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In Memory of the dark days of the Jews

On June 8, 1968, the United States naval vessel Liberty was accidentally attacked by Israel. The incident could easily have spiraled into an unpleasant confrontation between Israel and the United States. After all, American lives had been lost.

But, Lyndon Johnson, President of the United States, made sure that the incident did not cause a rift between America and its ally Israel. Johnson knew that attack on the Liberty was a mistake and not an act of war.

Compare Johnson's tempered response to the current tensions being inflamed in a seemingly deliberate campaign to paint Israel into a corner. After three years of a failed policy centered on talking to the madmen in Tehran, the Obama Administration is expending most of its energy on deterring any military action against Iran's nuclear facilities. In an unprecedented move, Secretary of Defense Panetta told the world that if Israel attacks Iran's nuclear labs it will take place in the Spring.

What kind of ally gives out sensitive military secrets to Iran? Congressman Peter King, Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, told the media that the Administration's public pronouncements are out of place and wrong.

Former Ambassador and Undersecretary of State John Bolton is predicting that if the Obama Administration feels Israel will take military action, it will make public Israel's plan of battle. In other words give Iran a leg up in defending itself.

The relationship between the current United States Administration and Israel is going from bad to worse.

On the 26th of February, campuses across America will begin their eighth annual Israel Apartheid Week (IAW). The stated aim of IAW is “to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system.” They believe that by doing so they will exert “urgent pressure on Israel to alter its current structure and practices as an apartheid state.” The attack on Israel goes beyond just the calendar of events during the week of Apartheid protests. IAW is the major pep rally for gearing up the Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) movement—a movement that seeks to isolate Israel economically but questions its basic right to existence.

As US and Israel dicker over Iran strike, America airlifts strength to the Gulf

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Jerusalem Connection
Posted in Iran, Middle East War

BY DEBKAFILE—

As the US and Israel carried on bickering over the right time to strike Iran’s nuclear sites, their war preparations continued apace. debkafile’s military sources report that flight after flight of US warplanes and transports were to be seen this week cutting eastward through the skies of Sinai on their way to Gulf destinations, presumably Saudi Arabia, at a frequency not seen in the Middle East for many years.

The three International Atomic Energy inspectors who spent the last three days of January in Tehran had asked to meet the hitherto invisible head of Iran’s nuclear bomb program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, 50, a general of the Revolutionary Guards. The Iranians pretended to be deaf. They also kept the inspectors away from any nuclear installations. A senior Obama administration official termed the visit “foot-dragging at best and a disaster at worst.”

debkafile’s intelligence and military sources note that without talking to Fakhrizadeh or any of the 600 nuclear engineers and scientists working under him, unless one of them defects, there is no way the West can determine what exactly is going on in Iran’s nuclear program stands and which installations have been moved to underground facilities.

No one doubts now that advanced centrifuges and stocks of enriched uranium – 3.5 percent and 20 percent grades alike – have been moved to Iran’s underground bunker site at Fordo near Qom, which the US administration has claimed its bunker buster bombs cannot reach and which Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak has defined as “a zone of immunity.”

In their ongoing argument with Jerusalem, American officials commented crossly this week that “Israelis are looking at the problem too narrowly.”

Clearly Israel, unlike America, envisions the Iranian “problem” from the narrow viewpoint of potential victim of an Iranian attack. Sunday, Feb. 5, Alireza Forghani, head of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s strategic team, was quoted as remarking, “It would only take nine minutes to wipe out Israel.”

The remark came from a just-published detailed and serious paper by an Iranian study group which advised Tehran not to wait to be attacked but to launch a preemptive strike against the Jewish state.

Wiping Israel out in 9 minutes would require a nuclear weapon. It therefore behooves Israel to narrow its vision and focus closely on Iran’s nuclear potential and intent.

By now, the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government have pretty well run out of semantic ammunition for their dingdong over how long to wait for sanctions to bite before going on the military offensive against Iran’s nuclear sites and who should do the deed.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu plans a trip to Washington in March and will almost certainly get together with President Barack Obama. That is a date to watch.

Israel leaders have not given up warning that time is running out for a military strike that could stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Obama’s comment to NBC TV Sunday Feb. 4, “I don’t think that Israel has made a decision on what they need to do,” has been interpreted by some circles in Washington as meaning that Israel has agreed to wait long enough to give tough sanctions a chance.

debkafile’s sources say that interpretation is wishful thinking rather than based on fact. The president’s comment was another attempt to keep Israel within certain lines of restraint.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said: “The Palestinian Authority has embraced terrorist organizations instead of peace. We said [the PA] needs to choose between the path of Hamas and the path of peace. The Palestinians embraced terrorist organizations that call for Israel’s destruction. PA President Abbas cannot have it both ways, either he has a pact with Hamas or he has peace with Israel. If he implements the Doha agreement and joins forces with the enemies of peace, the PA would be abandoning the path of reconciliation with Israel.”

God says: “From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests [including politicians and pundits] alike, all practice deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace. Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. So they will fall among the fallen; they will be brought down when I punish them,’ says YAHWEH.”… “You must destroy all the peoples the LORD your God gives over to you. Do not look on them with pity and do not serve their gods, for that will be a snare for you.” (Jeremiah 6:13-15; Deuteronomy 7:16)

The Jerusalem Connection says: The notion that the Palestinians want peace with Israel is a colossal myth designed for the acceptance of only the terminally naïve. The Palestinians have never wanted peace much less a two-state solution. They have declared repeatedly they want a one state solution, with Palestine being that state and the total extermination of the modern state of Israel. The good news is, if the agreement between Hamas and the PA holds, the Oslo Accords and all previous agreements are null and void. This way Israel can get on with “managing the conflict.” But it also sets the stage for the ultimate and inevitable conflict that will engage Israel with all its surrounding enemies. That is when we will see the miraculous intervention of the God of Israel.

Douglas Murray on Israel and a nuclear Iran

Douglas Kear Murray is a British writer and commentator. He was the director of the Centre for Social Cohesion from 2007 until 2011, and is currently an associate director of the Henry Jackson Society.

Murray appears regularly in the British broadcast media, commentating on issues from a conservative standpoint, and he is often critical of Islamic fundamentalism. He writes for a number of publications, including Standpoint and The Spectator. He has authored a number of books, including Neoconservatism: Why We Need It (2005) and most recently Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies and the Saville Inquiry (2011). And he’s only 33!

Here is a video of Douglas Murray’s finest speech delineating the inane moral stench emanating from Western academicians on the Iranian nuclear crisis.

Watch Video

Israel Campus Fellows Program

While Israel Apartheid Week gears up on campuses across America (starting on Feb. 26th), The Jerusalem Connection is doing something to counter the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric.

Joining with the Jewish Agency for Israel and Hillel, we are raising up donors for the Israel Campus Fellows Program. The Fellows Program brings a consortium of young emissaries from Israel to work on campuses across America. The aim of the program is to wake up Jewish and Christian students to the fact that they must speak out for Israel. The fellows are responsible for Israel education and engagement of students in pro-Israel activities as well as advocacy.

We at The Jerusalem Connection understand that this generation of emerging leaders and thinkers are living in a time where even Israel’s right to exist is put into question. In the quad and in the classroom, impressionable young men and women are forming their opinions and values that will last their lifetime. For this reason, Israel cannot afford to lose on the campus battlefield.

The Jerusalem Connection’s mission is to inform, educate, and activate support for Israel and the Jewish people. As such, we invite you to join with us as a cadre of donors who recognize the importance of inspiring and connecting the next generation of Zionists. Please join us in sponsoring one Israel Campus Fellow.

Make an online donation today

OR mail your donation to:
The Jersualem Connection, International
PO Box 20295
Washington, D.C. 20041

For latest articles from this week, scroll down.

The Obama Administration has recently concluded arms deals, which will send the most sophisticated military equipment, to two adversaries of the United States and Israel -- Saudi Arabia and Turkey. David Keyes of www.Cyberdissidents.org asks why we are selling arms to a theocratic regime which denies basic human rights to its citizens. We recommend reading his article in the New Republic.

Meanwhile the United States continues to supply Turkey with armaments and is considering a major arms deal with Turkey. Recently a Kurdish group has launched this internet petition urging the United States to end supplying Turkey with armaments that have been used to kill innocent civilians. Read the open letter to President Obama here.

These developments are occurring as the Obama Administration is actively promoting the fiction that the Muslim Brotherhood has become a moderate organization that the United States should work with. This policy is dangerous to the United States and Israel.

The U.S. and Biblical Israel

Posted 1-9-2012

Instead of the “two-state solution,” restore what God gave Abraham’s people.

By Barbara Lerner

By now, most Americans know that the “two-state solution” is no solution to the war that supremacist Muslims have been waging against the state of Israel since its rebirth in 1948. Most Americans in public life know it too, but in public, nearly all of them pay lip service to the idea of a Palestinian state. To do that plausibly, they have to studiously avoid any public mention of facts about the Palestinians that make it glaringly obvious that a Palestinian state is not in America’s national interest; and glaringly clear that empowering the Palestinians and the forces and ideas they represent is a self-destructive policy — a threat to our national security and a defeat for our values.

In the last Republican primary debate of 2011, Newt Gingrich broke the rules, giving voice to three undeniable facts about the Palestinians. He said: “These people are terrorists,” with an “invented identity,” and they teach their children that hating and killing Jews is their highest purpose in life. Michele Bachmann quickly backed him up with a factual account of the ubiquitous Saudi-financed textbooks that teach precisely that, from pre-school through university. Proper foreign-policy types, on and off the stage, reacted as if all this truth-telling were somehow akin to profaning a sacred script, but the Iowa audience was with the truth-tellers. They applauded wildly.

THE “TWO-STATE SOLUTION” IS NO SOLUTION
The “two-state solution” wasn’t always sacrosanct. In the 1940s and ’50s, it didn’t even exist. There were no Palestinians then, although the territory had been called the British Mandate for Palestine (after the old Roman name for Israel, Palestina). Arabs had never called themselves Palestinians; the few Jews who had called themselves that in the 1930s no longer did. There were only Arabs and Jews, and the openly avowed goal of all the Arab states surrounding Israel was to drive the Jews into the sea, and divide up the land amongst themselves. Arabs inside Israel were no less committed to that same pan-Arab goal. It was only in the 1960s, after the abject failure of repeated multi-state military assaults by massed Arab armies, that Arab rulers finally accepted the fact that Israel was not yet weak enough for them to destroy in open warfare.

Worse — from their perspective — each time Israel’s 5 million or fewer Jews defeated the Arabs who attacked her with hordes that numbered in the tens of millions, Israel gained in size and strength, and in the respect and admiration in which most of the world held her. We tend to forget now, but in earlier decades America was not Israel’s only ally. Europe was also pro-Israel then, and the two biggest, most rapidly developing Muslim nations in the region — Turkey and Iran — were Israeli allies. They were our allies too, in those days. Then as now, the Arab world was unified against Israel and against the West, but the Muslim world was not, and Europe had yet to capitulate to the Islamists.

After their major military defeat in 1967, Arab rulers finally faced up to these realities, grasped their implications, and rethought their war strategy. They realized then that, to win, they had to first attack with Taqqiya, not tanks. Taqqiya — lies to deceive the enemy into making himself vulnerable — is a venerable Arab weapon, one that Arab states have wielded for centuries, and they are quite skilled at it. They saw that before attacking Israel again, they had to first win what we call a propaganda war, in order to discredit Israel, strip away her allies, and apply enough diplomatic pressure to wring from her a mounting series of concessions that would, in the end, render the Jewish state indefensible. For a propaganda war like that, enlisting the aid of non-Arabs was critical, and the old Arab rallying cry — “Join your Arab brothers in driving the Jews into the sea” — was not helpful for that purpose. Neither was the image of 22 Arab states — with some 300 million people, millions of square miles of sparsely populated land, and vast amounts of oil wealth — ganging up on a few million Jews, who were clinging to a resource-poor strip of seacoast about half the size of the small ancient state of Israel.

Arab kings and dictators saw that they needed a small ersatz victim group to champion, in order to compete with the all-too-real victim image of the Jews, so they invented one, picking up the name the British had used — Palestine — to conjure up a new Arab people — the Palestinians. And of course, to demand a 23rd Arab state for them. They did this suddenly and in virtual unison, catching by surprise many Arabs in Israel who had no idea they were Palestinians. And from that day to this, Arab leaders have pushed the great Taqqiya relentlessly in every international forum, using the huge amounts of money and leverage their oil wealth gave them to court politicians, diplomats, journalists, and educators around the globe, and to saturate media markets and schools everywhere with their great lie

Growing numbers of states succumbed to it from the 1970s on, joining the Arabs in pressing for a Palestinian state, but America didn’t really buy the great Taqqiya until quite recently. The Oslo accord — the ersatz peace agreement President Clinton and Israeli prime minister Yizhak Rabin signed with the ersatz Palestinians on Sept. 13, 1993 — offered them self-rule, but not a state. Palestinian statehood did not become official American policy until June 24, 2002, when George W. Bush became the first U.S. president to endorse the idea, albeit with reasonable-sounding requirements, at first. In the decade since that fateful day, all requirements have been abandoned, and both America and Israel have suffered a continuing series of losses, disappointments, retreats, and defeats. Year after year, we made concession after concession, getting nothing, and less than nothing, in return. Today, it is painfully obvious to almost everyone that real peace — an end to continuing hatred, incitement, rocket and terrorist attacks, and threats of wars of annihilation down the road — is further away now than ever. It is equally obvious that a Palestinian state would be a terrorist state, a mortal threat to Israel.

Slightly less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that a Palestinian state would be a serious threat to us, too, because the Palestinians are controlled — by their own choice — by the Muslim Brotherhood’s most aggressive terrorist arm, Hamas, just as once-Christian Lebanon is now controlled by the terrorists of Hezbollah. As I write this, the Brotherhood is in the process of taking control of Egypt, the Sunni population giant to the west, while Hezbollah is controlled by Iran, the Shiite population giant to the east. These terrorist groups and their sponsoring states don’t threaten only Israel. Most Americans know they have directed their bombs at us, too, and not just in the Middle East, so it is no mystery that big majorities of Americans in public as well as private life are opposed to Palestinian statehood now.

WHY BIBLICAL ISRAEL IS THE ANSWER
The mystery is why so many Americans who recognize these obvious facts fail to reject the two-state “solution” altogether; why, instead of saying a clear, confident “No” to the two-state idea, they can only respond to the unending pressure from Muslim supremacists in the Organization of the Islamic Conference, their appeasers in the U.N. and the EU, and their allies on the Bill Ayers Left with a feeble, evasive “Not now.” Why don’t we stand up and say, “No. A Palestinian state is a Trojan horse of an idea; accepting it was a great mistake, and it is past time to firmly and finally reject it”? Some few won’t do that because they still cling to the blind faith that if we just push the Israelis to make more of the sorts of increasingly painful and enfeebling concessions they have been making to no avail since the Oslo accord two decades ago, Muslim supremacists will suddenly make a 180-degree turn and say, “Okay, that’s enough, we accept you as equals,” and peace and brotherhood with a small b — a brotherhood that embraces all people everywhere, not just Muslims — will prevail at last. Most Americans abandoned that illusion years ago, slowly and regretfully, but fully.

The problem for the great majority of Americans, I think, is that they have no new formulation with which to replace the two-state idea, no new policy idea they can openly embrace and work to implement in its stead. And when they look for one in the tangle of U.N. legalisms that greeted Israel’s rebirth, they get nowhere, because it is the wrong starting place. The shrunken and misshapen little piece of lowland the U.N. initially ceded to Israel was militarily indefensible — an open invitation to the attacks that followed. Looking for answers in the Zionist movement Theodor Herzl founded in Europe in the 19th century is no answer either. Herzl and his pioneering followers in Europe and America did yeoman’s work, culminating in modern Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, but it is shortsighted Western ethnocentrism to say that they created Israel.

A Jewish state in Biblical Israel could not be created by the U.N. or by the Jews of the West, only re-created. Ancient walls, scrolls, steles, and pottery, meticulously dated by modern science, bear irrefutable testimony to the existence of Biblical Israel. It was created nearly 4,000 years ago, and Jews have lived there, continuously, ever since.

It was only in the last 400 or so years that they migrated to the West in significant numbers, first to Europe and then to America. As late as the 19th century, a majority of all the world’s Jews still lived in the Middle East. Often, in their long, tortured past, they were reduced to a remnant in Israel itself, but they never disappeared entirely, and most did not go far; they remained in the Middle East. And from the rise of Islam in the seventh century on, they lived there as dhimmis, subservient, regarded as religious inferiors, impoverished, mostly, and with no rights that a Muslim was bound to respect. Today, these native Middle Eastern Jews — not Ashkenazi immigrants from the west — are a majority of all the Jews in Israel. They became the majority not long after Israel declared its independence in 1948, because Arabs in Middle Eastern countries where Jews had lived for centuries responded by stripping them of whatever possessions they had and driving them out, creating about a million refugees. Mass expulsions like this were not new to the Jewish people, east or west, but this time, all the Jews had a place to go. Nearly all of the eastern Jews, the Mizrahi, went home, to Israel

But no matter where they were, religious Jews never forgot the dream of a return to Zion, greeting one another each year, on Rosh Hashanah, the penitential Jewish New Year, by saying, “Next year in Yerushalayim” (Jerusalem). And, until the 20th century, most Jews were religious. Like most Christians then, and a majority of American Christians now, they believed what the Old Testament teaches: that God gave Biblical Israel — the land from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the Golan Heights to the Red Sea — to the Jews to be their homeland forever. They believe that God directed Abraham, the first Jew, to settle there, in Hebron, where he still lies, and his tomb still stands.

