The defeat of Conservative-party candidate Douglas Hoffman in the special election for New York’s 23rd congressional district was the only bright spot for the Democrats on a night when the governor’s races in both New Jersey and Virginia (states that Barack Obama won last year) were swept by the Republicans. So we can expect the Dems to tout their capture of a seat that had been in the hands of the Republicans for over a century as a rejoinder to those who will say this election is a harbinger of a GOP revival in 2010.

The main talking Democratic point about this race, both before and after the voting, was that the collapse of the campaign of the liberal Republican who had been tapped by the state party to try and hold the seat was due to the intolerance of a radical-Right fringe bent on purging the party of any but the most rabid conservatives. In this way Dede Scozzafava, the Republican candidate who dropped out of the race over the weekend and then endorsed Democrat Bill Owens, was elevated from an inept candidate whose positions were largely indistinguishable from that of the Democrats and who was heading for inevitable defeat, to a martyr for the lost cause of liberal Republicanism. The narrative portrays the Republican grassroots, aided and abetted by national conservative personalities such as Sarah Palin and Dick Armey, as bullies who can’t abide the presence of a pro-choice woman in their ranks and would rather lose an election with a conservative than win with a “moderate.”

The loss of this seat ought to cast a shadow on what was otherwise a big night for Republicans. But the villains here aren’t the tea-party rabble-rousers who sunk Scozzafava, but a local and state Republican leadership that imposed an incompetent candidate on a Republican electorate eager for leaders who could offer an alternative to the Democrats, not someone who would be a halfhearted supporter of Obama’s agenda. The victory of Chris Christie in New Jersey illustrates that there is room in the GOP for Blue State candidates who wouldn’t pass the muster of the conservative rank and file in more conservative states. But the decision to foist Scozzafava on Upstate New York Republicans was a cynical ploy that was always destined to fail even if a credible Conservative-party alternative hadn’t emerged. It is one thing to seek to open up parties to candidates who are not ideological purists. It is quite another to nominate a person whose positions put her on the side of the Democrats on virtually every major issue that Republicans care about. Scozzafava’s candidacy may have seemed like a good idea to GOP big shots, but since she refused to take up any issues that might have rallied the Republican faithful to her side and lacked the ability to appeal to the dissatisfied independent voters that deserted the Democrats elsewhere this fall, what possible chance did she ever have of winning?

The lesson here is not the danger that the right poses to the future of the Republicans but rather that a party leadership that is insensible to the interests of its voters is doomed to defeat. Had the Republicans chosen a candidate who could have counted on the support of the party’s base to start with, the seat could have been held despite the changing demographics in the district. It was Scozzafava’s dismal campaign that lost the seat, not the fact that it was impossible to convince most Republicans that they had no reason to support her.

The New York Times’s Roger Cohen is still obsessing over the fact that the nice Iran he puffed up in a series of controversial and utterly misleading columns last winter was exposed as a lie in July when a ruthless regime stole an election and then brutally repressed those who dared to challenge it. In his latest online column, Cohen ponders why some nasty regimes fall while others survive. It’s a fascinating question but one that Cohen clearly does not understand.

Cohen recalls the way the Communist government of East Germany collapsed when a border guard in Berlin opened the gate to the West. That was a moment in which a tangible crack in the Iron Curtain became a symbolic step that sent the infamous wall and then the entire Soviet evil empire crashing down in ruins. In contrast to that glorious victory for freedom, Chinese Red Army troops obeyed orders to mow down the Tiananmen Square freedom protesters in Beijing that same year. To the dismay of Cohen and the rest of the world, the same thing happened in Tehran this past July when government forces refused to break ranks with their Islamist masters and the leaders of the protest movement lacked the will to directly confront it as anti-Communist dissidents, such as the Czech playwright and future president Vaclav Havel, did in 1989.

Cohen doesn’t know why these different outcomes happened and seems to put it down to an unkind fate he is sure will someday be reversed, at least in Iran if not China. I share that hope, but it’s not very difficult to understand why tyrants fall in some countries and survive in others.

The most important reason is that history teaches us that repressive regimes only collapse when they embrace measures that loosen their hold on the reins of power, not when they are their most brutal. The Soviet Union collapsed not when it was at its most insanely totalitarian under Stalin or Brezhnev but when it was led by a man who hoped he could put a human face on the inhuman ideology of Communism. So long as China’s leadership as well as the Islamist mullahs of Tehran have no scruples about using force to hold on to power, it isn’t likely they will be ousted.

But part of the process by which these regimes lose their will to fight for their own preservation is accomplished via moral pressure. When the cause of freedom in such places is treated as a priority for the West, it can, when combined with the inevitable economic difficulties that such regimes find themselves in, create a loss of confidence in the regime. The willingness of the West to speak up in support of Soviet dissidents as well as protest movements in its satellite states, such as Poland’s Solidarity, helped isolate these regimes and deprive them of legitimacy. But when protesters are ignored by the West (as has been the fate of Chinese dissidents) or let down by the United States (as was the case with President Obama’s soft-pedaling the outrages in Tehran this year), those movements can be dismissed as irrelevant. Would East German guard Harald Jaeger, whom Cohen celebrates, have acted as he did in 1989 had not the protesters been emboldened and his Communist masters weakened by the willingness of the West to speak up against Communism?

Those who serve such regimes will only abandon them when they feel that tyranny is going under, a state of mind that cannot be encouraged when the president of the United States runs to engage and appease their leaders. Those in the West who bolster the legitimacy of despotic regimes via diplomacy should not be surprised when they observe that people who live in these countries and especially those who guard the tyrants conclude from such behavior that the time is not right to take a stand for freedom.

The collapse of President Obama’s daft strategy for “engaging” with the tyrants of Tehran has left his cheering section with some terrible questions. After spending months soft-pedaling Iran’s stolen election, abuse of dissidents, as well as the danger from its funding of terrorists and, of course, the threat from its drive for nuclear weapons, the administration thought it had fixed the problem with the deal it negotiated to have the Iranians ship their enriched uranium out of the country for processing. It was doubtful that the deal would have worked or that the Iranians wouldn’t have cheated. But Tehran’s rejection of the pact that its representatives had negotiated has the Obama camp thoroughly perplexed. Read the rest of this entry »

If Hillary Clinton is unhappy about the abuse she is taking from the Arab world over her equivocal attitude toward Israel, then she should blame President Obama and those of his foreign-policy advisers who urged him to make picking a fight with the Jewish state over settlements one of their top priorities once they took office. Clinton is taking flack for her comment that Israel’s offer to “restrain” the building of housing in Jewish settlements in the West Bank was “unprecedented.”

She’s right, in that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gone a long way toward trying to mollify the Obama administration on this issue. But having spent much of the past year hounding Netanyahu over settlements in a futile attempt to undermine the Israeli’s hold on power (in fact, Netanyahu’s popularity has grown as a result of his refusal to bow to Obama, while the Israeli public has lost all faith in the U.S. president’s goodwill), the Americans have raised Arab expectations to the point where any Israeli gesture on the issue is considered insignificant. Even more, when the United States reacts to such Israeli gestures with anything but complete contempt, it is interpreted by the Arabs as American acquiescence with the entire settlement enterprise. The Arab world was wrongly encouraged by months of Washington skirmishing with Jerusalem to think that the administration intended to completely ditch the U.S.-Israel alliance. Anything less than a break with Israel winds up being seen as a betrayal of those unrealistic hopes that were engendered by Obama’s ill-advised strategy.

So what does Clinton say in her defense in response to Arab criticisms? All she can do is repeat past rhetoric that attacks Israel on settlements, which does nothing to ameliorate Arab hard feelings. Allowing more “daylight” between Israel and the United States has turned out to be dead end from which the administration cannot extract itself.

