The Obama administration’s decision to pick a quarrel with the Jewish state over settlements, Jerusalem, and how to deal with a nuclear Iran, are all light years away from the down-the-line support for Israel that candidate Obama and his Jewish surrogates articulated throughout the campaign. This leaves those Democrats who spent 2008 vouching for Barack Obama’s bona fides as a supporter of Israel, with, as they used to say on “I Love Lucy,” a lot of ’splainin’ to do.

And none of them have as much to answer for as Harvard Law’s Alan Dershowitz who used his status as a celebrity author and personality to good effect on Obama’s behalf. It should be stipulated that while Dershowitz is, and always has been, a proud and loud liberal and though his sympathies have always similarly been with the Left of the Israeli political spectrum, there can be no questioning his long and honorable record of backing Israel. Few have been as articulate in making a principled stand on behalf of its right to self-defense against terrorism. Indeed, last year he argued that George W. Bush had earned the right to be considered a great friend of Israel (something most liberals would never admit to). But he nevertheless considered an Obama victory as a victory for Zionism, specifically because having a popular liberal president who cared about the Jewish state would be an improvement over a situation in which its greatest American champion was a deeply unpopular conservative Republican.

All of this makes Obama’s flipping on Israel issues during the last six months an acute embarrassment for Dershowitz, who tries to argue his way out of a corner in an unpersuasive op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Dershowtiz’s thesis is that the spat over settlements is a perennial issue and that Obama’s stand is no worse than that of previous administrations. On Iran, he claims there is no real change from Obama’s campaign stand that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable. Unfortunately, the prominent appeals specialist’s brief for Obama would be laughed out of any court in the land.

First, as even Dershowitz concedes, “Rhetorically, the Obama team has definitely taken a harsher approach toward Israel compared to its tone during the campaign.” For a president to adopt such a tone while at the same time going into overdrive in an effort to make nice with Israel’s Arab and Islamic foes, speaks volumes about his sympathies. Obama’s snub of Israel during his recent Mideast tour coupled with his profligate use of moral equivalencies between Israel and its would-be destroyers (i.e., the Holocaust equals the flight of Palestinians during the War of Independence) was the sort of thing that would have had Dershowitz on his hind legs screaming “bloody murder” had it been done by a president he didn’t campaign for.

Dershowitz is also wrong about the settlements spat, not only because it is significant that this administration made it their top foreign-policy priority early on but also because they have sought to escalate the dispute rather than resolve it. The calls by Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for an absolute freeze on any settlement building, including those the Bush administration conceded would stay with Israel in any peace settlement, was a blow to the alliance between the two countries. While Dershowitz is right that most American Jews are not fans of the settlements, the State Department’s statement that such a freeze applies even to the city of Jerusalem is something that only left-wing extremists within the Jewish community would countenance. It was also an effort to raise the stakes in a showdown between the Obama team and that of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that no friend of Israel could regard with anything but trepidation.

On Iran, the situation is also far worse than Dershowitz lets on. Though he rightly acknowledges that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s statements attempting to link a settlements freeze with U.S. action on Iran is ill considered and must be repudiated by the administration, he fails to note how Obama’s much ballyhooed attempt to “engage” Iran undermined efforts to rally the nation to more awareness of the existential threat that Tehran’s nuclear program poses to Israel. Up until the last week when the election fiasco and crackdown on dissents forced Obama to toughen his stand on the regime, the administration gave every indication that it was prepared to live with a nuclear Iran, a position switch that Dershowitz admits would justify Jewish supporters’ repudiation of the president. The best he can offer us is a hope that Iran’s behavior will strengthen Obama’s will to resist. However, the talk in Washington about resuming engagement after a “decent interval” makes this nothing but a wish upon a Democratic star. His faith in veteran peace processor Dennis Ross as a bulwark against appeasement of Iran is a weak reed upon which to base a defense of Obama.

Dershowitz understands that the fears about Obama’s betrayal of his pro-Israel supporters are real. He even goes so far as to say that “there may be coming changes in the Obama administration’s policies that do weaken the security of the Jewish state … with Iran’s burgeoning nuclear threat, it’s important to be vigilant for any signs of weakening support for Israel’s security — and to criticize forcefully any such change.” He’s right about that. But he’s wrong when he tries in vain to pretend that such a moment didn’t arrive months ago.

The bankruptcy of the Obama administration’s stillborn attempt at “engagement” with Tehran is no longer in doubt. The question is whether Washington will draw the proper conclusions and adjust its policy.

An interesting interpretation of the situation comes from M. K. Bhadrakumar, a former Indian diplomat writing for the Asia Times. He points out that Iran has received strong support from China throughout the tumult over the stolen presidential election and that Syria has remained a steadfast ally to Iran also, despite a flirtation with Obama.

More to the point, Bhadrakumar’s piece directly contradicts much of what has been written about the Iranian regime in recent weeks. Rather than being weakened by the election fiasco and the subsequent protests, he sees the regime — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in particular — as strengthened by recent events. His thesis holds that the regime is more united than ever in its resolve to hold onto power and that Ahmadinejad’s challenger Moussavi is completely isolated. Bhadrakumar believes Iran can retaliate against efforts to isolate it by complicating American efforts in Afghanistan.

Bhadrakumar is clearly sympathetic to the Islamic regime since he thinks that Ahmadinejad’s victory is legitimate. More absurdly, he seems to give some credence to the Islamist claim that the massive demonstrations against Ahmadinejad were ginned up by Western intelligence services. He laments Obama’s hardening stance against Iran — presumably as a result of pressure by U.S. public opinion — and advocates further appeasement of the regime after a “decent interval,” the same phrase employed by the Times’ Roger Cohen.

What can we make of this? First, I think Bhadrakumar’s point about the regime’s consolidated unity is well taken. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have demonstrated that they are in full control of the armed forces and can employ them without encountering dissent among their ranks. But his idea that Khamenei is now in a stronger position than before is nonsense. What the elections showed is that the Iranian version of democracy was always a sham. The Islamist clerics ruling that country with an iron fist can no longer pretend they do so with the consent of their people. This would give tremendous leverage to President Obama, should he decide to lead the West toward new stringent sanctions aimed at forcing Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions. Once the regime has shown a willingness to kill its own people with impunity, sympathy abroad has been diminished.

By now, President Obama must realize it is no longer possible to pretend that a policy of making nice with Islamist tyrants will achieve any of America’s objectives. But Obama’s popularity abroad gives him a unique chance to rally the world in isolating Iran. Obama may have entered office thinking he could sweet talk the Iranian nuclear threat away. But his gift of oratory can still be put to good use in the cause of both regional peace and Iranian freedom. Rather than worrying about whether Khamenei thinks he’s “meddling” or what the regime’s apologists say about him, Obama has an opportunity to lead on an issue of vital importance that will, due to Iran’s steady progress on the nuclear front, sooner or later be brought back to the top of his agenda. The question now is whether he has the wisdom and the courage to act.

The indefatigable Roger Cohen has earned some high marks in recent weeks for his coverage of the anti-regime protests in the streets of Tehran. He even admitted that some of his previous reports failed to convey the reality of the ruling regime. But he is far from repentant.

In an online Q&A with fellow op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, in which readers’ questions were posed to Cohen, he received a couple of sharp slaps across the wrist. But his responses were typically self-indulgent.

One reader posed the following question:

Nicholas Kristof mentions gnashing his teeth at your excellent recent reporting from Iran. I had long been gnashing my teeth at your many previous articles that sought to debunk U.S. opposition to this brutal regime that had long suppressed dissent with crackdowns and imprisonment. You then effortlessly ride the bandwagon of brave dissent with not so much as a look backward at your former positions that belittled U.S. opposition. Please comment.

— Daniel Saks

Cohen’s Response:

You are mistaken, Daniel, in saying that I have not looked back. I have written in two columns that I underestimated the brutality of the regime. I’ve not noticed any such mea culpas from my critics, however. They were wrong in underestimating the vibrancy and sophistication of Iranian society, in reducing the Iranian equation to a bunch of mad mullahs, and in dismissing this election as the meaningless foible of a clerical dictatorship. In my earlier columns, I tried to broaden the picture of Iran. … Iran was not, until these events, a subject over which there was any room for nuance. I tried to introduce some nuance, convey the society I saw. This was intolerable to some.

I think President Obama, as I wrote from Tehran, erred on the side of caution early on. He misspoke in equating Moussavi with Ahmadinejad in terms of US strategic interests. He should have been more forthright in standing with the Green Wave. Meddling be damned. This was a pivotal and historic moment. Obama should have tossed the strategy papers in the garbage and spoken from the heart. His comments got stronger and better, but they came as the street protests ebbed.

Cohen is right about Obama’s initial fecklessness and late response, but wrong about his critics.