Abraham is the man who gave the world monotheism. Born into a primitive, polytheistic world where every tribe had its own jealous and exclusive god, often one that required human sacrifice, Abraham’s God taught him that there is only one God, a God who created the universe and all mankind, a God who rejects human sacrifice. And from that day to this, Jews at prayer repeat the same ancient affirmation of monotheism: “Shema Yisrael. Adonai Elohanu, Adonai Echad.” (Hear O Israel. The Lord our God, the Lord is One.) This one God is a God of justice, the Old Testament tells us, the God who gave us the Ten Commandments, to make clear our duty to treat all men justly.

The Old Testament tells us that He did this on Mount Sinai, a ways south of the Bethlehem birthplace of the next world-changing Jew, Jesus Christ; or from his crucifixion site on Mount Calvary. Jesus came to us 2,000 years ago, the New Testament tells us, to teach the world love and forgiveness, and well over 2 billion people — about a third of the people on earth — believe that He is God’s own Son, sent here by a merciful Father Who took pity on us mortal sinners and offered redemption and the promise of paradise to all who embrace Him and show true repentance. All this and more happened in Israel, the unique state whose essential geographical boundaries, the Bible tells us, were drawn by God Himself. No wonder, then, that the whole of Biblical Israel is and always has been holy ground to Bible believers everywhere. It is also militarily defensible ground, because it includes both Judea and Samaria — the land Muslim supremacists taught us to call “the West Bank” — as well as the high ground to the north, the Golan Heights.

“So what?” I hear my secular friends saying. “What has all this ancient history got to do with us, here in America, in 2012? Why should we care?” The answer is that we should all care, whether we are Jews, Christians, or Americans of other faiths, or of none, because our civilization — the Judeo-Christian civilization, from which we have all benefited enormously, and of which we are all a part — is under fierce attack today by Muslim supremacists, determined to force us all to bow down before them, either by converting to Islam or by accepting the status of dhimmis. This war did not start with the emergence of modern Israel; it has nothing to do with Israel’s treatment of the million or so Arabs in its midst; and it will not end if we allow Israel to be destroyed.

This war began in the seventh century, when Muhammad, believing that God had ordered him to conquer and rule the whole world in the name of Islam, first used Taqqiya to trick and then slaughter Jews in Saudi Arabia who did not bow to his new religion, and then went on to conquer large parts of the Arab world. It began, and continues today, because too many Muslims still refuse to accept people of other faiths — Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian — as equals they can respect and live in peace with; because too many are still committed to using Taqqiya and violence to establish their supremacy and our subservience. The problem is not that we have mistreated Muslims or failed to show them the respect they are due as people with great civilizational achievements in their own pasts. The problem is that supremacist Muslims have no respect for us. Accepting the ersatz identity of the so-called Palestinian people and groveling before this and other supremacist Taqqiyas does not win us respect. It earns us contempt, and strengthens the conviction — growing by leaps and bounds all over the Muslim world today, even in once-friendly Muslim lands — that we are a weak, confused, and cowardly people, remnants of a dying civilization, ripe for toppling. To change their minds, and our future, we need to reject the Palestinian Taqqiya and embrace Biblical Israel.

MUSLIM FRIENDS AND OUR SECULAR REPUBLIC
Of course, not all Muslims believe in asserting Muslim supremacy by rejecting all Western ideas as haram (forbidden) and using Taqqiya and force to bring us to our knees. It is a fact beyond legitimate dispute that millions of Muslims wholeheartedly reject the supremacist credo, and yearn to live in peace and friendship with us, glad to embrace the best ideas the West has developed and integrate them with the best from their own traditions. Atatürk, the great man who founded modern Turkey in 1923, did exactly that, proudly and openly. His Ottoman predecessors — the remarkable men who ruled Turkey and much of the rest of the known world before him — treated foreign ideas in a quite similar manner for centuries, before closing themselves off to Western developments in the 19th century and falling behind the West. We should take heart from these brave, often embattled Muslim allies and support them, wherever and however we can, but we should not take false comfort from them. There are, after all, at least a billion and a half Muslims in the world today, and, at the present time, the sad truth is that most of them are with the supremacists, in no small part because theirs looks more and more like the winning side.

To convince Muslim supremacists that theirs is a losing strategy, and to make at least a partial reality of our vision of a world where all peace-loving people can live as equals despite our differences, we need to lift our heads with pride, and encourage our Israeli allies to do the same. We must end the mindless repetition of enemy propaganda about “occupied land,” and encourage our Israeli allies to annex the whole of Biblical Israel, claiming the birthplace of both Judaism and Christianity as rightfully theirs and insisting that Muslims respect their right to do so, and our right to back them up with our full might. Shocked at the idea of taking religion into account in recognizing sovereignty, anywhere in the world? Think again. Is it wrong to take religion into account in recognizing the birthplace of Islam in Mecca and Medina as Arab land? Wrong for America to recognize the Vatican?

Does it follow then that we should, perhaps, define and structure America on a religious basis, too, as a Christian nation? No, it does not. The idea that there is one best way to define and govern all states at all times is often well-intentioned, but, because it is blind to the reality of critical differences, it is often destructive in its effects. Our founders had it right, for us. They were men of faith, mainly — Christian faith — but they gave us a Constitution that defined and structured America as a republic of secular laws where a carefully limited and balanced government lets free people worship or not as they please, so long as they respect the rights of everyone else who is willing to respect our laws and live with us in peace. But we should not let the brilliance of our Constitution blind us to a fact that our founding fathers never forgot: No constitution — no system of government of any kind — can preserve freedom if a majority of the country’s people are not mostly fair, honest, law-abiding, and loving. That is what Ben Franklin had in mind when he answered a woman’s question about what sort of government he and his fellow founders had given America’s people by saying: “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

We have managed to keep it, for more than two centuries now, and you don’t have to be either a Jew or a Christian to grasp the fact that the moral precepts of Judaism and Christianity played a seminal role in making the people of America as good and open and all-embracing as most of us are, at our best. Of course, you don’t have to be a Christian or a Jew to be a good person. But all good people should have the good sense and humility to accept the fact that these religions played a major part in making us who we are. If you love America, and appreciate the freedom, opportunity, and security she gives you, you should not let Muslim supremacists — who hate us no less than they hate Israel — destroy, or redefine out of existence, the one small Middle Eastern state where all that goodness arose.

— Barbara Lerner is a frequent contributor to NRO

Panetta’s negative attitude toward Israel

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Jerusalem Connection
Posted in Christian Zionism, U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. Israel Relations

BY EARL COX, JPOST—

United States Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta recently returned from the Middle East with a warning directed at Israel. “It’s pretty clear,” he said, “at this dramatic time in the Middle East, when there have been so many changes, that it is not a good situation for Israel to become so isolated.” Therefore, Panetta insisted, “Israel must take risks for peace.”

Panetta is a US Cabinet member. How could he be so ignorant, naive or biased as to not know the truth? He is, in my opinion, obviously blaming Israel for the lack of peace in the Middle East. In his biased thinking, he laid no blame at all on the Arabs. He certainly should know why Israel is “isolated.” There is but one Jewish state among some 22 Arab states in the Middle East, and virtually all of those Arab states want to annihilate the Jewish state. They openly express their hatred for Israel and their desire to destroy it and its people.

So who is responsible for Israel’s “isolation?” Israel would love to have peace and friendly co-existence with all its Arab neighbors, but those neighbors keep planning and executing wars and terrorist attacks against the Jewish state. Israel has sought peace since its restored existence in 1948, only to have its offers rejected every time by the intransigent Arabs. Yet Panetta wants to blame Israel for the lack of peace while saying nothing about the destructive mindset of the Arabs.

So what more does Panetta expect Israel to do? He undoubtedly wants Israel to make more concessions such as surrendering more land and more security. And does he really think that the Arabs would then coexist with Israel in peace? Realistically, all evidence points to the contrary.

There is another reason why the negative attitude toward Israel is so prevalent today. It is the result of a theological malady that has plagued segments of Christianity for centuries. This warped theology says that Israel has no right to inhabit a portion of so-called Arab “Palestine” and is, therefore, an “illegal occupying power.” This view is linked directly to “Replacement Theology,” a heresy that has infiltrated several mainline Christian denominations.

Replacement Theology claims that God has rejected Israel, and that the Christian church has replaced Israel as God’s covenant people. So the Christian church is now (allegedly) the true spiritual Israel of God. This view leaves us with two problematic conclusions: (1) God does not keep His promises to Israel, which He said in His Word were irrevocable, and (2) it makes a mockery of Scriptures such as Romans 1:1, which says, “Has God cast away His people? Certainly not.” The Scriptures denounce the idea that the Christian church has picked up the ball that Israel supposedly fumbled.

What is also difficult to fathom is the accelerating anti-Israel militancy of several major Protestant denominations. It confuses the Jewish people and reflects poorly on Christianity. It bashes Israel when we should be loving and supportive of Israel. The Episcopalian, Methodist and Presbyterian denominations in the US have made official decisions to divest from any and all companies that do business with Israel. This divestment craze defies rational explanation.

An article in the March 2011 issue of an official Methodist Church publication offered harsh anti-Israel rhetoric. In “It’s Time for Palestine,” the author condemned what it called Israel’s “undemocratic, militaristic rule over millions of civilians suffering under its administration.” This statement is a willful perversion of the truth. Undemocratic governments and militaristic mindsets are the common characteristics of all the Arab states in the Middle East ― but not of Israel.

We believe the Christian church is charged with loving and standing with the Jewish people, supporting the nation of Israel and propagating the truth about God’s promises and our responsibilities. Our Christian responsibility is to stand for the whole truth of God despite the shifting winds of popular theology and the bitter anti-Israel bias of international politics.

Our God is still preserving, blessing and using Israel today, despite what the world is thinking and doing

Israeli journalist, Ryan Jones said: “Israel's National Security Council determined during an emergency meeting last week that US President Barack Obama is 'naive' when it comes to Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and the dangers it poses. … Both Obama's initial reaction to fears of a Brotherhood takeover and his response once such a takeover became inevitable were 'naive' and place the region at increased risk, warned Israel's National Security Council. Since Israel cannot change the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, it is suggesting to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he focus on educating Obama and his government on the very real threat created by the Muslim Brotherhood's hijacking of Egypt's revolution. Just this week, the Muslim Brotherhood's second in command told Arab media that once in power, his group will never recognize Israel and will work to undo the Camp David Accords, a policy that has the potential to unhinge what's left of regional stability.”

God says: “I will stir up Egyptian against Egyptian— brother will fight against brother, neighbor against neighbor, city against city, kingdom against kingdom. The Egyptians will lose heart, and I will bring their plans to nothing; they will consult the idols and the spirits of the dead, the mediums and the spiritists. I will hand the Egyptians over to the power of a cruel master, and a fierce king will rule over them,” declares the Lord, the Yahweh Almighty. … And the land of Judah will bring terror to the Egyptians; everyone to whom Judah is mentioned will be terrified, because of what Yahweh Almighty is planning against them” (Isaiah 19:2-4,17)

The Jerusalem Connection says: Whether naïve, terminally gullible or a willing conspirator, President Obama must not be allowed to determine our response to the Muslim Brotherhood. It is now apparent that the so-called “Arab Spring” is becoming a massive Jihadist takeover. The dysfunctional denial of this not having a religious base will be tantamount to an incremental suicide. We may not have a religious stake in this conflict but to refuse the inescapable fact that Islamist’s do is delusional. May God have mercy on us and grant us leaders who see themselves as “God’s servants to do you good,”… who “does not bear the sword in vain.”… “an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” (Romans 13:4-5)

Israel, Palestinian envoys to hold talks in Jordan on Tuesday

WHAT MESSAGE WILL IOWA SEND TONIGHT ON ISRAEL & IRAN?

The nation and world are watching.

Joel C. Rosenberg

(Washington, D.C., January 3, 2012) -- What message will the voters of Iowa send the nation and the world tonight regarding the future of U.S. policy towards Israel and Iran? The stakes couldn't be higher.

There's a real possibility that Texas Congressman Ron Paul could win. But he would be a disaster as Commander-in-Chief. His comments just this past week have proven how oblivious he is on foreign policy. Of Iran, Paul said, "They don't threaten our national security." Paul said there's no evidence Iran wants to build a bomb, and even if they did they wouldn't use them. He said, "If I were an Iranian, I'd like to have a nuclear weapon, too." He views economic sanctions against Iran as "an act of war" and believes the sanctions should be removed. He said he would severely slash defense spending and bring all U.S. military forces home from the Middle East and Asia, despite mounting dangers from Iran and North Korea. Paul has made similarly outrageous statements in the past. He has said he would end all military aid to Israel and would not come to Israel's defense if Iran attacked. As I noted recently on the blog, Paul's foreign policy of appeasement, abandoning Israel, turning a blind eye to Radical Islam and gutting the U.S. military would represent a total surrender and invite aggression.

All of the other GOP candidates have countered Paul on his views, especially Speaker Gingrich and Rep. Bachmann. But none have been as principled and consistent in his support of Israel and his commitment to stop Iran as former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. He was especially effective on NBC's "Meet The Press" on Sunday. "Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said he would use air strikes against Iran unless the country dismantled its nuclear program or allowed inspectors to verify that the work isn't aimed at making a weapon," reported Bloomberg News. Santorum said he would make it clear to the leaders of Iran, "You either open up those facilities, you begin to dismantle them and make them available to inspectors, or we will degrade those facilities through air strikes. Iran will not get a nuclear weapon under my watch."

Santorum was the first candidate to put a substantive plan on the table to neutralize the Iran threat, and is committed to working closely with the State of Israel, rather than undermine Israel. He has made clear he doesn't want another war in the Middle East, but that we are running out of options and we can't blink now. If all other measures fail, then he will use force. He believes we must stop Iran from getting the Bomb no matter what. He remains the most resolute GOP presidential candidate in the field on supporting Israel and countering Iran, though Gov. Romney has, to his credit, spoken out more on the issue in recent months. On today's blog, I have posted an updated analysis of all the GOP contenders.

I'm not endorsing any candidate in this cycle. I don't believe that's the specific role God has given me at this stage in my life, and there are many issues of policy and character and experience voters need to consider in choosing a President, not just one's positions on Israel and Iran. That said, my readers know that I believe the Iran threat to U.S. and Israeli national security will be one of the top issues facing the U.S. in 2012 and beyond, and I have to be honest that I remain deeply concerned by the support Ron Paul is getting in Iowa -- and elsewhere in the country -- given Paul's policy of appeasement and weakness towards Iran.

Thus, I'm praying hard and watching closely at what message Iowans will send tonight to the nation and the world on these issues. Hope you will be, too

Posted 1-2-2012

Lieberman Joins Barak in Praising Obama

They choose their words carefully, always limiting their praise to the Obama Administration's providing armaments to Israel. Last week, Senator Lieberman said: It is true, and you'll hear this from a lot of Israeli leaders, that President Obama has been very good on supporting Israel's military and its security.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak has echoed this sentiment.

But does selling Israel military hardware warrant this praise? No one will deny that the Obama Administration has continued the flow from America of weapons that Israel needs to defend itself. There is also evidence that Israel and the United States are sharing vital intelligence on Iran.

Do these facts, require critics of Obama's relations with Israel to recant?

One can argue that Israel's security situation has worsened because of Obama Administration policies. As I write this, there is a news report that the Obama Administration is opening up talks with the Muslim Brotherhood's anti-Semitic spiritual leader. The man who has declared that Israel must be destroyed and who also declared,"Those killed fighting the American forces are martyrs.."

Add to these dalliances with Israel's mortal enemies the following:

The United States has just concluded a massive arms deal with Israel's sworn enemy Saudi Arabia. The Obama Administration has meekly opposed Iran's nuclear arms program. Recently, the United States Secretary of Defense publicly warned Israel not to take action against Israel.

Sadly, this list can go on.

Posted 1-2-2012

Archbishop Attacks Israel Ignores Muslim Barbarity

On Christmas eve, as thirty five Catholics were killed by bombs set by Muslim terrorists in Nigeria, in London a senior prelate Archbishop Vincent Nichols focused his message on land disputes between the people of Israel and residents of Bethlehem but ignored the massacre of Christians by Muslims in Egypt, Nigeria, and other parts of the Muslim world.

Even if one limits the topic to the Christians of Bethlehem, Israel is not the cause of the many life and death problems facing the Christians of Bethlehem. Since the Palestinian Authority gained control of Bethlehem the Christian population of the city has gone from 80% to less than 25%. The reason for this decrease in population is the systematic persecution of Christian Arabs by their Muslim overlords. Just like in Egypt, the Christians of Bethlehem find Muslim populations intolerant of their continued existence.

Instead of attacking Israel the Catholic Archbishop would be doing a public service by stating the truth. The truth of Muslim persecution. Right now, too many Catholic prelates are helping the destruction of ancient Arab Christian communities by failing to confront Muslim persecution and lying about Israel.

