[(Continued from p.11)]
uncharted territory. But it may well turn out that while the new rules sound more appealing than the old, they prevent the necessary transformation of the defeated country, precisely because its population never experiences real defeat. It is too early to tell if Iraq will be transformed or, more likely, lapse into another species of authoritarianism. Certainly in the case of Israel, the Israeli army's limited police actions do not change the attitudes or behavior of the Palestinian Arab population. Twelve years ago, AFSI published a pamphlet The New Israel Fund: A New Fund for Israel's Enemies. The response was vituperative, with Jewish newspapers crammed with letters from establishment figures -- not just those on the far left -- coming to the defense of the New Israel Fund. All we can say is "We told you so" as others belatedly recognize what we saw at the outset. In May, Gerald Steinberg, a political scientist at Bar Ilan University, wrote "How the New Israel Fund Supports the Propaganda War Against Israel." Steinberg focuses on NIF's funding of anti-Israel NGOs because, as he says, they "enjoy a halo effect, and their claims to promote noble causes without a political axe to grind exempt them from scrutiny."
The New Israel Fund finances Physicians for Human Rights Israel, which uses a medical cover to propagate crude anti-Semitic propaganda, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, which calls Israel's efforts to prevent suicide bombings "apartheid" and the Arab Association for Human Rights, which denies Israel any legitimacy.
Steinberg is mistaken in saying the New Israel Fund should clean up its act because it makes "important contributions" in other areas. The few non-controversial outfits it funds are simply a sop to the NIF's American Jewish funders, most of them useful idiots, but the heart and soul of NIF are in its anti-Israel labors.
Is Ataturk's legacy finally losing its force in Turkey? The visitor to Turkey is struck by the omnipresence of Ataturk so many decades after his death -- images of the founding father of modern Turkey are everywhere. His political legacy -- Europeanization, secularization and democracy (within limits required by the first two) -- has been strictly upheld by Turkey's military, which has regularly pruned itself of officers with Islamic tendencies and intervened in cases of political crisis, including challenges to secularization. Most recently, in 1997, Turkey's first Islamist prime minister Najemettin Erkaban was forced to resign by the armed forces. But in November a party with Islamist roots, the AKP (Justice and Development Party) won two thirds of the seats in Parliament (although it only received a third of the vote -- Turkey's electoral system is even stranger than Israel's). While this is not to say that Turkey will soon abandon Ataturk's vision in favor of some version of Islamic orthodoxy, it does suggest that Turkey is moving away from, rather than closer to the secular West.
Thanks to long time AFSI member Rev. George Massay for his insight into the organization that -- if we believe the French -- embodies international morality. "Personally I suspect that the staff and diplomats at the UN showed their true colors when a food fight broke out at its headquarters on May 2 because the staffs manning the restaurants went on a wildcat strike at lunch time. Food, liquor and silverware worth $7,000 were looted by UN diplomats and staffers in a melee that some said resembled Baghdad immediately after the liberation. And these are the people who claim to know how to address and settle the great issues of our times! My comment was 'We need to send in the Marines.'"
Americans For a Safe Israel
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Outpost - 12 - June 2003