labor government touted a "wall" as the solution to Israel's security problem: "It is taking a year to construct the external fence around the Gaza Strip, 54 kilometers long. The Palestinians have started sabotaging it even as it is being built....Even stolen vehicles from Israel are smuggled through....The length of the Green Line before the Six Day War was 309 kilometers. We were never able to seal it. The new separation line will be much longer. Additional fences will have to be built in the Jordan Valley and around the settlement blocks. The system's length will be 500 kilometers. Won't these fences be sabotaged? Won't they be penetrated? Where will the forces to secure this system come from? From what budgets? It is difficult to fathom such silliness."

Democracy a Cure?

Natan Sharansky has finally won a hearing for his long-time argument that democratic reforms are key to the possibility for peace with a Palestinian entity. But while this sounds appealing to Western ears, attempts to open up Arab societies have thus far not been encouraging. In Algeria, recognition that Islamists would win the elections led the army to cancel them, leading to a reign of terror from fundamentalists that has now continued many years. This year Bahrain took tentative steps to democracy, with municipal elections that even permitted women candidates. The result (New York

June 2002               - 11 -               Outpost