But let’s go back to the basics about this whole dispute. The settlements argument was utterly pointless, because even if Israel continued to build everywhere at a breakneck pace, it wouldn’t mean that they couldn’t or wouldn’t surrender territory if a real peace deal was in the offing. But it isn’t. In fact, the Palestinians still have no interest in negotiating with Israel for reasons that have everything to do with the toxic nature of Palestinian nationalism and their refusal to accept a Jewish state within any borders and nothing to do with any gestures the Israelis have or have not made. So the argument with Israel accomplished nothing to undermine America’s standing on both sides of the argument, which is, when you think about, quite a trick.

The bottom line of Obama’s and Clinton’s first 10 months in office is worsened relations with both Israel and the Arab world, with peace just as far off as it was under Bush. All of which should leave us wondering just how much worse off another year of Obama’s foreign-policy incompetence will leave the Middle East.

Should the latest polls that show Chris Christie holding a small lead over incumbent Jon Corzine in the New Jersey gubernatorial race be vindicated by a victory for the Republican in tomorrow’s vote, we can expect Democrats to attribute it to the cycle of scandal and reform rather than as a referendum on their party. But as anyone who has spent much time in the state in the last few weeks can attest, New Jersey provides a test case for the Democrats’ strategy of running as if it were still 2008. Though Corzine’s nasty attacks on Christie’s weight and other purely negative tactics have drawn the most attention, a dominant theme has been the attempt to tie Christie to George W. Bush and Corzine to Barack Obama, a point reinforced by the president’s campaign swing through the state over the weekend. The image of George Bush looming above Christie and another showing Obama and Christie together was omnipresent.

Just as with so much of the national debate about the economy or even foreign policy, the Democrats appear to believe that the mere invocation of Bush and Obama effectively decides any argument. That was the case a year ago, as revulsion against an administration that was widely and not completely unfairly perceived as incompetent in many respects combined with enthusiasm for Obama to sweep the nation. But sooner or later, the Democrats are going to have to stop pretending that anything that goes wrong in 2009 is the fault of Bush and the Republicans. The question is when do we reach the tipping point when a still stagnant economy, a perilous situation in Afghanistan, and failed diplomacy on Iran can no longer be blamed on George W. Bush?

While local political issues and Corzine’s indifferent record are the main reasons Christie has a chance in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, if he does prevail tomorrow, it may also be time for Democrats to finally turn the page in their calendars and stop pretending as if it’s still 2008. While I don’t doubt that there will be races in next year’s midterm elections where Democrats will try the same trick, tomorrow’s New Jersey results may be the moment when they start to realize that voters understand that the party currently in power owns the problems afflicting the nation.

Political bias is never far below the surface in the New York Times. But the Grey Lady’s penchant for inserting its not-so-subtle partisan agendas into even the most arcane subjects must sometimes leave readers scratching their heads. For example, just read today’s Times International section, which is led off by what, at first glance, would appear to be a soft feature about an academic controversy over the Battle of Agincourt, whose 594th anniversary is celebrated today. The conceit of the piece centers on whether the English, led by Shakespearean hero King Henry V, were really as outnumbered by the French as historians as well as the bard have insisted. Did the French have a 5-to-1 numerical advantage, or merely a 2-1 edge before they charged the original “Band of Brothers” and were slaughtered in one of history’s most one-sided battles? Revisionist historians, both French and English, have been trying to debunk the “myth” that England’s warrior king did the impossible in vanquishing — and virtually exterminating — the flower of French knighthood in the narrow field between the villages of Agincourt and Tramecourt on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, 1415.

But rather than stick to that fascinating subject — fascinating, that is, for students of military history as well as lovers of Shakespeare’s great history play — the Times can’t help trying to inject the debate over Afghanistan into the story. To do that, the author James Glanz attempts to link the Agincourt revisionists with Gen. David Petraeus, the authors of the United States Army’s “Counterinsurgency Field Manual,” and the question of whether more troops are needed for American and Allied forces to win in Afghanistan. This historical flight of fancy leads Glanz to attempt analogizing our current dilemma in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban to Henry V’s campaign in Normandy, when “France was on the verge of a civil war with factions called the Burgundians and the Armagnacs at loggerheads. Henry would eventually forge an alliance with the Burgundians, who in today’s terms would become his ‘local security forces’ in Normandy, and he cultivated the support of local merchants and clerics, all practices that would have been heartily endorsed by the counterinsurgency manual.” The piece then goes on to claim that the English were eventually defeated in the Hundred Years War because Henry’s alliances drove his allies’ enemies into his foes camp.

This is, of course, a vast distortion of history. Unlike the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, which seeks to defeat terrorists and establish in those two countries stable and hopefully democratic governments that will not be a threat to their neighbors or to the West, Henry just wanted to own as much of France as he could. The English king already had ancestral rights to Normandy and Calais and, through some complex genealogy, contrived to make a claim for the French throne (“Cheerly to sea, the signs of war advance, no king of England if not king of France.”) Far from facing a popular insurgency, his duel with the French king Charles VI was a conflict between two armies that despoiled and oppressed the peasantry with impunity. A decade after Henry’s victory and after his untimely death only a few years after Agincourt, Joan of Arc would help to inspire feelings of French nationalism that would eventually help sink the English cause. But fatigue and misgovernment by the nobles who ruled in the name of Henry’s infant successor led to civil war at home and the eventual English defeat in France, which Glanz clearly is seeking to link to current American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. So the obvious point here is that even brilliant American victories in the field will eventually give way to defeat on foreign shores.

This concept gives us very little insight into Agincourt (for a better understanding of the battle there is no substitute for historian John Keegan’s classic account in his “Face of Battle”) or Henry V. But perhaps the Times has a point when it comes to the principle of leadership. Glanz’s example should perhaps deter us all from following him into the tangle of historical analogies (“once more into the breach dear friends”) but one cannot but notice that England prevailed in 1415 because of a skilled veteran army led by a young man who had risen above the shame of a misspent youth to become a brilliant national leader. He was followed in office by a sovereign who lacked his father’s marshal virtues and decisiveness and whose character was best remembered for a desire to please everyone. George W. Bush was hardly the reincarnation of Henry V, at least not the Shakespearean hero, though their behavior as the sons of famous fathers is strikingly similar. Yet let us pray that the dithering and the indecisiveness that characterizes the war leadership of the Barack Obama administration does not lead to the same results in the vital battles against our Islamist foes as the ones Henry VI’s forces achieved in France. One needn’t have Shakespeare’s “muse of fire” to understand that victory in war does not depend on apologies.

For most of the past few years, liberals who claim to care about human rights have pointed to the disaster in the Darfur region of Sudan as the prime example of the failure of the international system to act against genocide. The Bush administration’s halting efforts to isolate Sudan were consistently branded as insufficiently militant despite the rhetorical lip service that Washington paid to the need to do something about stopping the killing there during this period. Sanctions were enacted, but making it difficult for Sudan’s threadbare economy to interact with the West did not constitute much leverage. Sudan retained the support and the patronage of the Muslim world. In the absence of a real threat to the regime from either the West or concerned African nations, Sudan had no reason to worry.

But now the chief liberal icon of the moment has taken his philosophy of “engagement” with dictators to the next level by a policy of outreach to the government that the United States has accused of genocide in Darfur. On Monday, after months of internal arguments about the best way to deal with Sudan, the administration announced it would reward the country’s murderous dictator, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir — a man currently under indictment by the International Criminal Court for his role in directing the murder of hundreds of thousands of people — with economic incentives to try and bribe him to stop behaving in such a beastly fashion.

The idea of appeasing al-Bashir was enough to give even the Obama cheerleading squad at the New York Times editorial page pause; it demurred from its usual unflinching support to express a degree of skepticism about the idea that lifting sanctions will change the behavior of this rogue regime or cause it to no longer grant safe haven for terrorists. While this switch from sanctions to engagement fits in with the Obama foreign-policy template, can the same people who were appalled by Bush’s failure to act be persuaded that al-Bashir can be charmed into abandoning genocide?

