The Wall Street Journal

OPINION

Israel, Iran and the Bomb
By JOHN R. BOLTON
July 15, 2008; Page A19

Iran's test salvo of ballistic missiles last week together with recent threatening rhetoric by commanders of the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guards emphasizes how close the Middle East is to a fundamental, in fact an irreversible, turning point.

Tehran's efforts to intimidate the United States and Israel from using military force against its nuclear program, combined with yet another diplomatic charm offensive with the Europeans, are two sides of the same policy coin. The regime is buying the short additional period of time it needs to produce deliverable nuclear weapons, the strategic objective it has been pursuing clandestinely for 20 years.

Jul 8, 2008

America's special grace
By Spengler

To ascribe a special grace to America is outrageous, as outrageous
as the idea of special grace itself. Why shouldn't everyone be
saved? Why aren't all individuals, nations, peoples and cultures
equally deserving? History seems awfully unfair: half or more of
the world's 7,000 or so languages will be lost by 2100, linguists
warn, and at present fertility rates Italian, German, Ukrainian,
Hungarian and a dozen other major languages will die a century or
so later. The agony of dying nations rises in reproach to
America's unheeding prosperity.

ISRAEL IS PAYING FOR ITS DEFEAT

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

It was two years ago this month that Israel and Hezbollah went to war.

On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah, an Iranian-sponsored and Syrian-backed political and terrorist organization, staged an unprovoked raid across the Lebanon-Israel border, killing three Israelis and kidnapping two others, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser. The war that ensued -- a war for which Hezbollah had openly prepared for six years, constructing fortified bunkers and amassing thousands of Katyusha artillery rockets along the border -- was a disaster for Israel. The fighting lasted for 33 bloody days, during which Israel achieved none of its key objectives: It didn't destroy Hezbollah, it didn't stop the barrage of rockets slamming into its northern cities, and it didn't rescue its kidnapped soldiers.

The Shame Of It All
March 7, 2008

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There were days, and they were not that long ago, when Zionism was about something
different. Days when Zionists could articulate what the purpose of Jewish Statehood
was, days when Israelis understood that having a state was about changing the existential
condition of the Jew. Not anymore.

Hayyim Nachman Bialik, writing in 1905 shortly after the slaughter in Kishinev,
understood that the very essence of Jewish existence had to change. What else could
he possibly have been saying in his epic poem, "The City of Slaughter" (scroll down to the two paragraphs that begin with the lines
"Descend then, to the cellars of the town"), when he describes the mass rape scene in
which Jewish women are helpless victims and Jewish men are powerless to intervene? In fact,
for Bialik, the villains of the scene are not the Cossacks; rape and murder are simply what
Cossacks do. The problem with what happened in Kishinev, Bialik intimates with his
bitter irony, rests with the Jewish men. It's bad enough that they were too weak
to intervene, to defend their wives, their sisters, their mothers and their daughters,
though that is clearly lamentable. But worse than that, they were too frightened
to even try. And even worse than that, Bialik says, is that when the slaughter
and the butchery were over, these men looked down at the broken bodies of the women
that they had supposedly once loved, and instead of holding them, instead of telling
them that they still loved them, instead of assuring them that they would take care
of them no matter what, they gazed at these violated, half-dead women, and saw a
halakhic question. "Is my wife," the Kohanim in Bialik's poem want to know, "still
permitted to me?"

washingtonpost.com

Staying to Help in Iraq
We have finally reached a point where humanitarian assistance,
from us and others, can have an impact.

By Angelina Jolie
Thursday, February 28, 2008; 1:15 PM

The request is familiar to American ears: "Bring them home."

But in Iraq, where I've just met with American and Iraqi leaders,
the phrase carries a different meaning. It does not refer to the
departure of U.S. troops, but to the return of the millions of
innocent Iraqis who have been driven out of their homes and, in
many cases, out of the country.

In the six months since my previous visit to Iraq with the United

The New York Sun

Sarkozy's Brave Move

BY THANE ROSENBAUM
February 25, 2008
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/71759

President Sarkozy's honeymoon with the French people may have finally come to an end over, of all things, the Holocaust.

After an all-too-public divorce from his wife, Cecilia, followed by a tabloid-assisted romancing of a former supermodel and present pop star, Carla Bruni, now his new wife, the French president's approval ratings have declined and there is widespread disappointment of his management of the economy — all of this in just the first eight months that he has been in office.

Yet, the piece de resistance of Mr. Sarkozy's stumbles may have come last week when he announced a decision to require all fifth grade students to learn the story of one of the 11,000 French Jewish children murdered by the Nazis.

The Wall Street Journal

OPINION

Mr. President, Don't Forget Iran
By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
February 19, 2008; Page A19

Dear Mr. President: A few months ago, it became possible to hear members and supporters of your administration going around Washington and saying that the question of a nuclear-armed Iran "would not be left to the next administration." As a line of the day, this had the advantage of sounding both determined and slightly mysterious, as if to commit both to everything and to nothing in particular.

That slight advantage has now, if you will permit me to say so, fallen victim to diminishing returns. The absurdly politicized finding of the National Intelligence Estimate -- to the effect that Iran has actually halted rather than merely paused its weapons-acquisition program -- has put the United States in a position where it is difficult even to continue pressing for sanctions, let alone to consider disabling the centrifuge and heavy-water sites at Natanz, Arak and elsewhere.

Asia Times ~ Oct 30, 2007

When you can't deal with the devil
By Spengler

A year later than I expected, the drumroll has begun towards a
Western attack on Iran's nuclear capability. Despite the best
efforts of Western diplomacy, the "moderate" option in Iranian
politics expired last week with President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's
triumphal consolidation of power.

A combination of economic distress and external threats, Western
capitals hoped, would strengthen the position of the loser in Iran's
2006 presidential elections, Hashemi Rafsanjani, and external
pressure would undo the decision of the Iranian electorate. At best
that would have been a deal with the devil; unfortunately, the devil
was not returning phone calls last week.

The Wall Street Journal

COMMENTARY

The Counterterrorism Club
By THANE ROSENBAUM
July 18, 2007; Page A15

Last week, Germany, a relatively unscathed contestant in the game of radical Islamic roulette, publicly debated the antiterrorism proposals of its interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble. The law under consideration would permit the government to engage in online searches of computers and to shoot down hijacked planes. Mr. Schäuble also recommended the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists and the assassination of terrorist leaders abroad.