The irony of having a "friend" in Washington

When George W Bush was running for re-election against John Kerry in 2004, I speculated with some of my friends that maybe it would be better for Kerry to win, because at least then you'd know who you're dealing with. With Bush, who was perceived as a "friend" of Israel, it'd be difficult to say "no" to any demands he places on Israel, even though you know the Palestinians will serially violate every single one of their obligations with impunity - because Bush is a friend, and we don't want to alienate our friends, right? But for Kerry, who is known to be more pro-Arab than Bush, there wouldn't be any illusions, and therefore no need to pander to him.

My friends swung me only on the basis that Bush was in favor of keeping US troops in Iraq, which is exactly where you want them if Iran was ever going to be subjected to the former Bush Doctrine of regime change for governments that support terrorism, while Kerry had promised a full pullout.

Four years later, I had the same debate, and still came out rooting for John McCain for the same reasons, muttering a quiet "baruch Dayan HaEmes" when the results showed Obama had won. And now we get to see my "friend in Washington" thesis in practice.

Obama has truly surpassed all my expectations for alienating Israelis. It really is amazing how he has swung Israeli public opinion since his inauguration: when he started out he had 31% of Israelis thinking he was pro-Israel, versus 14% who felt he was pro-Arab, and 40% felt he was neutral. The latest opinion polls have only 6% still thinking he's pro-Israel, 36% neutral, and fully 50% now feel he's pro-Arab. You gotta hand it to the guy - that is really amazing work. Not only has he debased himself by grovelling in front of the Muslim world with his cringing apologetics in Cairo, but he has succeeded in completely alienating Israelis to the extent that only 6% of us feel that he's on our side!

To me, this is very good news. He now has absolutely no leverage to extract any more stupid unliateral concessions out of us. Take today - the US State Department officially stated that they demand and end to all construction in Jerusalem suburbs on the "wrong" side of the Green Line, including "natural growth". Does anyone seriously believe that we're going to listen to a bombastic edict like that? Fuggedaboudit. Obama is just burning all his leverage with Israel, because no "friend" could make a demand like that, especially when we would be getting nothing in return. To a world of Islamist enemies, the USA has no concrete demands, just some touchy-feely stuff about trying to get to know each other better - but for Israel, the US's only staunch friend and ally - for Israel, the US knows how to make concrete demands.

And if we don't comply? What are they going to do - declare sanctions on us? Congress and Senate may be stacked with Democrats, but most of them are still pretty pro-Israel, to the extent that there's even been a rumbling among the Democrats themselves about Obama's Israel-unfriendly line. Sanctions not happening any time soon.

There really is great meaning to the "Baruch Dayan Haemes" blessing - we acknowledge G-d's greater judgment when things happen that appear to be bad. Obama's ascent to the presidency looks like really bad news, but I'll bet in the next 4 years Israel makes fewer stupid unilateral concessions than it did in any of the 4-year terms of Bush (Jr and Sr) or Clinton.

Supporting the Iranian revolution is a no-lose proposition!

Today I had to say a birkas shehecheyanu - it's the first time I've ever felt proud of a statement made by Shimon Peres!

Israel is to my knowledge the first and only country to have publicly supported the Iranian people in their quest for freedom. And we should be trumpeting this from the rooftops!

It's a no-lose proposition: if the Iranian regime falls (as we all hope it will), then the Iranian people will have a massive grudge against the people who passively watched them getting slaughtered amid mild statements of "reservations" about the fairness of the election, calls for "restraint" and "calm", and earnest attempts to "engage in dialogue" with the murderers. Conversely, those who stood up and cheered for the people, even if they could do nothing more than have the moral clarity to call Evil for what it is, will at least be remembered as friends.

And if the regime manages to crush the revolution - well, what have we lost? Are they going to hate us more than they already do? Are they going to want to drop a bomb on us ר"ל any more than they do now? And if they try to incite their people against us with the "Look! It's all a Zionist plot!" line, I think that would backfire on them in our favor. The Iranian regime has no more credibility with its people, and they're not going to buy the "Goldstein" argument any more. The fear society of Iran is cracking, and it will not last very much longer at all. And if the perception in the street is that Israel is the enemy of the Iranian regime, so much the better! When the Iranian people eventually are liberated, they may yet become our allies!

Stranger than fiction?

You have nothing to lose. Get onto twitter and make sure everybody knows that Israel is supporting the Iranian people!

Rabbi Horowitz - The System Worked

After all the bad press we've been getting about the sexual molestation issues in our community, at last we have some good news from Rabbi Yakov Horowitz.

Note that in this case, they went straight to the police. Not to the tznius police, the real police. It was handled cleanly, discreetly, and with the full cooperation and support of the local Rabbonus.

Think we could manage that here?

The speech we wish Bibi could have given

Ah, if only we had a PM who had the guts to tell it like it is...

You want to have a prime minister who isn't afraid to mention G-d's name?
Sign up already!

Stan's right to have babies

It struck me that every one of Bibi's conditions for Palestinian statehood is very reasonable, yet even before the applause for his speech had died down, the Arabs had rejected every one of them offhand, and blamed him for setting unacceptable conditions. ("What?! You want our independence not to come at the expense of yours?! Outrageous!")

In effect, Bibi's nod to a Palestinian state is no more meaningful than Judith's proposal that Stan should have the right to have babies. Well played, man!

The best possible outcome x2

Yesterday there were two fairly significant events: Bibi Netanyahu's grand policy speech, and continued and escalating riots in Iran protesting the stolen election.

All told, I don't think things could have turned out better in either situation.