Apparently the American Jewish World Service, an advocacy group that has ridden the Darfur issue for all it’s worth and that has, to its credit, done a lot to raise awareness about the issue, thinks so. Ruth Messinger, the former New York mayoral candidate who has pursued a successful second career running the AJWS, had nothing but praise for Obama, stating, “With an administration that is unified in its commitment to these priorities and to leading the international community in active engagement on all of these fronts, we believe that lasting peace in Sudan is well within reach.”

Unlike Messinger, the Times’s editorial board is not so besotted with Obama that it isn’t worried about a secret plan to pay off a killer to stop murdering people, and rightly concludes by warning that Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “must be held to account if it fails.” But don’t expect the same liberal groups that railed against Bush to take to the streets to do that. When it comes to Obama, even a human-rights group that has dedicated itself to the Darfur issue is prepared to swallow a policy of appeasement.

The latest celebration of Barack Obama’s celebrity Nobel Prize came from a predictable source: a celebrity philanthropist. The Irish pop singer Bono, who is the front man not so much for a band these days but for Western guilt about third-world poverty, weighed in with a lengthy paean to the greatness of Obama in Sunday’s New York Times.

Much of this is the usual pap about how “the virtual Obama is the real Obama” who “might deserve the hype” because he represents the America of “King, M.L., Jr., and Dylan, Bob,” as opposed to the bad America that Obama swept away last November. Bono is all for a “rebrand, restart, reboot” of this country, by which he means in no small part the “administration’s approach to fighting nuclear proliferation and climate change, improving relations in the Middle East,” though, for all intents and purposes, the former is nothing more than an ineffectual attempt to appease Iran, and the latter is a policy that has alienated and isolated the state of Israel.

Yet in the midst of an anecdote in the piece that was meant to impress readers with the author’s importance, Bono undermines his rebranding argument. While informing us that Gen. James Jones called him for advice after leaving NATO and before joining the Obama administration, he lets drop that the model of “smarter aid” that he supports was actually a program championed by the president that his Nobel-laureate hero uses as the template for everything that was wrong about America. That’s right, according to Bono, the one concrete example of something good that America is doing was “President George W. Bush’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief and the Millennium Challenge Corporation,” which was, according to the singer, “beginning to save lives and change the game for many countries.” He goes on to explain that “this was a moment when America couldn’t get its cigarette lighted in polite European nations like Norway; but even then, in the developing world, the United States was still seen as a positive, even transformative, presence.” He neglects to add that if this is the case, perhaps the fact that the good burghers of Oslo don’t like Bush’s America has more to do with their own ideological baggage than our actual shortcomings.

The point is, the bad America that Europe and professional do-gooders like Bono — who for all of his championing of “smart” aid here exemplifies the drive to pump traditional dumb aid to the third world, which does nothing to aid the people or the economies of those nations but does enrich local elites while allowing Western elites who support such measures to feel better about themselves — despise was actually good for the third world.

Bono repeats the usual claptrap that in an age of counterinsurgency conflict in which American “might doesn’t make right,” it is Obama’s celebrity power that will keep us safe. But he forgets that it was American military power that stopped the genocide of Muslims in the Balkans and liberated Afghanistan from the rule of the Taliban (a victory that may be thrown away if Obama listens to Joe Biden), not multilateral diplomacy. And it is the absence of American will to use that power to stop genocide in Sudan (as was the case in Rwanda in the 1990s) that allows genocide in the third world to continue, not an insufficient amount of American apologies or appeasement of Islamist sensibilities that has the world so upbeat about Obama.

Bono is right that America remains a powerful symbol of good for the rest of the world. But the power of the idea of America is one that is based on its being a beacon of political and economic liberty, not a nation that defers to Europeans who mistake appeasement and shameless appeals for popularity for principle.

The New York Times’s online columnist Roger Cohen has had some distractions this year, but he hasn’t let it deter him from his idée fixe about the State of Israel. Having started the year by claiming that a few interviews with a few no-doubt terrified representatives of the remnants of Iranian Jewry justified his view that Iran’s Islamic Republic was run by people who were not the vicious tyrants that Israelis and American conservatives claimed they were, events overwhelmed his thesis. Cohen’s reporting from Iran conjured up memories of his Times predecessor Walter Duranty (whose whitewashes of Stalin earned him a Pulitzer Prize) here and the disgust of observers across the political spectrum, but even he was forced to notice that the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime was not so nice after they stole an election and brutally repressed dissent.

But Cohen was and is undeterred, because the point of his bouquets thrown in the path of the mullahs was not so much a desire to make them look good but to make Israel look bad. His worry all along was that the justified concerns of both Israelis and Americans about Iran’s nuclear-weapons program would distract the world from what he thinks ought to be its priority: pressuring the Israelis to make concessions to Palestinians who don’t want to make peace with it and making sure that virtually every measure of Israeli self-defense is falsely branded as excessive or a war crime. Even after personally witnessing the horror enacted on the streets of Tehran by Ahmadinejad’s goon squads, what really gets Cohen’s goat is the sight of a leader of Israel standing up for his country and trying to draw the attention of the world to the barbarism that threatens its existence.

Thus, while Cohen’s column in today’s Times resurrects his familiar tropes about the leaders of Iran being “rational” and “proud” (phrases that were put in storage while the memories of this summer’s outrages were fresh in the public mind), his anger is reserved for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his speech that opened the current session of the Knesset this week in which he outlined the threats to his nation. Cohen is offended by Netanyahu’s invocation of the Holocaust even though slaughter of the Jews and extinction of their state remains the goal of its Islamist foes. He’s also particularly offended by what he considers to be “Israeli exceptionalism” — the idea that the Jewish state is an isolated outpost of democracy and civilization surrounded by hostile neighbors and terrorist organizations and states that want to turn back the clock to the Middle Ages. That’s too dramatic for Cohen’s taste. Though he can’t claim that Netanyahu’s statements are false, he still feels that its Arab and Islamic enemies aren’t so bad and that the Israelis aren’t so good. What he wants from Israel is what he thinks Barack Obama is doing for the United States, so perhaps he thinks Netanyahu should go on an apology tour, during which he can say how sorry the Jews are for persisting in their effort to survive.

Not unsurprisingly, Cohen concludes with praise for Richard Goldstone, another South African Jew who, like the columnist, has been enlisted in the service of those who wish to destroy the Jewish state. Though Goldstone’s United Nations–sponsored report about Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza last winter to halt the terrorist missile attacks has been rejected as a biased farrago of Palestinian propaganda by Israelis from across the political spectrum as well as by the United States, Cohen accepts it without question. Indeed, Cohen thinks the chutzpah of Israelis in refusing to acquiesce to lies about its justified attempt to defend its people is, in Cohen’s formulation, symbolic of their refusal to think of themselves as a normal nation. But, of course, the opposite is true. Normality is exactly what Israelis want. And like any normal nation, they think they have a right to use force to stop terrorists from shelling their southern towns and villages, as well as a right to live without the threat of nuclear attack or blackmail from Islamist radicals. But that’s the sort of Israel that Roger Cohen just can’t stand.

Over at New York magazine’s Daily Intel blog, Peter Keating is wondering why the full force of organized American Jewry hasn’t been deployed to demonize critics of the Obama administration.

Keating lists a few instances in which right-wing critics of Obama and especially of his plans to change America’s health-care system compared the president to Hitler and his programs to Nazism. Such comparisons are, of course, not merely over-the-top insults but also vile. Say what you will about the faults of ObamaCare as well as the absurd cult of personality that has grown around the president, but neither he nor his party can or should be compared to the Nazis. Obama is a preening puffed-up poseur who is in love with himself and is pioneering some very bad ideas, but he is no totalitarian. Nor is he a mass-murderer like Hitler. Any comparison between the two or between liberal Democrats and Nazis in general says everything about the people who make such comparisons and nothing about Obama. The simple rule for rational politics is that anyone who invokes Hitler loses the debate as well the respect of right-thinking citizens.

