Mideast Media Sampler 04/11/2011

From an email from DG:

1) New meaning to "goldstone"

The IHT gave Nahum Barnea an opportunity to describe the Goldstone effect on Israel, called Goldstone aftershocks

It seems it's more of Shlomo Avineiri's argument that Israel made a mistake by not cooperating. I found these two paragraphs to be disturbing.

To understand the Israeli actions in Gaza, one has to go back to the debate in the Israeli cabinet at the time. The prime minister then, Ehud Olmert, was about to resign under the shadow of a corruption investigation. Wanting to leave his mark on history by gaining a decisive victory over Hamas, Olmert pushed for the sort of combat that would have exposed Israeli soldiers to face-to-face battles with Hamas militants. 

But the minister of defense, Ehud Barak, had a different agenda. He did not believe that Israel could really benefit from a military victory in Gaza and focused on minimizing the number of Israeli soldiers who would be sent home in body bags. Thus Barak and the general staff of the Israel Defense Forces preferred air bombing and artillery shelling over ground combat.

For anyone reading this, then, Cast Lead wasn't so much an effort to correct an intolerable situation as much as the result of as a cynical political calculation. (Olmert needed a legacy; Barak made sure it wasn't too expensive for Israel.)

Barnea observes:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman have now established special teams to spread the new gospel of Goldstone all over the world. Alas, the world is paying little attention. The opinion about the Israeli operation in Gaza was set in stone when the report was published. The debate about the two Goldstones is of interest largely to Jews, in and outside Israel. It has become a Jewish affair.

But has it? If Barnea is correct that's very comforting, but I can't believe that the Arab League's sudden concern for civilian casualties isn't an outgrowth of Goldstone.

Jennifer Rubin isn't so quick to dismiss the effects of Goldstone.

Despite the insufficiency of the confession, Goldstone inadvertently undermined another serious charge. In his newfound praise for Israel’s devotion of “significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct,”Goldstone made a mockery of another utterly unsubstantiated charge, namely that Israel’s judicial system doesn’t abide by the norms of international law.

You can’t come away from Goldstone’s retraction or Berkowitz’s insightful analysis without concluding that Goldstone was malicious in his findings, as were those who seized upon them. But to be clear, the Goldstone Report is fully representative of the sorry state of the international “human rights” movement, its member NGOs and the individuals who cheer them on..

The United Nations Human Rights Council’s serial denunciations of Israel, the International Criminal Court’s indictment of opposition leader Tzipi Livni and other Israelis, and the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement’s perpetual slander of Israel, like Goldstone’s screed, should be labeled for what they are: anti-Semitism. These developments and other similar conduct all reflect the accepted definition of Jew-hatred (authored by Natan Sharansky and adopted by the State Department as U.S. policy)

Finally there is Roger Cohen, who, of course still blames Israel in the Goldstone Chronicles

I would just point out this paragraph:

Israel is celebrating what it calls a vindication. It is preparing to welcome Goldstone. It is demanding nullification of the report, even though Goldstone is only one of its four authors. Meanwhile the facts remain: the 1,400 plus Palestinian dead, the 13 Israelis killed, the devastation, the Hamas rockets — and the need for credible investigation of what all evidence suggests were large-scale, indiscriminate, unlawful Israeli attacks in Gaza, as well as Hamas’ crimes against civilians.

Yes it's true that Goldstone is only one of four authors. But we already know about the other three authors that they went into the investigation prejudging Israel guilty. Despite evidence to the contrary Judge Goldstone claimed that he was open to contrary evidence.

So Cohen's view is that we should trust those who were not subject to being swayed. And in Travers he trusts a man who claims that Israel was attacked by only two rockets in the months leading up to Cast Lead. In the end Cohen writes:

To “Goldstone”: (Colloq.) To sow confusion, hide a secret, create havoc.

This recalls Yisrael Medad's coinage:

goldstoned

–adjective Slang.

1. attacked for acting in a presumed criminal manner, in particular of abusing human rights and of performing war crimes, - in a manner and fashion which is unfair, based on questionable testimony, framed in radical and progressive political ideology and predicated on a perverse interpretation of law, all the while divorced from reality, principles of self-defense and the requirement of a state to protect its civilian population from terror.

