Tzipi Livni will have to wait to become Prime Minister, if she ever does. After trying for close to two months to form a coalition, she has failed, and today President Shimon Peres formally informed the Speaker of the Knesset that Israel will be holding early elections, probably this coming January. This was not a widely predicted outcome: Most people thought she would somehow pull it together–especially given the likelihood, according to polls, that both Kadima and her existing coalition partners would either get trounced or maintain their present levels if elections were held. The incentives seemed to line up in Livni’s failure.
Why did she fail? Two big reasons come to mind. First, the global financial crisis made it impossible for her to commit to major financial handouts that would undermine Israel’s relative economic stability. And second, because Shas, the third-largest party in the coalition, became unusually rigid in its negotiations, eventually announcing they would prefer elections. This is extremely unusual for Shas, a party widely known to have few principles other than securing funding for its vast social and educational networks, something you cannot do as an opposition party. But Shas has a different problem to worry about: the return of Aryeh Deri, its founding father who will be eligible to re-enter politics some time next year. Only by having elections now can Eli Yishai, who has headed the party for the past seven years since Deri’s conviction on corruption charges, be assured of keeping hold of the party for the time being.
Neither of these facts were really in Livni’s hands to alter. But inevitably this will be looked at as her failure–a failure that will surely reflect badly on her party as we head into what is likely to be a very intensive election campaign. She is far more popular than her predecessor Olmert, but Kadima is still looked at as a party that achieved basically nothing in its tenure, while being plagued with corruption. Right now the polls show another shift back to the Right, with Labor getting demolished and Likud taking the lead. But three months is a long time. . .
Not really unrelated at all: http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/22/obama-israel-holocaust-durban-opinions-contributors_united_nations.html
What a shock! Another self-hating Jew writing for the New York Times. If I had a cat, I wouldn’t let him use the New York Times for kitty litter for fear that the stain of that liberal rag would give him an infection.
Roger Cohen thinks that the Iranian Jews he spoke to, all of whom supported the Ahmadinejad regime, were expressing their true feelings. It’s possible that they were, but it’s unlikely. People who say what’s on their minds in totalitarian states are asking for trouble. Roger Cohen certainly couldn’t find any citizens of North Korea who were willing to say anything bad about the government there.
Iranians—unlike anti-Israel demonstrators in San Francisco, England, etc.—have not made anti-Semitic remarks. That may be quite significant. Iranians have to express anti-Israel sentiments; they have no choice. The fact that these views are not tied to anti-Semitism may mean that most Iranians don’t agree with Ahmadinejad about Israel. Iran, after all, has no quarrel with Israel. Iranians are not generally pro-Arab. Despite the words expressed by former President Rafsanjani in 2001, most Iranians are probably not willing to die in order to kill Israelis. Most Iranians are simply victims of a totalitarian government.
George, interesting point – and true. It does seem rather ridiculous, when you think about it – Iran picking a fight with Israel. Over what? Get out a map – the two countries are separated by hundreds of miles and there is no discernible (sane) reason why they should ever come to blows. But trying telling that to Ahmadinejad and the Mad Mullahs. But yes, you’re right, the Persians were, historically, NOT enemies of the Jewish people.
Cohen is simply a modern day version of the appeasers that in WWII became collaborators.
That charge is substantiated by his ‘collaboration’; he seeks to whitewash the Islamic threat against the west, knowingly mischaracterizing it, so as not to be forced to confront it.
He’s a moral coward and, if push comes to shove, he’ll willingly accept his dhimmitude and justify it with rationalizations.
Re: #3,
“Most Iranians are simply victims of a totalitarian government.”
Perhaps that’s true of most, but then, where is the underground resistance?
“may mean that most Iranians don’t agree with Ahmadinejad about Israel. Iran, after all, has no quarrel with Israel. Iranians are not generally pro-Arab.”