The promiscuous use of the word Holocaust to describe anything bad has gotten out of hand. (I knew we were in trouble several years ago when an episode of the X-Files had one of the heroes saying that a mysterious happening in a lake that killed amphibians was a “frog holocaust.”) Indeed, Keating notes that a Democratic member of Congress recently decried our current system of health care as a “Holocaust in America.”

But what liberal polemicists like Keating and other members of the Obama cheerleading squad want from Jewish groups aren’t merely news releases or the usual attempts at education and outreach in response to such offenses. What they desire is a full-court press of the entire organized Jewish world, whose aim should be to take down Obama’s critics and effectively tar all such dissenters from our Nobel-laureate leader’s plans with the brush of extremism, if not anti-Semitism. The goal is to intimidate all those who take the name of Obama in vain, not just people who foolishly circulate goofy e-mails about his place of birth or religion.

But if Jewish groups — which are, contrary to the myths propagated by the anti-Israel Left, mostly populated by mainstream liberals and not conservatives — are reluctant to do so, they have good reason.

The most obvious reason is that, although liberals say with outrage that criticism against the president entailing the use of Nazi analogies is something new, it isn’t. In fact, for the entire eight years of the administration of George W. Bush, such invective was commonplace. There is virtually nothing nasty put about by the nuts on the Right about Obama that wasn’t already spewed by the Left about Bush and Cheney. Liberals pretend there is something particularly dangerous about right-wingers getting up at town-hall meetings and ranting about the expanding powers of the federal government. But what exactly is the difference between such persons and many antiwar protesters who often used intemperate and insulting rhetoric against Bush all the while displaying contempt for the right of others to free speech?

Liberals chose not to notice the excesses of Code Pink provocateurs or the nonsense spouted by the Moveon.org crowd when the latter was portraying Bush and Cheney as totalitarians extinguishing the flame of American liberty. But when right-wingers behave badly, it isn’t merely a case of protesters losing perspective but the thin edge of a new wave of racism and anti-Semitism. (The irony that the demonization of the state of Israel is primarily a left-wing phenomenon is lost on those who make such accusations.)

Keating is right when he says that “injecting Hitler analogies into subjects like Medicare reimbursement rates renders the Holocaust mundane, as though Nazis simply supported big government, rather than genocide.” But that was just as true when liberals were trying to compare Bush’s successful counterterrorism tactics against al-Qaeda and other Islamists to those of Hitler’s Gestapo. Both sides of the political divide are guilty at times of hypocritically judging their opponents more harshly than their allies. While Jewish groups have an obligation to hold those who employ Holocaust analogies accountable, they would do well to stay out of the sort of partisan crossfire into which Obama’s foot soldiers would like to fling them.

New York Times reporter Alison Smale confided to her readers today that the purpose of an interview she conducted with Vaclav Havel was for a piece on the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, in which the famous dissident playwright helped overthrow the puppet government of the Soviets in Prague. But, she writes, before he would speak about that or the current state of affairs in Europe, Havel had a question for her: “Was it true that President Obama had refused to meet the Dalai Lama in Washington?”

The Obama administration has placed concern for human rights on the back burner as it pursues engagement with antidemocratic regimes around the globe. But as a man who spent time in prison for speaking out against tyranny in his own country before becoming the first president of a free post–Cold War Czech Republic, Havel does not see human rights as a minor concern. Indeed, as Smale notes, the Dalai Lama was among the first visitors to Prague Castle (the site of the government) after Havel took office; in fact, he has a picture of the Tibetan exile in his current office.

Smale says that she told Havel, who claims to have been a fan of the American president, that Obama has announced that he would meet the Dalai Lama after a visit to China next month. But Havel was not impressed. “It is only a minor compromise. But exactly with these minor compromises start the big and dangerous ones, the real problems.”

Indeed, Havel said he resented the non-reception of the Tibetan even more than Obama’s betrayal of our Czech and Polish allies by bowing to the Russians’ demands and backing off on installing missile-defense systems there. Perhaps this keen observer of both the human condition and the realities of power politics seems to understand that such actions show that beneath Obama’s pose of moral superiority lies merely a shallow desire for applause, as well as a lack of resolve and principle.

As Havel rightly supposes, there is something profoundly troubling about a leader who is willing to slight moral heroes such as the Dalai Lama as well as staunch allies such as the Czechs and the Israelis while kowtowing to autocrats in Moscow and Beijing. At a moment in time when flattery of Barack Obama’s colossal vanity seems to be the height of fashion in Europe, Vaclav Havel’s contrarian instincts have served him well in pointing out our current idol’s feet of clay.

President Obama’s initial attempts to take a moderate stand on some social issues deeply offended many of his left-wing fans, but they remain hopeful that he will return to the fold. One case in point is his February executive order on the White House office for religion-based and neighborhood programs, which left in place presidential directives allowing religious programs that receive federal funding to continue hiring and firing employees on religious grounds. Left-wing critics are particularly exorcised by a 2007 ruling, according to which the government cannot order religious groups to not discriminate in this manner as a condition of public financing.

Today, the New York Times editorial page weighed in on this issue in a piece titled “Faith-Based Discrimination,” which demanded that Attorney General Holder bow to the wishes of a left-wing coalition that wants him to trash the rulings. Those opinions handed down by the Bush Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel were, the Times wrote, based on a “far-fetched interpretation” of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). But far from being outlandish, the existing policies are very much in the spirit of RFRA, which purposed to restrain government policies that discriminated against religious groups. Congress clearly intended to prevent laws that substantially burden the free exercise of religious faith. The point here isn’t to prevent “religious discrimination” but to force religious groups to operate as if they were purely secular organizations.

The problem with revamping the directives is two-fold. One is that one outcome, which the RFRA hoped to prevent, would be setting up a standard that will discriminate against religious entities. Second, and more to the point in terms of the impact on public policy, is that it is precisely religious organizations that tend to be most effective in dealing with social problems. Any effort to aid local programs dealing with substance abuse or other social pathologies would be ludicrous if it effectively excluded faith-based institutions. Given that private and religious social programs of every sort have become increasingly dependent on government largesse, any such decision that could potentially ban faith-based groups would have a devastating impact on the delivery of social services.

What is truly “far-fetched” is the extreme separationist interpretation of the Constitution that would sweep religious groups and religious speech from the public square. RFRA and the White House orders properly banned the government from weeding out faith-based programs from funding. Though some purists would be happier if all federal funding of any religious institution were banned, common sense demands that if the government is going to support local programs, it cannot place faith beyond the pale.

What was the bottom line of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov? America’s punting on a request for sanctions on Iran, as the Washington Post reported (and Jennifer discussed)? Or was it instead a case of “Russia Resists U.S. on Iran Sanctions,” as the Associated Press reported? Of course, both amount to the same thing. Clinton’s statement that it wasn’t yet time for sanctions on Iran to pressure it to stop its nuclear program is merely an admission that the administration’s plan to gain international support for restraining Iran is dead in the water. Russia may not be entirely pleased with the notion of a nuclear Iran, but its main foreign-policy goal since Vladimir Putin took power has been to thwart the United States and inflate Russia’s importance on the world stage. Because Iran’s nukes threaten America’s allies in the region, such as Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, and the destabilization of the Middle East undermines American interests, stopping Tehran does not interest Moscow.

Of course, Russia’s indifference to the threat of a nuclear Iran is not news. The Russians have been making it clear for years that neither they nor their allies-of-convenience on this issue in Beijing will allow the West to use the UN to orchestrate the sort of “crippling sanctions” that have a chance to bring the Khamenei/Ahmadinejad regime to heel. Our Nobel-laureate president and his secretary of state have made diplomacy and “engagement” with Iran the centerpiece of their foreign policy, but they have also maintained that such a stance will serve American interests because, by eschewing the “cowboy diplomacy” of the Bush administration (an ironic accusation, since W. outsourced diplomacy on Iran to the French and Germans with predictable results), they will be able to pursue a multilateral approach to all the world’s problems.

