Thursday, December 30, 2010
The Katsav Conviction
(with me and my children in it) and being hit by hundreds of Katyusha
rockets, as a direct result of Ehud Barak turning southern Lebanon
over to the Hezb'Allah in the worst act of cowardice in Israeli
history:
July 27, 2006 11:08 A.M.
Under the Katyushas by Steven Plaut
As the rockets fall on Israel, there are lessons to be learned.
Haifa, Israel — I am writing this in between ducking in and out of a
bomb shelter as Haifa is bathed by the Katyusha rockets and other
missiles that Ehud Barak has allowed to be fired at the city. Why Ehud
Barak? Because, as Israeli prime minister in 2000, he ordered the
cowardly unilateral withdrawal of Israeli troops from the security
zone in southern Lebanon, which led to the positioning of thousands of
Hezbollah rockets on Israel's northern border.
It occurs to me that now would be as good a time as any to sum up
everything that has been learned about the Middle East conflict — that
is, everything that the Israeli government and chattering classes have
refused to learn for the past two decades.
1. Nice fences do not stop missiles, rockets, and mortars.
2. Complete removal of Israeli forces and Jewish settlers from an area
does not achieve anything positive, but merely signals Israeli
weakness, inviting escalated terror and aggression from Israel's
enemies.
3. Hezbollah and Hamas cannot be defeated with air strikes. There is
no effective alternative to ground invasion and ongoing control of the
ground.
4. Unless the Israeli military controls the ground on the other side
of fences, those fences achieve nothing.
5. Goodwill gestures by Israel tend to increase terror and invite
further demands.
6. Goodwill gestures by Israel never produce moderation of Arab goals
and demands, but rather produce the opposite.
7. Terror is not caused by settlements, but rather is fueled by the
removal of settlements.
8. Terror is not caused by Israeli military occupation, but rather it
is allowed to flourish with the removal of Israeli military
occupation.
9. It is impossible for there to be two sovereign entities between the
Jordan River and the Mediterranean.
10. No matter how many concessions Israel makes, the world will always
justify Arab terrorism, because there is always one more capitulation
that Israel has failed to make (e.g., giving up the "Shebaa Farm" on
the Golan Heights).
11. No matter how nice Israel is to Israeli Arabs, no matter how many
affirmative-action programs it implements, it will always be accused
of being an "apartheid regime."
12. Much of the Israeli far Left is essentially an anti-Semitic
movement that seeks Israel's destruction and automatically endorses
the enemies of Israel in all things.
13. The Israeli Labor party and its Kadima cousin may be more
effective at fighting terror, once they decide to do so, than Likud.
The reason is that if Likud were fighting terror, the Israeli Left
would take to the streets in mass demonstrations against Israeli
imperialism and aggression, and the leftist Israeli media would
declare that 400,000 protesters turned out.
14. The Israeli Left will oppose every conceivable act of Israeli
self-defense, other than total capitulation.
15. Jewish far-leftism is a very real enemy of Israel.
16. Most international observers don't mind seeing Jewish civilians
murdered by terrorists, and will applaud and justify all such murders
as comeuppances for the Jews' being so insensitive.
17. Israeli niceness and flexibility encourage and embolden anti-Semites.
18. Israel-bashing is driven by anti-Semitism, and Israel-bashers are
increasingly open about their delight at seeing Jewish civilians
murdered.
19. Israeli pursuit of the "peace process" has triggered a worldwide
storm of anti-Semitism.
20. Terrorists cannot be appeased.
21. Arab terrorists do not morph into statesmen.
22. Looking for Palestinian moderates in politics is a fruitless endeavor.
23. Israel-bashers do not care about dead Arab civilians, other than
as a useful bludgeon with which to de-legitimize Israel.
24. Much of the Western Left would celebrate the destruction of Israel.
25. The vast majority of Israeli Arabs want to see Israel destroyed
and the Jews thrown into the sea.
26. There are hundreds of Jewish professors in Israel who serve as an
academic fifth column for terrorism and will do almost anything to
collaborate with the enemies of their country.
27. The Arabs will not accept an independent Israel in any set of
borders, no matter how small. Thus nothing can be achieved by reducing
Israel's territory, other than signalling weakness and vulnerability.
28. Much of the Western media believes that there are no problems on
earth that could not be solved by destroying Israel.
29. Most of the governments of Europe do not believe Jews should be
allowed to defend themselves from aggression.
30. The only country on earth that is expected to respond to the mass
murder of its civilians by turning the other cheek is Israel. The only
country on earth that has spent many years trying to defeat terrorism
by turning the other cheek is Israel.