I'm not going to dissect Bibi's speech here; there are some very good analyses from Jameel and Barry Rubin, among others. I will just say that I think he played his hand very well. He made an offer to the Arabs that incensed the Right, but it's got as much chance of coming to fruition as, we have of, well, the Arabs acknowledging Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, with Jerusalem as its undivided capital, and not flooded with millions of Arab "refugees". He also had the guts to say "NO" to Obama's noxious demands that we effectively sterilize the Jews who live over the Green Line; and he gave a good lesson to the Prez about Jewish history in Eretz Yisrael not having started with the Holocaust. Just a pity that he failed to call for the release of Jonathan Pollard. Maybe he felt that he'd pushed his luck enough already... but still...

In summary, I would have been ecstatic if he'd given the speech that Moshe Feiglin wrote for him, but I don't think Bibi, given that he does not believe in G-d, could have done any better than he did last night.

Strangely enough, I'm much more captivated by the goings on in Iran than I am by the repercussions of Bibi's speech. Before the elections I was in contact with an 19-year-old Iranian programmer whom I met on StackOverflow. I asked him what his feeling was on the election, and he said he wasn't even going to bother to vote. There was originally a field of hundreds of candidates, but the list got sanitized by the mullahs until there were only 4 candidates who got the hechsher of Iran's Supreme Leadership. If they got the hechsher, that basically automatically disqualifies them as a real hope for the people. They could only choose between Bad, Filthy, Disgusting and Utterly Repulsive.

So I thought, perhaps it's actually worse if Ahmadinejad loses! Coz then the new guy can come in and pretend that he wants to talk with the West, while buying more and more time to continue developing nuclear weapons apace, and still spewing the same hatred and genocidal invective against Israel. At least if Ahmadinejad wins, he can't even fake moderation! It'll be more difficult to pretend that talking to him is going to help things - although I think Obama has already decided that he has no problem with Iran having the Bomb.

But lo and behold! The Iranian people turned out in their masses to vote for Bad instead of Utterly Repulsive - and when their votes were stolen, they decided they had had enough! They have tasted freedom, and they are not going to let go! And it's not just about rallying around the guy who lost. I don't think the Iranians just want a change in government; if they did, I wouldn't be so interested. I think they want a change in regime.

Take a look at all the Twitter traffic emanating from Iran. People aren't just chanting, "Down with Ahmadinejad," or "Long live Moussavi" - they are shouting, "Death to Khamenei!"

It's really amazing, seeing as I'm in the middle of rereading Natan Sharansky's The Case For Democracy - to see how perfectly accurate his words are. We are watching a fear society in its last stages before collapse. The people have tasted freedom, and the regime is being forced to spend every last iota of its power to repress them and beat them into submission. As his last throw of the die, Ahmadinejad is playing his only trump card - the bogeyman of "foreign enemies" who are plotting against Iran and trying to sabotage its internal affairs. Sharansky identified this, too - the only way to keep True Believers as TBs, and to prevent doublethinkers from becoming dissenters is to focus their attention on outside enemies, to serve as a rallying point. Looking at the footage of the Iranian riots, I think it's too late for that.

IMO it's going to go either one of three ways from here.

1. The mullahs carry out their own version of Tiananmen Square, crushing people's will to resist. Try papering over a massacre when you're trying to fake moderation to the West. Even Europe will have a hard time justifying doing business with Iran after that.
2. They will give in to pressure and either annul the election results or institute some kind of power sharing between the candidates. There will also have to be some kind of regime reform to accompany that if they want the people to calm down. Yet another crack in the fear society's brittle fortifications.
3. The people storm the Bastille, as it were, and literally throw the mullahs from power. Not so far-fetched; from what I'm reading on Twitter, the army has declared it will not fight against the protestors, and the government is being forced to use Hizbullah Arabs for crowd control, because the local Farsi police are to compassionate on their brethren.

I'm rooting for number 3. But whatever happens, Iran's fear society is crumbling, and we can look forward to the liberation of the Iranian people from their dictatorship sooner than you think. The only thing that can save them now is if the West, in its infuriating "realist" delusions, decides to give the mullahs and Ahmadinejad a hand-up, all in the name of "regional stability". Right now what the people of Iran really need is for the USA and Europe to come out publicly supporting their struggle for freedom. If they fail to do so, then when the Iranians finally do liberate themselves, they will resent us all the more for failing to come to their assistance.

You can also make a difference. Use the social networking web sites to post messages of encouragement to the Iranian people, who deserve freedom no less than any other nation on Earth. Tell them we are with them; encourage them to liberate themselves - and show them that they have friends in the Weat, and especially in Israel.

The News Revolution

When social networks like Facebook and Twitter started coming out, I took a look, and after much consideration decided that they were just a bloody waste of time.

Now, watching the stuff happening in Iran after their elections, I am coming to realize that we are actually watching nothing less than a revolution - the News Revolution.

I started realizing this during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, when my primary news source was not CNN, not the Jerusalem Post, and not Radio Kol Yisrael. It was Jameel @ The Muqata. Yes, a blog web site, which carried the most up to date news about how things were going for our boys in Gaza, where rockets were falling - and they had the scoop hours before the news appeared on any mainstream news source.

And now on Twitter, you can watch everything happening within Iran, as told by the Iranians, and uncensored by the politicos at CNN and BBC who prefer detente over confrontation, who prefer stability over freedom. All the stuff that you'll never see on CNN. And more - it is also serving as a mouthpiece for those people who otherwise could not express themselves - both for Iranians to sound off about how they long for freedom, and for outsiders to encourage them to pursue it.

This is the News Revolution, where the people are taking back the narrative from the journalists. No longer can the mainstream media black out all dissenting opinions and subtly mold popular consensus; no longer can they control what people are exposed to. The truth will out, and we will all be much better off for it!