This charade may have earned Obama a great deal of applause as well as a certain peace prize. But the Russian refusal to play along has painted the administration into a corner. Though the United States has already betrayed its Eastern European allies by unilaterally abandoning strategic missile-defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic at Russia’s behest, Hillary’s meeting with Lavrov confirms that Iran will be allowed to continue to prevaricate while its nuclear program progresses with no real threat of international punishment. Though the administration continues to speak of deadlines — albeit constantly shifting them — for Tehran today’s comedy skit in Moscow illustrates just how empty America’s demands are. The only winners in this exchange are Russia and Iran. Israelis and others who rightly fear the consequences of an America content to let the Iranian nuclear program proceed while they talk about talking can only regard these latest developments with horror.

While the rest of the world still stumbles for an adequate reaction to Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, the president’s envoy to the Middle East met Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas, following an equally fruitless stop in Cairo.

Obama’s peace prize has launched a thousand parodies as well as lickspittle tributes from his political allies on the left like J Street. But Israelis — who have rightly pegged the president as anything but a friend of the Jewish state — have good reason to fear the award will encourage him to devote even more effort to ginning up a peace process with no chance of success. They know that more peace processing means only thing: more pressure for Israeli concessions, on top of all those already made, to appease Palestinian leaders who actually have little or no interest in real negotiations.

Abbas and the P.A. are locked in a desperate duel for the allegiance of their people with the Islamists of Hamas. That means that even if Abbas were truly interested in accepting a two-state solution with Israel, which is doubtful, there is no deal he can sign that Hamas will not paint as a betrayal of Palestinian nationalism. That is why Abbas refused Ehud Olmert’s offer of a state including parts of Jerusalem and virtually all the West Bank and Gaza in 2008. His predecessor Yasir Arafat did the same eight years earlier.

Abbas continued his race to the bottom with Hamas by reversing his previous stand; he called for the United Nations to take up the bogus Goldstone Commission’s accusations of war crimes over Israel’s counterattack against Hamas terrorists in Gaza last December. Playing off the latest riot-sparking lies about Israeli threats to Muslim shrines in Jerusalem, Abbas also said in Ramallah on Sunday: “There will be no Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty until the occupation of Jerusalem ends. We are determined to safeguard the Aksa Mosque and Jerusalem.”

But the conceit of the peace processers is that a new round of Israeli generosity will always sweep away the realities of Palestinian politics. Such delusions have destroyed the Israeli political Left. But elsewhere, the realism informing Israeli voters is viewed as intransigence. The Nobel Committee believed that Obama was deserving of their prize specifically because of his Cairo speech, which espoused a moral equivalence between Israel and its enemies and which picked a fight with America’s only democratic ally in the Middle East. There is little doubt that Obama’s undeserved prize will motivate him to continue along the same path. Obama and Mitchell know there is little or nothing they can do to sway the Palestinians, so their only option will be more pressure on Israel. That was the logic of the pointless dispute between Washington and Jerusalem over settlements earlier this year. And with the president now endowed with the halo that the Nobel grants him and with a faithful cheering section of left-wing American Jews to encourage him, more such pressure is surely on the way.

To do proper justice to an event as ridiculous as President Barack Obama’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize would seem to require satire at the level of Jonathan Swift or at least H.L. Mencken. Though I’m sure some of our contemporary humorists will come forward on this topic, the idea of a man who has only been in office for nine months and who has done little to nothing to lessen the dangers to world peace that threaten the globe (and nothing on this score before reaching his nation’s highest office) receiving such a prize is staggering and beyond the ability of most common scribblers to properly characterize. While we already knew that the president’s vanity was virtually limitless, who could have thought that even the fools who cook up these prizes would be willing to pander to him with such shameless cynicism?

Peace is further off in the Middle East, a nuclear Iran is a virtual certainty, and victory in Afghanistan over the Taliban is more doubtful than ever under Obama’s watch. So since he can point to no actual achievements, Obama’s worthiness for this honor would seem to consist merely of gracing the world stage with his presence. As such, his peace prize is, perhaps, like all those medals that kings and dictators wear on their dress uniforms when they are trotted out for public display. Indeed, if Obama is already worthy of the peace prize, then surely other equally unlikely honors are soon to follow so that other sectors of society can pay homage to him for just being Barack.

By this I don’t mean the sort of plaques that any famous person can get, such as honorary doctorates from universities. No, if this is the standard by which the president must be flattered, then I’m afraid Joe Mauer and Albert Pujols may be disappointed to learn later this year that Obama will be voted the Most Valuable Player Award for both the American and National Leagues for 2009 just because of his inspiring stint throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at the All-Star Game.

But rather than dismissing the Nobel Committee as being merely besotted with the president’s persona, we must not ignore the fact that their purpose is not just to add to Obama’s legend but to actually reward him for what they think he has done. And that is no laughing matter.

The award citation includes the following: “His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”

What are those values and attitudes? In his Cairo speech in June, Obama articulated his belief in a moral equivalence between Western democracy and the authoritarianism and tyranny under which almost all the Arab and Muslim world labors. In Cairo he lauded the right of Muslim women to choose to wear veils but said nothing about the fact that the societies he means to engage seek to compel the wearing of such headgear on all women, as well as to impose their beliefs on everyone. To the applause of America’s detractors and enemies, he has eschewed the spread of democracy and freedom, apologized for rather than expressed pride in his own nation, and preferred instead to “engage” vile dictators who mock the values and attitudes upon which American liberty is based.

As absurd as this prize may be, it is no joke. Obama has won the applause of the Nobel Committee honestly by appealing to their contempt for democracy and their desire for more appeasement of tyrants. On that score, the president surely won this award fair and square.

In today’s New York Times arts section, film industry correspondent Brooks Barnes analyzes Hollywood’s attitude to fugitive sex predator/Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski.

Most prominent artists have lined up behind the push to let the famed director off the hook for having drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl over 30 years ago. Polanski fled the country to avoid sentencing after he plead guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sex with a minor and has since lived in a cushy exile in Europe. After his recent arrest, Polanski is currently sitting in a Swiss jail awaiting possible extradition to the United States.

The fact that Harvey Weinstein, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, and Woody Allen (at least the latter is no hypocrite given his own past actions) are calling Polanski’s arrest an outrage shows how disconnected the film industry is from the rest of the country when it comes to morality. However, according to Barnes, Hollywood’s main problem with Polanski is that few of his films have made money recently. “Hollywood has most assuredly become a chillier place for Mr. Polanski over the last decade,” Barnes reports. “It’s a judgment that this guy is no longer readily commercial.”

But in an attempt to understand what he describes as the industry’s mixed feelings about the director, Barnes draws an absurd analogy between the fugitive rapist and Elia Kazan, the famed theater and film director who testified about secret Communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee. “The closest equivalent is Elia Kazan. In some film circles, Mr. Kazan was forever a pariah for his friendly testimony in 1952 before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Others finally looked beyond his McCarthy-era behavior to focus on his outsize directing talent.”

Thus, according to Barnes, telling the truth to Congress about the influence of active Communist-party members who supported Stalin in the film industry but who pretended to be merely liberal supporters of civil liberties is the moral equivalent of raping a 13-year-old!

Of course, not everyone in the industry who talked to Barnes has completely lost their moral compass:

“I’m kind of appalled,” said Alison Arngrim, an actress who is best known for her work in ‘Little House on the Prairie’ and who has spoken publicly in the past about having been sexually molested as a child. “If Roman Polanski were a Catholic priest or a Republican senator, would these people feel the same way?”

Not likely.