Certainly, the Archbishop knows that the State of Israel protects the rights of its Arab Christian and Muslim populations. He should speak these truths.

http://www.thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2011/11/01/just-war-theory-vs-american-self-defense.html

Just War Theory vs American Self-Defense » the Jerusalem Connection Blog -

BY YARON BROOK AND ALEX EPSTEIN, THE OBJECTIVE STANDARD—

This essay is partially based on a lecture, “The Morality of War,” delivered by Yaron Brook at numerous venues across the country. This article is very long and it was written six years ago but it is the best article I’ve ever read on Just War Theory.

It has been nearly five years since September 11, 2001—the day that Islamic terrorists incinerated thousands of innocent individuals in the freest, wealthiest, happiest, and most powerful nation on earth.

On that day and in the weeks after, we all felt the same things. We felt grief, that we had lost so many who had been so good. We felt anger, at whoever could commit or support such an evil act. We felt disbelief, that the world’s only superpower could let this happen. And we felt fear, from the newfound realization that such evil could rain on any of us. But above all, we felt the desire for overwhelming retaliation against whoever was responsible for these atrocities, directly or indirectly, so that no one would dare launch or support such an attack on America ever again.

To conjure up the emotions we felt on 9/11, many intellectuals claim, is dangerous, because it promotes the “simplistic” desire for revenge and casts aside the “complexity” of the factors that led to the 9/11 attacks. But, in fact, the desire for overwhelming retaliation most Americans felt after 9/11—and feel rarely, if ever, now—was the result of an objective conviction: that a truly monstrous evil had been perpetrated, and that if the enemies responsible for the 9/11 attacks were not dealt with decisively, we would suffer the same fate (or worse) again.

After 9/11, our leaders—seemingly sharing our conviction in the necessity of decisive retaliation—promised to do everything possible to make America safe from terrorist attack. In an almost universally applauded speech, President Bush pledged to eradicate the enemy by waging a war that was to begin with Al Qaeda and the Taliban but that would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been . . . defeated.” In the same speech, Bush vowed: “I will not yield, I will not rest, I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people.”1

To fulfill the promise to defeat the terrorist enemy that struck on 9/11, our leaders would first have to identify who exactly that enemy is and then be willing to do whatever is necessary to defeat him. Let us examine what this would entail, and compare it with the actions that our leaders actually took.

Who is the enemy that attacked on 9/11? It is not “terrorism”—just as our enemy in World War II was not kamikaze strikes or U-boat attacks. Terrorism is a tactic employed by a certain group for a certain cause. That group and, above all, the cause they fight for are our enemy.
The group that threatens us with terrorism—the group of which Al Qaeda is but one terrorist faction—is a militant, religious, ideological movement best designated as “Islamic Totalitarianism.” The Islamic Totalitarian movement, which enjoys widespread and growing support throughout the Arab–Islamic world, encompasses those who believe that all must live in total subjugation to the dogmas of Islam and who conclude that jihad (“holy war”) must be waged against those who refuse to do so. Islamic Totalitarians regard the freedom, prosperity, and pursuit of worldly happiness animating the West (and especially America and Israel) as the height of depravity. They seek to eradicate Western Culture, first in the Middle East and then in the West itself, with the ultimate aim of bringing about the worldwide triumph of Islam. This goal is achievable, adherents of the movement believe, because the West is a “paper tiger” that can be brought to its knees by sufficiently devoted Islamic warriors.

Given that the enemy that attacked on 9/11 is primarily ideological, what, if anything, can our government’s guns do to defeat it? Our government cannot directly attack the deepest, philosophical roots of Islamic Totalitarianism; however, to defeat Islamic Totalitarianism as a physical threat, it does not need to do so. Why? Because an indispensable precondition of an active, threatening Islamic Totalitarian movement—one for which individuals are willing to take up arms—is its active support by Arab and Islamic states that assist, embody, and implement it. Without this state support, Islamic Totalitarianism, and thus Islamic terrorism, could not exist as a major threat.

We can see how the end of state support for a movement can destroy the threat it poses in the cases of Communism and Nazism, two militant movements with world-conquering, totalitarian ambitions. As Angelo M. Codevilla, Professor of International Relations at Boston University, writes:

Recall for a moment the Communist movement’s breadth and depth. The Communist Party was just the tip of the iceberg. Every political party, every labor union, every newspaper, every school, every profession, every social organization had sympathizers with Communism who played a significant role in its life. . . . Where now are all those people, young and old, who would argue and demonstrate, and scheme and spy and kill and betray for the grand cause of Communism? They were no more when the Soviet Union was no more, just as sunflowers would cease to exist were there no sun. As for those ferocious Nazis . . . only the name remains, as a hackneyed insult. Human causes are embodied by human institutions. With them they flourish, without them they die. Communists and Nazis everywhere ceased to be a problem when the regimes that inspired them died.2

For Islamic Totalitarianism, the “sun” (the equivalent of Communism’s Soviet Union) is Iran. Iran was founded on the principles of Islamic Totalitarianism, implements the ideals of the movement in a full-fledged militant Islamic theocracy, and thus embodies its cause—providing the movement with a model as well as indispensable spiritual hope and fuel. Iran is also a leading supporter of the terrorist groups Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. (Compared with Iran, the Taliban in Afghanistan was a bit player.) The second leading state supporter of Islamic Totalitarianism is Saudi Arabia, which has spent more than seventy-five billion dollars on the Wahhabi sect of Islam that inspires legions of Islamic Totalitarians, including Osama Bin Laden.

Without physical and spiritual support by these states, the Islamic Totalitarian cause would be a hopeless, discredited one, with few if any willing to kill in its name. Thus, the first order of business in a proper response to 9/11 would have been to end state support of Islamic Totalitarianism—including ending the Iranian regime that is its fatherland. As a secondary priority, a proper fight against the enemy that attacked on 9/11 would have involved ending state sponsorship of terrorism by Arab states derivatively connected to Islamic Totalitarianism—states such as Syria (and, before it was ended, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq). These regimes are active supporters of Arab–Islamic terrorism and mouth support for the Islamic Totalitarian cause, but are not ideologically committed to it; these regimes support this cause out of political expediency. Supporting Islamic Totalitarianism gains power for them; by supporting anti-Western causes and jihadists, Arab states direct the misery of their people toward America and Israel and away from their own brutal rule. Supporting Islamic Totalitarianism also gains money for Arab states; for example, the leaders of Syria, a stagnant nation with no oil wealth, are wealthy because oil-rich Iran pays them for providing assistance to terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah. Dealing effectively with these accessories to Islamic Totalitarianism would require, first and foremost, getting rid of the primary supporters of the movement. The next step would be, where necessary, making clear to these derivative regimes that any cooperation with that movement or its aims is not expedient, but a guarantee of their destruction.

What specific military actions would have been required post-9/11 to end state support of Islamic Totalitarianism is a question for specialists in military strategy, but even a cursory look at history can tell us one thing for sure: It would have required the willingness to take devastating military action against enemy regimes—to oust their leaders and prominent supporters, to make examples of certain regimes or cities in order to win the surrender of others, and to inflict suffering on complicit civilian populations, who enable terrorist-supporting regimes to remain in power.

Observe what it took for the United States and the Allies to defeat Germany and Japan and thus win World War II. Before the Germans and Japanese surrendered, the Allies had firebombed every major Japanese city and bombed most German cities—killing hundreds of thousands. Explaining the ration¬ale for the German bombings, Churchill wrote, “. . . the severe, the ruthless bombing of Germany on an ever-increasing scale will not only cripple her war effort . . . but will create conditions intolerable to the mass of the German population.” And as we well know, what ended the war—and the Nazi and Japanese Imperialist threat to this day—was America’s dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan.
The Civil War provides another stark example of what can be required to win a war. In 1864, as the war was dragging on in endless, bloody battle, the Northern general William Tecumseh Sherman helped end it with a devastating campaign against Georgia’s civilian population. After burning the city of Atlanta, Sherman’s army ravaged much of the rest of Georgia by burning estates; taking food and livestock; and destroying warehouses, crops, and railway lines. These actions had the effect not only of disrupting the supply of provisions to Lee’s army in Virginia, but also (and more importantly) of making the war real to the civilian population that was supporting the war from the rear. This, in turn, broke the spirit of the men on the front lines, who were now worried and demoralized by what was happening to their homes and families.

In both World War II and the Civil War, once massive defeats were handed to the enemy, the causes that drove the military threats were thoroughly defeated as political forces. There are no threatening Nazis or Japanese Imperialists today, nor was there any significant political force agitating for the reemergence of the Slave South after the Civil War.

To have decisively defeated Islamic Totalitarianism post-9/11, America would have had to both correctly identify the enemy and show the same unmitigated willingness to defeat its identified enemies as it has in past wars. In the weeks after 9/11, the American people, for their part, seemed willing to do whatever was necessary to prevent another 9/11. And throughout the Arab and Muslim world, many feared that they would be made to pay for the aggression of their nations. An expert on the Middle East reports that although 9/11 was greeted by much celebration by civilians in the Muslim world, many feared “that an angry America might crush them. . . . Palestinian warlords referred to the events as Al Nakhba—’the disaster’—and from Gaza to Baghdad the order spread that victory parties must be out of sight of cameras and that any inflammatory footage must be seized.”3 But the fear of our enemies in the Middle East quickly disappeared once it became clear that few, if any, of them would pay for the atrocities of 9/11.

Observe that nearly five years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11—longer than it took to defeat the far more powerful Japanese after Pearl Harbor—the two leading supporters of Islamic Totalitarianism and the majority of their accessories remain intact and visibly operative. Iran is aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons, led by a President who declares that our ally Israel must be “wiped off the map,” and by Mullahs who lead the nation in weekly chants of “Death to America.” Abroad, Iran’s terrorist agents kill American troops in Iraq, while its propagandists attempt to push Iraq into an Islamic theocracy. Saudi Arabia continues to fund schools and institutions around the world that preach hatred of America and advocate Islamic Totalitarianism. Syria remains the headquarters of numerous terrorist organizations and an active supporter of the Iraqi insurgency that is killing American troops. The Palestinian Authority continues a terrorist jihad initiated by Yasser Arafat—a jihad that can be expected only to escalate under the entity’s new leadership by the Islamic Totalitarian group Hamas. Throughout the Arab–Islamic world, “spiritual leaders” and state-owned presses ceaselessly incite attacks against the West without fear of reprisal.

America has done nothing to end the threat posed by Iran and Saudi Arabia, nor by Syria and the Palestinian Authority. In the rare cases that it has taken any action toward these regimes, its action has been some form of appeasement: extending them invitations to join an “anti-terrorism” coalition (while excluding Israel); responding to the Palestinians’ jihad with a promised Palestinian State; declaring “eternal friendship” with Saudi Arabia and inviting its leaders to vacation with our President; responding to Iran’s active pursuit of nuclear weapons with the “threat” of possible, eventual, inspections by the U.N.

Of course, America has done something militarily in response to 9/11; it has taken military action against two regimes: the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. But in addition to these not having been the two most important regimes to target, our military campaigns in each case have drastically departed from the successful wars of the past in their logic, aims, methods—and in their results. In Afghanistan, we gave the Taliban advance notice of military action, refused to bomb many top leaders out of their hideouts for fear of civilian casualties, and allowed many key leaders to escape in the Battle of Tora Borah. And in Iraq, we have done far worse. While we have taken Saddam Hussein out of power, we have neither eradicated the remnants of his Baathist regime, nor defeated the insurgency that has arisen, nor taken any serious precaution against the rise of a Shiite theocracy that would be a far more effective abettor of Islamic Totalitarianism than Saddam Hussein ever was.
In terms of ending the (limited) threat posed to America by the respective countries, the “war” in Afghanistan was a partial failure, and the “war” in Iraq is a total failure. Our leadership, however, evaluates these endeavors not primarily in terms of whether they end threats and dissuade other hostile regimes from continuing aggression, but in terms of whether they bestow the “good life” on the Middle Eastern peoples by ridding them of unpopular dictators and allowing them to vote-in whatever government they choose (no matter how anti-American). This objective is presently consuming endless resources and thousands of American lives in Iraq, where we are sustaining a hostile Iraqi population until they can independently run their new nation—in which Islam is constitutionally the basic law of the land.

How is all of this supposed to fulfill our leaders’ pledge to defend America? The democratically elected Iraqi government, we are told, will somehow lead to a renaissance of “freedom” in the Middle East, which will somehow stop terrorism in some distant future. In the meantime, we are told, we should show “resolve,” take off our shoes at the airport, and pay attention to the color-coded terror alerts so we can know how likely we are to be slaughtered.

Empty talk of “complete victory” notwithstanding, our official foreign policy regarding America’s security against Islamic terrorism is: accepted defeat. We have not been willing to take military action against the most important threats against us, and the type of military action we have been willing to take has not succeeded in making us safer. And most disturbing of all, despite our travesty of a foreign policy, the vast majority of once-enraged Americans has not demanded anything better. Most Americans acknowledge that Iraq is a debacle, that we will not be safe anytime soon, and that we have no plans to deal effectively with threats such as Iran’s nuclear weapons program—yet there is widespread resignation that this is the best we can do. This—in response to a threat caused by pip-squeak nations, against the most powerful military in history.
Why? What explains the defeatism of the leaders and citizens of the most powerful nation on earth?

One crucial factor is the failure of our intellectual and political leadership to clearly identify the nature of our enemy, to recognize that terrorism stems from a religious ideological movement that seeks our destruction and that that movement is widely supported by Muslim peoples and states.

One intellectual motivation for this evasion is the doctrine of Multiculturalism, which holds that all cultures are equal, and thus that it is immoral for Western Culture to declare itself superior to any other. Having swallowed this doctrine, most of our intellectuals and politicians are reluctant to identify a clearly evil, militant ideological movement as an aspect of Arab–Islamic culture or to acknowledge its widespread support in that culture.

An even more significant motivation is the religiosity of many Americans (especially conservatives). While the militant methods of Islamic Totalitarianism are anathema to religious Americans, the ethical prescriptions of the movement—a life of faith, material renunciation, and sacrifice for a “higher” cause—are consistent with everything religious Americans hold as ideal. These Americans are thus reluctant to indict such ideas as the cause of a massive evil and, instead, are drawn to the theory that our enemy is confined to isolated individuals such as Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and a few crazy followers. Our leaders go even further; not only are they reluctant to indict Islamic ideas, they bend over backward to claim that no truly Islamic movement can be responsible for terrorism because “Islam is peace.” Islamic terrorists, they claim, have “hijacked a great religion.”

America’s intellectual failure to identify the nature of the enemy is a major cause of its defeatism—but this failure, and its responsibility for our policies, only goes so far. For example, none of our politicians identify our enemy as “Islamic Totalitarianism”; however, they all know and admit that Iran and Syria are active sponsors of terrorism, that Iran is developing missiles and a nuclear weapon, that Saudi Arabia turns out legions of wannabe terrorists, and many other facts pointing to the conclusion that if we are to be safe, these states must be stopped. Shortly after 9/11, President Bush demonstrated some understanding of the role of state support of terrorism when he declared: “From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” Recently, despite his misgivings about indicting any variant of any religion, he has been condemning “Islamic Radicalism” as a major source of the terrorist threat.

If America were to take military action to end the threats we face, even based on our leaders’ limited understanding of these threats, it would be far more significant and effective than what we have done so far. Why, then, haven’t our leaders taken such actions?

The reason is that, despite their claims that they will do whatever is necessary to defend America, our leaders believe that it would be wrong—morally wrong—to do so. They believe this because they consistently accept a certain moral theory of war—one that has come to be universally taught in our universities and war colleges. This theory is accepted, at least implicitly, not only by intellectuals, but by our politicians, the leadership of our military, and the media. And while the American people are not explicitly familiar with this theory, they regard the precepts on which it is based and the policies to which it leads as morally uncontroversial. The theory is called Just War Theory. To understand today’s disastrous policies, and to reverse them, it is essential to understand what this theory holds.

“Just War Theory”

Consider the following passage from the book Just and Unjust Wars by Michael Walzer:
A soldier must take careful aim at his military target and away fromnonmilitary targets. He can only shoot if he has a reasonably clear shot; he can only attack if a direct attack is possible . . . he cannot kill civilians simply because he finds them between himself and his enemies.4
Simply not to intend the deaths of civilians is too easy. . . . What we look for . . .is some sign of a positive commitment to save civilian lives . . . if saving civilian lives means risking soldiers’ lives the risk must be accepted.5

Walzer’s prescriptions are not the idle musings of an ivory tower philosopher; they are exactly the sort of “rules of engagement” under which U.S. soldiers are fighting—and dying—overseas. When our marines in Baghdad do not shoot back when fired upon from a mosque, or when our helicopter pilots are shot down while flying too low in an attempt to avoid civilian casualties while in pursuit of their targets, they are following the dictum that we should show a “positive commitment to save civilian lives” even if this entails “risking soldiers’ lives.”