2. deriv. dazed from such an attack, for example: "I am goldstoned from the things you say about me".

2) An op-ed about Syria

For the most part, the MSM hasn't reported much on Syria's protests. It can't, obviously. But it also hasn't given Syria much attention in the opinion pages. So it is welcome that the New York Times ran Prisoner of Damascus by Yassin Al-Haj Saleh

IN all my 50 years, I have never held a passport. Other than visiting Lebanon, I’d never left Syria when, in the fall of 2004, I was barred from leaving the country. I tried many times afterward to get a passport, but to no avail.

I spent 16 years of my youth in my country’s prisons, incarcerated for being a member of a communist pro-democracy group. During the recent protests, many more friends have been detained — most of them young — under the government’s catch-all emergency laws.

The state of emergency, under which Syria has lived for 48 years, has extended the ruling elite’s authority into all spheres of Syrians’ public and private lives, and there is nothing to stop the regime from using this power to abuse the Syrian population. Today, promises follow one after the other that these all-pervasive restrictions will be lifted. But one must ask, will it be possible for the Baath Party to rule Syria without the state of emergency that has for so long sustained it?

However there is an attitude that is troubling:

The official pretext for the emergency laws is the country’s state of war with Israel. However, restricting Syrians’ freedoms did no good in the 1967 war, which ended with the occupation of the Golan Heights, nor did it help in any other confrontations with the Jewish state, nor in any true emergencies. Because in the government’s eyes everything has been an emergency for the last half-century, nothing is an emergency.

Syria’s struggle against an aggressive Israel has encouraged the militarization of political life — a development that has been particularly favorable to single-party rule. And the suspension of the rule of law has created an environment conducive to the growth of a new ruling elite.

An "aggressive" Israel?

3) Responsibility to protect

The Arab League has asked the UN to impose a no-fly zone over Gaza.

The Arab League (AL) said on Sunday it would ask the United Nations to consider imposing a no-fly zone over the Gaza Stripe to protect the civilians against Israeli air strikes.

In a statement issued after an emergency meeting of the pan- Arab organization at the permanent delegates' level in its Cairo headquarter, the AL said it would ask the United Nation Security Council to convene an emergency meeting to discuss the Israeli aggression over Gaza to lift the siege and impose a no-fly zone against the Israeli military to protect civilians.

The statement rejected the double standard policies towards the Palestinian case, urging the UN Security Council and the Quartet committee to bear all responsibilities for halting the subsequent massacres and provide an international protection for the unarmed citizens.

It does not appear that there is anything about this in the American media. For example, the New York Times's Israel and Hamas Consider Cease-Fire covers Hamas's request for a ceasefire, but there's no mention of the Arab League's effort.

The Washington Post ran an AP story about FM Avigdor Lieberman's discouraging a ceasefire.

Yisrael Medad asks why doesn't the Arab League ask to protect the citizens of Syria?

The same could apply to Egypt

Yemen

Bahrain

I suppose I could go on, but won't for now.

And Yaacov Lozowick uses one picture to show the hypocrisy of the whole enterprise.

4) Saudi stuff
Two interesting bits of news about Saudi Arabia.

President Obama is sending his National Security Adviser to the Gulf.

US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates held talks in Riyadh on Wednesday with King Abdullah, with both sides concerned as well by Iranian intentions in the region and spiraling unrest in Yemen.

Boosted by the arrival of a Saudi-led Gulf forces contingent, Bahraini security forces smashed a month-old protest mid-March in central Manama by Shiites, leaving three protesters and two police dead.

The surprise Saudi decision to lead a regional mission into the strife-torn and strategic kingdom ruled by a Sunni minority also reflected the deep shadow cast by Iran in the instability testing US-allied leaders across the Gulf.

Apparently the President feels he needs to mend some fences.

Finally, there's something to gloat over.

Egypt's public prosecutors' office said on Sunday it had frozen land in southern Egypt controlled by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal because the original sale of the land violated the law.
The public prosecutor has been investigating business transactions and the finances of officials under Hosni Mubarak since mass protests forced him to resign as president on February 11.

The Prince offered millions to New York if the United States would changes its policy towards Israel after 9/11. Giuliani refused the money.

Technorati Tag: Middle East and Goldstone Report.