Those who were appalled by Cohen’s dispatches from and about Iran earlier this year were not wrong to reduce everything to “mad mullahs.” As Cohen learned to his sorrow, the mullahs, their front man Ahmadinejad, and their hired guns, turned out to represent the only real power in the country. It wasn’t that we underestimated the vibrancy of Iranian culture, it was that Cohen was so seduced by the scent of incense in the bazaars and the seductive sight of uncovered hair peeking out underneath the scarves of the country’s oppressed women, that he persuaded himself that nothing else mattered.

Even more to the point, his real goal was not, as he claims, to introduce “nuance” into the discussion but to whitewash Iran, thus undermining efforts to halt the regime’s push for nuclear weapons. Indeed, as he made plain time and again, his agenda was to replace the merited demonization of a truly evil regime with a different story line, in which Israel and its supporters were falsely portrayed as manipulating American foreign policy. As I wrote in the May issue of COMMENTARY, in order to do this, the same regime he now condemns enlisted him to write articles portraying the small Jewish community of Iran as free and happy rather than as a terrorized remnant suffering from discrimination at the hands of a rabidly anti-Semitic government.

Cohen’s widely reviled columns about Iranian Jews and his attacks on Israel weren’t merely wrong-headed. They constituted disgraceful and patently dishonest pieces of reporting, which, as we said here months ago, prompted a comparison with Walter Duranty’s whitewash of Stalin’s atrocities in the same newspaper more than 70 years ago.

Roger Cohen’s critics have no reason to apologize. But despite some good work recently, the Times columnist still has much to atone for.

The Supreme Court’s ruling this morning on the New Haven firefighters’ lawsuit is a reminder of the vital role a sane majority on the high court plays in protecting the rights of citizens against the dictates of liberal ideology.

The 5-4 ruling, which reverses a decision endorsed by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, validated the complaints of a group of firefighters who took and passed a promotion test but wound up being told that the exam was invalid because not enough minorities had done sufficiently well on it. Though no one could credibly allege that the test was biased or that any discrimination had actually taken place, the city of New Haven threw out the test (thus rendering the efforts of the firefighters who had passed it worthless) because they feared that they would nonetheless be sued by the affirmative action bar, which views any result other than the one sought for minorities as inherently discriminatory.

Sotomayor and the Second Federal Circuit majority that dismissed the firefighters appeal didn’t even bother to state their reasons for their egregious and unconstitutional approval of this outrage. But fortunately there are still five members of the Supreme Court who aren’t willing to go along with such travesties.

How did the four members of the minority justify their dissent? Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the white and hispanic firefighters “understandably attract this court’s sympathy. But they had no vested right to promotion.” This is nonsense. Having jumped through every hoop that the city of New Haven set for them, the firefighters were entitled to the promotions that they had fairly earned in open competition. Denying them these promotions, merely because they were not black, is inherently discriminatory. Such reverse discrimination has become commonplace in recent decades, but it is still a disgrace when our courts seek to rationalize such naked racialism through the sort of convoluted reasoning put forward by Ginsburg.

The majority, led by that fickle weathervane Anthony Kennedy (thank goodness the wind was blowing in the right direction!), is to be commended for establishing a precedent that may curtail the widespread practice of officially endorsed discrimination.

But just as interesting is the insight this ruling brings to the question of Sotomayor’s nomination. The Senate is being asked to approve a person who was willing to endorse blatant discrimination motivated by race, albeit in the guise of remedying past discrimination even when no such discrimination is proved or even alleged.

Sotomayor will, when she is undoubtedly confirmed, replace David Souter, one of the justices who were willing to let the affirmative action mindset further erode American democracy. But the fact that her nomination will not undermine the narrow majority for reason is no cause for complacency. A doctrinaire liberal like Barack Obama can be counted on to put forward similar nominees in the next three to eight years. Anyone who cares about the future of the rule of law in this nation should not go to sleep tonight without saying a prayer for the continued good health of Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Kennedy.

Three years ago today, Hamas terrorists crossed the international border between Gaza and Israel to attack an Israeli army post. They killed two Israelis and kidnapped Corporal Gilad Shalit. He remains their prisoner to this day, held somewhere inside the Gaza territory ruled by the Hamas movement. Unlike Hamas killers held by Israel, Shalit has received no Red Cross visits. He is held incommunicado while his kidnappers hold off-and-on indirect negotiations to ransom him by forcing Israel to release hundreds or more terrorists including those convicted of perpetrating massacres onIsraeli civilians.

Some will say that Shalit was a solider in a war against Hamas and therefore, unlike a civilian, had to take his chances. If his fate is hard, we are told, that’s too bad but the Palestinians in Israeli hands aren’t at a beach resort either. And, as we are constantly reminded by celebrity tourists like Jimmy Carter as well as by the press, Palestinian civilians in Gaza are living in terrible conditions.

But it is curious that Shalit’s captivity is dismissed by most of the same people who are quick to attack Israel for behaving as if it is fighting a war against the Hamas rulers of Gaza. If Shalit’s fate is merely a caprice of war rather than a human rights issue, then how can anyone fault Israel for treating those who attacked its sovereign territory — and continue to do so by every means they can — as an enemy in a state of war against the Jewish state? How can it be okay for Hamas to hold an Israeli soldier hostage but not okay for Israel to attack Hamas terror bases and infrastructure as it did last December and January? Why is it an imperative for Israel to lift the limited blockade on Gaza (which attempts to prevent Hamas from rebuilding its military infrastructure while letting in food and medicine) so long as it is illegally holding an Israeli prisoner? What does it say about world opinion that it condemns Israel for cruelty toward the Palestinians while Iran’s ally Hamas is given impunity to commit terror and even to profit from kidnapping.

The anniversary of Shalit’s captivity also comes at a time when the Obama administration is attempting to restart peace talks in which Israel is being asked to make concessions on security and territory as a precondition of discussing peace. This insistence on pressuring Israel takes no account of the realities of Palestinian politics and society that render the entire project a fool’s errand. Hamas remains in power in Gaza, and might well be in charge of the West Bank too if Palestinians there were offered a free choice. Those in Washington and elsewhere who blithely talk of the need for Israel to freeze settlements or to lift roadblocks ignore the nature of Hamas — a military/political entity that continues to support the eradication of Israel and the massacre of its Jewish population. They forget that a total withdrawal of Israeli settlements and soldiers from Gaza four years ago didn’t bring peace or even an attempt by the Palestinians to build their economy. Instead it brought Hamas into power, first by elections and then by an armed coup, and the conversion of the strip into a vast terror base sheltered amid a civilian population.

While we must pray that Gilad Shalit is either ransomed or rescued soon, the lack of interest in his fate or the nature of his kidnappers on the part of the same people who are so quick to lecture Israel is a reminder of the absurd double standard by which that country is judged .

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford earned conservative applause earlier this year for refusing to accept federal stimulus funds since he opposed them in principle. Some even saw Sanford as a possible future GOP presidential hopeful though most of the mainstream media — and the South Carolina legislature that overrode him on the stimulus — saw him as just a conservative goofball.

Unfortunately for those searching for the next GOP star, that dim view of Sanford looks to be on the money after the governor disappeared for a week with his cell phone turned off. His office claimed he was off for a solo hike on the Appalachian Trail to clear his head after a stormy legislative session. Though some South Carolinians thought the post of governor was important enough that his whereabouts should never be a secret (not to mention little details such as who would be in charge of the National Guard in case of a disaster), others thought the idea of a leader going off to meditate in the midst of nature was great material for a future campaign. Indeed, campaign strategist Mark McKinnon, who has been keeping track of Republican presidential hopefuls for 2012 on the Daily Beast, thought the Appalachian retreat was a brilliant move by Sanford. Writing earlier this week, McKinnon described the walkabout as “Mark Sanford unplugged. Literally. He decided to take a hike. And he told his security detail to take a hike as well. Guy wanted some alone time in the woods to clear his head. Here we have a guy in politics who actually likes to get OUT of the spotlight. How exceedingly normal. … This is the sign of a healthy, sane individual.”

This was enough for McKinnon to move Sanford up on his list of 2012 Republican presidential contenders to fourth, leaving the South Carolinian trailing only Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, and John Thune, even though such rankings are pretty meaningless at this stage.

But unfortunately for McKinnon’s ranking system, Sanford wasn’t making like St. Francis of Assisi communing with the birds, the beasts, and the flowers in God’s southern mountain garden. Nor was he channeling that scene in the classic film “Sergeant York,” where Gary Cooper sits on top of a mountain with his dog and a bible while he decides whether to fight for his country.

Instead, as the world now knows, Sanford spent the last few days “crying in Argentina” as he sorted out his affair with an unidentified Argentinian lady with whom he originally shared an interest in politics.

Let’s just say that those who looked to South Carolina for a plausible presidential candidate had been a bit optimistic. His self-indulgent performance at today’s press conference shows him to be an egotistical nitwit. I’ll say one thing about this sorry spectacle; at least we were spared the sight of his wife standing by his side as he humiliates her, in the manner of Elliot Spitzer and his aggrieved spouse. Good for Mrs. Sanford. As for where Mark Sanford goes from here, the only reasonable answer for South Carolinians and Republicans is that he should just go away.

