by Daniel Pipes*

If you cannot name your enemy, how can you defeat it? Just as a physician must identify a disease before curing a patient, so a strategist must identify the foe before winning a war. Yet Westerners have proven reluctant to identify the opponent in the conflict the U.S. government variously (and euphemistically) calls the “global war on terror,” the “long war,” the “global struggle against violent extremism,” or even the “global struggle for security and progress.”

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

How long did we hear the “international community” and Palestinians piss and moan about Israel’s occupation of Gaza? Israel gave peace a chance in 2005 by pulling all its settlers and soldiers out of Gaza. What has the Jewish state gotten in return expect proof that the Palestinian leadership’s mantra is, “It’s never enough; we want ALL of Israel!” From the AP:

… Israel’s blockade was imposed in an effort to pressure Hamas to stop attacks from Iranian-backed militants, who have been bombarding southern Israel with rockets and mortars for seven years.

The rate of fire increased after Israel pulled its troops and settlers out of Gaza in 2005 and stepped up further last year after Hamas wrested power from forces loyal to moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose government controls the West Bank. …

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By Phyllis Chesler

Just as more and more information becomes seemingly available, we nevertheless seem to know less and less. Today, one has to know as much as a physician in order to make one’s own personal medical decisions. One must possess an advanced degree in history, Middle East Studies, political science, or law, in order to be able to evaluate what newspapers print daily.

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by Caroline Sevier*

Almost as soon as it started, the democratization agenda that the Bush administration hoped would be the lodestar of its post 9-11 foreign policy has been all but shelved. The insurgency and sectarian bloodshed in Iraq, the regional threat posed by an expansionist Iran, and the Palestinian civil war have combined to help resurrect the U.S. embrace of regional stability as a foreign policy priority and have convinced President George W. Bush to reduce his emphasis on transformative diplomacy. Leaders such as Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Saudi King Abdullah bin Abd al-’Aziz, whom many administration officials viewed as embarrassing allies during Bush’s first term, now enjoy a renaissance of U.S. support. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for example, said little as Mubarak crushed liberal dissidents, and shortly before Bush met the Saudi king, he parried questions after a Saudi court sentenced a 19-year-old rape victim to 200 lashes and six months in jail.[1]

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

It is not news that the BBC is biased in its coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It is nonetheless instructive to analyze the subtle wording the Beeb uses in its editorializing — in news stories. Today, information about Palestinian casualties as a result of Israeli operations were reported as a self-evident fact, while attacks by Palestinians against Israeli civilians were specifically cited only as a claim made by the Jewish state’s army:

… Over the past seven days, more than 20 people have died in Gaza as a result of Israeli military action. In the same period, the Israeli army says that Palestinian militants have fired more than 90 rockets and mortars into Israel. …

Fair and balanced?

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By Phyllis Chesler

Has everyone seen Thomas McCarthy’s universally praised film The Visitor? Or at least read the reviews about it? Having no idea what the film was about, I slipped in yesterday expecting to see a “romantic comic drama” which is how the snapshot review described it.

What I saw instead was a poignant, touching film about illegal immigration in post 9/11 America which, I now understand, has been embraced by almost every film critic.

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By Barry Rubin

Golda Meir once said that a bad press was better than a good epitaph. In other words, pragmatic considerations must take precedence over public relations.

Sometimes it seems as if contemporary Israeli governments have forgotten that concept. Yet in general, especially where it counts, this principle continues to prevail in Israel.

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By Phyllis Chesler

For years now I have maintained that the hottest and most important war is the war of ideas or rather the propaganda war unleashed by ideologues in both the East and the West. The Arab and Islamist world is canny, strategic, and clever; they are also unbelievably bold liars. (Remember the Al Dura Affaire and the alleged massacre in Jenin). The politically correct West falls for the lies and treats them as sacred political truth.