Along with the leaders of Britain and France, President Obama was forced today to take time out of the G-8 Summit to react to the announcement that Iran has been building a secret underground plant to manufacture nuclear fuel. What followed was the announcement that Iran had a deadline of two months to comply with international demands to halt its nuclear program or it would face sanctions. This makes it sound as if real pressure is about to be ratcheted up on Tehran. Supposedly, this means that unless the Iranians allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct an immediate inspection of the facility, the West will press for new, tougher sanctions on Iran. Obama hopes that his recent appeasement of Russia by breaking faith with Poland and the Czech Republic on missile defense will mean that the Putin/Medvedev regime will finally play along on sanctions and drag the Chinese with them.

It’s a nice theory, but Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, fresh off another vile Holocaust-denying speech at the United Nations, may not exactly be shaking in his boots about the prospect of Western resolve. Years of feckless Western diplomacy (outsourced by the Bush administration to France and Germany) did nothing but convince the Iranians that no one outside of Israel was serious about stopping them. And after months of outreach from the Obama administration, including an astonishingly weak response to their brazen theft of a presidential election and brutal crackdown on dissidents, it’s not clear that the threat of sanctions is one the Iranians take seriously.

As for what would happen after the two months if the deadline is not adhered to, Tehran understands all too well that the negotiations between the United States, its Western allies, and Iran’s erstwhile friends in Moscow and Beijing would be long, tedious, and likely to produce something short of the draconian measures necessary to produce significant leverage.

Just as important is that the two-month deadline, though seemingly indicative of some spine on behalf of the West, is hardly the sort of ultimatum likely to spur panic among the leaders of the Islamist regime. It is, in fact, not the first multi-month deadline Iran has recently received. When U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was in Israel over the summer, he attempted to placate his anxious hosts by saying that America had given Tehran only until the United Nations General Assembly to respond to Obama’s overtures before the clock would start on stronger sanctions. So, far from being the harbinger of a new era of resolve on the issue, the new two-month deadline is in effect an extension on the previous demand placed on Iran. This must lead Ahmadinejad to reason that no matter what his government does or doesn’t do between now and the end of November, it may be a reasonable bet that this date will be merely the beginning of a new period during which Washington will say diplomacy must be given just one more chance.

We may hope that Obama’s rhetoric today is the beginning of a new era of American seriousness about the threat from Iranian nukes. But when seen in the context of what has recently preceded it, and the clear preference on the part of the president and our allies for “engagement” rather than action on the issue, optimism in Tehran about their chances of further successful defiance of international opinion may well be justified.

Jennifer, you’re right. Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the United Nations today was as eloquent as it was on target with respect to the Holocaust denial and genocidal threats of Iran’s Ahmadinejad as well as the hypocrisy and distortions of the UN’s Human Rights Council and its Goldstone report on the fighting in Gaza last December.

With respect to the threat to humanity posed by the bid for nuclear weapons in the hands of fanatical Islamists, Netanyahu asked if “the UN is up to that” challenge. It’s a good question. But his speech reminded me of another question left unanswered by recent events: whether American Jewry and other friends of Israel here are up to the challenge of speaking out against the Iranian threat and against pressure on Israel to make concessions to Iran’s Islamist allies.

In pointing out the shame of the world body in allowing maniacal anti-Semites such as Ahmadinejad to use its rostrum as a bully pulpit from which to broadcast hate, Netanyahu said he was speaking in the name not just of the people of Israel but of the Jewish people at large as well as decent people everywhere. But there appears to be a sharp division between the sentiments of Israeli Jews who support Netanyahu’s prideful stands against Iran and the pressure President Obama is applying on Jerusalem, and American Jews, the majority of whom seem inclined to back Obama’s “engagement” with Tehran, as well as his inept attempts to strong arm Israel.

There was a time when Israelis such as Abba Eban and Chaim Herzog galvanized American Jewry into action with brilliant speeches. The threat to Israel and the Jewish people—as well as to humanity in general—from the Islamism of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah is no less dangerous than that posed in Eban’s day by Nasser or in Herzog’s day by Arafat. The main difference is that unlike in that era, there appears to be a growing reluctance on the part of many liberal American Jews to identify with Israel or to oppose its foes. This “count me out” strategy of Jews who not only are lukewarm about their affection for Zion but are actually embarrassed to be caught supporting Israel in front of their fellow liberals was brazenly articulated by Jay Michaelson in a disgraceful column published in the Forward last week.

While I can’t believe that Michaelson, and others who take the point of view that they are in some sense morally superior to Israelis, represents anything more than a troublesome minority of American Jewry, it would be foolish to believe that it is an insignificant group. Even worse is the prospect that those liberal Jews who have the ear of the current resident of the White House are putting this point of view forward.

While many Jews took to the streets today around the UN to protest Iran, it is far from clear that the community is either united on this issue or prepared to put aside political differences in order to make action on the issue a bipartisan priority. With the clock ticking down toward a nuclear Iran, a reluctance to oppose Obama’s policies on any issue, as well as Jewish diffidence with respect to support of Israel, may become crucial factors in the unfolding political drama on this issue. If so, then the question of shame may very well be directed not so much at the circus performers and clowns of the UN but at those of us who fail to act or speak during this historic challenge.

In an article that might well have deserved publication in the Onion, the New York Times introduced a heretical notion to its readership today. Despite the fact that any skepticism about global warming and the responsibility of humanity for this rise in temperatures is now considered proof of insanity, the Times reported that it appears more than likely that “global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.”

This must come as quite a shock to an American public that has been relentlessly propagandized on this issue and convinced that the end of civilization as we know it is just around the corner. But facts are stubborn things, and for all the hoopla about “saving the planet,” now even the Times is prepared to admit that far from heating up at the exponential rates Al Gore has discussed to near universal applause, it appears that the story is a bit more complicated than he may have let on. Indeed, according to researchers from the British climate-change office and published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, temperatures have hardly budged since 1998 and may well continue to dip in the coming decade.

Does this explode the whole global-warming theory? I don’t know, and I’d venture to say neither do most scientists, let alone Times reporter Andrew C. Revkin, who wrote today’s story. But it is interesting to note that this not insignificant piece of intelligence is presented not as a startling challenge to the environmentalist orthodoxy on global warming but as a troubling development that will give skeptics about the threat more ammunition. As Revkin writes, “The recent stability of global temperatures makes regular appearances in blog postings disputing the reality of global warming and is frequently invoked by pundits who oppose the climate bill that passed the House this year and is pending in the Senate.”

The problem, according to Revkin’s story, is that it has been difficult to get people to “understand and respond to environmental problems” and that “the current temperature stability has created confusion and apathy.”

In other words, facts contrary to the accepted narrative about the apocalyptic threat of global warming have clouded the picture and could make it harder to enforce uniformity of belief on the subject as well as to ram through Congress legislation that has the potential to cripple our economy. Or at least they will unless discussion about this is framed solely in terms of how best to get people to ignore some truly inconvenient truths.

Barack Obama got to play peacemaker today during his staged meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. In a throwback to Bill Clinton’s famous photo op on the White House Lawn with Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, Obama stood between the men, holding their arms as the two shook hands.

In his remarks, the president proclaimed that he intended to break new ground:

It is past time to talk about starting negotiations; it is time to move forward. It is time to show flexibility and common sense and sense of compromise that is necessary to achieve our goals,” he continued, adding that leaders in the Middle East could not continue “the same patterns, taking tentative steps forward, then taking steps back.

But given the fact that the Palestinian Authority and Abbas are in no position to make any deal with Israel no matter where such an agreement placed the borders between Israel and a Palestinian state, the Obama-orchestrated dog-and-pony show staged for the press today is, in fact, simply more of the same. Like George W. Bush’s Annapolis Summit, held in the fall of 2007, the pictures and the talk about the need for progress are utterly futile. After that meeting, Netanyahu’s predecessor Ehud Olmert offered Abbas pretty much the deal that the “experts” on the Middle East always claim is the only solution: a two-state plan, with the Palestinians getting virtually all the West Bank as well as part of Jerusalem. But Abbas was no more able to say yes to this than Arafat was when Ehud Barak offered him almost as much in the summer of 2000.