But I am looking forward to Mark McKinnon’s next ranking of candidates. Let’s just say that Gov. Sanford ought to lose a few notches.

Only two days ago a wide range of pundits were praising President Obama for his refusal to take a strong stand on the situation in Iran.

At the Daily Beast, veteran foreign policy “realist” Leslie Gelb complimented the president for his refusal to embrace the street protests or to express outrage over the situation. Gelb thought Obama was wise to ignore the neocons and “leave Iran to the Iranians,” lest a presidential statement tarnish the demonstrators as tools of America.

On the same day on the same site, veteran leftie Eric Alterman took an interestingly similar stance,  mocking neoconservatives such as Charles Krauthammer’s and Robert Kagan’s criticism of the president for, as Alterman put it, “not force-feeding Iran their democracy.” For Alterman, the whole idea of the United States taking a strong stand on the bloodshed in the streets of Tehran was just a wacky neocon theory, deeply reminiscent of the prelude to the war in Iraq, which he then rehearsed at length. Conveniently, Alterman omits the ultimate outcome of the war, which to date has produced a flawed and shaky but still coherent democracy that right now may look pretty good to those living under the thumb of the ayatollahs.

Indeed, Alterman thought the whole idea of Americans expecting their president to articulate a moral stance on a crucial foreign-affairs issue to be so laughable that he predicted that the dust-up over Obama’s failures on Iran means that neoconservatism will soon be as dead as Marxism. And considering that Alterman has spent a good deal of his career flaking for the legacy of the late Stalinist spy I.F. Stone, he may be presumed to be an expert on the subject of the death of Marxism.

These were just a couple of the pundits who blasted whomever who had the temerity to ask their president to start behaving like a leader. In the view of many realists, leftists and a few renegade Republicans who defy classification (such as former congressman and current MSNBC gabber Joe Scarborough who may fancy himself as a future leader of the GOP), Obama was right to stay mum.

But, lo and behold, after ten days of milquetoast releases on Iran, the president decided to significantly raise the temperature on the subject yesterday by making exactly the kind of strong statement his critics had been begging for all week. And what was the reaction from all those who had been saying that his refusal to do so was an indicator of his cool wisdom? Nothing much.

The Washington Post editorial page claimed that the president was not yielding to those who had blasted his “softness” even though that is exactly what he had just done. Instead, the Post pretended that Obama was finding his own middle way to avoid repeating what they think is the mistake of the Bush administration in trying to isolate Iran (though, in fact, Bush’s team significantly backed away from a tough Iran policy in his last year in office). Other neocon bashers seem either silent or in a similar state of denial about Obama’s flip. Like the White House spinners, they are merely pretending nothing has happened.

What does all this prove? That after taking a beating on the issue, Obama accepted that the so-called “realist” policy of engaging Iran is simply unacceptable to an American people that seem curiously susceptible to ideas like support for democracy and freedom abroad, even though such neoconservative notions were supposedly dead. Obama may still hope to one day engage Ahmadinejad rather than deal with the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons and terrorism at home and abroad, but he can’t afford to be branded an appeaser or enabler of that regime even if that’s what his realist and left-wing fans want.

Obama is still a popular president and, given his keen political instincts, may remain so despite his obvious failings. But the events of the last two weeks have shown that the only ideological corpse on display is the realist foreign policy on Iran that he had embraced to applause from the same pundits who are mum about his switcheroo.

Tony Judt is a very influential New York intellectual. From his perch at New York University, he sends forth books and lengthy articles that appear in influential forums. When Judt writes lengthy essays, the New York Times frees up room on the op-ed page while guys like Roger Cohen and Ross Douthat have to make do with being published in the on-line version only.

But all you really need to know about the 1,600+ word essay that appears in the Times today is that Judt couldn’t be more disingenuous if he tried. The piece, titled “Fictions on the Ground,” leads with his memories of being a kibbutz volunteer in the early 1960s. With that, Judt attempts to establish himself as someone who is – or used to be – a supporter of the pre-1967 Jewish State. That’s an important distinction for him to try and make since the point of the piece is to demonize the country for its supposedly illegal settlements on the West Bank. Mind you, he doesn’t make a case for their illegality. He merely asserts it as if there were no argument about their legal status. After all, from what sovereign nation did Israel “steal” the West Bank when it took control of it during a defensive war in 1967? Not Jordan, since almost no one recognized its illegal occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem from 1949 to 1967, after its British-led army invaded the former Mandate of Palestine. Not from a sovereign Palestinian Arab state, since none has ever existed (in no small measure because the Palestinian Arabs rejected the United Nation’s offer of a partition of the country in 1947).

Equally absurd is Judt’s assertion that Israel “needs settlements” because it conforms to a pioneer image of the country that sells to the world. In fact, Israel is doing everything possible to market itself to the world as the opposite of the settler stereotype, instead focusing on its attractive beaches, attractive Israelis (paging Bar Rafael, Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit covergirl), high tech industries, and medical innovations. In other words, Judt hasn’t the faintest idea what he’s talking about when he tries to explain anything about the country.

But far worse is the thing that Judt doesn’t mention in this lengthy diatribe about illegal settlements and Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategies. For all of his attempts to treat Jewish communities over the green line as illegal (including the Jerusalem suburbs where most “settlers” live), anyone who’s read Judt’s previous writings about the country knows very well that he considers the existence of the entire state to be immoral if not illegal. That’s right. As he explained in an even lengthier essay in The New York Review of Books in October 2003, he’s not a Zionist of any sort but someone who believes Israel needs to be dismantled and replaced by a “binational” state in which Zionism will be extirpated.

There are those who will argue that someone can advocate for such a thing to happen without understanding that it would almost certainly involve the destruction of the Jewish population of the country along with the Zionism. But that’s beside the point. Anyone who supports bi-nationalism and considers Zionism a sort of crime is in no position to be an arbiter of the legality of anything that Israel does. All of which leads us to wonder about the egregious lack of judgment on the part of the Times’s editors in allowing Judt to pontificate on this subject without mentioning his assertion that Tel Aviv, and yes, that kibbutz where he once volunteered, is more or less illegal too.

For those who wondered about the fate of Palestinian murderers living in protected exile in Europe, it turns out life in the Emerald Isle for Jihad Jaara isn’t exactly a remake of “The Quiet Man.”

That’s the upshot of Joshua Hammer’s article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine that gives us an update on the man who masterminded the murder of an American immigrant to Israel who worked with Palestinians in Bethlehem back in 2002. Along with other Palestinian killers from the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, Jaara took refuge from Israeli forces in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (or to be more accurate, he was one of the terrorists who hijacked the place). After a long siege, international pressure forced Israel to let the terrorists go free with some going to Spain and others to Ireland.

Hammer subsequently interviewed Jaara in Dublin in 2002 for a book about the siege and published his confession of responsibility for the killing. As the victim was an American citizen,  Hammer was later asked to testify about the confession before a federal grand jury.

Hammer goes on at length about his agonizing over whether to testify. This is as pointless as it is self-indulgent. There was no question of revealing sources since all the Justice Department asked of him was to verify in person the facts about the confession that he had already published. Unfortunately, nothing concrete came from the grand jury proceedings. Hammer leads his piece though with an account of a subsequent offer from the FBI, aimed at make him a government informant about Jaara. This gave Hammer a chance to show off his unwillingness to cooperate with law enforcement authorities.

Without too much trouble, Hammer again tracked down Jaara in Ireland. What he found was a sad remnant of a man living in fear of retribution from Israel and perhaps the United States. He and a Palestinian doctor both beg Hammer to tell them how he found them. Hammer refused them as he did the FBI and left the formerly brazen killer “sweating, sucking on a Marlboro, his eyes wide with fear.”

Hammer goes on:

I supposed he spent most of his exile holed up like this, watching bad movies and smoking Marlboros, waiting for the day when Mossad or the C.I.A. burst through the door … Jaara was trembling; the Palestinian physician placed two hands on his shoulders to steady him. He was still shaking when I slipped out the door …

Decent people everywhere can take some satisfaction from the fact that a man who got away with murder is now a sniveling coward in a living hell. There is nothing left for him but to wait for the inevitable day he gets his just desserts.

But there’s more to Hammer’s piece than this illustration of poetic, if not actual, justice. Hammer’s pose of journalistic integrity is especially tough to take because his portrait of the conflict between Israelis and terrorists like Jaara is based on a false moral equivalence. In discussing the outbreak of the second intifada, Hammer buys into the myth that it was a reaction to Ariel Sharon’s “provocative visit to the Al Aksa mosque, one of Islam’s holiest shrines in Jerusalem.” Of course, Sharon didn’t go into the mosque but just went for a stroll on the site of the Temple Mount (the original name of the place, which Hammer’s text doesn’t mention). Rather than place the outbreak of this campaign in the context of Yasser Arafat’s need to change the subject after he rejected an Israeli Peace offer months earlier, he chooses to falsely blame it all on the Israelis.

