The U.S. has joined the predictable chorus of "world opinion" in criticizing Israel's shutting down (alas, only temporarily) three "colleges" that openly foment terror as part of their curriculum. One of them actually used its chemistry laboratory to teach bomb-making.
Here is what the Israel Defense Forces encountered when soldiers entered the Islamic College of Hebron. Outside the building was a sheltered area over which the words "It is holy to remember the martyr" were painted. The entire first floor was decorated with banners showing "the whole land of Palestine" and slogans calling for Israel's destruction. In the main office was a wide variety of incitement paraphernalia, including banners, posters, flags, CDs, tapes, and even children's notebooks depicting the faces of suicide bomber "martyrs" on their cover. Some showed the "Martyrs tree" -- looking like an enormous family tree, it has the faces of all the "martyrs" on it. Classrooms were filled with posters praising suicide bombings.
On the second floor were hundreds of cassettes made by the different terror organizations and boxes of folders with covers showing pictures of the World Trade Center collapsing, next to pictures of armed Palestinians. Soldiers found that the college not only distributed these materials but had incorporated them into the curriculum.
Meanwhile, as writer Naomi Ragen observes, "the UN has discovered that Congolese rebels are in the habit of raping and then eating young girls, but of course the UN can't be bothered to do anything about it. As Kofi Anan says, 'We are in the midst of drafting a report to determine what to do.' This issue has to take a back seat at Kofi's UN, because peace-loving Kofi is way too busy buying time for Saddam Hussein to build a nuclear bomb (for peaceful purposes of course, like opening the door to Paradise for the infidels by nuking them -- I mean us)."
It seems increasingly likely, as Ovadia Soffer writes in the Jerusalem Post (Jan. 15), that the U.S. plans "to pay the Arabs in Israeli currency for their active or passive support of actions against the Iraqi regime." This was the currency that the first President George Bush used after Gulf War I, when he forced the reluctant Shamir government to the conference table at Madrid, and unfortunately it looks as if his son may follow the same path. Indeed, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz announced on January 18 that "Our stake in pushing for a Palestinian state will grow" after the war. Nor does the behavior of the Quartet (the U.S., Russia, the EU and the UN) look promising. In January, the Quartet came up with a worse text than the original Bush "road map" and rejected all Israel's reservations to the new text. There is no mention of the preconditions for negotiations Bush outlined in his speech last June -- an end to terror, a democratic PA -- but only demands for total Israeli withdrawal to the armistice borders of 1949.
In The Right Man, David Frum, former speechwriter for President Bush, lauds the President for his ability to break out of the box, seeing possibilities for new policies where his predecessors and the bureaucracy have been trapped in tired formulas that do not work. But in a speech at the Manhattan Institute on January 8, Frum also asserted that the President sees a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza as the "solution" to the Arab-Israel conflict. It is hard to imagine a more tired formula than that or one less likely to achieve the President's aims. Unable to break out of the false formula, the president, a la Shimon Peres, has a "vision" of a "new" Palestinian Authority. When, naturally, this fails to materialize, the President is left holding the bag of his "solution," and finds the only way of advancing it is the way his predecessors and the bureaucracy sought to advance it -- naked pressure on Israel for suicidal concessions.
Former arms inspector Scott Ritter's conversion from the most severe critic of Saddam Hussein's failure to eliminate his weapons of mass destruction program to staunch defender of the Iraqi regime's disarmament record has been a huge boon to the Iraqi dictator. Precisely because he was the toughest member of the previous inspection regime, Ritter's clean bill of health for Saddam, proclaimed on every TV interview show that will have him, has carried weight. But now the New York Daily News (January 19) reports that Ritter was secretly prosecuted in Albany County in 2001 on a misdemeanor
Outpost - 2 - February 2003