31. Whenever Israel responds firmly to aggression and terrorism, it
will always be criticized for a "disproportionate" response.
32. Most of those who claim that anti-Zionism is different from
anti-Semitism are anti-Semites.
33. The only people on earth whom the Left believes should be denied
the right to self-determination and self-defense are the Jews.
34. "Palestinians" are not a people and never were. They are simply
Arabs who happened to migrate into historic Western Palestine. They
have no right to statehood.
35. The Golan Heights are not "Syrian" and never were.
36. Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein are anti-Semites, and so are
many of their supporters.
37. Israeli politicians are among the stupidest on earth.
38. Israeli leftists never learn from the failures of their policies
and "ideas." Every failure is explained away by the fact that their
policies were not applied thoroughly enough.
39. The moral and legal responsibility for every single Arab civilian
death or injury in the Middle East conflict rests squarely upon the
shoulders of the aggressor Arab fascists and terrorists who provoked
Israel.
40. There is no moral or legal reason for Israel to refrain from
attacking terrorists and murderers when they hide among civilians.
41. The "anarchists" and others who protest against Israel's security
wall want the wall removed because they want terrorists to murder
Jewish civilians.
42. Palestinians are the Sudeten Germans of the Middle East.
43. Israel has no obligation to share its water resources with the
"Palestinians" or anyone else.
44. There are no non-military solutions to the problem of terrorism.
45. Israel is faced with a host of committed enemies, and it is they
who will not accept a fair peace settlement.
46. There are no significant differences between the agenda of the PLO
and the agenda of Hamas and Hezbollah.
47. The Middle East conflict is not a marital spat. Going through the
pretense of holding hands and holding talks does not calm tensions and
achieves nothing.
48. One cannot make peace by pretending that war does not exist.
49. One cannot buy off anti-Semites and Islamofascists with trade
concessions and subsidies.
50. The only way to stop terrorism is to kill terrorists.
*******
2. The Katsav Verdict
I think I would be more inclined to believe that justice was done
in the trial of Moshe Katsav if the Israeli leftist chattering
classes, led by Shimon Peres himself, were not running about giddily
pronouncing that the trial proves that Israel has one single uniform
fair justice system for all.
It does not.
Israel has a dual justice system, under which one standard of
justice applies to far leftists and another to everyone else.
The Israeli judicial system is corrupt and highly politicized. It
is biased and functions in many ways as an appendage of the radical
Left, and this is true going all the way to the top of the system,
where so many of the country's senior jurists are still openly
practicing and preaching courtroom political bias in the name of
"judicial activism."
The court system refuses to defend the basic constitutional
rights, especially freedom of speech, for non-leftists. At the same
time it refuses to prosecute and indict Arabs and leftists for treason
even in the most egregious cases. Some Arab judges misuse their
courtrooms as arenas of a judicial intifada against Israel. The
courts castrate the military and prevent Israel from fighting
terrorism properly. The judicial system openly persecutes "rightists"
and "settlers," denying them their constitutional rights. All the
while pandering to the political petitions of the Far Left.
So while the self-righteous chatterers are patting themselves on
the back over Israel's judicial system being so fair and equitable, it
behooves us to wonder out loud if Moshe Katsav would be headed to
prison if he were a leftist. It also behooves us to wonder if he
would be headed to jail had he not trashed Shimon Peres in the
Presidential election of 2000, when Katsav blocked Peres and his Labor
Party minions from seizing the Presidency. (Peres did manage to
become President later, but he and his Labor Party bolshies always
nursed a grudge against Katsav.)
Moshe Katsav was well liked before the charges of sexual
misbehavior were raised against him, much better liked than Shimon
Peres. Large protions of the Israeli general public and several
leading jurists in Israel are still convinced that Katsav is innocent
and was railroaded, perhaps as political payback.
Me personally? I have no doubt that Katsav was always a lech and a
skirt chaser and I believe he did engage in inappropriate sexual
advances against anything with two X chromosomes. An Israeli Bill
Clinton. But did he actual perpetrate violent rape? The court says
he did. The court might be correct. And it might not be. I reserve
the right to retain a bit of skepticism.
There have been too many abuses of public trust and too many
politicized decisions by the Israeli courts to presume in all cases
that they are competent and reliable and fair and objective . The
burden of proof is today upon the courts to prove they did not judge
Katsav in a politically biased manner. It is the fault of politicized
judges that things have gotten to this - where the courts themselves
must convince the public that they did not produce politicized
miscarriages of justice.
I have no evidence that the Katsav conviction was such a
miscarriage. But I am not willing to presume that Israeli judges are
ALWAYS neutral and fair until proven biased. There are too many cases
that have already proved otherwise.