Interestingly, one fact that Hammer doesn’t conceal is that before Jaara killed Avi Boaz and took part in other terrorist shootings, he was an “officer in the Palestinian Authority’s Preventive Security Service.” This group was funded and trained by the West in order to maintain law and order and prevent terrorism. Instead, Jaara turned his rifle (no doubt given to him by Israel) on the Israelis and became part of Al Aksa, an organization that was financed by Arafat and his Fatah Party, the same group that is considered Israel’s ideal partner for peace today. There are  some who believe that those Fatah-supported Palestinians who are currently undergoing similar training by the United States will become an effective counter-terrorism force. Anyone who buys into that hope needs to learn more about why previous efforts to appease terrorists produced Jihad Jaara rather than peace. Despite its fractured portrayal of history, in this limited sense Hammer’s article is of some value.

In yesterday’s New York Times, reporter Helene Cooper pondered the meaning of the odd migration of Dennis Ross from an undisclosed location at the State Department to an equally obscure post somewhere in the White House. Cooper doesn’t come up with any definitive answers as to Ross’s MIA status in Obamaland. But Cooper was able to come up with a quote that may rank among the silliest bits of sycophancy we’ve read in a long time.

David Makovsky is a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where Ross also landed during his break from the George W. Bush administration. The two collaborated on a book about the peace process that has been much discussed since Ross returned to government service. When asked why Ross got his latest job, Makovsky claimed it was because “Dennis Ross is the Lebron James of Middle East diplomacy.”

Picking up on the basketball metaphor, Cooper concluded her piece by speculating that the reason Ross was pushed out of the State Department is because, “it really is crowded in the special envoy hallways at the State Department, what with Mr. Mitchell, the Kobe Bryant of Northern Ireland diplomacy, and Mr. Holbrooke, the Michael Jordan of global diplomacy, already parked there.”

Comparisons of George Mitchell to KB and Richard Holbrooke to His Airness are overblown. Those two ballplayers are genuine immortals in their field while it is unlikely that future historians will put either Mitchell or Holbrooke in the same class as a Prince Metternich or even a lesser diplomatic demigod such as Henry Kissinger. But they did achieve something as envoys in the past, even if it is highly doubtful that they will accomplish much in their present posts though Holbrooke’s task in Afghanistan is more realistic than the fool’s errand that Mitchell’s has been sent on in the Middle East.

Though Ross has been on duty for more Middle East peace processing than anyone else in captivity that is not the same thing as having done anything worthwhile.

Ross started out as one of Secretary of State James “f____ the Jews” Baker’s little helpers during that uber-realist’s pressure campaign on Israel after the first Gulf War. He stayed on during the Clinton administration and though he could claim no credit for brokering the failed Oslo Accords, he did spend several years trying to prop them up. Ross consistently whitewashed the incitement and violence of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority and thus contributed to the false hopes of the Oslo era as well as to its ultimate bloody collapse. He eventually decamped from Foggy Bottom early in the younger Bush’s presidency and was a critic of that administration’s decision to cut off talks with Arafat. Ross was also an early backer of Obama and spent most of 2008 fluttering around the country testifying to his candidate’s pro-Israel bona fides, a stance that has also lost much of its credibility in the last few weeks.

So comparing Dennis Ross’s track record of failures with Lebron James’s, a man widely acknowledged to be the best individual player in the NBA, is fairly ridiculous. It is true that James has yet to play on a championship team but that has had more to do with the failings of the rest of the Cleveland Cavaliers than anything James has done. By contrast, Ross was just another lousy player on a series of awful foreign policy teams led by losers like Baker, Warren Christopher, and Madeleine Albright.

Readers are invited to come up with their own suggestions for sports comparisons (keep it clean guys!) for Ross. If we’re going to stick to basketball, I’d like to nominate Stephon Marbury. Marbury has flitted from team to team in the course of a long career. Though very talented, he has made every team he played on worse rather than better. He is now, like the Oslo Accords Ross once touted, a metaphor for failed promise, better known for the cheap sneakers that bear his name than for any winning games.

Rather than worrying about whether Ross will prop up or undermine pro-Israel sentiment in the administration (the tack that many observers have taken), I think it is more apt to wonder what recycling a man who has helped author so many past disasters says about the judgment of the current occupant of the oval office.

President Obama has now adopted a position that many critics of his commitment to “engagement” with Iran were articulating before the Iranian election, namely that there isn’t much difference between the reformist Mir Hussein Moussavi and the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

It’s true that had Moussavi been allowed to win, the result would not have advanced peace in the region or increased the chances of Iran halting its nuclear program. By the same token, those who say that having Ahmadinejad in power is in the interests of both the United Sates and Israel are not thinking clearly. Ahmadinejad’s shameless anti-Semitism makes appeasement of Iran a less attractive policy in the West. But to make this the central consideration is to mistake tactics for strategy. Given the stakes involved in that nation’s quest for nuclear weapons, having a slightly saner Iranian government is preferable to the status quo — though both alternatives are pretty bad.

Yet Obama’s plague-on-both-their-houses attitude toward Moussavi and Ahmadinejad would have more credibility if the administration were not so clearly determined to make nice with Iran, no matter who becomes its next president. The growing pro-appeasement sentiment of the Iran lobby has been momentarily flummoxed by the drama in Tehran. But there is little doubt that following a “decent interval” (as the now slightly contrite Roger Cohen put it) Washington’s determination to avoid confrontation over the genocidal threat that a nuclear Iran poses to Israel will not be changed.

Though the administration’s spin masters are trying to avoid painting the president as a cynical observer who couldn’t care less about the beastly behavior of his proposed “engagement” partner, the meaning of his failure to speak out is becoming more and more obvious. After six months in office, it is time to face up to the fact that what Americans got when they elected Barack Obama last November is the second term of the first President George Bush’s foreign policy.

The first Bush presidency was, of course, the heyday of foreign policy “realism.” It was the elder Bush who was unmoved by the Tiananmen Square massacre. Making a stink about the snuffing out of a movement for Chinese liberty would have interfered with his friendship with the Beijing gerontocracy behind the slaughter. And it was the elder Bush who opposed freedom for the Baltic states and Ukraine when the Soviet Empire was tottering.

Obama’s refusal to “meddle” in foreign quarrels may have its origins in a belief in America’s unworthiness and past sins (for which he has ceaselessly apologized since his inauguration) rather than the pure cynicism about human rights that seemed to characterize the James “f___ the Jews” Baker school of diplomacy. But the bottom line here is the same.

Indeed, like Bush, the one nation Obama feels free to “meddle” with is the one true democracy in the Middle East: Israel. The only difference is that while it might have been argued in 1991 — when Bush I pioneered the Walt-Mearsheimer critique of pro-Israel activists — that peace might be the outcome if Israel were pressured to make concessions to Palestinian terrorists, today, after many attempts on the Jewish State’s part to do just that, such a position has been exposed as utterly fantastic.

What the president’s legion of admirers must admit today is that though Obama is much better at articulating the sort of “vision thing” that Poppy Bush was incapable of doing, his foreign policy is in this respect virtually indistinguishable from the elderly Republican. Opposition to the younger President Bush’s democracy promotion agenda has become the keystone for Obama, even if it means that the world’s greatest democracy must clam up when Tehran’s tyrants stifle hope for change. The sad truth is that appeasement of tyranny has never been the sole preserve of either the Left or the Right. It is, however, the default position for cynics and cowards of all political persuasions.

What are we to make of the new poll that supposedly shows a decline in American support for Israel? According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the survey was conducted by the Israel Project and the results were leaked by someone who obtained the data immediately after polling last week.

Reportedly, the poll shows a precipitous drop in the number of those who call themselves supporters of Israel, with 44 percent believing the United States should support Israel as opposed to 69 percent last year.

However, not all the results in this poll are bad for Israel. Despite the decline in Israel backers, the Palestinians are still favored by only five percent of Americans with 32 percent saying they are undecided.

As for the question of the ultimate disposition of the lands disputed by Israelis and Arabs, 57 percent of Americans say that some of the West Bank should be retained by Israel for security – a position that dovetails nicely with the stand of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and seems to contradict the position of President Obama, who has called for a complete freeze in Jewish life everywhere inside the territories. Even more telling is that 66 percent of those polled do not believe that the creation of a Palestinian state or the freeze of Jewish settlement activity will lead to peace. And 85 percent believe that Iran is a serious threat to Israel.

So even if we accept the idea that support for Israel has declined, the poll still reveals that Americans are by no means sanguine about the Obama administration’s decision to feud with Israel’s government while seeking to appease Arab and Muslim opinion.

However, it would be foolish to dismiss the results showing lower figures of support for Israel and not to ponder what is responsible for such results. Two obvious answers present themselves to this question.

The first is the enormous damage done to Israel’s reputation by the media’s coverage of the fighting in Gaza in December and January. The failure of the media to adequately report the attacks on Israelis and their acceptance of misleading Palestinian propaganda about casualties was a blow to Israel. The willingness of many Americans to accept the lie that Israel’s counter-attack against a campaign of Palestinian terrorist rocket fire was disproportionate or unjustified has probably cost the Jewish state some support.