What is different about the current situation is that when this president makes “evenhanded” statements in which he poses a moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians, his coolness to the Jewish state during his nine months in office leads one to believe that he really means it. Obama’s obsession with trying to halt the building of Jewish housing not only in Jerusalem but also in the West Bank (parts of which were accepted by the Bush administration as permanently belonging to Israel in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza) has not made the Palestinians more amenable to peace. On the contrary, the more Washington backs away from the Israelis, the more likely Abbas (not to mention his Hamas rivals who rule Gaza and threaten his hold on the West Bank) is to stand pat and wait for the Americans to deliver more Israeli concessions to him on a silver platter. And given that leftist Jewish groups, who may well have the ear of Obama and his intimates, are calling for more pressure on Israel, supposedly for its own good, there is every reason to believe that any involvement by the president in the talks will be to Israel’s detriment.

Far from being a formula for peace, Obama’s involvement and his hectoring of Israel may set in motion a chain of events that, like the failure of Bill Clinton’s Camp David summit, may instigate a new campaign of Palestinian violence. Photos such as the one taken today may nurture the illusion that Obama is helping to nudge the Middle East on its way to peace. But the price for such heightened expectations, in the absence of any real change of heart about the need for mutual recognition of Israel on the part of the Arab and Muslim worlds, may be terrible indeed.

At the center of the recent controversy about the participation of Israeli artists at the Toronto Film Festival was the fact that the event highlighted the city of Tel Aviv’s centennial. To the signatories of a letter of protest, a group that included Danny Glover, Wallace Shawn, and Jane Fonda, it was the notion of celebrating Tel Aviv that was the real problem. It was, they said, founded on violence and the “suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants.”

The anti-Israel protesters have their facts wrong. Tel Aviv was founded not on the site of former homes of Palestinian Arabs who were dispossessed by the Jews but on empty sand dunes outside the city Jaffa. The village that was founded there a century ago grew large as a result of Jews fleeing anti-Jewish riots in Jaffa in 1921. The city has grown to be the nation’s largest city and is as cosmopolitan … and liberal as any in the world today.

So it is no small irony that those seeking to boycott Israel and brand it as illegitimate are willing to claim that Tel Aviv, of all places, is just another illegal Jewish settlement. As pressure grows on Israel to “freeze” building in the Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem, as well as in parts of that city itself, it is interesting to reflect on the fact that to those who wish to destroy the Jewish state, every house in every town in the country is an illegal settlement.

Many in Israel (especially in Tel Aviv), as well as many friends of Israel in the United States, like to think of the West Bank settlements as being bizarre places where crazy, violent people live and that have nothing to do with the “real” Israel inside the 1967 borders. What these anti–Tel Aviv protesters tell us is that for much of the rest of the world, this is a false distinction. And, in a sense, they are right—just as once Tel Aviv was another empty place where intrepid Jews bravely attempted to put down roots and build homes. Today it may be a booming, bustling city, but to Hamas and Fatah—as well as Glover, Shawn, and Fonda—it is just a part of hated Israel and no more legitimate than any hilltop settlement deep in the West Bank.

Those Americans who think there is nothing wrong with the Obama administration’s decision to press for more Israeli concessions and building freezes in Jerusalem and elsewhere should think about the significance of the Tel Aviv bashers. Some may argue that the settlements, even those in and around Jerusalem, must go to save Israel. But to those whom Obama wishes to appease by this pressure policy, there is no difference between them and the biggest Jewish settlement of them all in Tel Aviv.

The UN’s investigation of last winter’s fighting in Gaza was the farrago that every objective observer expected it would be. Based on the UN Human Right Council’s premise that the Israeli counteroffensive aimed at stopping the barrage of rockets at its southern towns and villages constituted a “war crime,” the so-called “fact-finding mission” led by South African Judge Richard Goldstone found exactly what it was looking for and regurgitated the avalanche of Hamas propaganda fed by Palestinian witnesses. Though it condemned Hamas missile attacks on Israel, the main focus of the report is to classify Israel’s attempt to defend itself from attacks across the Gaza border as an unjustifiable crime. The bias of the committee, one of whose members, Christine Chinkin, had already condemned Israel’s actions, was apparent, and Israel was right to refuse to take part in the affair.

The main point of the report was not so much the individual charges but the notion that the entire Israeli campaign was itself illegitimate, and to set an absurd standard of conduct by which Israel’s armed forces are judged as criminal for any attempt to root out terrorists who hide among civilians.

What’s missing here is any sense of context. Hamas considered itself at war with Israel and used the territory it controlled to attack Israel. But when, after completely evacuating Gaza in 2005 and holding back for years, Israel took the only step any sovereign state could—using its army to try wiping out the terrorists and their bases—Hamas cried foul and the anti-Israel cheering section at the UN has now obliged with a report that treats the attacks on Israel as insufficient to justify a serious military response. The point is that the responsibility for the fighting and all the casualties on both sides rest with those who launched the war and made attacks on Gaza inevitable.

Just as the Nazi regime bears the guilt for all the civilian casualties incurred, not only during their own conquest of Europe, but also killed and hurt during the Allied campaign to liberate the Continent, so too does the Hamas terrorist movement bear the sole responsibility for all the hurt done to the people of Gaza as a result of their calculated decision to wage war on Israel from that area. To provoke a war and then to lament their sad fate as victims of their own aggression is hypocritical on the part of Hamas. For the UN to endorse this stand renders the world body, its Human Rights Council, and the Goldstone committee as guilty as the terrorists themselves. To endorse the principle that Israel has no right to defend itself against attacks across its borders is to delegitimize the Jewish state.

This report will, no doubt, be grist for the mill of Israel bashers but will persuade few not already convinced that Israel was born in sin and that efforts to protect it are likewise sinful. But almost as interesting as the UN’s efforts to besmirch Israel is the way some in the mainstream media have treated this story. Among the most fascinating was the story the New York Times published on its front page yesterday.

Nothing in the piece challenged the extraordinary premise of the report, which views Hamas terrorism and Israeli self-defense as morally equivalent. Even more important, the Times article presented the committee’s claims that armed Hamas fighters were not located in the schools, mosques, and other civilian targets that suffered during the fighting, even though the paper’s own coverage of the war contradicted this assertion.

But not satisfied with trumpeting the UN attack on Israel on its front page, the Times followed up the next day by giving Goldstone space on the op-ed page to further justify his report without giving space to any dissent to this point of view. Titled “Justice in Gaza” (no irony intended), Goldstone continued his campaign of treating the two sides of the battle as morally equivalent. Indeed, in order to justify the UN’s attempts to criminalize Israeli self-defense, he goes even further. He believes that since the West has pushed for accountability of Sudan’s government for the genocide in Darfur, they “must do the same with Israel.” In the bizzaro world of Goldstone’s persecution of Israel, Israeli self-defense is now indistinguishable from the mass murder of hundreds of thousands in Darfur, and it’s equally indefensible.

Goldstone’s premise that all civilian deaths in battle are, in the absence of any conclusive proof, war crimes and subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court is clearly not sustainable. Nor is it one the United States would care to see applied to our own forces. But though the international Left would like to see such a standard applied to the United States, Israel is much more vulnerable a target. With the help of friendly media such as the Times, Goldstone and the UN have advanced the campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state another crucial step.

Liberals spent most of the past decade decrying what they never tired of describing as the “lawlessness” of the Bush administration. But today’s New York Times brings to its readers’ attention the fact that Obama’s team is just as willing to disregard legalities. But whereas Bush’s people showed a willingness to bend the rules to fight a war against Islamist terrorists, Obama’s minions will do the same in their quest to appease Islamists.