Just and Unjust Wars serves as the major textbook in the ethics classes taught at West Point and dozens of others colleges and military schools.
More broadly, Just War Theory—for which Just and Unjust Wars is the most popular modern text—is the sole moral theory of war taught today.
Just War Theory is conventionally advocated in contrast to two other views of the morality of war: pacifism and “realism.” Pacifism holds that the use of military force is never moral. Just War theorists correctly criticize this view on the grounds that evil aggressors exist who seek to kill and dominate the innocent, and that force is often the only effective way to stop them. War, they hold, is therefore sometimes morally necessary.
“Realism” is the view that war has no moral limitations. Just War Theory rejects this theory as well, holding that war, when necessary, must be conducted in accordance with strict moral principles. Since “realism” renounces morality, Just War theorists observe, its advocates cannot in principle oppose wars or acts of war in which the guilty unjustly kill the innocent. More broadly, Just War theorists argue, “realism” is deficient because it denies the need to think carefully about the moral issues raised by war. Given that, in wartime, thousands or millions of lives hang in the balance—given that war is a major undertaking with the potential to do massive good or massive evil—we are obligated to consider the important, and non-obvious, moral questions that war raises. These questions include: Under what circumstances should a nation go to war? And: What should a nation’s policies be toward the soldiers and civilians of enemy nations?

These questions, Just War theorists argue, must be thought about systematically, in advance of any particular war, so that we can do the right thing when the circumstances arise. These are not questions to be answered by the seat of our President’s pants, in response to the international or domestic whim of the moment. To act in such a way, they say, would be an injustice to all those who are sent to war, and especially to those whose lives are ended because of it.

All of these arguments against pacifism and “realism”—and for systematic analysis of the morality of war—are valid. They lend credence to the claim that Just War Theory is a practical and moral theory of war. But an investigation of Just War Theory—and its consistent practice in our so-called “War on Terrorism”—demonstrates that it is neither practical nor moral. To the extent that Just War Theory is followed, it is a prescription for suicide for innocent nations, and thus a profoundly unjust code.

All forms of Just War Theory provide guidelines that fall into two categories: justice in entering a war, and justice in waging a war. (These two categories are known as jus ad bellum, and jus in bello, respectively.) Broadly speaking, Just War Theory holds that a nation can go to war only in response to the impetus of a “just cause,” with force as a “last resort,” after all other non-military options have been considered and tried—with its decision to go to war motivated by “good intentions,” with the aim of bringing about a “good outcome.” And it holds that a nation must wage war only by means that are “proportional” to the ends it seeks, and while practicing “discrimination” between combatants and non-combatants. Finally, in a requirement that applies to both categories, Just War Theory holds that the decision-making power for when, why, and how to wage war—including the declaration of war—must rest with a “legitimate authority.”

By themselves, these guidelines—“good intentions,” “just cause,” “last resort,” “proportionality,” “discrimination,” and “legitimate authority”—are highly ambiguous. Their meaning and interpretation depend on the view of the “just,” the “good,” and the “legitimate” presupposed by Just War Theory—that is, the theory’s basic view of morality. Although advocates of Just War Theory differ on many specifics about the nature of morality, they all hold one fundamental idea in common. To zero in on this idea, let us turn to the origins of Just War Theory: the writings of the Christian theologian Saint Augustine on the proper use of violence by individuals.

In his work, Augustine asked whether a Christian can ever justify killing another, given the Biblical imperative to “turn the other cheek.” Augustine’s answer was this: One can use force, not to protect oneself, but to protect one’s neighbor. As the scholar Jean Elshtain, author of the highly regarded book Just War Against Terror, explains:

For early Christians like Augustine, killing to defend oneself alone was not enjoined: It is better to suffer harm than to inflict it. But the obligation of charity obliges one to move in another direction: To save the lives of others, it may be necessary to imperil and even take the lives of their tormenters.6

Thus, according to Augustine, if only you are attacked, you are obligated to turn the other cheek and die, because personal self-defense is immoral; only if someone attacks your neighbor’s cheek are you permitted to retaliate.

Augustine’s theory is not about justice in the sense of the innocent defending their lives against the guilty. In Augustine’s view, the guiding purpose and standard for the just use of force by individuals—trumping guilt or innocence—is that it must be an act of selfless service to others.
All of this boils down to this: One’s life is not an end in itself, to be defended righteously for its own sake—but a means to some “higher” end, to be sacrificed or preserved as is required by one’s moral duty to serve others. This is a perfectly consistent expression of the present-day morality of altruism.

“Altruism” literally means “other-ism”; it holds that one should live one’s life in selfless service to the needs of others, with sacrifice for their sake as the highest virtue. To act for one’s own sake, according to altruism, is immoral (or, at best, amoral). The morality of altruism is descended from Christianity but is accepted today in various forms by both the religious and the non-religious. While consistent adherence to altruism is widely recognized as impractical, altruism is nevertheless almost universally upheld as the moral ideal, and almost never challenged. Observe that while few seek to live a Mother Theresa-like life, no one questions that her life was a moral archetype.

Augustine did not write systematically about the application to war of his altruistic, Christian views on the use of violence, though he did apply these views to strongly endorse the practice of fighting wars to relieve suffering and spread Christianity to other nations. After Augustine, other Christian theologians greatly expanded Just War Theory (as it later came to be known). Eventually, it was developed by both religious and secular philosophers, and adopted in various forms by groups as disparate as Christians and atheists, by self-proclaimed “hawks” and borderline pacifists, by moral absolutists and moral relativists. The most significant development in Just War Theory since Augustine’s time is that the theory has come to include an endorsement of what it calls a “right to self-defense.” But because Just War Theory has maintained its Augustinian, altruistic roots, its alleged “right” to self-defense turns out to be no such thing.

Let us explore in detail the meaning and consequences of the guidelines of Just War Theory, focusing on their employment in America’s “War on Terrorism.” Consider first the requirement that a nation go to war only in response to a “just cause.” What constitutes a “just cause” for war? The classic “just cause” that led Augustine to sanction war, and that Just War theorists have endorsed ever since, is a “humanitarian crisis”: a situation in which a foreign people is suffering from aggression or oppression or genocide. Walzer goes so far as to say that “ . . . the chief dilemma of international politics is whether people in danger should be rescued by military forces from outside.”7 Many Just War theorists hold that the sacrifice of American soldiers and American wealth for “peacekeeping” and “humanitarian” missions (where no threat to the U.S. is at stake)—such as in Sudan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia—is morally mandatory.

Where in such “just causes” is the justice for the innocent, hardworking individuals who are forced to fund this “humanitarianism,” let alone for those who die in such missions? The “justice” is to be found in Just War Theory’s standard of justice: the altruistic notion that justice means selfless service to the needs of others. In practice this means that the world’s “haves” (the productive, the virtuous, the happy) are to sacrifice for the sake of the world’s “have-nots.” American soldiers, in this view, should not fight for themselves and their freedom; they should fight to serve anyone who needs them.

Given that Just War Theory regards individuals, not as ends in themselves, but as means to the ends of others, what is its view of the right to self-defense, that is, the right of a people to defend its own lives and freedom, not for the sake of a “humanitarian” cause, but for its own sake?
While in name Just War Theory claims to uphold a right to self-defense, in substance it denies this right. Self-defense, the theory holds, is a “just cause” for war. This means that if the people of a nation are suffering aggression, oppression, or genocide, and are themselves capable of stopping it, they are morally entitled to respond militarily. But—and this is the crucial part—only under strict conditions. Aggression from another nation is a “just cause,” according to Just War Theory, but only as a “last resort”—and only if the decision to go to war is motivated by “good intentions.” (These qualifications apply to “humanitarian” “just causes” as well, but we will focus on their application to alleged wars of self-defense.)

Let us first examine the requirement that war must be a “last resort.” This restriction is often portrayed as a sensible policy that simply entails taking the act of going to war seriously, rather than going to war willy-nilly. But, in fact, war as a “last resort” goes far beyond forbidding wars of whim or aggression; it means that a nation cannot go to war immediately even when there is an objective threat—that is, when another nation has shown the willingness to initiate aggression against it. Because the use of military force involves the harming of others, Just War Theory holds, every other conceivable avenue short of using military force must be tried: appeasement, U.N. resolutions, being persuaded by the crocodile tears of enemy leaders, and anything else that pacifists (or U.N. ambassadors) can muster.

What is an innocent nation to do when it knows of a threat that, if left unaddressed, could result in a catastrophic attack on it at some point in the future—such as the knowledge possessed by the U.S. of Iran, a nation that sponsors terrorism, spreads Islamic Totalitarianism, develops nuclear weapons, has attacked U.S. interests in the past, and promises the eventual destruction of America? Such projections are dismissed by Just War theorists as merely hypothetical (“How can we know what the future will hold?”). Projections of future attacks, they hold, are tainted by self-serving motives—that is, too much concern for one’s own life and liberty, too little concern with the consequences of war on others (such as the Iranians)—and thus morally out of the question as a cause for action. For example, in 2002, Walzer told the New York Times: “we don’t have to wait to be attacked; that’s true. But you do have to wait until you are about to be attacked.”8

The requirement that war be a “last resort” is inimical to the requirements of self-defense, which demand that serious threats be stopped as soon as possible. Observe that evil nations and movements do not commit major atrocities out of the blue; they need time to build their forces, gain converts, extract concessions, and win small victories; they need to convince themselves and their followers that they have a chance of success. The earlier their intended victims retaliate, the less damage the thugs can do, and the easier it is to dispose of them.

Consider Germany in the 1930s. Hitler, who had stated publicly his intentions for domination of Europe and the world, was an objective threat to his neighbors. He was a threat as soon as he came to power, and then increasingly so as he built up a military, explicitly rejecting existing treaties with England and France. Yet these nations took no military action against his regime. Then Germany annexed Austria, and was met with no military response. When Nazi troops occupied the Rhineland (a disputed area on the border with France), they were given a pass. When Hitler asked the European leaders to hand him the free state of Czechoslovakia, they did. It took the invasion of Poland to prompt the European nations to take military action against the Nazis. They practiced war as a “last resort”; and we know the result.

Or consider the rise of Islamic Totalitarianism. In 1979, a new Iranian regime founded on Islamic Totalitarian principles held fifty-two Americans hostage for four hundred and forty-four days, while America helplessly begged for their return and Iranian leaders had a world stage to proclaim their superiority to the nation they call the “Great Satan.” Not one American died during the hostage-taking—but, with America on her knees, the burgeoning anti-American movement achieved a crucial victory.

What would Just War Theory say about whether this situation warranted a military response? Did it rise to the level of a direct attack sufficient to place us at the point of “last resort” with Iran and other nations that sponsor Islamic terrorism? Not according to Jimmy Carter. What about after two hundred and forty-three marines were killed in Lebanon in 1983? Not according to Ronald Reagan. Or after Khomeini’s fatwa offered terrorists a bounty to destroy writer Salman Rushdie and his American publisher for expressing an “un-Islamic” viewpoint in 1989? Not according to George Bush, Sr. Or after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993? Not according to Bill Clinton. The pattern is telling.
Since there is no definable threshold at which to declare something a “last resort,” the threshold tends to default to some kind of a range-of-the-moment, perceptual-level event, such as a massive, direct attack by an enemy nation (e.g., 9/11). Until then, Just War theorists and their pacifist spiritual brothers can always concoct new schemes for appeasement, or new fantasies that the enemy has reformed, or new rationalizations that their aggression is our fault—and thus claim that to wage war would be immoral. By the time war becomes a “last resort,” an innocent nation has endured far more risk, fear, and destruction than was necessary—and will have to endure far more in order to defeat a long-appeased and thus more powerful enemy. “Self-defense” as a “last resort” is not self-defense.

Further undermining the self-defense of an innocent nation is the requirement of Just War Theory that the decision to go to war be motivated by “good intentions”— that is, seeking a “good outcome.” This requirement, by naming the motive and purpose of war, goes to the heart of what Just War Theory means and demands.

What does “good” mean here? It means “altruistic.”

According to Just War Theory, it is wrong for a nation to be exclusively concerned with its own well-being in deciding whether to go to war; it must demonstrate concern for the well-being of the world as a whole—including the well-being of the nation it is attacking. Only such a concern will yield a “good outcome”—that is, an altruistic outcome.

Insofar as it constitutes “good intentions” for any part of a mission to be devoted to a nation’s own defense, it is justified as altruistic: by the “sacrifices” that leaders and especially soldiers make to “serve their country”—a country that is defended as an altruistic one. For example, when President Bush discusses why America is a country worth defending, he emphasizes our charity, our service to other nations, the religiosity of many Americans, and so on. He does not emphasize the fact that we devote our lives to making money and pursuing happiness.

In implementing Just War Theory, the less a nation is concerned with the well-being of its own citizens, and the more it is concerned with that of others, the more it proves its “good intentions.” The more it seems to be going to war for the sake of its own citizens, the more suspect its motives. Observe this at work in the two wars our government has entered since 9/11: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The impetus for both wars, especially in Afghanistan, was clearly the events of September 11 and the realization of the extent of the terrorist threat to America. But observe that while President Bush said that America has a right to defend itself, he did not consider the elimination of the threat posed by these countries to be a sufficient justification for war in either case. In both wars, he defended his actions, not just as a response to the threat of terrorists to America, but as a response to their threat to the “world.” Bush supplemented the alleged self-defense portions of each mission with massive campaigns to relieve Afghan and Iraqi suffering—suffering that constituted uncontroversially “just causes.” And in the case of the war in Iraq, he made a crucial component of his justification the goal of preserving the “integrity” of the U.N. (an organization whose myriad dictators are committed opponents of American interests), whose resolutions Saddam had violated.

In the buildup to the war in Iraq, President Bush was especially concerned with giving the mission an altruistic purpose. He sought to justify the self-defense aspect of the war on the grounds of preemption, an idea controversial among commentators, politicians, and Just War theorists. Thus, President Bush made sure to focus, above all, on the goal of freeing the Iraqi people of a tyrant and showering them with food, collectively owned oil, and “democracy.” The name of the war, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” perfectly reflects Bush’s moral priorities.

As an expert who is sympathetic to Just War Theory wrote in the Claremont Review of Books:
In the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, to have listened to President Bush, or to his principal civilian and military advisors, was to learn how profoundly just-war thinking has influenced the leadership of the world’s most powerful nation. One may of course disagree with their conclusions, but one has to be impressed by the evident care they took to provide moral justification for their actions. Measured by any objective standard, Operation Iraqi Freedom plausibly met all the criteria for just war . . . a serious, good faith effort was made to subject American policy to rigorous moral scrutiny.9

Whenever President Bush wants to defend the morality of the wars we have fought, he insists that we fight for reasons “larger than our nation’s defense.” When Bush refers to our “good intentions” in Iraq, as he frequently does, he speaks not of our intention to defend ourselves, but of the intentions of American citizens to pay and of American soldiers to die so that Iraqis can hold a mob vote.

An injunction to go to war with altruistic intentions, seeking an altruistic outcome, is in direct contradiction to the requirements of self-defense; it forbids the very essence of self-defense in the context of war: identifying and defeating enemy nations.

To identify a nation as an enemy is to recognize it as a committed initiator of force that threatens one’s own life, that forfeits its right to exist, and that in justice deserves whatever is necessary to end the threat it poses. By Just War Theory’s moral standards, however, there is no such thing as an enemy nation. Even when a nation initiates aggression, it is not regarded as the proper object of retaliation, but as a haven of “others” to be served. (This notion is, unsurprisingly, rooted in Augustine’s religion, Christianity, which countenances us to love everyone—especially, as proof of extreme virtue, to “love thine enemy.”)

Observe that America has not gone to war with one nation since September 11. In each war, President Bush has made clear that we are in Afghanistan or Iraq to aid the “Afghan people” or the “Iraqi people,” and that we oppose only their current leaders. In the case of Iraq, he has made the well-being of the Iraqis, including the satisfaction of their religious and political desires, the overriding purpose of the war.
Given that the purpose of war, according to Just War Theory, is the well-being of others (including those who are, in fact, one’s enemies), it is logical that Just War Theory also precludes a nation from waging war in a manner that will destroy its enemies. It is imperative, according to Just War Theory, that war be fought by unselfish, sacrificial means, in which great value is accorded to the citizens of enemy nations. This is the meaning of the requirements of “proportionality” and “discrimination.” Proportionality is the idea that the value gained by the ends a war seeks must be “proportional” to the damage incurred during the war. To advocate that ends and damage be “proportional” presupposes a standard of value by which these are to be weighed. What is the relative weight, for example, that the U.S. government should accord an American civilian and an Iraqi civilian? Since Just War Theory holds that a government’s intentions are “good” to the extent that it places value on other peoples, including enemies, by its standard of value a government of an innocent nation should place equal value on the lives of its citizens and those of enemy nations. On this view, in America’s “War on Terrorism,” we have to “balance” the lives of American soldiers and civilians with the lives of the enemy nation’s soldiers and civilians. According to Walzer, “In our judgments of the fighting, we abstract from all consideration of the justice of the cause. We do this because the moral status of individual soldiers on both sides is very much the same: they face one another as moral equals.”10

This is what our present and future military leaders are learning at West Point. They are being taught that no matter the cause of war, they are risking their lives to fight and kill their moral equals—that they must regard protecting the life of a fellow soldier as morally equivalent with saving the life of the enemy.

The requirement of “proportionality” is one reason why we did not do any damage to the infrastructure of Iraq or Afghanistan, so as not to inflict “disproportionate” suffering on the people. And it is probably the reason that the promised “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq never materialized. Proportionality means that in fighting a war we cannot conduct ourselves in a way that hastens victory or that minimizes our casualties.

The requirement of “proportionality,” as bad as it is, is made even worse by the requirement of “discrimination,” which is a clarification on the value a government is to accord various types of people under “proportionality.” The requirement of “discrimination” holds that a nation defending itself must differentiate between combatants and noncombatants, valuing noncombatants more highly by providing them with “immunity.” Just War Theory regards all noncombatants as “innocents” with “rights” to be respected. We must, according to Elshtain, “make every effort to avoid killing noncombatants . . . women, children, the aged and infirm, all unarmed persons going about daily lives, and prisoners of war. . . .”11 To those who would reject such imperatives in order to defend one’s own people, Elshtain replies: “The demands of proportionality and discrimination are strenuous and cannot be alternatively satisfied or ignored, depending on whether they serve one’s war aims.”12

Observe the inversion of justice here. Benevolent, individualistic, life-loving Americans, and death-worshipping, collectivist, nihilistic Arabs—such as the dancing Arabs who celebrated 9/11—are regarded as equally worthy of protection by the American military. The exception is if the American is a soldier and the Arab is a civilian, in which case the Arab’s life is of greater value.

The requirements of “proportionality” and “discrimination” are deadly to the nation that takes them seriously. A nation fully committed to defending itself must value the lives of its citizens more than the lives of its enemy’s citizens; it must be morally confident in its goodness, in its right to exist, and of the rightness of killing whomever in enemy nations it must to preserve the lives and liberty of its citizens. Self-defense may well require killing more of the enemy’s citizens than the enemy has killed of ours. It is commonly necessary in war to break the spirit of a foreign people whose nation has initiated aggression in which they are complicit. This often requires killing civilians, and in some cases even targeting them, as America did in World War II. These actions were regarded as just by leaders who viewed civilians of enemy nations as part of the national war machine and rarely truly innocent—and who viewed any deaths of actual innocents, including children, as wholly the moral responsibility of the nation that initiated war.

Just War Theory forbids such tactics. A nation with “good intentions,” practicing “proportionality” and “discrimination,” cannot possibly raze a city as Sherman did. This is why, although Sherman’s actions helped to end the Civil War, he is a reviled figure among Just War theorists: His goal was to preserve his side by inflicting unbearable misery on its enemy’s civilian population—the opposite of “good intentions.” Many Just War theorists hold—as by their standard they are obliged to hold—that the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was immoral. America, they claim, should have valued Japanese civilians over the hundreds of thousands of GIs who would have died invading Japan.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, we see the consequences of not being led by a Sherman-like policy. Our policy of dropping food packages in Afghanistan gained us the scorn of our enemy, who was often the beneficiary of these gifts. Our declared purpose of helping the Afghan people provided security for Osama Bin Laden, his deputies, and his Taliban supporters; they knew that we would be reluctant to bomb them out of their hideouts for fear of killing the Afghans we were there to serve.

In Iraq, since our declared purpose is the well-being and happiness of Iraqi citizens, the countless hostile Iraqis feel free to condemn our troops, to incite violence against them, and to provide refuge to insurgents. President Bush has stressed that we did not go to war against Iraq (only against Saddam), but for the Iraqi people. Thus, we did not make it a priority to defeat them. Almost daily in Iraq, our troops risk their lives because of rules of engagement that place the lives of Iraqi civilians above their own. This was evident in our withdrawal from Fallujah in 2004 when we feared civilian casualties, and in the fact that when we returned to Fallujah in 2005 we allowed tens of thousands of people, including thousands of insurgents, to leave the town before the battle began. Indeed, from the first bombing, the war has been conducted in a way so as to minimize Iraqi casualties, and at almost any cost. Is it any wonder that an insurgency arose? Is it any wonder that leaders and citizens of other terrorist nations feel no real pressure to stop threatening America?

In the “War on Terrorism,” the U.S. is following the pronouncements of Just War Theory in regard to civilians with incredible dedication, and has received much acclaim among Just War theorists for doing so. In Elshtain’s evaluation of the war in Afghanistan, she writes:

The United States must do everything to minimize civilian deaths—and it is doing so. . . . The United States must investigate every incident in which civilians are killed—and it is doing so. The United States must make some sort of recompense for unintended civilian casualties, and it may be making plans to do so—an unusual, even unheard of, act in wartime.13

She adds:
It is fair to say that in Afghanistan the U.S. military is doing its best to respond proportionally. If it were not, the infrastructure of civilian life in that country would have been devastated completely, and it is not. Instead, schools are opening, women are returning to work, movie theaters are filled to capacity, and people can once again listen to music and dance at weddings.14

What she does not mention—but what must never be forgotten—is the price that has been paid for such supposedly “just” conduct. That price is the hundreds of heroic American men and women who have been killed so that Afghans and Iraqis may live and their mosques may stand (to say nothing of whatever unknown price the rest of us will pay when the undefeated enemy next attacks America).

The final Just War requirement that we will discuss is the mandate that the decision-maker who chooses both when and how to go to war must be a “legitimate authority.” Historically, this has been a minor restriction, meaning simply that a government (not a private militia or gang) should declare war. In recent decades, however, it has become a major restriction, because Just War theorists regard a “legitimate” authority as one who will ensure that force is used with “good intentions,” that is, unselfishly. For example, many Just War theorists have come to hold that a war is invalid unless authorized and supervised by the U.N. And even those who do not regard U.N. approval as strictly necessary, such as President Bush, value the approval of other nations as evidence of lack of selfishness. Observe Bush’s frantic desire to make an Iraq mission that was suitable to the U.N. and then, failing that, to assemble any and every insignificant nation into a “coalition of the willing.”

Self-defense requires that a nation assess, independently and objectively, by the standard of the lives of its own citizens, what to do. To subordinate that to a coalition or to Kofi Annan—for the reason that they are not concerned with our interests—is unjust and suicidal.
In the “War on Terrorism,” America has taken self-destructive action after self-destructive action in the name of winning over the U.N. and “coalition partners.” America’s missions in Afghanistan and Iraq were stymied by the vetoes of such so-called allies as the Saudis (who denied us use of aircraft landing strips) and of other nations (who urged us to limit the number of ground troops in Afghanistan), forcing us to rely on duplicitous warlords who connived in the escape of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. As a result of Bush’s submission to “legitimate authorities,” we have sacrificed victory.

All of the requirements of Just War Theory help to explain why the Bush Administration has felt justified in going to war only in Afghanistan and Iraq—and only then with major “humanitarian” purposes in each mission, which failed to eliminate the threats posed by the nations.
Just War Theory has also had a major influence in determining the wars our government does not think it is justified to fight. President Bush has taken no military action whatsoever against Iran, none against Saudi Arabia, none against Syria. President Bush is not ignorant of these threats—he is well aware of the fact that these countries sponsor terrorism; in the case of Iran and Syria, he has said so repeatedly. But he has done nothing militarily to stop the threats these countries pose, nor is there any indication he will do so in the future. Instead, he continues to engage in “diplomatic” bribery, nudging the U.N., inviting terrorist nations into “anti-terrorism” coalitions, and other completely ineffective—indeed, self-destructive—moves.

As discussed earlier, our improper identification of the enemy, motivated by multiculturalism and religion, has played a major part in our mis-selection of targets. Additionally, the altruistic war in Iraq has so discredited the idea of military action, by fatally engaging our troops for no clear purpose and with no clear standard of victory, that few Americans want to go to war again. But another major reason why we are reluctant to target our major enemies today—and why we did not target them from the outset—is that they do not meet Just War Theory’s qualifications for military action.

Of course, from a self-defense standpoint, Iran was and is the most important regime to defeat—much more so than Iraq. But under Just War criteria, the case for war with Iran would be almost impossible to make, whereas the case for war with Iraq was relatively simple. Iran was not ruled by a universally accepted “monster”; Iraq was. The “will of the Iranian people” had not been obviously thwarted; the “will of the Iraqis” had been. Iran had not violated nearly two dozen U.N. resolutions; Iraq had. The Iranian people had not been subject to mass slaughter; the Iraqis had. These considerations, while nearly irrelevant in terms of self-defense, are decisive by the criteria of Just War Theory.

What about the fact that Iran is the spiritual fatherland of the ideology driving Islamic terrorists? Or the fact that the “will of the Iranian people” largely supports the deadly ideology that seeks the extermination of the West? Or the fact that Iran is developing a nuclear arsenal? Or the fact that Iran has sponsored terrorist attacks on Americans abroad on numerous occasions in the past? According to Just War Theory, so long as Iran has not yet unleashed a devastating, direct attack against us, and so long as there is no altruistic emergency, these facts do not justify military action or the threat of military action; at most, they are justification for endless “diplomacy” or a request for a U.N. resolution. In an interview in 2004, Bush said: “We will continue pressing [Iran] diplomatically. . . . Diplomacy failed for 11 years in Iraq . . . and this new diplomatic effort [in Iran started] barely a year ago.”15 Could anything be more encouraging for the nations and groups seeking to wage a long-term battle against the West?

In the case of our refusal to take or threaten military action against the leading sponsors of Islamic terrorism, we see the true meaning of the restrictions of Just War Theory regarding when a nation can go to war, and how it must fight. A nation that will go to war only as a “last resort,” in response to a “just cause,” with “good intentions”—and once it goes, employ “proportionality” and “discrimination”—is a nation that will endure unnecessary risks and even mass death before going to war. And even if it goes to war, it will fight with both hands tied behind its back.
Just War Theory, to summarize, is the application of the morality of altruism to war. It holds that the citizens of an innocent nation are not ends in themselves, but means to some “higher” end. In today’s version, it claims that the citizens of an innocent nation can “defend” themselves—as a means to realizing the goal of sacrificing themselves to the needs of others (including those who are in fact their enemies). This is not a right to self-defense, but a “duty” to practice altruism.

To the extent that Just War Theory is practiced, it leads to unnecessary fear, suffering, and death visited on innocent nations—and to the rise of evil movements and regimes—all while it claims to be virtuous and practical.

Because it purports to support self-defense while actually forbidding its preconditions, Just War Theory is uniquely dangerous. Unlike pacifism, it is eminently plausible to today’s Americans. Americans will not accept en masse a theory that explicitly forbids them self-defense against their evil enemies. But they will accept a theory that claims to endorse both self-defense and the altruistic morality that they have grown up believing is the ideal. They do not realize that it is either–or.

What, in fact, happens to policies that could potentially lead to self-defense, such as giving every state sponsor of Islamic terrorism an ultimatum to cease and desist, or else? The altruism underlying Just War Theory makes our leaders morally rule out such policies without consideration. And then, whatever course of action they do consider and pursue, they portray as in America’s self-defense and self-interest.

The ultimate embodiment of Just War Theory and its embrace of self-destructive policies under the partial cloak of self-defense is the present overall foreign policy of President Bush: the “Forward Strategy of Freedom.” This strategy is the Bush Administration’s policy of spreading “democracy” throughout the Middle East and other backward areas. The first major step of this strategy is the establishment of a “free Iraq,” which allegedly will be an inspirational “beacon of freedom” for the rest of the Middle East and inspire them toward “democratic reform.”
These are goals that Just War Theory would applaud; they embody “good intentions” (i.e., altruistic intentions) in our foreign policy and in our choice of wars. True to the popular advocacy of Just War Theory, however, President Bush does not frame the Forward Strategy of Freedom as good only on altruistic grounds; if he did, the American people would not tolerate it (nor would he). He argues that this strategy is the one that will best serve America, that by encouraging the “liberation” of oppressed nations we promote our own security. For example, in his State of the Union Address in 2005, Bush proclaimed: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

Why is the Forward Strategy of Freedom our “best hope”? Because, as Bush and others point out, free nations do not initiate aggression (including terrorism), whereas unfree ones do. So a “free,” “democratic” Middle East promotes our self-defense.

In analyzing whether this policy is in fact in America’s self-defense, let us leave aside for a moment its massive evasions about what freedom is and requires—the fact that freedom (i.e., individual liberty) and democracy (i.e., unlimited majority rule over the individual) are entirely different and incompatible things, the second being an enemy of the first. Even assuming that our leaders had any idea what freedom is, and how to most efficiently establish it, would this be a policy in America’s self-defense?

Absolutely not. The one half-truth in the argument for the Forward Strategy of Freedom is that truly free nations do not initiate aggression against other nations. But so what? There are dozens of statist nations that do not threaten America, either, because they fear us or have no ideological interest in fighting us.

The question of what is in America’s self-defense comes down to: What is the best way to make other nations non-threatening as quickly as possible? To consider this question objectively, one must be willing to consider all our options, including: quickly deposing terrorist and especially Islamic Totalitarian regimes, threatening the inhabitants with retribution if they threaten America again, and then moving on to ending support of terrorism by other regimes. Given the options available to us, it is inconceivable that the best strategy is to spend endless military resources to set up a “democracy” in Iraq, and then pray that every terrorist nation decides to adopt a free, constitutional government. To make the Middle East even semi-free would cost a tremendous amount of time, money, and American lives. Given the options available to us, the Forward Strategy of Freedom is entirely self-sacrificial. But because the Bush Administration has morally ruled out a true strategy of self-defense, it can delude itself into believing that, as its members repeatedly tell us, it is doing “everything possible” to protect us.

Because Just War Theory removes from the table the possibility of forthrightly defeating our enemies, its advocates must concoct bizarrely indirect means of stopping them (bizarre is the only adjective that does justice to a policy of hinging American security on the similarities between today’s Iraqis and Jefferson-era Americans). Observe that in Bush’s policy the “liberation” of Iraq is not seen as part of defeating that country, but as replacing the necessity of defeating it. And the magical inspiration it is supposed to provide to Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and so on, will allegedly replace the necessity of militarily confronting those nations. Since Bush feels morally unwilling to defeat our enemies, he regards it as necessary to delegate that task to their subservient and sympathetic populations. Instead of making us more secure, this policy has inspired the Iraqi insurgency, made Iran and Saudi Arabia feel more confident than ever, and may well allow the Iraqi people to eventually vote their country into an Islamic dictatorship akin to Iran. (Given the big victories by religious Shiite politicians in Iraqi elections so far, they are well on their way.) And because our failure to defeat our enemies only contributes to the success of Islamic Totalitarianism, our support for elections in the Middle East foretells that Islamic Totalitarians will “democratically” be given greater influence; we have already seen increases in the political influence of even more committed supporters of Islamic Totalitarians in Saudi Arabia, of Hezbollah in Lebanon, of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and of Hamas in the Palestinian Authority.

To call this a policy of American self-interest or American self-defense is to invert the meaning of these concepts. This is a policy of American self-destruction, and it is made possible by a theory that morally rules out self-defense while claiming to support it.

The President’s version of Just War Theory is not the only one; there are many different varieties of the theory, and their various advocates emphasize and interpret the rules differently. Some, such as the Pope, are borderline pacifists and emphasize the “last resort” rule. Others, under the influence of multiculturalism, believe that most “peacekeeping” missions are wrong, not because they are sacrificial, but because one should not “impose” one’s definition of a better life on a foreign people.

But such disagreements are ultimately insignificant as far as America’s self-defense is concerned, because none challenges the theory’s basic altruist premises. Observe that the media, Democrats, and intellectuals do not criticize the Bush Administration for its failure to smash the insurgency in Iraq or for doing nothing to fight the threat posed by Iran. Most criticisms of Bush amount to him not being altruistic enough. They accuse him of “rushing” to war despite the desires of other nations; they tally civilian casualties; they fixate on humiliated prisoners of war; they treat any deficiency in Afghan or Iraqi standards of living as a moral travesty on the part of America. Thus, the competing proponents of Just War Theory differ with the Bush Administration not on whether America’s security should be sacrificed for the sake of others, but only on how.
Just War Theory, in the final analysis, is anti-self-defense and anti-justice. By preaching self-sacrifice to the needs of others, Just War Theory has led to the sacrifice of the civilized for the sake of the barbarous, the sacrifice of victims of aggression for the sake of its perpetrators, the sacrifice of noble Americans for the sake of ignoble Iraqis—the sacrifice of the greatest nation in history for the sake of the worst nations today.

The Morality of Victory

In terms of fundamentals, Just War Theory is completely unopposed by any other theory of war today.

For those concerned about self-defense, the alleged alternative to Just War Theory is “realism”: the idea that there is no connection between morality and war. “Realists” hold that war should be entered into and fought according to strictly “practical” considerations. But this position is not a viable alternative to Just War Theory. First, as Just War theorists rightly point out, “realism” evades the fact that war is an act of monumental moral significance, and by treating it otherwise one sanctions truly horrific things, such as wars of aggression. Second, the dictum that one must evaluate war according to simply “practical” considerations is intellectually empty, since there is no such thing as practicality detached from morality.

Any claim that a course of action is “practical” presupposes some basic end that the course of action achieves. For example, any claim that “diplomacy” with Iran is practical, or that an ultimatum against Iran is practical, or that sending a nuclear warhead to Iran is practical, presupposes some basic goal that it will achieve—whether that goal be the approval of others, or the “stability” of the Middle East, or winning “hearts and minds,” or eliminating the Iranian threat. The question of what basic ends one should pursue in war is inescapable to the issue of practicality—and it is a moral question.

Because “realism” rejects the need for moral evaluation, and because the need for moral evaluation cannot be escaped, its advocates necessarily take certain goals for granted as “obviously” practical. Which goals? Those widely seen as valid—that is, the goals of altruism.
Consider the case of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a prominent “realist.” Does he call for America’s unequivocal, uncompromising self-defense using its full military might, since that would be eminently practical in achieving America’s self-interest? No. Instead, when he ran the State Department, he sought to avoid war, to appease any and every enemy, to court “world opinion,” to build coalitions, to avoid civilian casualties—while at the same time somehow to protect America. In other words, he did everything that pacifism and Just War Theory would have him do.* While Powell and his ilk may say that they eschew moral analysis in matters of foreign policy and war, altruism nevertheless shapes what they think and seek to do.

“Realism,” therefore, is no antidote to Just War Theory. It is not even a theory of war but an intellectual parasite that camouflages the destructive nature of altruism with a professed concern for “practicality.” To bury the moral issues involved in war for the sake of “practicality” does not erase them; rather, it serves to entrench the status quo, by offering covert altruism as the only alternative to overt altruism.

There is no escape from morality, and no reconciling self-defense with the morality of altruism. To escape from the destructiveness of Just War Theory, therefore, we must embrace a moral approach to war that rejects altruism and fully upholds self-defense, thus providing the moral foundation for free, innocent nations to secure the lives and liberty of their citizens in the face of aggression.

Such a moral foundation exists in the morality of rational self-interest (also known as rational egoism or rational selfishness), the code of ethics originated by philosopher Ayn Rand.

Rational self-interest holds that every individual ought to live his own life for his own sake, by his own independent effort—without sacrificing himself to others or others to himself. It holds that the individual’s self-interest is achieved, not by doing whatever he feels like doing, and not by placing his goals in opposition to his neighbors’ freedom, but by living a life of reason, productivity, and trade.

According to rational egoism, the greatest threat a rational man faces to the achievement of his goals—and the greatest threat to a harmonious, prosperous, free society—is the initiation of physical force by others. In justice, when someone initiates force against an innocent man—whether by violence, theft, or fraud—the initiator of force deserves to be met with retaliatory force.

In the egoistic approach, the need for individuals to be free from the initiation of force necessitates the existence of governments—and the option of war. A proper government places the retaliatory use of force under principled, objective control. A proper government is founded on the principle of individual rights—the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. These rights sanction the individual’s freedom of action; they recognize the right of eve¬ry individual to pursue his own goals by his own judgment: to produce, trade, speak, write, love, and live as he chooses, free of the threat of force. A proper government is the agent and servant of its citizens. It exists only to protect their rights by forbidding the initiation of force and by retaliating against those who initiate it—whether the aggressor is a criminal at home or a nation abroad.
Like an innocent individual, an innocent nation does not seek to exist at the expense of other nations, by force. But once force is initiated against it and its citizens, it must respond righteously with force; anything else is an injustice toward its citizens and an abdication of its moral purpose: to protect their rights.

Once the basic egoist view of morality and government is understood, the egoist view of war follows readily: The sole moral purpose of war is the same as the sole moral purpose of any other action by a proper government—that is, to protect the individual rights of its citizens. Every moral issue pertaining to war must be judged by this standard—and only by this standard.

Achieving the purpose of “self-defense” means the complete restoration of the protection of individual rights and thus the complete return to normal life, achieved by the permanent elimination of the threat. This is the only proper meaning of “complete victory.” Defeat in the war with Islamic Totalitarianism does not simply mean that America becomes an Islamic theocracy or that our soldiers fight battles in the streets of Atlanta; these prospects are, fortunately, extremely unlikely. Defeat means any enduring negative change to the American way of life as the result of an active enemy, such as the colored alerts, or the provisions of the Patriot Act that allow virtually anyone to be investigated as a terrorist subject, or the random airport searches suffered by innocent travelers.

The “self” in “self-defense” includes not just a nation’s civilians, but also its soldiers. Contrary to the policies of the Bush Administration, American soldiers are not sacrificial animals, but full citizens of the United States. Rational soldiers are motivated by their own values, by their own desire to live free of the threat of violence against themselves and their loved ones. The fact that a soldier chooses a risky profession does not make him any less entitled to every protection his government can provide. To send soldiers into battle, as we have done in Iraq, with rules of engagement that place the lives of Iraqis above their own, is a moral crime.

By the standard of individual rights, a nation can morally go to war only for the purpose of self-defense, and can morally do in war only what is necessary for that purpose. Both wars of self-sacrifice (“humanitarian” wars) and wars of aggression—and acts of self-sacrifice or aggression within war—violate the rights of citizens, especially of soldiers. Both entail forcibly sacrificing the lives and money of individuals for the sake of some “higher” cause—whether relieving the suffering of the Somalians or satisfying the power-lust of a President.

The necessity of war in self-defense arises when a nation is attacked or threatened by a foreign aggressor. In some cases it might be possible to stop such an aggressor through lesser coercive means, such as sanctions or ultimatums. Once it becomes clear that the enemy is undeterred, however, military force is not a “last resort,” but the only resort.

In response to the Iranian hostage-taking of 1979, for example, America was morally obligated to inflict massive retribution on the Iranian regime immediately. As Ayn Rand said at the time, the proper response to the assault was to “march with force the first or second day after the hostages were taken.”16 For America to do anything less in such a situation is to capitulate to the aggressors and to abdicate its moral responsibility to its citizens. America did something less and is still paying the price.

All aggression, including terrorism, is fueled by hope—the hope of success in achieving some irrational goal or furthering some irrational cause. For a nation like the United States to be secure from threats for the long term, its enemies must know that initiating force against it will bring nothing but their own destruction. Supporters of any cause that seeks the destruction of the U.S. must be made to realize that that cause is doomed.

Acts of aggression left unpunished can lead only to further acts of aggression. Appeasing the initiators of force, as we have seen throughout history, leads to more and greater violence. Thus a proper, rights-respecting government does not appease its force-wielding enemies; it acts to eliminate them. Such action, when executed consistently in self-defense, will not only destroy the particular initiator of force; it will also deter other such threats. Indeed, it is America’s reputation for appeasement, for being a “paper tiger,” that fuels the belief of Islamic Totalitarians that they can bring down America.

It is important to note that a proper morality does not require that one be directly attacked in order to retaliate. We need not sit idly by as Iran builds nuclear weapons and missile launchers; we need not wait to respond until they have destroyed an American city. A preemptive strike is justified if the nation involved is an objective threat—that is, if it has shown, in action or in official statements, its willingness to initiate or advocate force against us. For America to identify a nation as an objective threat does not mean to identify exactly when or how that threat will materialize (that is impossible); rather, it means to identify that a nation or regime has the will and means to attack or support an attack against the United States. A nation that threatens innocent nations thereby forfeits its right to exist and deserves whatever consequences innocent nations visit on it. There is an analogy here to domestic criminals. When a government establishes that a man is making death threats against his wife, or has hatched a plot to kill her, it properly throws him in jail—it does not wait until her corpse is found, on the grounds that he might change his mind and not carry out the threat.

To fight and win a proper war of self-defense requires two basic courses of action: (1) objectively identify the nature of the threat and (2) do whatever is necessary to destroy the threat and return to normal life, with minimum loss of life and liberty on the part of the citizens of the defending nation.
The specific identity of any given threat and what is necessary to destroy it is not the province of morality; it requires specialized cultural and military knowledge (whereas morality applies only to the basic principles governing human life). But the morality of rational self-interest provides crucial, principled guidance in identifying and then destroying a threat. It holds that the identification of a threat, just like any identification, can be achieved only by means of a scrupulously rational process—unclouded by considerations such as an unwarranted affinity for religion, or the desire to be liked by foreign leaders, or the dogma that all cultures are equal. As for what to do about any given threat, egoism gives the crucial sanction, in enemy territory, to kill and destroy whomever and whatever needs to be killed and destroyed in order to end the threat to the victim country. Such a policy, contrary to Just War Theory, upholds both the principle of justice and the principle of individual rights. Depending on the circumstances, legitimate targets can include the leaders, soldiers, and civilians of the enemy nation.

There is a popular notion, held by nearly every advocate of Just War Theory, that only a handful of crazed dictators and bomb-toting terrorists are our enemies; all other residents of the unfortunate, backward states are “innocent” civilians, tragically trapped among these few killers. Accordingly, we must wage war, not against a nation, but against the few evildoers within it, treating the rest of the population with the same respect we accord American citizens. This notion is false and deadly.

As Churchill and General Sherman understood, civilians play a crucial role in sustaining the military aggression of an enemy country, and directly targeting them can save the lives of one’s own soldiers and civilians. During the Civil War, the civilian population of the South provided motivation and encouragement for its soldiers, greatly prolonging their willingness to wage war against the North. So long as the civilians were exempted from the direct consequences of their actions, they continued to fuel the war effort of the South, which in turn took thousands upon thousands of Northern lives. By directly targeting the civilian population, Sherman was performing an act of moral heroism: fully living up to his responsibility of protecting the citizens of the North.

Now take the case of Islamic terrorism, a threat in which civilians are also a crucial source of spiritual support. Many civilians across the Arab world give terrorists encouragement by worshipping them as heroes. Newspapers in many Arab countries spread anti-Americanism and glorify the martyrdom of the terrorists. Clerics promise terrorists a glorious afterlife. Madrassahs indoctrinate students with Islamic Totalitarianism. Even civilians who do not entirely support the methods of Islamic terrorists are often sympathetic to and encouraging of their goal of Islamic world domination. Enemy civilians are also a crucial source of material support for terrorists; these civilians frequently provide terrorists with hideouts, money, and weapons. Rich statesmen pay large bounties to the families of suicide bombers.

Most civilians of oppressive regimes do nothing to oppose or resist or change their governments. This passivity does not render them innocent; it renders them accomplices to the evils of their regimes. This passivity is one of the major factors enabling these regimes to commit atrocities against innocents at home and abroad. Unless oppressed civilians take active steps to object to the evil ways of their government, or to go underground, they are morally responsible for the actions of their government. (The positive or negative consequences of the actions one’s government performs in one’s name is one reason why being active in regard to politics, especially intellectually active in this realm, is a selfish obligation.)

“Individual citizens in a country that goes to war,” Ayn Rand once said in response to a question on this topic,
are responsible for that war. This is why they should be interested in politics and careful about not having the wrong kind of government. If in this context one could make a distinction between the actions of a government and the actions of individual citizens, why would we need politics at all? All governments would be on one side, doing something among themselves, while we private citizens would go along in happy, idyllic tribalism. But that picture is false. We are responsible for the government we have, and that is why it is important to take the science of politics very seriously. If we become a dictatorship, and a freer country attacks us, it would be their right.17

To summarize: The civilian population of an aggressor nation is not some separate entity unrelated to its government. An act of war is the act of a nation—an interconnected political, cultural, economic, and geographical unity. Whenever a nation initiates aggression against us, including by supporting anti-American terrorist groups and militant causes, it has forfeited its right to exist, and we have a right to do whatever is necessary to end the threat it poses.

Given that a nation’s civilian population is a crucial, physically and spiritually indispensable part of its initiation of force—of its violation of the rights of a victim nation—it is a morally legitimate target of the retaliation of a victim nation. Any alleged imperative to spare noncombatants as such is unjust and deadly.

That said, if it is possible to isolate innocent individuals—such as dissidents, freedom fighters, and children—without military cost, they should not be killed; it is unjust and against one’s rational self-interest to senselessly kill the innocent; it is good to have more rational, pro-America people in the world. Rational, selfish soldiers do not desire mindless destruction of anyone, let alone innocents; they are willing to kill only because they desire freedom and realize that it requires using force against those who initiate force. Insofar as the innocents cannot be isolated in the achievement of our military objectives, however, sparing their lives means sacrificing our own; and although the loss of their lives is unfortunate, we should kill them without hesitation.

Any true freedom fighter caught in America’s fire understands the nature of the situation his nation has put us in, supports our cause, hopes for the best, and blames his government and fellow citizens for the danger he is placed in. He recognizes the principle that any innocent deaths in war are the sole moral responsibility of the aggressor nation.

Doing whatever is necessary in war means doing whatever is necessary. Once the facts are rationally evaluated, if it is found that using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran’s nuclear facilities or flattening Fallujah to end the Iraqi insurgency will save American lives, then these actions are morally mandatory, and to refrain from taking them is morally evil.

To close our discussion of a self-interested, truly just approach to war, let us apply it to two issues that have been extremely prominent in the ongoing war in Iraq: the proper treatment of POWs, and when and how we should occupy a foreign people, including the issue of whether we should establish a free or semi-free society in an occupied country.

Let us begin with POWs. How should POWs be treated? Given the purpose of war, the answer must be: in a way that protects the individual rights of one’s citizens. It is often the case that it is in one’s interest to treat POWs well, because this will encourage enemy soldiers to surrender rather than fight to the death. If more enemy troops surrender, fewer of one’s own troops will die. In a situation where POWs are no threat, treating them well is in one’s self-interest—and treating them badly or killing them is sadistic and self-destructive. However, treating prisoners well does not make sense if, for example, they are hampering one’s efforts to win, or if they are refusing to divulge vital information that could save the lives of one’s own troops. If humiliation or torture is an effective method of extracting information that would save American lives, we should humiliate or torture prisoners as necessary.

Of course, if a POW is truly innocent—that is, a genuine opponent of his regime who was forced to fight for it—he will eagerly provide the victim nation with all the information to which he is privy; no torture will be necessary. Thus, torture is potentially necessary only for the guilty. Those who wish to hide information that could protect the lives and rights of Americans in the name of fidelity to the triumph of Islam have forfeited all rights and deserve any form of abuse that can possibly be used to extract information.

Whether and under what conditions torture is practical is a specialized military question. The moral point is: If and to the extent torture is an effective technique to save American lives, and it is used on those who are initiating force against us, then it is morally obligatory. The idea, prevalent in Washington and in the halls of academia, that it is wrong and inhumane to torture Al Qaeda operatives scheming to kill Americans is suicidal. To not do whatever is necessary to extract information from the inhuman monsters that plan the mass murder of Americans is a horrific violation of the moral purpose of government, which is to protect the lives of its citizens.

Terrorists caught on the battlefield are not innocent until proven guilty; they are by that fact proven guilty of pursuing the deaths of Americans. Just as it is legitimate to kill them in the battlefield, so it is legitimate to use whatever force is necessary on them in an effort to achieve victory once they are caught.

The question of occupation—when one should occupy a country, and what one’s goal should be in occupying it—properly arises only after the nation in question has been defeated. If a nation has not been defeated, it cannot be successfully occupied.

Once an aggressor country is defeated, there is a legitimate question of what the victor should do. There are numerous options, ranging from letting the most powerful domestic faction take over (with the knowledge that any aggression against America will lead to the same fate as the predecessor), to handing over the reins to a friendly strongman or tribe, to making a serious effort to establish a proper, free society.
There is only one standard by which to properly evaluate the situation and choose between these options: What is the least expensive, most effective way to ensure America’s long-term security—that is, to protect the individual rights of Americans? Again, much of this depends on specialized questions of military strategy and the cultural–political conditions of the defeated country. But such a strategy can be properly formulated only if the strategists recognize that the freedom of an enemy country is at most a means to an end for the innocent nation, never an end in itself.

In the event that the establishment of a proper government is in America’s self-defense, every aspect of setting up that government must be governed by that purpose. If we are risking American lives and spending billions of dollars, we must do everything possible to ensure that the new government is non-threatening, if not a staunch ally.

The egoist approach to war—that is, the genuinely just war theory—is completely at odds with Bush’s Forward Strategy of Freedom, which, aside from rejecting the need to defeat our enemies, lets hostile Middle East mobs choose whatever government they wish. When Bush was asked whether he would accept an Iran-style Islamic Republic in Iraq—after some two thousand American lives had been lost and some two-hundred billion dollars spent—he said he would, because “democracy is democracy.”18 Democracy is democracy—that is, democracy is mob rule, which is precisely why it must be rejected in any proper occupation. (When a population has proven itself to be non-threatening to America, it should be given the power to vote, but only in the selection of leaders, not the content of the constitution.) Note that in Japan, General Douglas MacArthur did not ask the Japanese to write a constitution but forced a constitution written by Americans onto the Japanese. Both America and Japan have benefited from this for sixty years.

If, during the course of an occupation, a major insurgency arises against the occupier, then a state of war has resumed—and the insurgency should then be crushed by any means necessary, just like the government that preceded it. But if a war has been fought properly, with the enemy seeing the futility of his ways and offering his unconditional surrender, such an insurgency is very unlikely. The insurgency in Iraq is made possible by President Bush’s failure to actually defeat that nation. If we had fought the war properly from the outset, the thought of an insurgency would be terrifying both to today’s insurgents and to the many civilians that support and protect them. Contrast the fiasco in Iraq today to the occupation of Japan after World War II—in which zero Americans were killed by insurgents.

Conclusion
When Ayn Rand wrote about the moral code she originated, the code of rational self-interest, she stressed that morality is a matter of life and death. The right ethics, she held, leads to individual (and societal) survival, prosperity, happiness; the wrong ethics leads to misery, poverty, death.

This is true in every field but is especially true in the realm of war, as the present struggle has made clear. We are losing the war on Islamic Totalitarianism because our leadership, political and military, is crippled by the morality of altruism, embodied in the tenets of Just War Theory. The moral code inherent in Just War Theory defines rules that undercut, inhibit, and subvert any hope of success in war, because it demands that one regard one’s own life as the sacrificial object of others. The moral code of rational self-interest, by contrast, defines principles to attain the values that one’s life and happiness require—including success in war and national self-defense. Altruism is the morality of defeat, and rational self-interest is the morality of victory.