Second is the decision of President Obama to devote so much of his early presidency to fueling a dispute with Israel over settlements and a dead-in-the-water peace process while giving the Palestinians a pass over their complete lack of interest in peace. Obama’s personal popularity is a major factor when probing American opinion on any issue on which he has expressed an opinion. The administration’s clear decision to downgrade the alliance with Israel at the expense of ties with an undemocratic and largely unfriendly Muslim world has to have had some impact on American support for Israel. But given that the same poll figures still show majority support for Israel and against the Palestinians, should Obama continue to pursue these policies, there may eventually be a price to pay.

That said, the poll ought to be a wake up call to Americans who care about Israel, including the majority of American Jews who voted for Obama. Sooner or later, they are going to have to stand up and start holding Obama accountable on both Israel and Iran.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Department of the Treasury belatedly woke up to the fact that a number of Islamist terror groups have been using the United States as a base from which to raise money for their activities abroad. The result was that organizations like the Holy Land Foundation, a Hamas front group, were eventually shut down. In some cases, those running these so-called charities were prosecuted.

But not everybody is happy with this outcome. The American Civil Liberties Union has just issued a report contending that the federal government’s efforts to stem the flow of funds to terror groups violate the civil rights of American Muslims. The report describes the Treasury’s actions as impinging on the religious freedom of Muslims who have a religious obligation to give to charity. The upshot, according to the ACLU and a New York Times article on their report, is that the government crackdown has a chilling effect on all Muslim charities and impeded the ability of American Muslims to give zakat – one of the five pillars of their religion.

This is a view that was seemingly echoed by President Obama in his Cairo speech to the Muslim world. He apologized for the fact that “rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslim to fulfill their religious obligation. That is why I am committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat.”

What exactly the president will do to act on this promise is unclear but there are a few major problems with this conclusion.

The first is the willingness of both the ACLU and the Times to accept that giving to groups that funnel money to terrorist organizations is a reasonable definition of charitable activity. Though terrorism is the word that dare not be spoken aloud by both the president and everybody else in his administration these days, it is at the heart of this issue. In some cases, the money raised here by Islamist groups was going to needy people — the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. American money was being used to fulfill the promise that terror groups made to murderers. Other funds went to pay for the social services those groups, like Hamas and Hezbollah, provide for the poor in order to bolster their reputation and support among the population. The purpose was essentially to fund the budget of a terror group. While not every donor to such a group was completely aware of this fact, those who solicited the funds certainly were.

Second, as the Times reports, the downturn in Islamic giving has not affected all groups.

Paradoxically, two of the largest mainstream Arab-American charities — Access and Islamic Relief USA — say they have benefited from aggressive enforcement of antiterrorism laws. Islamic Relief USA, an aid organization with affiliates around the globe, has seen annual donations rise to about $25 million last year from roughly $7 million at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, with an additional $50 million in in-kind gifts, said the group’s spokesman, Mostafa Mahboob.

In other words, those groups with no ties to terror have been unaffected by the crackdown and have prospered.

But while legitimate Muslim charities have benefited from enforcement of the laws, many of the groups that pose as the leaders of American Muslims are still tied to the pro-terror agenda of institutions like the Holy Land Foundation. For example, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) continues to be put forward in the media as a legitimate representative of Muslim opinion despite the fact that the Holy Land prosecution revealed CAIR to have been founded as a Hamas front. Moderate anti-terror Muslims are still being crowded out of the public square while those who continue to rationalize the actions of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are treated as respectable players. If this trend is reinforced by the president it will be a setback for both America’s anti-terror actions and the efforts of genuinely moderate American Muslims who hope to break free of groups like CAIR and their terrorist partners.

One of the interesting sidelights of the reaction to the Iranian election is the debate here over whether the announced landslide re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is legitimate or not. The vast majority of those opining on the subject have assumed that Ahmadinejad’s victory by an astonishingly high margin over Mir Hussein Moussavi had to be a fraud. But not everyone is buying it and those who are saying that Ahmadinejad’s win actually does reflect the will of the people are not all on one side of the spectrum when it comes to what to do about Iran.

Over at the New Republic, Martin Peretz, who has not let his cheerleading for Obama’s election last year prevent him from pointing out the fecklessness of our current policy on Iran, writes:

My impression is that the incumbent’s margin of victory was too big to have been fraudulent and the loser’s numbers also too big. Tyrannies don’t play around with the numbers like this. A dictator usually wants 99% of the voters to have been for him. But in Iran we were seeing the remnants of a true civil society, the last expressions of which were during the time of the Shah. It would be a blessing if this were to be the beginnings of a renaissance.

Maybe the regime fiddled around a bit with the numbers at the polls and after the polling. Still, the outcome had a sense of authenticity.  A vast majority in the country is poor, and there is where the backing for Ahmadinejad and his ayatollah patrons is deepest.

Equally skeptical about the charges of fraud but more sympathetic to Tehran (and still supportive of engagement with the Islamic regime) are Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, a staffer at the left-wing New America Foundation. They write in today’s Washington Post that the polls they have conducted in Iran prior to the election back up the regime’s claim of an Ahmadinejad landslide. Inexplicably, their survey results show support for “a more democratic system, with normal relations with the United States, as consonant with their support for Ahmadinejad.”

Make of that what you will, but as much as I believe the United States ought to speak up strongly about the possibility of fraud and against the suppression of street protests and the arrest of opposition leaders, it is still possible that Ahmadinejad is actually the choice of a majority of Iranians. The idea that the Iranian people would willingly choose to be led by a man who seems to speak and act irrationally goes against every instinct of the Western mind. The people crying out for justice and change in the streets of Tehran seem to be like us in their disdain for an odious clerical dictatorship. Surely, we think, these protesters are representative of the majority of Iranians.

But what if they are in the minority? What does it say about the prospects of any diplomatic engagement with Iran if a Holocaust denier and a man bent on the annihilation of Israel and confrontation with the West has won again? It is one thing to think of that country as being ruled against the will of its people, by a repressive Islamist regime. But the notion that such a government could actually represent the will of the people there is probably too frightening for most of us to contemplate.

But fraud or not, the event of the past few days ought to disillusion even those most dedicated to appeasement of Iran. Obama may have been counting on Ahmadinejad’s defeat to justify his administration’s decision to punt on the nuclear issue. But whether Iran is ruled by a popular man who is nevertheless a threat to the West or by a regime that is repressing its people in order to stick to Ahmadinejad’s mad policies, any Obama determination to pursue a policy of engagement represents sheer folly.

It’s way too early to tell what the ultimate outcome of the Iranian election will be. After everyone there has voted, we’ll have to allow some time for the Islamist government and its supreme council of mullahs to ratify or fix the results more to their liking.

That said, it may well be that the Iranians have decided that they want a more presentable front man for their revolutionary cause and thus threw out Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in favor of “reformer,” Mir Hussein Moussavi. The New York Times blog, the Lede, tells us that Britain’s Channel 4 News has broadcast a story in which: “Lindsey Hilsum says that a source in Tehran has told her that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has had his own private opinion poll conducted and the results suggest that Mir Hussein Moussavi could be on the verge of a broad victory.”

If so, the main problem will be, as Elliott Abrams writes admirably on today’s Times op-ed page, that we will mistake the victory of Iranian “reformers” for a real change in the nature of the regime. The bet here is that, if he wins, Moussavi (who was Iran’s prime minister during the fanatical Islamic Republic’s war with Iraq) will get kid-glove treatment from the international press and be given the sort of deference and understanding that Benjamin Netanyahu, who won a real democratic election in Israel in February (where the candidates were not vetted by a supreme religious council to ensure that no dissent from its absolute rule is tolerated) never gets.

With Netanyahu slated to deliver a major address on foreign policy on Sunday, during which he will give his response to President Obama’s peace overtures, the contrast between the coverage given his peace proposals and the line taken by Moussavi will be significant. After all, why shouldn’t the leader (albeit a more moderate one than his predecessor) of a theocracy bent on nuclear domination of the region be treated better than the democratically-elected leader of a U.S. ally whose existence is threatened by said theocracy?

In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman takes time out from his calls for more government intervention in the economy to take a shot at hate-mongers. Krugman is not the only left-winger to blame the shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Museum on conservative talk-show hosts and Fox News. But when a fellow who has won a Nobel Prize for Economics (whether he deserved such an honor is another question entirely) uses his regular perch on the most prestigious op-ed page in the country to spout such nonsense, then we have to accept that the culture wars have escalated to a new level of viciousness.

It was one thing to try and pin the tragic and horrendous murder of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller on the pro-life movement. Polls show that a majority of Americans were, at best, leery about the sort of late-term abortions that Tiller provided. But that does not mean that anyone who opposed Tiller’s work is responsible for the lunatic who killed him acting on his own. Yet, fair or not, it was to be expected that the Left would make a meal of Bill O’Reilly since the Fox personality had targeted Tiller in his coverage of the issue.

But for Krugman and others to seize on the case of neo-Nazi James W. Von Brunn as a rationale for ranting against Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, and actor Jon Voight is the height of absurdity. Nothing they have said or done is even remotely connected to this murderous nut or anyone else who might share his anti-Semitic views. Indeed, Von Brunn probably considered that trio to be the enemy as much as Obama, since they are all stalwart supporters of Israel.

But the most egregious aspect of Krugman’s sham case for blaming the political Right for extremist violence is the fact that he and other liberals ignore the third case of political violence that recently occurred in this country: the shooting of two U.S. soldiers in Arkansas by Abdulhakim Muhahid Muhammad — a Muslim extremist who claimed to be taking “revenge” for America’s “crimes” against Muslims. That incident has received paltry coverage by the mainstream media in contrast to the all-out approach to both Tiller’s murder and to the Holocaust Museum shooting. Krugman and company prefer to ignore it because it doesn’t fit into their ideological box, in which everyone who loudly disagrees with Obama or the left can, in some way, be linked to extremist nut jobs.

To leftists like Krugman, the real story of Muslim-inspired terrorism in this country is one that needs to be played down since it reminds everyone about George Bush’s now abandoned “war on terror.” In fact, the Arkansas incident was hardly the only instance of Islamist terror in this country in the last year. Muhammad’s murderous attack fits into a pattern alongside the foiled plots against the soldiers of Fort Dix, New Jersey and synagogues in Riverdale, New York. Anyone who dares to point this out is falsely accused of fomenting hatred against Muslims when, in fact, the real problem is the flood of anti-Semitic and anti-Western propaganda emanating from Arab and Islamic sources.

Everyone who disagrees with Israel or opposed the war in Iraq ought not to be blamed for anti-American terror, even if they have sometimes spoken in a vulgar or extreme fashion. By the same token, the only rationale for trying to tie right-wing talkers to von Brunn is politics pure and simple.  Far right extremism is dangerous but it has as much to do with Limbaugh and Beck as Al Qaeda does with Krugman. The attempt to politicize the Holocaust Museum shooting or even the Tiller murder is shameful. So is the refusal of the media to recognize the even more dangerous threat of Islamist terror.

While elsewhere in the media the push to appease Iran is growing more popular, Jeffrey Goldberg is taking the opposite tack in his latest feature for the Atlantic, titled “How Iran Could Save the Middle East.”

His thesis is one that many Israelis, particularly President Shimon Peres, have been promoting in the last year. Namely, that Israel and the moderate Arab nations can come together in order to combat their mutual enemy: Iran. Goldberg rightly points out that the Sunni-Shia divide within the Muslim world is of paramount importance and that the Sunni nations such as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia both despise and fear Tehran, especially now that its nuclear ambitions may well be realized.

The conflict between Sunni and Shia is the most consequential in the Middle East because it is so profound and elemental. But precisely because it is so intractable, it might hold the key to solving another seemingly eternal Middle East conflict, the one between Muslim and Jew. The definitive Middle East cliché is, of course, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Well, it turns out that today, more than at any other time in the ruinous 100-year encounter between Arabs and Jews on the strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the two parties in the dispute have a common enemy: the Shia Persian Islamic Republic of Iran. President Obama’s skills and charisma just might bring Sunni Arabs and Israeli Jews together…

According to Goldberg and David Makovsky (whom Goldberg cites as the “expert” who has thought all this through) Iran’s gains in Iraq and aggressive behavior elsewhere ought to be enough to motivate Arab/Sunni countries to cooperate with the United States and Israel against Iran. His formula for sealing this alliance is familiar. Israel must freeze Jewish settlements on the West Bank and make other concessions to the Palestinians that will give the other Arabs cover for more cooperation with the Jewish state. Then Israel and the Palestinians can move on to delineate the borders of a future Palestinian state, clearing the decks for a “Sunni-Jewish alliance” against Iran.

It’s an interesting idea but, like so many other bright ideas produced by “experts” such as Makovsky, it runs aground on the shoals of reality. Neither Iran-backed Hamas nor the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority are interested in coming to an agreement with Israel on borders. If they were, they could have had a favorable deal with Ehud Olmert last year (forget about Yasser Arafat’s rejection of another offer of state in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem nine years ago). Both Hamas and Hezbollah (funded and supplied by Iran) also have the ability to heat things up with terror attacks and rocket fire across Israel’s border any time they like because Israel’s self-defense measures against such actions inevitably stir up more Arab and Muslim hatred for the Jewish state. No matter how bitterly they criticize Iran in private, when push comes to shove Arab countries always play to the crowd by appealing to anti-Jewish sentiment.

The Hamas-Iran alliance shows that despite the deep enmity between Shia and Sunni, it is a gap that can always be bridged by the hatred for Israel and the West that has been fomented by a generation of anti-Zionist incitement in the Muslim world. Goldberg’s scheme is predicated on the notion that Israeli concessions will enable the Sunnis to trump Iran’s stance as the protector of the Palestinians. But since those concessions are more likely to be interpreted by the Arab world as weakness and an incentive for more attacks on Israel, the moment for the Sunni-Jewish alliance may well never come. Goldberg’s heart may be in the right place with this article but, alas, in the Muslim world, the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy if he’s a Jew.

Making common cause with Israel against Iran would be the smart thing for Arab leaders to do. But despite knowing how dangerous Iran is, assuming they have the courage and the foresight to act in their own interest and cooperate with Israel is probably giving them far too much credit.

Roger Cohen is back in Tehran this week but the good news is that, unlike his previous visit, this trip does not find the New York Times columnist harassing the beleaguered remnants of the once great Jewish community of Persia into giving testimonials about the magnanimity of their oppressors. (For a more thorough discussion of Cohen’s earlier visit see my article “An Ominous Turn in Elite Opinion,” in the May issue of COMMENTARY.) Instead, after a refreshing break in Vietnam (where he penned columns whitewashing the communist dictatorship of that country much as he did for the tyrants of Tehran) Cohen has returned to the land of Omar Khayyam for what we may laughably term “coverage” of Iran’s presidential election.

The point of today’s Cohen column (available only in the online edition of the Times), and virtually every other piece he has written about Iran this year, is to knock down the popular and accurate image of the place as a police state run by fanatical mullahs. The election appears to be a lively affair with what may well be a close race between incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and challenger Mir Hussein Moussavi — the man western reporters term a “reformer.” But, as usual, Cohen gets so caught up in the atmosphere into which he has parachuted that he interprets what he’s seeing as the end of the long night of Islamist rule:

For months now, I’ve been urging another look at Iran, beyond dangerous demonization of it as a totalitarian state. Seldom has the country looked less like one than in these giddy June days.

I wandered in a sea of green ribbons, hats, banners and bandannas to a rally at which Ahmadinejad was mocked as “a midget” and Moussavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard, sporting a floral hijab that taunted grey-black officialdom, warned the president that: “If there is vote rigging, Iran will rise up.”

A Moussavi kite hovered; a shout went up that “It’s even written in the sky.” I don’t know about that, but something is stirring again in the Islamic Republic, a nation attached to both words in its self-description. … Moussavi is dour but seen as a man of integrity, the anti-Ahmadinejad who can usher back the 1979 revolution’s promise rather than incarnate its repressive turn.”

What’s lacking here is analysis of any real differences between Moussavi and Ahmadinejad. While Moussavi may tone down the outward and obnoxious face of Iran (i.e. Holocaust denial), will he cut off the spigots of aid for Hamas and Hezbollah, the terrorist groups that form the long arm of Iranian foreign policy? Will he end Tehran’s nuclear delusion?

We don’t know the answers to these questions and neither does Cohen. While diving headfirst into the minutia of the feuds between the rival groups of mullahs and their hangers-on that constitute Iranian politics, Cohen doesn’t mention that the Islamist religious figures that run the country (and who vet each potential candidate for president) have no intention of changing course even if a new front man adopts a more civil tone.

The real fallacy in this column is Cohen’s astonishing belief that it was America that created Ahmadinejad: “Why the sudden turbulence? … Radicalism in the Bush White House bred radicalism in Iran, making life easy for Ahmadinejad. President Obama’s outreach, by contrast, has unsettled the regime.”

The lack of historical perspective in this sentence is breathtaking. George W. Bush created Iranian radicalism? The Iranian regime created by the Ayatollah Khomeini and perpetuated by his followers after his death has never ceased being a radical revolutionary movement aimed at oppressing its own people and spreading its vision of Islam and hatred for the West elsewhere. Iranian support for terror and its hopes for a nuclear option didn’t begin with Ahmadinejad and, it is fairly easy to surmise, won’t end without him.