In this case, the Justice Department “has declared that President Obama can disregard a law forbidding State Department officials from attending United Nations meetings led by representatives of nations considered to be sponsors of terrorism.” Thus, rather than obeying laws passed by Congress to quarantine a nation like Iran, which ranks very high on that list of state sponsors of terror, Obama has sent State Department officials to take part in UN meetings chaired by Iran.

As the Times reports when it notes that the decision has gotten very little attention, “assertions by the Justice Department that certain laws cannot bind the president have drawn far more attention since the Bush administration, when the Office of Legal Counsel wrote secret opinions authorizing the bypassing of statutes and treaties governing surveillance and the treatment of detainees.”

Predictably, there isn’t much outrage from the same people who are ready to disbar or jail Bush staffers who issued rulings they didn’t like. To her credit, Democrat Rep. Nita Lowey of New York, who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees the financing of the State Department, objected to the administration’s caprice. “This provision is law for a very good reason,” Ms. Lowey said. “There are consequences for being a state sponsor of terrorism. The decision of both the previous and current administrations to disregard this law is unacceptable.” On the other hand, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, was only peeved that he wasn’t informed about it before the rules were broken.

Don’t expect many of those who are ready to hang anyone who worked for Bush on any technicality they can find to express much anger over legalisms conjured up to advance the cause of appeasement. As the Times notes, “the new memorandum demonstrated that the Bush legal team’s approach was not as aberrational from other administrations as some critics contended.”

The New York Times returns to one of its favorite hobbyhorses today when it again attempts to shift the blame for the current impasse in the Middle East to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Times editorial, titled “Squandering the Moment,” starts off with the astonishing assertion that the current situation is “the best chance for Middle East peace in nearly a decade.” The piece backs up that dubious premise by saying, “President Obama is committed to serious negotiations and, for now, there is a lull in regional violence.”

But this is, of course, nonsense. There have been lulls before, even during the last violent decade that was marked by Palestinian terrorism directed at Israeli cities and rocket fire on its southern towns and villages. And though the Times’s editorialists have adopted the self-congratulatory stance of the president and his acolytes, Obama is no more committed to the idea of Middle East peace than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush was. Though liberals are loath to give any credit to the latter, it should be remembered that it was he who first proclaimed America’s support for the concept of a Palestinian state in peaceful coexistence with Israel, though it should be noted that in making that concession, he was no more or less successful than any other American leader in getting the Palestinians to buy into the notion that they could acquire sovereignty in exchange for recognizing the legitimacy of their Israeli neighbors.

And that not inconsiderable point is the crux of the fallacy that forms the basis of not only the Times editorial but also the policies of the Obama administration. The focus on Jewish settlements has served to divert the world’s attention from this fact, but Palestinian rejectionism remains the key issue, as has been proved over and again since Yasir Arafat rejected a state in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem in July 2000. Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas repeated this performance when Ehud Olmert desperately tried last year to make peace. Indeed, the “moderate” Abbas made it clear in interviews with the Western press this year that he wasn’t even inclined to talk to Israel. As Israel has demonstrated time and again, anytime there is an actual partner for peace, the existence of settlements in disputed territories is no impediment to Israeli concessions.

The failure of Obama to cajole America’s Arab allies into even the tamest of confidence-building measures toward Israel stems from the same problem that has little to do with anything Netanyahu does or does not do. The result of several generations of fomenting hate against Israel and Jews in Palestinian society as well as in the wider Arab and Islamic world means that the constituency for peace there is virtually nonexistent.

An understanding of this dismal reality underpins the widespread support within Israel for Netanyahu’s attempt to stand up to Obama while still stating Israel’s willingness to make peace in the unlikely event that the Palestinians change their tune. Unlike American Jews, the majority of whose understanding of the situation is filtered through their partisan loyalties to the Democrats, wishful thinking about the peace process, and an unwillingness to confront the facts about the Palestinians, the vast majority of Israelis have given up their illusions about peace. So when the Times encourages Obama to “prod Mr. Netanyahu toward bolder action by making a direct—and better—case to a skeptical Israeli public on why a settlement freeze and reviving peace talks is in its interest,” it is not only overestimating Obama’s considerable rhetorical powers but also asking Israelis to ignore the inconvenient facts about the Palestinian political culture, which views any recognition of the Jewish state as unacceptable. Whatever their opinions about the value or the wisdom of some settlements might be, the majority of Israelis understand that the argument about a freeze on building in Jerusalem and the areas surrounding it has little to do with the actual prospects for peace. That is why in Israel, Obama is the most unpopular American president in recent memory.

The summit that Obama will host at the meeting of the United Nations this month will lead, as have past attempts by more skillful diplomats than the president, to nothing—simply because a Palestinian people divided between Fatah and Hamas are constitutionally incapable of recognizing the legitimacy of a Jewish state under any circumstances or within any borders. The idea that the presence of Barack Obama in the White House renders this a “moment” that holds an opportunity for peace is nothing but hubris on the part of the president and hero worship on the part of his followers.

As we pointed out yesterday, the reaction to a Swedish newspaper’s publication of a blood libel against Israel is a seminal moment for those seeking to understand the comeback of European anti-Semitism. The decision of Aftonbladet to run a piece that alleged that the Israeli army was killing Palestinian boys and then harvesting their organs for sale was shocking enough; the unwillingness of much of the Swedish establishment to speak out against this outrage, however, shows just how bad things are getting there.

And for those who imagined that the paper might choose to cut its losses and slowly back away from the canards it launched against Israel, the opposite is true. A look at the blog of Jan Helin,* Aftonbladet’s editor, reveals that he is intent on doubling down on a campaign of libel while all the while attempting to pose as a victim. Helin claims: “I’m not a racist. I’m not an anti-Semite. Aftonbladet is not an anti-Semitic newspaper. On the contrary, we openly stand against xenophobia.”

But he describes the understandable reaction of Israelis and Jews around the world to his digging up what is one of the old standbys of anti-Semites—a medieval-style blood libel that depicts Jews as blood-sucking vampires who feast on the bodies of non-Jews—as “a wave of hatred.”

Curiously, though he specifies that “Aftonbladet takes no position on the veracity of the facts,” he writes as if the notion that Jews kill Palestinians and steal their organs is not a slander but a debatable proposition and that the ball is in Israel’s court to prove that its soldiers are not guilty of such a preposterous crime.

But just as brazen as his defense of the article is his attack on his country’s ambassador to Israel for having the good sense to try and distance her nation from Aftonbladet’s anti-Semitism. Calling her statement—that she was shocked and appalled at the article—an attack on freedom of the press, Helin writes: “Have you woken up in Iran? No, it is Sweden’s Ambassador Elisabet Borsiin Bonnier in Tel Aviv, who attacks the Swedish freedom of press and freedom of expression.”

This is, of course, nonsense. Helin and Aftonbladet may have the right to publish lies, or at least they would in the United States (though they might be liable for libel charges), but it is not a violation of that right for decent persons and even government officials to denounce them for spreading hate. And in an attempt to blame the victims of his libel for having the chutzpah to denounce it, Helin invokes the more familiar language of Israel-bashers: “It’s deeply unpleasant and sad to see such a strong propaganda machine using centuries-old anti-Semitic images in an apparent attempt to get an obviously topical issue off the table.”

So, according to Helin, it is Israel, which he accuses of killing children and then cannibalizing their bodies, that is invoking anti-Semitic imagery.

Helin notes with satisfaction that Sweden’s Foreign Ministry distanced itself from Borsiin Bonnier’s condemnation of Aftonbladet. Moreover, he appears confident that it is more likely that the ambassador will, as he wishes, be punished for her conduct than it is that the Swedish government, which itself funds NGOs that routinely engage in anti-Israel propaganda, will join in any condemnation of his newspaper’s conduct.

Perhaps the most salient comment about any of this came from a reader of this blog who noted sardonically in a reference to the great Swedish hero of the Holocaust that “I guess not everyone is Raoul Wallenberg up there . . .”

I guess not.

* Nota bene: The blog was run through Google’s translator.