Antisemitism is alive and well within Iran. Iranians are Islamic, as well as Persian. Islam is quite specific in its condemnation of the Jews. Iran, as presently formulated, has a problem with Israel’s very existence. The Iranian ‘people’ have, and are still, at the very least, continuing to condone the rule of a fanatic theocratic regime.
The first rhetorical question strikes me as well-supported by the evidence, but the second, third, and fourth are, I submit, propagandistic exaggerations based on forced misreadings of the record. Deploying them does harm to the aim of any writer to be taken seriously on these most serious subjects.
To the best of my knowledge, Ahmadinejad was not in and has never been the position to do any of those things. At most, he may advance the interests of his faction within the real Iranian power structure.
He hasn’t “threaten[-ed] to wipe Israel off the map.” First, neither his country nor its proxies possess the ability to do that. Second, he does not possess the ability to order an attack. It would be like some Mexican politician threatening to wipe the US off the map. Third, like other Iranian leaders – and contrary to the Rafsanjani canard that appears so frequently in the rightwing blog world – Ahmadinejad has scrupulously avoided direct threats. Instead, he and they always speak allusively – as though some mysterious force (internal rot, the hand of Allah, flouridated water…) is going to cause Israel to cease to exist.
Israeli de-moralization and isolation may in fact be a much greater threat to Israel than Iranian military action. I’d be the last to suggest that Iran’s leaders, Ahmadinejad included, don’t mean Israel great harm, don’t believe that the land of Israel rightfully belongs to Islam, and wouldn’t make war on Israel with the ultimate aim of annihilating the Jewish state if they could, but anyone who wishes to be taken seriously on these most serious issues should be willing to rest on the reality of the situation, not reaching for manipulative distortions that in the end may do more harm to their (our) side than good.
The Iranians are getting away with a lot, but it’s important to see clearly what exactly they’re getting away with. Otherwise, you’re sparring with phantoms, letting yourself be terrorized and thus diverted from the real dangers.
To have a bias of facts over words, as Cohen states, is to suspend all thought and judgment. It is to behave as a turkey the day before Thanksgiving, where all facts align–until they don’t.
“Israeli de-moralization and isolation may in fact be a much greater threat to Israel than
Iranian military action”. Without any doubt : the current daemonization of Israel, actions
of dozens of anti-Israeli NGOs, Durban II and the slow but steady changes in the Middle
East-Policy of the Obama administration, are really a greater current threat to Israel
than Iran. I’m starting to think back with nostalgia for the good old Dubya-days.
Re#6
I must take issue with you C.K., “propagandistic exaggerations “?
Ahmadinejad Quotes:
“I declare that the Zionist regime has reached the end of the road and more crimes cannot save it… In the near future the concepts of aggression and Zionism will be wiped from the world.” (a concept can only be “wiped from the world”, by eliminating the people who hold it…)
“I must announce that the Zionist regime (Israel), with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene…Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of the United States has come and the countdown to the annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has started.”
My perception is that neither Tobin or anyone else is suggesting that Ahmadinejad personally has the power to do any of the things asserted. He’s the President and a figurehead with some power, not a dictator. But he does represent the views of his personal benefactor, mentor and supporter, the Supreme Ayatollah Khamenei…he does represent the views of a substantial majority within the Iranian power structure. And that is what makes Tobin’s assertions about what Ahmadinejad represents factually true.
Hasn’t Iran, with the full backing of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, “Launch[ed] an all-out push for nuclear capability?”? Isn’t Iran the primary, “Fund[er] of Hezbollah and Hamas”?
On what substantive basis do you assert these to be “propagandistic exaggerations”, C.K. ?
As for Ahmadinejad’s inability to successfully attack Israel…once the Iranians have the bomb, nuclear proliferation is certain. That means that sooner or later a major terrorist group gets its hands on nukes. Tel Aviv is highly vulnerable to a sneak nuclear terrorist attack by sea. Israel cannot survive such an attack.
Recognizing that the Iranian’s will not directly attack anyone with a nuclear missile attack in no way lessens the threat that Iranian nuclear capability poses to the west and Israel.