Roger Cohen may actually believe that Obama and Moussavi will together usher in an era of “rapprochement with the United States that will at the same time preserve a modified regime.” But, even if that happens, why will the preservation of an Islamist regime that will, no doubt, keep its nuclear options as well as its terrorist satraps, be something that the United States would desire? The only thing that Obama’s appeasement of a more moderate-sounding Tehran would accomplish would be to further isolate a still threatened State of Israel and undermine any hope of genuine reform in Iran. But anyone who has been reading Roger Cohen’s columns this year will understand that it is precisely this outcome the columnist desires.

Benjamin Netanyahu said he won’t repeat the same mistakes in his second term as prime minister that torpedoed his first stint. Since winning the big seat again in February, most of the commentary on his chances of success have centered on whether or not he will be able to avoid alienating Israel’s American allies, as his relationship with the Clinton administration was terrible.

Netanyahu deserved some of the blame for the acrimonious relationship with the Clinton administration, but not all of it. Clinton had done everything in his power to try helping Shimon Peres beat Bibi in the 1996 election, and was more than disappointed when his candidate lost. For all of Netanyahu’s inability to bond with the man from Hope, Clinton never gave him much of a chance.

The same thing may be happening with Barack Obama, who has gone out of his way to gin up a phony dispute with Israel over settlement growth. The controversy is a contrivance because Obama and his people know very well that no Israeli concession could manufacture a serious Palestinian peace partner where none exists. Obama’s breaching of previous U.S. commitments for which Israel paid dearly (in terms of acceptance of the road map peace formula and the withdrawal from Gaza) illustrates his bad will.

But those negative vibes with Washington were not the only Netanyahu blunders in the 1990s. Almost as important was the way the prime minister spent his initial three-year stay in office alienating friends and allies. Netanyahu’s reported arrogance and high-handed manner was widely resented in his own party and among his coalition partners. By the time he was ousted in 1999 by Ehud Barak (whose own time as prime minister was such a disaster that, by comparison, Netanyahu didn’t look so bad), it seemed as if he had few friends left in Israeli politics.

Circumstances (the collapse of the Oslo process due to Arafat’s unwillingness to accept a Palestinian state on a silver platter from Barak) and hard work (such as his willingness to serve under Ariel Sharon and do a tough job well at the Finance Ministry) gave him another chance at glory. But, if a report in today’s Jerusalem Post is to be believed, it appears that Bibi just can’t help being Bibi.

Apparently Netanyahu met with his Likud faction in the Knesset yesterday, but refused to discuss the speech he is planning to give on Sunday at Bar Illan University, in which it is believed he will outline a new peace plan. It was understandable that Netanyahu didn’t want to scoop himself by divulging the details of an address that he hopes will help defuse the tensions between him and Obama, so he didn’t tell the MKs what he would say. But in typical Bibi fashion the story says, “Netanyahu belittled them by telling them to leave their advice with cabinet secretary Tzvi Hauser. The prime minister mockingly told Likud MK Miri Regev that she could write the speech for him if she wanted.”

Ironically, some of those present told the Post that even if, as expected, Netanyahu tilted a bit to the left in his speech, he wouldn’t face a rebellion. That’s important, since Obama and Jewish leftists appear to be hoping that such moderation would cause Netanyahu’s government to fall. The Likud Knesset caucus needs to understand that the alternative to the current coalition is one that will be even worse for their party’s principles and that the smart thing for them to do is to stand with Netanyahu and enable him to weather the storm.

But if Netanyahu is going to repeat his previous conduct, and treat his supporters like fools who deserve nothing but scorn, then he will wind up as isolated as he was in 1999. Publicly abusing the people whose votes he needs to stay in office is not smart—no matter what he thinks of those people. It turns out the “new Bibi” may be very much like the old Bibi.

Give credit to veteran liberal journalist Phil Bronstein. Unlike Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, who thinks our president is “sort of God,” the San Francisco Chronicle’s editor-at-large is aware of the steamy affair going on between Barack Obama and the mainstream press and thinks there’s something fishy about it.

In a blog entry titled “Love or lust, Obama and the fawning press needs to get a room,” Bronstein describes the New York Times coverage of the president’s recent evening in New York with his wife “full-on chick-flick swooning.” An interview of Obama by NBC’s Brian Williams was more about hanging out with the new cool chief executive rather than asking probing questions; Bronstein wonders if “a little navel-gazing among journalism standards hall monitors about whether the thing had been too soft came and went.”

He goes right to the heart of the matter when he says he thought such stuff couldn’t happen in this day and age:

I thought that the Maxfield Parrish, heroic days of the Kennedy Administration PR, where the press and the president were pretty much all in on the same screenplay and the same jokes, couldn’t happen in our modern era, what with paparazzi and tabloids and talk shows, citizen sound-bite scavengers and voracious 24/7 news cycles. But now that the stumbling Bushes and smirking Clintons are out of the White House, time has compressed back on itself like the machine in the Denzel Washington movie, “Deja Vu.” It’s the early 1960s and Camelot all over again: Very attractive wife, cute, precocious kids and the hopes and dreams of at least 63 percent of the population sitting on the athletic shoulders of a young, charismatic, mold-breaking leader, Blah, blah.

Bronstein is right when he puts the blame for this on the press and not an administration, which is all too eager to take advantage of the hero worship being given their man:

You can’t blame powerful people for wanting to play the press to peddle self-perpetuating mythology. But you can blame the press, already suffocating under a massive pile of blame, guilt, heavy debt and sinking fortunes, for being played. Some of the time, it seems we’re even enthusiastically jumping into the pond without even being pushed. Is there an actual limit to the number of instances you can be the cover of Newsweek?

New Yorkers woke up this morning to read the news that the Republicans have taken back control of the State Senate in Albany. But GOP stalwarts in the Empire State and elsewhere should take no comfort from this development. While they may consider the breakup of the Democratic monopoly on power in the state a good thing, the method by which they accomplished this trick is nothing to brag about.

The slim Democratic majority in the State Senate was lost by virtue of the votes of two members of their caucus who decided to flip: Pedro Espada, Jr. of the Bronx and Hiram Monseratte of Queens. The two have one thing in common other than the fact that they used to be loyal Democrats: they are both in serious legal trouble. Espada is under investigation for the way he has run a non-profit health care network and was fined for not disclosing campaign contributions. Monseratte is under indictment for stabbing his female live-in companion with broken glass. Quite a pair, aren’t they?

As a result of the coup, Espada is the new Senate President. Thus, because New York currently has no lieutenant governor — since, as you may recall,  David Patterson left that post to become governor after Elliot Spitzer resigned in the wake of his prostitution scandal —  Espada would become governor if the bumbling Patterson was forced to resign or became incapacitated. All of which gives new meaning to the phrase “dumbing deviancy down.”

The plot was apparently hatched and pushed forward by Tom Golisano, a Rochester billionaire who has spent much of the last decade pushing for various state government reforms and last year helped finance the election of candidates — mostly Democrats — to effect these changes. When, surprise, surprise, the new Democratic majority didn’t dance to his tune and raised even more taxes, Golisano said he was leaving the state for Florida but began plotting his revenge.

After the reorganization vote (which the Democrats tried to stop by turning out the lights in the Senate Chamber) the new GOP majority enacted new rules about term limits for leadership positions and other reforms that will equalize the amount of pork barrel projects passed between the two parties. The switch could also undermine the Democrats’ plans for more tax-and-spend policies (though, to be fair, during their times in power, New York Republicans have been just as bad) and may make it even harder for the legislature to pass a gay marriage bill (though Espada is himself a sponsor of that legislation). Of course, if Espada and Monseratte are convicted of the crimes for which they are either under investigation or indictment, they will have to resign and the Democrats can seize the Senate back.

Odds are, most New Yorkers will see all of this as just another case of politicians scrapping for more power and patronage.

More importantly, anyone who thinks this disgraceful spectacle is a harbinger of a comeback by New York Republicans is dreaming. On the contrary, such shenanigans will convince no one that the party has an idea worth the name or even the slimmest grasp of political ethics. If Republicans are serious about cleaning up their act and providing a coherent alternative to the public in our new age of Obama, then this is exactly the sort of monkey business they should be avoiding.

What was most noticed in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s interview yesterday on ABC’s “This Week” was her seemingly bellicose warning to Iran that any nuclear attack on Israel would be treated as an attack on the United States. Some are interpreting this extension of America’s nuclear umbrella over the Jewish state as an expression of warm support that ought to reassure any Israelis nervous about Iran’s fast track into nuclear capability.

However, before we get all warm and fuzzy over Hillary’s reiteration of her presidential campaign rhetoric about defending Israel, let’s place this statement in the context of her current position and President Obama’s speech in Cairo last week. What was missing from both the Clinton statement and Obama’s speech was a declaration from the United States that Iran’s enrichment of uranium and, indeed, its drive for nuclear capability had to be stopped in its tracks. Instead, Obama merely mouthed some vague platitudes about non-proliferation while Clinton was jumping ahead to dealing with the policy implications of a situation in which Iran already had a nuclear weapon.

The point is that despite Obama’s campaign rhetoric about an Iranian nuke being a “game changer,” his administration has, in effect, already given up on trying to stop the game from irreversibly changing.