America faces a choice between two irreconcilable foes: self-defense or altruism—which are but forms of the basic choice we all face: life or death. Let us choose life.
________________________________________
* There is a small, insignificant minority of Machiavellian realists who consciously reject altruism, but their alternative is to say that there are no moral limits on what the United States (or any nation) can do. Such a view is a sanction to barbarism by any nation, and genuinely horrifies those with a legitimate concern for justice.
Endnotes
Acknowledgment: The authors would like to thank Onkar Ghate, Senior Fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute, for his invaluable editorial assistance with this project.
1 George W. Bush, address to both houses of Congress, September 20, 2001.
2 Angelo M. Codevilla, No Victory, No Peace (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 39, 97–98.
3 Ibid., p. 39.
4Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 3rd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 174, emphasis removed.
5Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 155–56.
6 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 57.
7 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. xi.
8 David E. Sanger, “Beating Them to the Prewar,” New York Times, September 28, 2002.
9 Michael M. Uhlmann, “The Use and Abuse of Just War Theory,” Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2003.
10 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 127.
11 Elshtain, Just War Against Terror, p. 65.
12 Ibid., p. 66.
13 Ibid., p. 69.
14 Ibid., p. 70.
15 David E. Sanger, “Pakistan Found to Aid Iran Nuclear Efforts,” New York Times, September 2, 2004.
16 Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand Answers, edited by Robert Mayhew (New York: Penguin Group, 2005), p. 97.
17 Ibid., p. 95.
18 George W. Bush, Associated Press Interview aboard Air Force One, October 18, 2004.

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8-8-2011

Shalom on this Tisha B'Av,

“There is a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and
a time to dance.” (Ecclesiastes 3:4)
In his wisdom, King Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes that there is a season for
everything, and “a time for every purpose under heaven.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1)
On the Jewish calendar, Tisha B’Av, the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av
is the time for mourning.

Jewish women mourning at the Wailing Wall
According to some rabbis, this day of fasting is as significant to the Jewish people
as Yom Kippur (The Day of Atonement), which is considered the holiest day of the
Jewish year.
Tisha B’Av, the saddest day in Jewish history, primarily commemorates the
destruction of the First and Second Temples.
In synagogues around the world and at the Kotel (Wailing Wall) which is Judaism’s
holiest site, religious Jews gather to mourn the destruction of the Temples and to read
from the words of the Prophet Jeremiah and portions of the book of Lamentations.

Model of Herod's Temple in Jerusalem
 please click here to sponsor a chapter of the Messianic Prophecy Bible,
on this special day of Tisha B'Av
 
Other tragic events that befell the Jewish people on this exact same day are also
remembered on Tisha B'Av, most notably the expulsion of Jews from Spain.
Rabbinic oral tradition as recorded in the Mishnah (Taanit 4:6) reveals the details
of several tragedies that occurred on the 9th of Av.
In 586 BCE, Solomon’s Temple (the First Temple) was destroyed by the Babylonians,
who sent the Jews into Babylonian exile.
Under the leadership of Nehemiah and Ezra, construction began on the Second
Temple 70 years later.
In 70 CE, Herod’s Temple (the Second Temple) was destroyed by the Romans,
656 years after the destruction of the First Temple on Tisha B'Av. 

Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, by Francesco Hayez.
It boggles the mind to think that both Temples were destroyed on the very same day
of the Hebrew calendar.
According to the Mishna, on Tisha B’Av, not only were the Jewish people expelled
from the Israel when both Temples were destroyed, but during the time of Moses
on Tisha B'Av, God also delivered the verdict that Israel would not enter the
Promised Land because of their sins of unbelief, complaining, and idolatry.
Apart from Joshua and Caleb, who followed God wholeheartedly, Israel was
condemned to wander in the wilderness for 40 years until the entire generation died.
 

 please click here to give a gift this Tisha B’Av, and to bless our ministry work here
in the Holy Land.

Other Tragic Events That Took Place On Tisha B’Av:

In 132 CE, the Romans crushed Bar Kokhba's revolt and destroyed the
city of Betar, killing over 100,000 Jews

In 133 CE, following the Roman siege of Jerusalem, Roman commander
Turnus Rufus plowed the Temple site and the surrounding area

In 1095, the First Crusade was declared by Pope Urban II, killing
10,000 Jews in its first month and annihilating Jewish communities in France
and the Rhineland

In 1290, King Edward I issued an edict expelling all Jews from England

In 1492, an edict of expulsion of the Jews in Spain was carried out

In 1914, World War I broke out, setting the stage for the later devastation
of World War II and the Holocaust

In 1942 on the eve of Tisha B'Av, the mass deportation of Jews from the
Warsaw Ghetto to Hitler’s Treblinka death camp began

In 1994, the bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires
killed 86 and wounded 300 others

In 2005, more than 8,500 Jewish residents were expelled from Gaza as part
of Israel’s ill-fated Disengagement Plan, a desperate bid for peace designed
to further relations with Palestinian Arabs.  Read more below, Tommy

How ironic that this time the Jewish people were expelled from their own land
by secular Jewish Israelis!

In 2005, expelled residents of the Nezer Hazani community
formed a protest camp in a public park in Tel Aviv.
You can see people living intents in the background.
This expulsion was a Land for Peace deal with the Palestinians that obviously did not
bring about peace.
The Israeli government uprooted Jewish families from their homes in Gaza.  A total
of 1,700 families were displaced at a cost of nearly $900 million.
Daycare centers, kindergartens and schools were all closed.  The Jewish bodies in the
cemeteries were removed from the graves for burial elsewhere.  Homes and
civic buildings were bulldozed with only the synagogues left standing.
Some Israeli soldiers refused to participate, standing in their integrity before God and man,
even at the risk of a military court martial.
The Disengagement Plan was an abysmal failure.
After the Jewish soldiers left Gaza, the looting began.  The synagogues were
desecrated and torched.  Gaza became the staging ground for terrorist attacks
against Israel.
And the rockets have been launched from Gaza ever since, raining fear down
on the Jewish towns and cities in southern Israel.
What a bitter pill to swallow!

On Tisha B’Av we must ask ourselves how could God’s people be brutally torn
from the Land that He promised in an everlasting covenant to the descendants of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob?
 

Comfort is found in Amos 9: 14-15:
“I will bring back the captives of My people Israel; They shall build the waste cities
and inhabit them;…I will plant them in their land, and no longer shall they be
pulled up from the land I have given them, says the Lord your God.”
How can Believers, as fellow citizens in the commonwealth of Israel
(Ephesians 2:12-13, 19), appropriately respond on Tisha B’Av to the grief of the
Jewish people?
This is the time to weep with those who weep and to mourn with our brethren, the
people of Israel.


These excavated stones from the
Western Wall of the Temple Mount
(Jerusalem) were knocked down to
the street below by Roman battering
rams in 70 AD 
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Yeshua (Jesus) wept with compassion when he foresaw the destruction of the
Holy Temple and the disaster that would come upon Israel.  He said,
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who
are sent to her!  How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers
her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!  See!  Your house is left to you desolate.”
(Matthew 23:37-38)
Yeshua knew that not even one stone of the magnificent buildings of the Temple would remain
untouched.  All would be thrown down. (Matthew 24:2) 

Despite this, when Yeshua was asked for a sign, he answered, “Destroy this temple, and in
three days I will raise it up.” (John 2:19)
 
Messianic Prophecy Regarding the Destruction of the Temple
Yeshua knew that he was destined to fulfill the Messianic prophecies that the Messiah
would be cut off before the destruction of the Second Temple. (Daniel 9:26)
The Jewish people long for and pray daily for the restoration of the Holy Temple.  Plans
and preparations are already being made in Jerusalem for the Third Temple.

The Dome of the Rock currently stands where
the Third Temple will be rebuilt.
The Brit Hadashah (New Testament) indicates that in the end times, the Temple
will be rebuilt.  Within this temple “the man of sin, the son of perdition, who opposes
and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped,  …will sit in the
Temple of God, showing himself that he is God.” (2 Thessalonians 2:4)
The Land of Israel is still far from being the ‘Holy Land’ it is destined to be.
In Israel today, there is a great divide between those who believe in the Word of God
and those who don't.
Pray and Stand with Bibles for Israel, as we encourage the secular people of Israel
to read their own Hebrew Scriptures, inform them about the Promised Messiah of Israel,
and tell them how Yeshua fulfilled the Messianic Prophecies.
God says that He will forsake neither Israel nor Judah. 
“For Israel is not forsaken, nor Judah, by his God, the Lord of hosts, though their
land was filled with sin against the Holy One of Israel.” (Jeremiah 51:5)
He is seeking intercessors to stand in the gap for Israel.

God sent a messenger throughout the midst of Jerusalem to “put a mark on the
foreheads of the men who sigh and cry over all the abominations that are done
within it.” (Ezekiel 9:4) 
Are we willing to be marked by God as an intercessor who shares in His grief and
plead for mercy for His people, Israel?
 
 please click here to give your Best Gift on Tisha B’Av, and to Bless Israel and our ministry
work here in the Holy Land.

The Imaginary Palestinian State

Posted August 5, 2011

BY STEVEN J. ROSEN, FOREIGN POLICY—

In a few weeks, an overwhelming majority in the United Nations General Assembly will likely vote for collective recognition of a Palestinian state. But which Palestinian state? Of the three Palestinian states the assembly could recognize, two are real and arguably could meet the requirements for statehood. But it is the third, purely imaginary one that the assembly will endorse, one that neither has a functioning government nor meets the requirements of international law.

According to the prevailing legal standard, the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, a “state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government; and d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.” Both the Hamas-controlled Palestinian entity in Gaza and the rival Fatah-governed Palestinian entity in the West Bank can be said to meet all four of these criteria of the law of statehood. The one on which the United Nations will vote does not.

In Gaza, Hamas controls a permanent population in a defined territory (i.e., Gaza within the armistice lines of 1949). Gaza has a functioning, if odious, government. And Hamas-controlled Gaza already conducts international relations with a large number of states. From a narrowly legal point of view, the Hamas Gaza entity could become a state, another miserable addition to a very imperfect world.

Of course, a Hamas state in Gaza is not something most of the world wants to see. A Hamas state allied to Iran would be a severe blow to international peace and security, and it would not be a state deserving of recognition by any democracy. It would be a state arising from the military coup of June 2007, a state that engages in large-scale violations of treaty obligations and human rights. Nor does Hamas seek statehood for Gaza alone. Hamas wants eventually to rule the whole of mandatory Palestine, comprising not just the West Bank along with Gaza, but all of today’s Israel too. Gaza alone is too small a prize for so grand an ambition. So this possible state is not on the table.

The Fatah Palestinian entity in the West Bank also could meet the legal requirements for statehood, and it would have more international support. It has a functioning government in the Palestinian Authority (PA), a permanent population, and international relations with a very large number of states. It also controls a defined territory, which comprises what are called areas A and B as defined under the Oslo II agreement of September 1995, plus additional territory subsequently transferred by Israel in agreed further redeployments. (Area A is the zone of full civil and security control by the Palestinian Authority, and Area B is a zone of Palestinian civil control and joint Israeli-Palestinian security control.) The Fatah West Bank entity within these lines also could be recognized as a state under international law.

But Fatah, the PA, and the broader PLO do not seek statehood for this West Bank entity that arguably could meet the legal requirements. Their minimum demand is a state that includes Gaza along with the West Bank, the eastern part of Jerusalem, and all the other parts of mandatory Palestine that were under Jordanian and Egyptian control before 1967. Fatah, the PA, and the PLO are demanding title to lands and authority over populations they do not control, being as they are under the rule of Hamas and Israel.

Unlike the two Palestinian entities that already exist, either of which could be recognized as a Palestinian state because they seem to fulfill the legal requirements, the Palestinian entity that a General Assembly majority will recognize as a state this September does not actually exist on Earth. It is imaginary and aspirational, not real. And it does not meet the legal requirements.

First, it will have two rival presidents pursuing incompatible policies. Mahmoud Abbas is presenting himself as the president of the Palestine that is pressing the claim in the U.N. General Assembly, but he is not considered to be the president anymore by Hamas, the largest political party in the putative state. And Hamas has Palestine’s own laws on its side in this dispute. Abbas was elected in 2005 to serve until January 2009, so his term has expired. In 2009, he unilaterally extended his term for another year until January 2010 (an extension that also has expired), but that extension did not adhere to Article 65 of the Palestinian constitution, the Basic Law. Hamas, which controls a majority in the now defunct Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), opposed the extension. According to Article 65 of the Basic Law, the legally empowered president of Palestine, since January 2009, has been PLC Speaker Abdel Aziz Dweik, a deputy representing Hamas. Palestine’s ruling party, Hamas, considers Dweik, not Abbas, to be the legal president of Palestine, and it has a strong case.

Second, the Palestine that the General Assembly will recognize also will have two rival prime ministers pursuing incompatible policies. Hamas denies that Abbas has the authority to appoint Salam Fayyad as prime minister, because Abbas is not legally the president of Palestine under Article 65 and because Fayyad has not been empowered as prime minister by the Palestinian Legislative Council as required by Article 66 of the Basic Law. Neither his first appointment, on June 15, 2007, nor his reappointment on May 19, 2009, was confirmed by the PLC as required.

Hamas, which controls the majority in the PLC, considers the legal prime minister of the Palestinian Authority to continue to be Ismail Haniyeh, a senior political leader of Hamas. Haniyeh was empowered by the PLC to be prime minister of Palestine in February 2006. Abbas dismissed Haniyeh from the office on June 14, 2007, after the Gaza coup, but Haniyeh counters that this decree violated articles 45, 78, and 83 and that he continues to exercise prime ministerial authority under Article 83. The PLC also continues to recognize Haniyeh’s authority as prime minister. Here again, Hamas has the law on its side.

Third, this putative state of “Palestine” will also have a legislature that never meets. Elected on Jan. 25, 2006, for a term of four years, the PLC has enacted no laws, passed on no ministers, and conducted no meetings since 2007. Instead, Abbas says, “It is my right as a president to legislate laws and decisions that are called decrees. These decrees are legal, as long as the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) is not able to convene.”

It is common for Palestinian observers and their supporters in the West to attribute the PLC’s inaction to the fact that Israel arrested 21 of its more radical members in June 2006 after the abduction of Gilad Shalit, most of whom are still in detention. The Carter Center, for example, states, “With most of its representatives in Israeli prisons, the Palestinian Legislative Council never assembled the required quorum for meetings and hence was unable to carry out legislative functions designated to the PLC.” But the PLC has 132 members, of whom fewer than 20 are detained by Israel, and a quorum of the PLC requires only one more than half the members — 67 — to be present. So it is not Israel that is preventing a quorum.

In fact, neither faction contending to rule Palestine actually wants the PLC to meet, for different reasons. Hamas does not want it brought to session to enact new laws or amendments to existing laws when its majority has been diluted, especially because it fears unfavorable amendments to the election law. And Fatah is only too happy to see the Hamas members in jail, because it too does not want the PLC to meet, lest it enforce the Basic Law by replacing Abbas and Fayyad. PLC Speaker Dweik, whom Hamas considers to be the legally empowered president of Palestine, has said of his own arrest by Israel, “Any action that put an end to our activity in the parliament was welcomed by many, among them the Palestinian Authority.”

Fourth, this Palestine that the General Assembly will recognize will also lack the ability to hold presidential or legislative elections as required by Article 47 of its Basic Law — not because Israel will prevent them, but again because the rival Palestinian rulers will not allow them to happen. Abbas’s constitutionally defined term expired in January 2009, and the terms of the PLC representatives expired on Jan. 25, 2010, so new elections for both are overdue. The 2005 Palestinian Elections Law No. 9, Article 2, which Hamas recognizes as legally binding, and the replacement Elections Law unilaterally decreed by Abbas on Sept. 2, 2007, Articles 2 to 4, which Hamas considers an unlawful usurpation of power under the constitution, require elections by now, but no such elections are in sight. Neither of the rivals wants an election to be held under the electoral rules recognized as legally binding by the other, and neither will permit the other to compete freely on territories it controls as required by both sets of regulations.

So there you have it. The General Assembly will make a remarkable decision about all this in the next few weeks. Instead of recognizing either of the two state-like entities that already exist, each having many of the attributes of statehood required by international law, the General Assembly will create an imaginary state that has two incompatible presidents, two rival prime ministers, a constitution whose most central provisions are violated by both sides, no functioning legislature, no ability to hold elections, a population mostly not under its control, borders that would annex territory under the control of other powers, and no clear path to resolve any of these conflicts. It is a resolution that plants the seeds for civil and international wars, not one that advances peace.

A DAY OF PRAYER AND FASTING IN AMERICA – 8-6-2011

"On Saturday, we need to stop everything we're doing--stop working, playing, entertaining ourselves, texting, emailing, Facebooking, eating--and just spend it with the Lord in prayer for our country."

By Joel C. Rosenberg

(Denver, Colorado, August 5, 2011) -- Here's one sobering headline that caught my eye this morning: "Global stocks tumble amid recession fears: Market panic spreads across globe as investors fear double-dip recession." Here's another: "Dow's losing streak now in ninth day; Dow's losing streak unmatched since 1978."