Here are some recent examples of how the West is actively and foolishly collaborating in Big Lies to its own disadvantage.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Jimmy Carter wants Israel to give peace a chance with Hamas, but the former president has, to put it mildly, selective perception (i.e., he looks the other way when Palestinians commit abhorrent crimes against humanity). Hamas today showed its true colors again. From the BBC:

The armed wing of Hamas has admitted that a massive explosion in the Gaza Strip on Thursday was caused by militants preparing an armed operation.

Seven people, including a four-month-old baby were killed in the blast, in Beit Lahiya, in the north of the strip. …

The [Hamas] statement said six members of the brigades were killed in the blast, as well as the four-month-old baby of one of the militants.

About 50 people were wounded, among them 15 children, Palestinian medics say. …

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by Cinnamon Stillwell*

With fatal terrorist attacks on the decline worldwide and al Qaeda apparently in disarray, it would seem a time for optimism in the global war on terrorism. But the war has simply shifted to a different arena. Islamists, or those who believe that Islam is a political and religious system that must dominate all others, are focusing less on the military and more on the ideological. It turns out that Western liberal democracies can be subverted without firing a shot.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

The stupidity and overzealousness of Islamist terrorists doesn’t make them any less dangerous. Case in point, the “Toronto 18, which was busted during a massive police sweep in the summer of 2006.” The trial of the idiotic would-be murderers in now taking place in Brampton, Ontario. It turns out that this group was planning to hit Ottawa, not just Toronto, and had American friends planning to cause mayhem in Atlanta. Here are some highlights from the testimony:

Fearing his days were “numbered” and his arrest imminent, the alleged ringleader of a homegrown terror cell wanted to forge ahead and build explosives to carry out a “mission” that included an attack on Ottawa, a Brampton court was told yesterday.

“I’m just gonna go all out with the mission call, man, like fully all out,” he is overheard saying in an electronic intercept. “If we had more money, guy, I would have just strapped up, like, as many people as possible. … ‘Cause this is tense.” …

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by Saliba Sarsar and David B. Strohmetz*

Last year was a tumultuous one for democracy in Muslim-majority countries. On July 22, 2007, despite Turkish military warnings three months earlier about the danger to secularism posed by the impending election,[1] the Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi — AKP) won the Turkish parliamentary elections, leading Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to proclaim “democracy, security, and stability” to be the real winners.”[2] Then, on November 3, 2007, General Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency in Pakistan, suspending the constitution. Shortly after, assassins gunned down Benazir Bhutto, the leading secular oppositionist. Such events demonstrate not just the fragility of democracy in Muslim countries, but the complicated role that the military plays in such states — sometimes as a protector of secularism, but frequently, as an enforcer of the power of anti-democratic regimes.

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by Scott Carpenter and Michael Rubin*

Within the next few months, Iraqis will once again wave purple fingers in the air as they cast ballots for provincial governments. As Iraq’s parliament debates a law to govern the elections, U.S. diplomats and international experts have an opportunity, if not to correct past mistakes, then to help put local government on the right footing.

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by Daniel Pipes*

In a declassified National Intelligence Estimate, Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities, the U.S. intelligence agencies announced last December, “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”

This highly controversial conclusion encouraged the Iranian leadership to dismiss the possibility of an American attack, permitting Tehran to stake out an increasingly bellicose position and rendering further negotiations predictably futile.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ popularity has increased over his rival Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. This is according to a poll “conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR),” and reported by the Jerusalem Post (see summary below). Is this good news? There is a popular misconception that Abbas (Fatah) is more “moderate” than Haniyeh (Hamas), and Abbas would be better for peace with Israel.

Abbas’ Ph.D. thesis and subsequent book was entitled, “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism” (Holocaust denial). Abbas was one of the founding members of the PLO/Fatah, a group which terrorized Israelis for decades. He had great influence over the 1993 Oslo deal, which led to the “most sustained wave of Palestinian suicide bombings in Israeli history.” The Palestinian Authority never lived up to its Oslo commitments. Also note that:

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