It is clear that these statements should give cold comfort to Israel or anyone who worries about the consequences of Tehran acquiring nuclear capability. Israel doesn’t want or need the United States to come to its rescue after an Iranian nuclear bomb has exploded. Sympathy or even retribution after another Holocaust would be pointless. What Israel and other countries rightfully fearing Iranian nukes need is American leadership for serious sanctions that will prevent such a weapon from ever being built. Since such a campaign is clearly off the table for Obama, the question then must be posed as to how he and Clinton plan to weasel out of their commitments to stopping Iran. The answer? They seem to be waiting and hoping for this week’s Iranian presidential election to produce a winner other than incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to give them an excuse to back down even further.

Will it happen? Today’s New York Times feature on the election indicates that Mr. Hussein Moussavi, whom the paper described as a “reformer,” is leading in unofficial polls. While Moussavi, one of the few approved by the ruling Islamist mullahs to run for the post, does not appear to be any more moderate on the question of aiding terror, threatening Israel, or boosting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he may be a bit more presentable than the repulsive Ahmadinejad. In other words, while he may actually be a Holocaust denier, if elected, he may not talk much about it.

Though Iranians may be eager to seize any opportunity, even in these decidedly unfree elections, to show their dissatisfaction with the direction their country is taking, the distinctions between reformers and non-reformers in Iran have not been significant in terms of actual policy. But they may be sufficient for Obama and Clinton to justify their walking away from a policy for restraining Iran.

While in Dresden on Friday, Barack Obama sat down for yet another fawning interview, this time with NBC’s Tom Brokaw on the “Today Show.”

Brokaw asked Obama what Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could learn from his visit to Buchenwald. Obama made short work of this softball, answering: “Well I was very explicit yesterday.  He should make his own visit.  I have no patience for people who would deny history. The history of the Holocaust is not something speculative.”

Well said, Mr. President!

Brokaw’s next question was something else entirely: “What can the Israelis learn from your visit to Buchenwald? And what should they be thinking about their treatment of Palestinians?”

To this the president responded: “Well, look, there’s no equivalency here.”

Of course, Obama had implied that there was such an “equivalency” in his speech in Cairo the day before by directly contrasting the Holocaust with the plight of the Palestinians in his patented “on the one and then on the other hand” style. But when Brokaw connected the dots that Obama had drawn, the president stepped back and repudiated the analogy. So far, so good. Had Obama stopped there, we might well think that the president understands the situation better than he let on in his Cairo speech. But he didn’t stop. Here’s the rest of his answer to the question:

But I do think that given the extraordinary moral traditions of Judaism, the potential power of empathy that arouses out of going through such historic hardships that - that will ultimately give the people of Israel the strength and purpose to seek a just and lasting peace. And I believe that will involve creating two states side by side with peace and security.

Though moments earlier he had said he had no patience for those who deny history, that’s exactly what he did when he spoke as if the people of Israel had yet to try to seek peace. He was, in effect denying the fact that it was the Jews who accepted the principle of partition of the land into two states for two peoples in 1937 and 1947 before the State of Israel was even born. He was denying that it was the people of Israel who reached out to the Palestinians and attempted to make peace with them in 1993 with the Oslo Accords and various follow-up agreements later that decade (including two signed by current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu). And that it was the Israelis who offered the Palestinians a state in virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza and part of Jerusalem at Camp David in July 2000 and a few months later in Taba. And that Ehud Olmert offered them even more last year after the Annapolis summit.

Obama was so quick to speak in a patronizing tone about what Israelis should learn from their own religion (which apparently Obama thinks he knows better than they do), he forgot to mention that it was the Palestinians who rejected peace each and every time and responded consistently to Israeli peace offers with war and terrorism (a word that never passes the president’s lips any more).

The people of Israel have already found the strength and purpose to try and make a lasting peace. They found it long before Obama arrived on the scene and need no instruction from him on the subject. What they need is a Palestinian negotiating partner that has found such strength and purpose, something completely lacking from both the feckless Palestinian Authority and the Hamas Islamist terrorist movement that he spoke of in Cairo, neither of who have any real interest in a two state solution. What they are both still striving for is a one state solution in which Israel is extinguished.

What they also need is for their sole ally to stop acting and speaking as if history began the day he entered office and that all that has gone before is of no significance. While his arrogance and condescension may play well on the international stage, it is no match for the realities of this complex situation. But if you’re Barack Obama, I guess you don’t have to worry too much about history or facts so long as the applause and fawning interviews keep coming.

A hat tip to Alan Luxenberg of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia for alerting me to the content of this interview.

President Obama’s world moral equivalency tour continued today in Germany with a stop at the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp and then on to the city of Dresden. While pleasing to his German hosts, who have been rightly upset by Obama’s attempt to foist his stimulus approach to economics, the stop at Dresden does a bit more than, as Chancellor Angela Merkel said, symbolize the progress Germany has made since unification. To Germans, it is a symbol of their suffering at the hands of the victorious allies in World War Two and balances out Obama’s reminder of the crimes of the Third Reich.

The firebombing of Dresden in 1945 caused horrific casualties and some have always argued that it had little military value. As such, the Dresden raid has always served as an opportunity for revisionists to try to prove that the “good war” that America fought wasn’t as pure as we have been told. But though the debate over the utility of much of the allied strategic bombing campaign in the war is fair, the idea we should consider Dresden a war crime — something indicated by Obama’s decision to go there on the same day he visits an outlet of the Nazi machine of oppression and death — is dead wrong.

Historical evidence about German war production indicates that once the Allies were able to deploy sufficient numbers of bombers with fighter escorts and to concentrate them on targets that couldn’t be missed (i.e. large cities) in 1944 and 1945, the results were devastating and clearly impacted the Nazis’ ability to go on fighting and murdering. Dresden, a major rail hub, was not free of war-related manufacturing. And the chaos that resulted from rendering large numbers of German workers homeless (at a time when their industry was completely devoted to war work), had to harm Germany’s already faltering war effort.

Although the human cost of attacks on German cities was horrible, it was a direct result of Germany’s decision to keep fighting to the bitter end. That was a decision that was largely supported by the German people, the vast majority of whom loyally continued to do their criminal government’s bidding until Hitler’s suicide. Allied attacks, including bombing raids on centers of military industrial activity and rail sites that facilitated the movement of German war activity, were fully justified and, indeed, necessary, for the defeat of the Nazi terror regime. German civilians in places like Dresden died because their nation had launched a genocidal war, not because of American or British beastliness.

As RAF Bomber Command chief Arthur “Bomber” Harris memorably said as the Allied air offensive started up earlier in the war, “The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”

Just as one cannot compare the cold-blooded murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust to the fact that the Palestinians have suffered from their ongoing refusal to live in peace with Israel — as Barack Obama did in his Cairo speech — one should not compare, even implicitly, the suffering of the victims of the Nazis at Buchenwald with that of those German civilians who died as the result of efforts to extinguish the Hitler regime. And anyone who does so lacks the moral seriousness to be a leader in the search for peace, no matter how eloquent his rhetoric.

Twenty years ago today, Chinese troops fired on their own people who were demonstrating for freedom in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The slaughter preserved the rule of the Communist Party over the world’s most populous nation. Since then, despite corruption and an iron-fist approach to any spark of free speech, the party’s tyrannical control continues virtually unchallenged.

The administration of Barack Obama has jettisoned a concern for freedom in its approach to foreign policy throughout the world, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressly stating that human rights were a secondary concern in our dealings with China. Yesterday, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged the anniversary of this atrocity by calling for China to finally formally account for those killed in the massacre and to stop harassing the survivors and the families of the slain.

Mrs. Clinton’s statement was entirely appropriate and partially recoups — but only partially — her own sorry record on the issue that dates back to her days as First Lady.

However, the unlikely prospect of Beijing owning up to the truth about the despicable way it has clung to power is not the only accounting that needs to be done.

Just as necessary is an assessment of the way in which the West has served as a willing partner for the Communist regime during the past two decades. The refusal to take the human rights crisis in China seriously has been the work of a broad cross-section of America’s political and economic elites and encompassed administrations from both parties as well as both large and small business interests. Americans have accepted the indefensible notion that the lack of freedom — both political and religious — in China is no hardship for the Chinese people. We are told that the opening up of the economy is more important than the nature of the dictatorial and repressive regime that shows no signs of loosening its grip even though those same excuses never were deemed acceptable when the subject was the former Soviet Union or South Africa. The continued existence of the laogai — the Chinese gulag — does not attract the attention of the Western press. And the fact that, contrary to the assurances of apologists for Beijing, the 2008 Summer Olympics did nothing to improve the human rights situation, is similarly ignored.

Sooner or later the day will come when the criminals of Tiananmen Square will be called to account. Let us hope that the people of China, whose nation will, free or unfree, continue to be a rising force in international affairs, do not someday blame Beijing’s Western business partners as much as the Communists themselves for the way their rights were trampled and then forgotten.