That’s not a “propagandistic exaggeration”, that’s just reading the ‘handwriting on the wall’ and drawing the obvious conclusion. That conclusion’s horribleness, in no way lessens its probability.
Is he somehow related to Hanoi Jane?
GB, you quote Ahmadinejad as follows: “I declare that the Zionist regime has reached the end of the road and more crimes cannot save it… In the near future the concepts of aggression and Zionism will be wiped from the world.”
As usual – an unnamed agency does the work in this formulation, not Iranian military action. The above is a prophecy, not a threat. You may choose to interpret it as a threat, but that is an act of interpretation on your part. The same goes for the second quotation. In both cases, as I argued, Ahmadinejad specifically avoids threatening war. There are very good reasons – legal, political, practical, and otherwise – why he does so. The ambiguity strikes me as totally intentional. It is worth asking yourself why it should be so, and what it really reflects about his and his sponsors’ and followers’ thinking and intentions.
You yourself say:
Your stating, as you so often do, that something is “certain” doesn’t make it so.
Once the Iranians have a bomb (on the way to a few bombs and, eventually, one presumes but cannot know, a nuclear arsenal), nuclear proliferation will have already occurred. Whether or not a major terrorist group gets its hands on a nuke is a completely separate question. As I have argued on this board now several times, without ever receiving a credible response, it is very difficult to imagine a realistic scenario under which some Iranian nuclear terror-master would be able to “hand off” a nuke and in so doing (or, more precisely, in so attempting, since even preparing the hand-off would be an operation fraught with uncertainty and danger) achieve a higher likelihood of Israel’s destruction than of his own country’s.
I do believe that we are entering a very dangerous period, quite possibly to be marked by escalated nuclear proliferation and eventually by use of nuclear weapons and other WMD. We’ll have a better chance of negotiating the political and military maze successfully if we speak and think precisely about what we know, rather than constantly trying to turn conjecture and supposition into fact, and making ourselves subject to reasonable suspicion of paranoia and/or politically self-interested exaggeration.
Speaking of “slimy apologias,” how about Commentary, the spokesdogs for the traitorous, dual-citizen, AIPAC Bund, and its shilling for torture and for its favorite president, the incompetent, floor-crawling drunk of an idiot, George W. Bush? Who in hell are you people to talk about “slimy apologias,” anyway? The Commentary neo-con crowd is as slimy as slimy vermin ever get.
I used to line my bird cage with the NYT, now my parrot is mentally challenged.
Jonathan, where is Roger’s “tough love” for Iran?
From a US State Department report(2001) on religious freedom in Iran.
“Human Rights Watch reported the death in May 1998 of Jewish businessman
Ruhollah Kakhodah-Zadeh, who was hanged in prison without a public charge or
legal proceeding. Reports indicate that Kakhodah-Zadeh may have been killed for
assisting Jews to emigrate. As an accountant, Kakhoda-Zadeh provided power-of-attorney
services for Jews departing the country.”
Give me a break. Cohen is just another useful idiot.
I wondered about Ali Reza Eshraghi’s identification. He’s a former editor of a Tehran newspaper and a resident “scholar” at a school of “journalism.” Given his previous position, his job (other than correcting grammatical errors and ensuring uniformity of style) was to produce the most effective propaganda for the government or for the government permitted party published the paper.
So what does that say about “journalism” nowadays? That it’s simply propaganda?
John Hartland,
Am I correct in assuming that you are actually a Zionist whose posts are designed to wake Jews up to the degree of danger that they face?
How does this fit into the picture:http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KB24Ak02.html
John Hartland writes things like “traitorous, dual-citizen, AIPAC Bund”….but heavens no, John’s not an anti-Semite, right? Perish the thought! He’s merely a “reasoned critic of Israel,” right? Right, John? Not even a dash of bigotry in Mr. Hartland!
John Hartland is Lester in disguise.
Bobby Stern are you saying that John Hartland is les-ter than meets the eye?