U.S. and global markets have been severely rattled in recent weeks by the inability or unwillingness of politicians in Washington to make the truly serious and dramatic reforms necessary to move our country back from the brink of bankruptcy. Our national debt now equals 100% of our GDP. America hasn't faced a debt crisis this serious since we were fighting for our lives against the Nazis in World War II. Meanwhile, millions of Americans remain out of work. Millions are losing their homes. Nearly 46 million Americans are now on government food stamps. No wonder a stunning 73% of Americans say our country is on the "wrong track."

America is in trouble, morally, spiritually and financially. Yet no one seems to have any answers. The politicians seem clueless. The media certainly doesn't have any answers. Academia seems more out of touch than ever. Sadly, far too many Church leaders are asleep, as well -- or too timid, or drifting off course spiritually and theologically - just at the time they could and should be powerfully proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ as the only real hope of mankind. God hasn't failed us. We have failed God. Christ is ready to come help us, care for us, get us back on the right track, if we would only turn to Him en masse. The Church's job is to be a light to the nations, ours and the world. But too much of the Church is sleeping. We need a wake up call.

America needs a revival -- a dramatic spiritual renewal like the "Great Awakening" of the early 1700s, and the "Second Great Awakening" of the mid-1800s. But such a revival has to begin first and foremost with the Church waking up and asking the Lord to purify us, heal us, and re-inspire us with the life-changing truths of His Word. Only then can we truly love our neighbors with Christ's love and be a blessing to our country in a time of severe crisis.

Today, I'm flying to Houston to participate in tomorrow's day of prayer & fasting for our country. The event was called by Texas Governor Rick Perry. It's based on the Book of Joel. And despite enormous opposition from liberal groups and atheist organizations, I believe this is exactly what we need right now. We need to take a day out from our normal lives and stop everything we're doing -- stop working, playing, entertaining ourselves, texting, emailing, Facebooking, eating -- and just spend it with the Lord. In His Word. With His people. In praise and worship. In prayer and fasting. Asking Him to show mercy to us...before it's too late.

If you're anywhere near Reliant Stadium in Houston tomorrow, I hope you'll join us. If not, may I encourage you to take time out of your busy schedules to pray and fast tomorrow for a true, deep and powerful revival in America, beginning in the Church?

"'Yet even now,' declares the Lord, 'return to Me with all your heart, and with fasting, weeping, and mourning; and rend your heart and not your garments.' Now return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness and relenting of evil. Who knows whether He will not turn and relent and leave a blessing behind Him?" (Joel 2:12-14)

August 4, 2011

AN ECONOMIC REBELLION GROWING IN ISRAEL: OBSERVATIONS FROM A MONTH IN THE HOLY LAND

By Joel C. Rosenberg

(Washington, D.C., August 3, 2011) -- I just got back to Washington after living in Israel for the past month. By God's grace, Lynn and our boys were able to join me for the past two weeks. Together, we worked on projects for The Joshua Fund, delivering packages of food and other essential household goods to poor and needy Israeli Jews, visiting with needy Israelis in their apartments, packing pallets of food and supplies in TJF's warehouse, helping fix up and paint a bomb shelter, and more. It was a wonderful and moving time -- especially for our kids -- as we got to see up-close-and-personal just how hard it is for so many Israelis to make ends meet. It was very different side of Israel than most tourists get to see, and I wanted to share some observations with you.

In many ways, modern Israel is a conundrum:

* On the one hand, Israel's macro economy is booming, especially compared to the U.S. Despite wars and rumors of wars and all kinds of regional instability, Israel's increasingly sophisticated, high-tech and export-driven economy is growing faster than most other countries in the industrialized Western world. What's more, unemployment in Israel is actually at an all-time low right now. (see stats below) That's the good news.

* On the other hand, prices in Israel for gasoline, apartments, even cottage cheese and other food staples are high and soaring higher, and many lower- and middle-income Israelis are becoming so exasperated that they are literally taking to the streets in protest government policies that are compounding the problem. This is the bad news. For the weeks we were there, we saw protests growing in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem and elsewhere. Young people are setting up "tent cities" to to show their frustration with an economic system that is leaving them behind and actually causing many to slip into poverty. Doctors are on strike to protest low wages in Israel's nationalized health care system. And last Saturday - the day we flew back to the U.S. -- an estimated 50,000 Israelis held a demonstration in Tel Aviv, while tens of thousands more Israelis held demonstrations in other parts of the country.

August 4, 2011

AUDIO EXCLUSIVE :: US State Department Discriminates Against US Citizens Born in Jerusalem

Dear Friend of Jerusalem,

Last week, we reported that the US Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case of Zivitofsky v. Clinton. Today, One Jerusalem had the privilege of hosting the world renowned legal team of Nathan and Alyza Lewin (Lewin & Lewin) to discuss the case and lay out some of the arguments made in their brief presented to the court. Listen to the exclusive Audio Interview.

Go to our website www.OneJerusalem.org  and Download MP3 File

The case involves a law passed by Congress that requires the State Department to write "Israel" as the place of birth on the passports of all US citizens born in Jerusalem, a law the State Department refuses to enforce. The State Department will only write "Jerusalem." The Lewin's argue several points:

The State Department policy is discriminatory because it allows those who are anti-Israel to remove the word "Israel" from their passport but does not allow those who are pro-Israel to add it. The law passed by Congress aims to correct that policy.

Congress has been legislating on issues related to passports since the mid 1800's,

US citizens born in other places can self identify by listing unrecognized sovereigns ons as their place of birth on their passports (Gaza, West Bank) but does not allow those born in Jerusalem to self identify as being born in Israel.

The state Department does not recognize Taiwan as an independent country (it recognizes instead the People's Republic of China) but allows those US citizens born in Taiwan to write Taiwan on their passports if they desire.

Other agencies if the US government identify Jerusalem as part of Israel without it changing US policy.

The most upsetting part of the State Department's claims are that enforcing this law passed by the US Congress would upset the Arab world. As our friend Anne Lieberman of Boker Tov Boulder so aptly put it - "Are we to accept that the State Department is more considerate of the view of the Arab World over that of the US Congress?!!"

Upsetting the Palestinians and the Arab world should not be justification for failing to impose a law passed by the US Congress and signed by the President. What do you think? Post your Comment here.

Sincerely,

Allen Roth & David Goder

www.OneJerusalem.org

August 1, 2011

Defiant Palestinian Leadership

The Obama Administration and the Europeans who send millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority have reportedly been pressuring Abbas to drop his bid to get the United Nations to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian State. But the generally low key Abbas has been publicly rebuffing these pleas from his supporters. In fact, he has become somewhat militant in his push-back.

Reuters describes Abbas' initiative this way:

Abbas, addressing a Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) meeting, reiterated his decision to seek full UN membership for a state of Palestine alongside Israel, a diplomatic move resulting from paralysis in the US backed peace process.

"In the coming period, we want mass action, organized and coordinated in every place," Abbas said. "This is a chance to raise our voices in front of the world and say that we want our rights."

Why is Abbas being so contrary to his patrons?

One explanation is that he is more committed to his Hamas relationship than we give him credit for. Since he formalized a relationship with Hamas there has been credence given to the theory that this is just a short term marriage of convenience - that when push comes to shove Abbas will side with the civilized world against Hamas. Well one result of his decision to push on with a UN campaign is that he keeps Hamas in his fold by putting the Palestinian Authority in the rejectionist camp.

Another explanation is that Abbas has drawn the conclusion that the Obama Administration is a toothless tiger, that it is more important to satisfy Hamas and the radical elements on the Palestinian side than to grant the wishes of the United States. He is also confident that the Obama Administration will not punish him for his actions.

Of course there is also the possibility that Abbas is taking this course with the quiet acquiescence of the Obama Administration.

Posted July 1, 2011

Unmasking the ‘international community’ » the Jerusalem Connection Blog -

BY CAROLINE GLICK,

For many years, the Left in Israel and throughout the world has upheld the so-called “international community” as the arbiter of all things. From Israel’s right to exist to climate change, from American world leadership to genetically modified crops, the Left has maintained that the “international community,” is the only body qualified to judge the truth, lawfulness, goodness and justice of all things.

Most of those who uphold this view see the United Nations as the embodiment of the “international community.” US President Barack Obama has repeatedly made clear that his chief litmus test for the viability or desirability of a foreign policy is the support in garners in UN institutions.

Obama is so averse to acting against the will of the UN that he is trying to strong arm Israel into making suicidal concessions to the Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority. Obama claims that if Israel agrees to accept indefensible borders, then he will be able to convince the Palestinians not to ask the UN to endorse Palestinian sovereignty in September. Since the success of the Palestinian initiative is entirely dependent on the US Security Council veto, by acting as he is, Obama is showing that he prefers sacrificing Israel’s future viability as a nation state to standing up to the “will of the international community” as embodied by the UN.

Furthermore, in a bid to maintain faith with the UN Security Council resolution permitting the use of force in Libya to protect civilians, Obama has refused to articulate a clear goal for the US military involvement in Libya. The fact that the Security Council resolution essentially dooms NATO’s military intervention in Libya to strategic incoherence stalemate that can lead to the break-up of Libya is unimportant to the US President. The only thing that is important is that the US abides by the limitations dictated by the UN Security Council resolution.

As to Libya, Obama’s decision to send US forces to Libya without Congressional permission makes clear that from his perspective, the UN Security Council, rather than the US Congress is the source of authority for US military action. To the extent that the US Congress calls for the US President to act in a manner that is contrary to the UN Security Council, as far as Obama is concerned, it is the duty of the President to disregard Congress and obey the Security Council.

Given the totemic stature of the UN in the minds of the American President and the international Left, it is worth considering its nature.

A glance at UN affairs in recent days is revealing. Last week UN members elected Qatar President of the UN General Assembly and Iran one of the body’s Vice Presidents. Both countries’ representatives will use their platform to advance their regimes’ anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Western agendas.

As Prof. Anne Bayefsky noted in the Weekly Standard last week, their first order of business will be leading the Durban III conference that will take place in New York on the sidelines of September’s General Assembly meeting. The first Durban conference was of course the infamously racist and anti-Jewish UN conference in Durban, South Africa in September 2001. At Durban Israel was singled out as the only racist, xenophobic country in the world and Jewish people were denied their right to national rights and self-determination.

The conference ended three days before the jihadist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001.

In addition to their anti-Jewish conference, the Qatari and Iranian leaders of the General Assembly will reliably advance a General Assembly resolution embracing Palestinian statehood and condemning Jewish statehood.

Perhaps anticipating its new leadership role in the “international community,” last weekend Iran hosted its first “World Without Terrorism Conference.” Speaking at the conference, Iran’s supreme dictator Ali Khamenei called Israel and the US the greatest terrorists in the world. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the US was behind the Sept. 11 attacks and the Holocaust and has used both to force the Palestinians to submit to invading Jews.

Aside from the fact that the leaders from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — who owe their power and freedom to the sacrifices of the US military — participated in the conference, the most notable aspect of the event is that it took place under the UN flag. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon sent greetings to the conferees through his special envoy.

According to Iran’s Fars news agency, “In a written message…read by UN Envoy to Teheran Mohammad Rafi Al-Din Shah [Ban] Ki-Moon [commended] the Islamic Republic of Iran for holding this very important conference.”

According to Fars, Ban added that the UN had “approved a large number of resolutions against terrorism in recent years and holding conferences like the Teheran conference can be considerably helpful in implementing these resolutions.”

When journalists inquired about the veracity of the Iranian news report, the UN Secretary General’s office defended its position. Ban’s spokesman Farhan Haq sniffed, “If we’re reaching out and trying to make sure that people fight terrorism, we need to go as far as possible to make sure that everyone does it.”

So as far as the UN’s highest official is concerned, when it comes to terrorism there is no qualitative difference between Iran on the one hand and the US and Israel on the other. Here it is worth noting that among the other invitees, Iran’s “counter-terror” conference prominently featured Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir. Al-Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court on genocide charges for the genocide he has perpetrated in Darfur.

The new General Assembly Vice President is not merely the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. It is also a nuclear proliferator. This no doubt is why Iran’s UN representative expressed glee when earlier this month his nation’s fellow nuclear proliferator North Korea was appointed the head of the UN’s Conference on Disarmament. This would be the same North Korea that has conducted two illicit nuclear tests; constructed an illicit nuclear reactor in Syria; openly cooperated with Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile program; attacked and sank a South Korean naval ship last year, and threatens nuclear war any time anyone criticizes its aggressive behavior.

What these representative examples of what passes for business as usual at the UN show is that the international institution considered the repository of the will of the “international community” is wholly and completely corrupt. It is morally bankrupt. It is controlled by the most repressive regimes in the world and it uses its US and Western funded institutions to attack Israel, the US, the West and forces of liberty and liberalism throughout the world.

Given the utter depravity of the UN and the international system it oversees, what can explain the international Left’s kneejerk obeisance to it? From San Francisco to Chicago to Boston; from Stockholm, to Paris to London, members of the international Left claim they support the victims of tyranny. They claim they stand for liberal values of freedom and tolerance and human rights. But like the UN, the truth about the international Left shows that its members are the opposite of what they claim to be.

Here too, a few examples from the past week suffice to tell the tale of liberal intolerance and violence. On Sunday US Congresswoman and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann appeared on ABC News’ This Week with George Stephanopolous. Towards the end of her interview, Stephanopolous informed Bachmann that she can expect the media to begin attacking her family, and specifically the 23 foster children that she and her husband cared for.

As he put it, “I know you want to shield them [the foster children] but are they prepared and are you prepared for the loss of privacy that comes with the president [sic.] campaign? And is that something you are concerned about for them?”

Stephanopolous’s menacing warning was notable for what it says about the nature of the leftist-dominated media. In a recent interview First Lady Michelle Obama thanked the media for protecting her family from scrutiny. Yet Stephanopoulis had no compunction about threatening Bachmann’s family with a journalistic lynch mob.

And this makes sense.

As fellow leftists, the Obamas get a free ride. But as a conservative Republican, and as a non-leftist woman, Bachmann – like the Sarah Palin — has no right to expect tolerance for her family’s privacy from the enlightened, feminist, liberal media.

Then there was the mob assault on Israeli historian Benny Morris outside the London School of Economics two weeks ago. As Morris described it at the National Interest, on his way to give a lecture at the university, “a small mob…of some dozen Muslims, Arabs and their supporters, both men and women, surrounded me and, walking alongside me for several hundred yards as I advanced towards the building where the lecture was to take place, raucously harangued and bated me with cries of “fascist,” “racist,” “England should never have allowed you in,” “you shouldn’t be allowed to speak.”

He added, “To me, it felt like Brownshirts in a street scene in 1920s Berlin.”

No less appalling than the behavior of the mob was the behavior of the professor at LSE who hosted Morris’s lecture. As Morris described it, in his “brief introductory remarks,” the professor “failed completely to note the harassment and intimidation (of which he had been made fully aware) …, or to criticize [Morris's attackers] in any way.”

In New York last weekend when conservative television and radio host Glenn Beck went to New York’s Bryant Park to watch a movie with his family, they were accosted by the people around them who professed hatred for “Republicans.”

The extraordinary intolerance of the Left for Israel is on full display among the participants in the so-called flotilla. The purpose of the “flotilla” is to break international law by providing aid and comfort to Hamas-controlled Gaza and weaken with the intention of ending Israel’s lawful maritime blockade of Gaza’s Hamas-controlled coastline.

As Ehud Rosen exposed Thursday in a report for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, this year’s flotilla is organized by Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood with the active participation of leftist anti-Israel groups.

In their public statements, participants in the Hamas flotilla profess bottomless tolerance for Hamas and its genocidal agenda. And they profess no tolerance whatsoever for Israel or its right to exist.

In their behavior, participants in the flotilla from the Obama-aligned Code Pink group and sister organizations ape the behavior of UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon in celebrating Iran’s provocative conference on terrorism, overseeing North Korea’s ascension to the head of the UN’s Conference on Disarmament’ and Qatar’s and Iran’s leadership of the General Assembly.

While emptily mouthing slogans of tolerance, all these adherents to the rule of the “international community” embrace the agenda of the most violent, intolerant, totalitarian forces in the world. Not only do they embrace them, they serve them.

It doesn’t take much to tear off their flimsy mask of sweetness and light. Pity so few can be bothered to do it.

Holocaust survivor and activist Elie Wiesel said: Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.  Never shall I forget that smoke.  Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.  Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith for ever.  Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.  Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.  Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

God says: “I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more.  But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after your body has been killed, has authority to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.  Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God.  Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows." (Luke 12:4-7)

The Jerusalem Connection says: My wife Pat and I are now in Poland to exhibit her paintings, The Auschwitz Album Revisited. What a sign and a wonder that the paintings meant to honor the lives of the innocent victims are now on display at Auschwitz.  May there memory be blessed and the horrors that happened here never be forgotten.  

Our participation in the Krakow Jewish Cultural Festival comes at the invitation of the Chief Rabbi of Poland.  We are humbled by this tremendous honor and feel so privileged to be a part of this reconciliation effort to bring healing between Jews and non-Jews. Please do pray with us for this endeavor.  Please pray that we will receive God’s favor and He will be honored.  And pray that Christians will be recognized for their support of Israel and the Jewish people.