MEQ Summer 2015: Daniel Pipes on Why Americans Can Be More Anti-Israel Than Arabs / More Zionist Than Israelis

The following by Daniel Pipes is reposted here with permission of the Middle East Forum:

Americans Battle the Arab-Israeli Conflict

by Daniel Pipes
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2015 (view PDF)

Texas senator Ted Cruz meets with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Israel, January 11, 2013. A week after taking office, Cruz traveled to Israel on a congressional delegation trip, led by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell.

When, in the midst of the 2014 Hamas-Israel war, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration briefly banned American carriers from flying to Israel, Sen. Ted Cruz (Republican of Texas) accused Barack Obama of using a federal regulatory agency "to launch an economic boycott on Israel, in order to try to force our ally to comply with his foreign policy demands."[1] In so doing, Cruz made an accusation no Israeli leader would dare express.

This is hardly unique: Over the years, other American political figures, both Republican (Dan Burton, Jesse Helms, Condoleezza Rice, Arlen Specter) and Democrat (Charles Schumer), have adopted tougher, and sometimes more Zionist, stances than the Israeli government. This pattern in turn points to a larger phenomenon: The Arab-Israeli conflict tends to generate more intense partisanship among Americans than among Middle Easterners. The latter may die from the conflict but the former experience it with greater passion.

Why Arabs Lose Wars -- From Middle East Quarterly 1999

The following by Norvell B. De Atkine is reposted here with permission of Middle East Forum

Why Arabs Lose Wars

by Norvell B. De Atkine
Middle East Quarterly
December 1999

Norvell De Atkine, a U.S. Army retired colonel with eight years residence in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt, and a graduate degree in Arab studies from the American University of Beirut, is currently instructing U.S. Army personnel assigned to Middle Eastern areas. The opinions expressed here are strictly his own.


Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s.¹ Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming weaponry and numbers.² Iraqis showed ineptness against an Iranian military ripped apart by revolutionary turmoil in the 1980s and could not win a three-decades-long war against the Kurds.³ The Arab military performance on both sides of the 1990 Kuwait war was mediocre.⁴ And the Arabs have done poorly in nearly all the military confrontations with Israel. Why this unimpressive record? There are many factors—economic, ideological, technical—but perhaps the most important has to do with culture and certain societal attributes which inhibit Arabs from producing an effective military force.

It is a truism of military life that an army fights as it trains, and so I draw on my many years of firsthand observation of Arabs in training to draw conclusions about the ways in which they go into combat. The following impressions derive from personal experience with Arab military establishments in the capacity of U.S. military attaché and security assistance officer, observer officer with the British-officer Trucial Oman Scouts (the security force in the emirates prior to the establishment of the United Arab Emirates), as well as some thirty year's study of the Middle East.

Video: Gang Of Arab Youths Attacks Orthodox Jews In Jerusalem

The Algemeiner reports on Shocking Footage: Arabs Laugh as They Terrorize, Abuse Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem

Shocking footage emerged on YouTube Saturday of Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem being hounded and abused by a mob of Arabs some of which are heard on the video to be laughing loudly.

In the video the Arab youths are seen kicking, shoving, hurling chunks of snow and shouting insults at two men. One of the Jewish men falls as he slips on stairs attempting to escape the mob and the hat of one of them is taken. The attackers are mostly hooded and wearing kaffiyehs.

Here is the video: