• International nuclear inspectors, just returned, will visit Iran again in three weeks. If nothing else, it’s a sign that both sides want to be seen as cooperating. [NYT]

• With the last round not yet implemented, the Senate is already working on new financial sanctions against Iran that would target individual leaders, including President Ahmadinejad. [FP The Cable]

• Eight rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel; they hurt no one. They may have been timed to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s visit to the region, including Gaza. [Israel HaYom]

• At the Herzliya Conference, Israeli central banker Stanley Fischer did not go easy on Israel. Among other things, he said the Haredim, many of whom deliberately subsist on generous government subsidies, have to start working. [Haaretz]

• “In the world of mohels … Mr. Sherman has become a kind of bold-faced name.” [NYT City Room]

• At a debate last night in Florida, the Republican frontrunners laid into President Obama’s dealings with Israel. Mitt Romney reiterated the “threw Israel under the bus” line from the 1967 borders speech last May. [JPost]

• Sheldon Adelson, who along with his wife has now given $10 million to a pro-Newt Gingrich Super PAC, denies (through an aide) that he is trying to buy off the presidency. [NBC]

• Even as he sounded more bellicose notes, in a speech President Ahmadinejad also acknowledged the havoc that sanctions and the looming oil embargo are wreaking on Iran’s economy and currency. [NYT]

• Though he resigned as top Middle East adviser, Dennis Ross—long seen as the most pro-Israel voice in the White House—retained his security clearance and still advises the president from time to time. [Haaretz]

• The West’s favorites from both sides, President Peres and Prime Minister Fayyad, met at Davos. [IMEMC News]

Goodbye to All That

For generations, the Jews of Caracas had idyllic weather, prosperity, and vibrant communal organizations. Things have changed under Hugo Chávez.

By Vox Tablet

During a recent trip to Bogotá, Colombia, where I’d lived for years, I discovered that the wealthier parts of the city were filling up with an odd sort of super-refugee. The new arrivals were mainly rich Venezuelans fleeing an increasingly chaotic situation in their home country: oil execs booted out by nationalization, industrialists frustrated by the corrupt and now hostile business environment, successful entrepreneurs and others displaced by a newly minted Russian-style oligarchy loyal to Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez. These transplants, many of them Jews, were arriving in the Colombian capital and prospering because they had tremendous skills and valuable international connections—and because they were coming with their social and business ties intact. Their first complaint was invariably about what they called “the security situation” in Caracas. That they found Bogotá to be an island of safety and peace by comparison was alarming.

Through some of these new Colombians, I was introduced to a man named Alan Vainrub. In 2005, Vainrub’s parents sat him down in their spacious apartment in Caracas, on the lush lower slopes of Ávila mountain, to talk about his future. Vainrub, then 23, held an engineering degree from the local Universidad Metropolitana and was happily employed at Procter & Gamble. He had designs on an overseas MBA, after he’d gained more work experience. But Vainrub’s father, a doctor, told him that the domestic political situation was getting worse under Chávez; by the following year, Vainrub’s father said, there might be hundreds of upper-class Venezuelans applying for business degrees, all looking for a way out.

Vainrub was in no hurry to leave. After all, he was the comfortable heir to one of the great flowerings of the Jewish postwar diaspora, third- and fourth-generation Venezuelans with education, social clout, and roots. Jews had first arrived in Venezuela from Curaçao, a haven from the Inquisition, in the 19th century. “Turcos”—the catch-all term for anyone of roughly Middle-Eastern coloring or north African descent, regardless of their religion—had been arriving in the country since the 1900s. And a long tradition of lenient immigration policies—especially after World War II, based in part on the need for expertise and manpower to exploit the country’s single most important resource, oil—meant that Europeans, Iberians, Chinese, Russians, and other Latin Americans were all welcome there. Venezuelans came in all colors and had intermarried for centuries, fashioning a fully mestizo culture brewed from the descendants of indigenous people, Spanish colonials, African slaves, and 20th-century immigrants. Jews were a tiny, accepted minority. People called each other affectionately demeaning nicknames, instead of epithets: mi vieja, mi gorda, mi negra.

But by the time Vainrub’s father sat him down, the Jewish community of Caracas, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, was in precipitous decline. The major cause of this decline was the 1998 election of Chávez—now the longest-serving head of state in the Western hemisphere. After surviving an ouster by coup in 2002, and pushing through constitutional reform to end presidential term limits, Chávez, who declared his recent battle against cancer won, now openly projects his rule into the middle of the 21st century. He has proclaimed the next 10 years to be the Bronze Age of the Bolivarian Revolution, a hybrid of populism and socialism soldered onto a Napoleonic personality cult. The Bronze Age is to be followed by an intermediary Silver Age, and then concluded, beginning in 2031, with the Golden Age of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Over the years, as Chávez’s brash populism has been buoyed by income from Venezuela’s vast, nationalized oil reserves, an object of his political manipulation has become the Caracas elite—“estos ricachones,” roughly translated: those fat cats, as he has dismissively referred to the upper class. In 2004, Chávez made his first official visit to Tehran and struck up a personal friendship and diplomatic alliance with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, whom he welcomed to Venezuela this month. This came after decades of political tutelage from another Holocaust denier, the Argentine ultra-nationalist Norberto Ceresole, who died in 2003 but who managed to instill a conspiratorial, amalgamated view of Jews in his pupil. Chávez has seemed to find in anti-Zionism, and later anti-Semitism, a valuable political tool, one that enhances, or makes more precise, his love of straw-man rhetoric and open hostility toward the United States, first against the bellicosity of George W. Bush and then against President Barack Obama, who remains an avatar of “imperialismo yanqui,” which has abetted “las oligarquias” in Latin America.

And so in 2006, Alan Vainrub entered Harvard Business School, hoping to return to Venezuela after graduation and rejoin the Jewish community of Caracas. But the intervening five years have made that dream seem foolish, if not suicidal. As the reality of Chávez’s durability has set in, nearly half of Venezuela’s Jewish community has fled from the social and economic chaos that the president has unleashed and from the uncomfortable feeling that they were being specifically targeted by the regime.

In this significant migration I saw the seeds of a story of dispossession and loss unlike any other in the hemisphere, a tale spanning five generations—from Europe to Israel to the Americas and back. What I found was at stake for people like Vainrub, his sister, his parents, his Caracas-born grandmother, and her German-born Jewish parents, was the very idea of a “Venezuelan Jew”—a patriotic, Latin-inflected, Holocaust-surviving, entrepreneurial, cosmopolitan, privileged, devout, convivial, passionate, Merengue-dancing, carefree, and idiosyncratic species. How dangerous must a situation get for a Jew to cast off the identity he had constructed for himself and his family as a person rooted in a particular place? I asked this question of everyone I met: What is your limit? When do you leave? On the one hand, there was the Jewish leader who made religion his measure. “I won’t stop being Jewish,” he told me. “If by staying I can’t be Jewish, then I’m not staying.” But many more seemed to have the tolerance of community association President Salomón Cohen Botbol. Just three weeks before I met him, Botbol’s oldest son, who had graduated from high school, had been kidnapped—allegedly by ransom-seeking delinquents. Understanding the situation of what they call “secuestro express,” Botbol said, meant he knew that the assault would be no more than a few unpleasant and costly hours—“the scariest of my life,” he said, but nothing out of the ordinary. An arrangement was made—Botbol declined to offer the details—and the family resumed its life. “In this case it wasn’t traumatic,” he said. “But there are traumatic cases.”

Wasn’t finding your son in mortal danger reason enough to abandon a sinking ship? “I’m not thinking of leaving,” he answered.

***

On Dec. 2, 2007, the day a constitutional referendum was held to abolish term limits, the Chávez government raided the undisputed hub of Jewish life in Caracas, the Colegio y Centro Social, Cultural y Deportivo Hebraica, the site of the main Jewish school and club. It was the second such invasion. This time, masked and armed police piled over the walls as elementary-school children arrived for class. The government claimed it was acting on a vague, anonymous tip that the club was harboring weapons, or was a front for Mossad. In both cases, the raids were officially declared “unfruitful.”

Continue reading: Inside the Jewish islands

The United States and Europe’s leading countries condemned the new enrichment at the U.N. Security Council, but Russian and Chinese vetoes will likely forestall another (fifth) round of sanctions. Beyond that, the Obama administration has been putting forth slightly mixed signals. Appearing on a Sunday morning talk show, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta took a hard line, with rhetoric to match: if Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, “we will defeat that;” if they try to build a bomb, “they’re going to get stopped.” Yet, reflecting the most recent National Intelligence Estimate, he surmised that Iran has not yet started to develop an actual weapon. Meanwhile, a Washington Post article earlier this week created some confusion: a senior administration official was quoted as saying sanctions were intended to stoke public resentment and lead to regime change; then, this quote was changed to reflect the intention that the sanctions stoke public resentment merely in order that “the Iranian leaders realize they need to change their ways.”

The message from Iran is also mixed. The bluster likely masks panic. Closing the Strait of Hormuz would surely be the quickest way to halt Russian and Chinese protection, given the number it would do on world energy markets; it would be a pure desperation move, and so even threatening it can be seen as a desperation move, “Crazy Ivan”-style brinksmanship. The economic sanctions are slowly ruining Iran’s currency, financial system, and overall economy. In Venezuela this week, Presidents Ahmadinejad and Chávez joked, “That hill will open up and a big atomic bomb will come out.” Keep laughing, guys.

Domestically, President Obama does face some pressure to act, as the presidential campaign gears up and Republican candidates talk military action (Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman yesterday introduced a bill that would put the Senate on record as opposing “containment” of an Iranian nuclear bomb). Anne-Marie Slaughter suggests giving Turkey, which cut a fuel swap deal with Iran (in contravention of Western wishes) some time ago, another opportunity—limited negotiations are actually due to begin there anyway, although yesterday’s assassination may postpone them. Contributing editor Jeff Goldberg proposes that Obama make a show of giving Iran a “last chance” to seriously come to the table with the goal of coming into line with all international nuclear treaties (which it currently is violating). Such a threat should seem credible: accounts are that if it came down to choosing between a military strike and Iran’s crossing a U.S. red line in its nuclear weapons program, Obama would choose the military strike.

Iran Trumpets Nuclear Ability at a Second Location [NYT]
Iran Reports Killing of Scientist in ‘Terrorist’ Blast [NYT]
U.S., EU Slam Iran Nuclear Enrichment Activity at Security Council Meet [Haaretz]
Panetta: U.S. Will Not Allow Iran to Develop Nuclear Bomb [Haaretz]
Public Ire One Goal of Iran Sanctions, U.S. Official Says [WP]
Sanctions Begin Taking a Bigger Toll on Iran [LAT]
Slaughter: Saving Face and Peace in the Gulf [CNN]
To Avoid All-Out War Give Iran One Last Chance [Bloomberg View]
Ex-Adviser: Obama Ready to Strike to Stop Iran [Bloomberg/JPost]

Rational, of course, is not the same thing as reasonable. A regime that shoots its own people in the streets, as the Iranian government did in June 2009, is not reasonable. In the policy debate, rationality refers to a regime’s interest in preserving itself. A regime is rational, therefore, if it understands that using a nuclear weapon would elicit a response that might spell its doom. An irrational regime is one that can’t be deterred because it may use a nuclear weapon regardless of the consequences.

Thus, the Islamic Republic’s threat last week to close the Strait of Hormuz—a move that would send oil prices skyrocketing—struck many as strong evidence of the regime’s irrationality. Interrupting the world’s oil supply would compel the United States, the guarantor of Persian Gulf security, to take military actions that might mean toppling Iran’s ruling establishment. On Sunday, U.S. Joint Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said in no uncertain terms that if Iran tries to close the Strait of Hormuz, the United States “can defeat that.”

Others look at Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz as having little bearing on the country’s rationality. Since the Iranians know the Americans would have no trouble breaking through a blockade, their argument goes, Iran doesn’t actually have any intention of trying to close down one of the world’s most strategically vital waterways. This regime understands, as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Sunday, that closing down the Strait of Hormuz is an American red line. If Iran crosses it, it jeopardizes its own existence—and so it won’t.

Those that argue the regime is irrational point to the fact that the Iranian regime regularly threatens to destroy Israel, which would retaliate by obliterating Iran. Those that claim Iran is rational write off such threats as mere rhetoric. A nuclear Iran, they say, poses little threat to a much more powerful Israel, never mind the United States. Membership in the club of countries with nuclear weapons might even make Tehran more responsible.

The reality is that it doesn’t matter whether the regime is rational or not. The issue is not whether the Iranians would use the bomb, but how Tehran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon would enhance the regime’s already reckless behavior. Moreover, it would severely limit the ability of the United States to respond to the provocations of this dangerous regime. For instance, if a nuclear-armed Iran actually closed the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. officials would be much less confident in their ability to re-open shipping lanes. American policy-makers already worried about high oil prices are not likely to risk the chances of a nuclear incident and even higher oil prices.

It’s pretty easy to make a strong case that the Iranian regime really is suicidal. This is the same ruling clique, after all, that pioneered the use of the suicide car-bombing during the course of the Lebanese civil wars from 1975 to 1990. The Iranians tapped their local allies, namely Hezbollah, for martyrdom operations against Israel, the United States, and other Western powers. The Iranians spent their own blood even more recklessly in the war with Iraq when they dispatched wave after human wave of teenage boys to march through minefields, clearing a path with their bodies. Perhaps most tellingly, the plummeting Iranian birthrate—from 6.5 children per woman a generation ago to 1.7 today—suggests that it is not just the regime, but an entire nation, that no longer wishes to live.

No country sets out purposefully to bring about its destruction. And yet history is nothing but the record of nations that have misunderstood the limits of their own power and the resources of their adversaries. Nazi Germany may have been suicidal, but the British Empire was not, and yet at the end of World War II both were finished. No one thinks that the rulers of Athens were irrational, but by the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War, their actions had effectively cashiered Athenian democracy.

Jewish leaders between 66 C.E. and 135 C.E. were not irrational, but their revolts against Rome put an end to Jewish sovereignty for two millennia. Furthermore, who is to say that renewing Jewish sovereignty in a sea of Muslim hostility is an entirely rational act? But the rationality of any given government is irrelevant. The question of rationality moves the debate from the real to the speculative—i.e., might a given nation use the bomb at some point? The fact is no one knows beforehand whether any regime is likely to use a nuclear weapon.

The only question American policy-makers should concern themselves with is whether or not a given regime seeking nuclear weapons is already hostile to U.S. interests. If it is, U.S. policy-makers should do everything in their power to prevent that regime from acquiring a bomb. The apparent injustice that Israel has the bomb while the world rues the prospect of a nuclear Iran is a quandary for academics and ethicists—and an entirely inappropriate concern for U.S. officials, whose concerns are much more specific: protecting U.S. citizens, allies, and interests. There is little debate in Washington over Israel’s nuclear-weapons program because Jerusalem has never posed a threat to American strategic interests. Iran, however, has threatened U.S. interests for 30 years.

If or when Iran gets a nuclear weapon, it might drop the bomb on Tel Aviv—or Riyadh, for that matter. But that’s not the main problem. The issue is that Tehran will act in precisely the same fashion as it has since 1979—hostile to the United States and its allies—only now on a much more ambitious scale. And the range of responses available to the United States and its allies will be seriously limited.

Imagine Iran with a nuclear weapon: Tehran will continue to support terror, except that Iranian assets like Hezbollah and Hamas would now be operating under a nuclear umbrella, which will shape Israeli responses. In planning its military strategy, Israel already has to take into consideration world opinion and the strain warfare puts on Israeli society and the economy. Now Jerusalem will have to wonder if crossing the border into Lebanon or Gaza will elicit nuclear threats from Iran.

The Iranians will further extend their reach into Africa and Latin America, where Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in the midst of a regional tour. Allies like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez will be emboldened to take otherwise unimaginable risks in Washington’s direct sphere of influence in the Americas. The recently unveiled Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington would be only a taste of things to come.

In other words: If Tehran gets a nuclear weapon, will U.S. policy-makers be prepared to ensure that the Islamic Republic doesn’t make good on a threat to close the Strait of Hormuz?

• President Ahmadinejad apparently used the word “iota” when describing the distance his country wouldn’t retreat from its current path. [AP/WP]

• Like Israel, the United States isn’t saying much. [NYT]

• The Palestinian Authority’s foreign minister admitted that they won’t get the nine votes they need in the Security Council for full U.N. membership. [AP/WP]

• David Ignatius reports from Cairo, where the Coptic Christian community worries for its future and he worries for all minorities in the post-Arab Spring region. [WP]

• Some morning vlogging from senior writer Allison Hoffman?

• Ten members of the so-called Irvine 11, who disrupted Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at the University of California-Davis, were found guilty by a jury of two misdemeanors. [JTA]

• More (since we first linked Wednesday) on how John J. Mearsheimer, of The Israel Lobby fame, has blurbed a book by an honest-to-God, self-proclaimed self-hating Jew who has some particularly troubling things to say about the Holocaust. [Adam Holland]

• Meet Shelly Yachimovich, the new leader of Labor, who has her work cut out for her. [NYT]

• Prompted in part by the Emergency Committee for Israel’s campaign, several Jewish leaders have cautioned that Israel ought not to be turned into a partisan wedge issue. [Forward]

• Last year, at his press availability in New York, President Ahmadinejad served bagels and lox. [The New Yorker News Desk]

• President Clinton major-league disses Prime Minister Netanyahu. [FP The Cable]

• Peggy Noonan praises President Obama on Israel and chastises Gov. Perry. Wait, what? [WSJ]

• A new study found that younger Conservative rabbis may be more politically left than their elders, but are still staunchly pro-Israel. [Forward]

• Prominent Jewish journalist Ruth Ellen Gruber was honored by the government of Poland. [JTA]

• Israel has pledged $1 million to Auschwitz’s upkeep. Which, read the wrong way, comes off sounding pretty ironic. [AP/WP]

• The German fashion company Hugo Boss has formally apologized for its onetime ties to the Nazis. [Imprint]

• What are you doing next Wednesday? You’re watching Rush Hashanah on VH1, of course. [The Daily Swarm]

• Did Germany’s reunification in part lead to a neo-Nazi resurgence? [Jewish Chronicle]

Happy 62nd birthday to a man who is frequently mistaken for a Jew but is always accurately captured when deemed the Boss.

• Nick Kristof scores a long interview with the Iranian president. [NYT On the Ground]

• Is “Islamic liberalism” being birthed in the chaos of post-Mubarak Egypt? [NYT]

• Why, no matter what, Palestinians are probably not going to be initiating international prosecutions against Israel any time soon. [Slate]

• What Gov. Perry gets wrong. (A lot.) [Abu Muqawama via Attackerman]

• Manohla Dargis grapples with Lars von Trier. [NYT]

Happy birthday, Bilbo!

Still, this is red meat for hawks. I don’t mean people who want to bomb Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons facilities. I mean actual hawks! You see, Ahmadinejad’s arrival at Columbia in 2007 roughly coincided with the discovery of a red-tailed hawk on campus; quickly dubbed Hawkmadinejad by the campus blog Bwog, he was periodically spotted killing pigeons and squirrels and feasting on their remains, because let me tell you hawks are insane. (Don’t believe me? Squirrel. And this the French call squab.)

So here is hoping that a new fall brings a new Columbia controversy and a new bird of prey to bear his name. Ahmadinejowl, anyone?

Members of CIRCA to Dine with Ahmadinejad [Columbia Spectator]
Related: Ahmadinejad, at Columbia, Parries and Puzzles [NYT]
The Bird, the Legend: The Genesis of Hawkmadinejad [Bwog]

• The Palestinians launched their P.R. blitz in favor of their upcoming statehood gambit with a ceremony in Ramallah. [AP/WP]

• President Ahmadinejad called on President Bashar Assad to halt his violent repression of protesters. [AP/WP]

• Mysteries continue to abound about last month’s attack in Eilat, for which—atypically—no terrorist group has actually claimed credit. [Time]

• The Washington Post editorializes against the bully Dan Snyder. [WP]

• The very real, and very deep, roots of Palestinian identity. [Now! Lebanon/Ibishblog]

Sid Caesar turned 89 today.

• Israel had intelligence about last Thursday’s attacks, but Defense Minister Barak refused a preemptive strike on the attackers. [Haaretz/Forward]

• A new WikiLeaks dump reveals that in early 2009 U.S. diplomats were telling the administration that Prime Minister Netanyahu is more pragmatist than ideologue, and that he was keeping all options open on the peace process. [Haaretz]

• President Ahmadinejad advocates a one-state solution, to put it mildly. [AP/WP]

• China announced it would support full Palestinian statehood at the United Nations next month. [AP/Reuters/Haaretz]

• Casey Ribicoff, wife of former Sen. Abraham and a towering figure in New York society, died at 88. [NYT]

• Israel is blaming Popular Resistance Committees, a Gaza-based group with ties to Hamas and Hezbollah, for yesterday’s attacks. [The Envoy]

• In Iran, is Supreme Leader Khamanei gearing up to arrest his underling President Ahmadinejad? [Frontline]

• Despite prior statements that they would, Sen. Joe Lieberman and Rep. Eric Cantor will not attend Glenn Beck’s rally next week in Israel. [Washington Jewish Week]

• Former Sen. Russ Feingold, Democrat from Wisconsin, won’t run for president, senator, or governor. [Ben Smith]

• Bar Refaeli has shot a new bikini catalogue. Yes, Virginia, there is a photo gallery. [Page Six]

• This Ed Koch robo-call in that Queens/Brooklyn race has to be read (and ideally heard) to be believed. [PolitickerNY]

• Half-black Jewish songsters unite: Drake is featured on a new Lenny Kravitz track. [The Fader]

• A Forward editorial notes all the “Rich Jews for Tax Hikes,” and rightfully schleps naches from them. [Forward]

• The woman in That Black-and-White Photo You’ve Seen in Italian Restaurants speaks out. But the photographer was Ruth Orkin, a Jew! [MSNBC]

• Hebrew U. is 57th. [Haaretz]

• Frequent Vox Tablet contributor Jon Kalish has a podcast on contemporary musicians covering old pioneer songs. [iTunes]

Contributing editor Mark Oppenheimer gets frequently insightful, frequently infuriating critic Lee Siegel exactly right: he’s an intellectual tummler. As opposed to a tumbler, born under punches (I’m so thin).

• President Abbas called for a meeting of the Arab League to address the Palestinian Authority’s emergency lack of funds. [JPost]

• Grand Ayatollah Khamanei appointed a mediator to help resolve all the disputes that have cropped up between himself and President Ahmadinejad. [AP/WP]

• Roger Cohen’s fairly standard column on suspected Oslo killer Anders Bering Breivik takes a big turn in the final paragraph that you’ll want to stick around for. [NYT]

• “Who does a camp for kids that’s all about politics?” Glenn Beck asked in reference to the young, innocent victims of Breivik’s massacre. “It sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler Youth.” Actually that thought only occurred to you. [Ynet]

• A group of former top Israeli military and diplomatic officials visited Washington, D.C., including the White House, pushing peace and insisting that the ’67 borders themselves are defensible. [Haaretz]

“Ma,” he replied. “This is the beginning of the end.”

Whether the August conference was the cause, Small’s prescience was confirmed last month, when news of the program’s demise was leaked to the New York Post. On June 6, the Post’s Abby Wisse Schachter reported that a four-member Yale faculty review committee had decided to close the program just several days earlier and then laid out a narrative that took hold among YIISA’s supporters: that the university had caved into pressure from a cadre of academic leftists and malign foreign influences, both of whom were made uncomfortable by a program they portrayed as a stalking horse for extreme right-wing supporters of Israel. As evidence, Schachter pointed to a letter written in the immediate aftermath of the August conference by Maen Rashid Areikat, the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s ambassador to Washington, to Yale President Richard Levin, in which the PLO representative said it was “shocking that a respected institution like Yale would give a platform to these right-wing extremists and their odious views” and “deeply ironic that a conference on anti-Semitism that is ostensibly intended to combat hatred and discrimination against Semites would demonize Arabs—who are Semites themselves.” Schachter also cited an op-ed in the Yale Daily News by a Syrian-American Yale Law student, who, in reaction to the conference, wrote that “the university cannot preach tolerance and inclusion while simultaneously also providing a haven for bigoted ideas about Muslims and Arabs that often form the basis for Islamophobic sentiment in this country.” After five years running the institute, Small’s time at Yale had come to an end: YIISA would shut its doors on July 31. Small was given three months’ severance, the minimum required under Connecticut law.

In the aftermath of the “Crisis of Modernity” conference and the controversy that ensued, Yale took a series of measures to reform YIISA, but to Small’s mind the die was cast: He had treaded on a subject—anti-Semitism in the Muslim world—that was simply too controversial for the university. Though he had hosted talks by academics on this topic from the very start of the program (in addition to lectures on a wide variety of subjects from “Legitimating Nazism: American Universities and the Third Reich” to “Memetics and the Viral Spread of Antisemitism Through ‘Coded Images’ in Political Cartoons”), the “Crisis of Modernity” conference thrust the phenomenon onto the international academic agenda in an unprecedentedly high-profile way. Anything that had even the faintest whiff of “Islamophobia” touches the third rail of the American academy, and, for Small, there was no way Yale was going to let the program continue.

Yale offered a different set of reasons for discontinuing the program, beginning with the explanation that it fell short of the Ivy League university’s exacting academic benchmarks. “YIISA suffered the same fate as other initially promising programs … that were eventually terminated at ISPS because they failed to meet high standards for research and instruction,” Donald Green, a professor of political science and director of the university’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies, which oversaw YIISA, told the Yale Daily News. Jewish bloggers placed the decision to close YIISA within a broader context of a politically correct university succumbing to the demands of shadowy outside Muslim forces. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee issued statements of concern about YIISA’s closure, and the controversy was further fueled by academics from around the world who had participated in YIISA over the years, like Walter Reich, a George Washington University professor and former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, who charged in the Washington Post that YIISA was closed because it was “accused of being too critical of the Arab and Iranian anti-Semitism and of being racist and right-wing.”

Yale then announced, in a move that would receive mixed reactions from YIISA’s supporters, that this was not to be the end of the university’s pioneering work in the study of anti-Semitism after all. On June 17, two weeks after the announcement that YIISA would be discontinued, the school’s Jewish chaplain, Jim Ponet, sent a mass email to Yale alumni (I am one) acknowledging the “loud outpouring of reaction on the part of students, faculty and alumni around the world.” In response, Ponet wrote, “I think that within a few days Yale will announce that a reconceived YIISA, under new faculty leadership, has been established.” Three days later, Yale Provost Peter Salovey wrote an open letter announcing the creation of the Yale Program for the Study of Anti-Semitism, to be headed by Maurice Samuels, a professor of 19th-century French literature. YPSA, Salovey wrote, “will encourage serious scholarly discourse and collaborative research focused on anti-Semitism, one of the world’s oldest and most enduring prejudices, in all of its forms.”

But the creation of YPSA did not quell the impression that Yale was timorous about discussing contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism; indeed, its decision to name a professor of 19th-century French literature as the new program’s head only reinforced that conception. A boast in Salovey’s letter—that YPSA would be able to utilize “the Fortunoff Video Archives of Holocaust Testimonies and the 95,000 volume Judaica collection,” held within the Yale library—was proof positive, critics said, of the new program’s intention to focus on anti-Semitism of the historical rather than contemporary variety. “The sad truth is that dead Jews—victims of crusades, pogroms, the Shoah—are safe terrain for academia,” Ben Cohen, a former associate director of communications for the American Jewish Committee, wrote in the Forward. “Live Jews, however, are a much more daunting proposition.”

Due to the nature of its subject matter, YIISA was bound to be contentious. “I’m probably not shocking you to say that if it’s a Jewish organization, everybody’s fighting all the time,” jokes Steven Smith, a Jewish professor of political theory and the author of a book on Baruch Spinoza, who last year was appointed to co-chair an oversight committee created in the aftermath of the August conference. While the university publicly claims that politics played no role in YIISA’s dissolution, both supporters and detractors tell a story of the program’s demise that is more complicated than either side is willing to admit. It is one in which the endlessly contentious realms of academic politics, Jewish communal life, anti-Semitism, and the Middle East inevitably collided.

***

The story of YIISA begins in 2004, when Small created the Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism and Policy. Disturbed by the global rise of anti-Semitism in the aftermath of the Second Intifada and the Sept. 11 attacks, Small, then working as director of urban studies at Southern Connecticut State University, decided that the world’s oldest hatred was deserving of serious academic inquiry. Eying nearby Yale, he brought the idea to Salovey, then dean of Yale College. “I had a PowerPoint presentation,” Small recalled. “I met with him and was very nervous. He loved the idea. He gave me chores to do, and when I’d go off and do them and I’d come meet him, he would give me other things to do, get faculty support, raise money. He was very helpful, very honest.”

YIISA got off to an auspicious start; unlike most academic centers, its very founding earned headlines. The institute’s international board of academic advisers was a who’s who of Jewish academic heavyweights: former Canadian Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, historian Benny Morris, philosopher Martha Nussbaum, future Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, and Robert Wistrich, author of a recent 1,000-page book on the history of anti-Semitism. In addition to a regular seminar series, the program also published a small number of working papers and hosted a variety of visiting faculty and post-doctoral fellows.

Continue reading: Ahmadinejad, “Crisis of Modernity,” and a $20 million donation. Or view as a single page.

• President Ahmadinejad and Grand Ayatollah Khamanei are basically playing the Game of Thrones in Iran. [NYT]

• The International Committee of the Red Cross wants proof that captured Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit is still alive, nearly two years after the last sign that he was. [Reuters/JPost]

• John Galliano exercised the substance-abuse defense. His verdict is due September 8. [NYT]

• Five Russian nuclear experts who helped design Iran’s facility at Bushehr died in a plane crash. [Haaretz]

• President Obama announced a speeded-up pullout from Afghanistan, as well as a changed mission there that will now, in more limited fashion, focus on counterterrorism. [NYT]

We spent that night in 2007 in a local safe house, where I was asked to dismantle my phones and camera for a security inspection before bedding down on the carpeted floor. Early the following morning I was driven along the course of a dry riverbed. On the outskirts of the ramshackle city of Turbat we approached a bridge, one of Pakistan’s last military checkpoints before the Iranian border. With my bearded foreigner’s face hidden by the darkened glass, we were waved through. I started to believe that my rendezvous with Iran’s most wanted terrorist was actually going to happen.

My escorts in the gray car were members of Jundullah (Arabic for the “Soldiers of God”), a Sunni militant organization that had for several years been waging a violent but under-reported insurrection against Iran’s military and government in the country’s southeastern province of Sistan-va-Balochestan. Their attacks had highlighted the fragility of the Islamic Republic’s hold over the non-Persian minority groups—including Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, Baluchs and Turkmen—that make up nearly half of the country’s population. The group’s website has most recently claimed responsibility for a devastating December 2010 attack in the port city of Chabahar, which left nearly 40 people dead and more than 80 injured. News photos from the site showed body parts and pools of blood in front of a local mosque, after a suicide bomber blew himself up during a religious procession.

The landscape we careened through was stark, hot, empty; a boulder-strewn valley lined on both sides with craggy ridgelines of dark mauve rock. Balochistan, a region the size of Montana and Wyoming combined, includes parts of Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and experiences some of the highest temperatures in the world. The borders here would be described as “porous” by Washington think-tanks, and from what I had already seen the towns were awash with opiates, semi-automatic weapons, long-standing tribal rivalries, and oil smuggling. Days earlier I had filmed a Pakistani border guard smoking crack cocaine, and hours later I was nearly arrested after watching local police demand a bribe from truckers smuggling drums of Iranian crude along a lonely asphalt road.

As far back as back in the spring of 2007, Jundullah had cemented its reputation as a violent militant group after staging several large-scale attacks against Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Just three months before I arrived in the region, Jundullah had launched a bomb attack on a military transport vehicle in the eastern Iranian border city of Zahedan that tore 11 Revolutionary Guards to shreds, provoked newspaper headlines globally, and led to condemnation from the United Nations secretary general. The group’s young leader, Abdulmalik Rigi, had appeared in several audio recordings posted online railing against the Shia Islamic Republic for its mistreatment of Iran’s Baloch minority, who are predominantly Sunni.

Still, Rigi and his comrades had never before spoken to a journalist in the flesh, let alone appeared in front of a television camera, and consequently the group was often described by both Iranian and American media as “shadowy.” Rigi’s decision to grant me an interview was prompted by an ABC News story broadcast in April 2007. The Secret War Against Iran was the lead item on the network’s evening news and reported that Jundullah was being “secretly encouraged and advised by American officials.” “Tribal members” from Balochistan apparently formed the basis for the report, but when I had contacted the news consultant behind the story he said he had not actually traveled anywhere near Balochistan. (The man who provided the information for the ABC News report, Alexis Debat, was later discredited after writing up imaginary interviews with Kofi Annan, Hillary Clinton, and Michael Bloomberg, among others. Iranian state broadcasters and websites still regularly cite the 2007 ABC News report amid accusations that Jundullah continues to receive support from foreign intelligence agencies.)

En route to Pakistan I had arranged to meet some Iranian Baloch based in the United Arab Emirates, a short hop across the Arabian Gulf from Iran’s Sistan-va-Baluchestan province. I suspected some of them might have ties to Rigi, who was variously described by the Iranian authorities as an al-Qaida lieutenant or a powerful narcotics trafficker. The men I met in the emirate of Sharjah were angry about the ABC report, released just days before our encounter. “He needs no money from the CIA, he makes plenty from smuggling and kidnap ransom,” explained one elderly bearded man over a lunch of fried chicken and naan. He called himself Jumma Khan and claimed to have commanded a previous Baloch insurgent group during the Iran-Iraq conflict of the 1980s, with weapons and cash provided by his benefactor Saddam Hussein. (It was Jumma Khan who eventually brokered my interview with Rigi.)

I recalled this conversation on my drive with the four young men from Jundullah, which, after two jarring hours, led us to a small cluster of mud-brick homes that I reckoned to be around 25 miles from the Iran border. Minutes later a pickup truck roared into the compound where we sat waiting. Crouched in the back were half a dozen more Jundullah fighters sporting AK-47s and RPGs. The driver dismounted from the cab and approached me, smiling broadly. I recognized him from the grainy photos I had seen online; it was Rigi.

He was a slender man with a short trimmed beard, crisp white clothes, and an enthusiastic handshake. We drove a short distance to a date palm plantation on the edge of the settlement, and while sentries watched from the tree line, he invited me to sit with him and half a dozen others on a shaded mat. His fingers were well manicured and his smile revealed exceptionally white teeth. He appeared to be a dashing young guerrilla commander straight out of central casting, even though I had seen poor-quality video recordings of him personally beheading a man with a kitchen knife. He told me he was 23 years old, married with three young children, and that his six brothers and both parents lived with him “in the mountains.”

Speaking in a mixture of Farsi and Baloch dialect through an interpreter the group had provided, Rigi answered my questions about attacks his group had made on Iran’s “cowardly” forces. He checked tactics off with his fingers, “encirclement ambushes, hit-and-runs, hand-to-hand combat.” He bragged about the weapons at his disposal, “Kalashnikov, M16, cannon, heavy weapons,” and added that his fighters also possessed several Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles.

According to Rigi, his group, which he’d recently re-branded the “People’s Resistance Movement of Iran”—less Islamist, more Maoist—was essentially a coalition of older Baloch insurgent groups. He had decided to challenge the Iranian government as a teenager, after he stumbled upon the corpses of eight young Baloch men strung up from a crane in the center of his hometown, Zahedan. He attended high school for a while and appeared articulate and literate, citing several manuals on insurgent warfare he had studied. He played down the religious aspect of his group’s ideology and seemed at pains to emphasize his Baloch nationalist credentials. During time he’d spent in southern Afghanistan, he explained, local Taliban commanders had clashed with Jundullah on several occasions, and so his fighters now traveled back and forth only between Iran and Pakistan. A question I posed about support from Pakistani authorities was met with silence, but he grew animated when I mentioned the CIA, leaning forward and raising his voice. “We haven’t had any secret relations with any intelligence service.”

But long after the interview, I was able to confirm independently that Rigi had in fact met face to face with U.S. officials to discuss his activities inside Iran, though no money had ever changed hands. Instead, just as Rigi had asserted during our conversation, I learned that significant funds were finding their way to Jundullah from Baloch refugees living in European countries like Sweden. “Our weakness is only the lack of equipment,” Rigi had told me wistfully. “If we had equipment, we would have conducted 10 operations a day.”

Jundullah’s attacks on Iran continued after this interview, throughout 2008 and 2009. One of Rigi’s brothers, Abdul-Ghafoor, was reportedly the suicide bomber in an attack on a military headquarters in the town of Saravan in December 2008. It was the first time a suicide bomber had acted against the Islamic Republic. There followed a similar suicide attack in May 2009 against a mosque in Zahedan, which killed 30 and wounded more than 120. The greatest affront to the Iranian military establishment came next, the deadliest attack inside Iran for almost 30 years. A bombing in Zahedan targeted a meeting of Baloch tribal leaders and Iranian military officials in late 2009, killing 40 people, including 15 Revolutionary Guards. It particularly embarrassed the state’s security agencies since the No. 2 commander of the Revolutionary Guards died in the blast.

Large numbers of Iranian border police and several Revolutionary Guards were kidnapped by the group over several years; the lucky ones were ransomed, but the rest were executed. A former member of Jundullah I contacted shortly after that attack, by this time hiding in Pakistan, said he had left the organization because there was an increasingly influential faction that supported sectarian violence against civilians as well as state employees. “They are religious, and I am more secular,” he explained.

***

Almost three years after my meeting with Rigi in Balochistan I was on assignment in a very different desert with another group of armed young men: the American military on patrol just south of Kirkuk, Iraq. One evening I got word from a Baloch friend in Pakistan that Abdulmalik Rigi had been captured. On a painfully slow U.S. Army Internet connection I watched a video of a wiry figure being bundled out of a small plane by masked security officials, while newswires carried quotes from senior Iranian officials crowing about his arrest.

The Iranian government account claimed Rigi had boarded a flight from Dubai to Kyrgyzstan, where he was allegedly intending to meet with a senior American military official, possibly Defense Secretary Robert Gates or CentCom’s commander Gen. David Petraeus, who was recently tapped to head the CIA. The plane was then apparently intercepted over Iranian airspace by a pair of fighter jets and forced to land. But under scrutiny certain elements of this story failed to add up, and I later learned from sources in the Pakistani province of Balochistan that Rigi had been betrayed to Pakistani authorities, who in turn had handed him over to Iran.

Days later an edited video confession appeared on Iranian state television, in which a tired-looking Rigi described meetings his group had held with American officials in Dubai. His older brother Abdulhamid had been captured the previous year and made several similar appearances on Iranian news channels, talking about his brother’s relationship with foreign intelligence organizations.

Having followed news stories about Jundullah over the years, I had repeatedly encountered Iranian military commanders claiming that Rigi had been killed in a skirmish with security forces. But on June 20, 2010, he was finally executed in Tehran’s Evin prison, having been found guilty on several dozen counts of kidnapping, murder, assassination attempts, drugs trafficking, and armed robbery. Last November the United States designated Jundullah as a foreign terrorist organization.

Just days after his capture the group had announced its new leader, and in July 2010 Jundullah claimed responsibility for large explosions that killed nearly 30 and injured nearly 200 outside the main Shia mosque in Zahedan. The December 2010 explosion took place during a Shia procession in the days leading up to holy festival of Ashura, which celebrates the sacrifice of Imam Hossein, grandson of the prophet Muhammad. A suicide bomber detonated an explosive belt in a crowd of local fishermen in the balmy port city of Chabahar, at the southern edge of the Sistan-va-Baluchestan province, and shortly afterward a photo and message from the bomber were posted on Jundullah’s blog.

Though the United States, Great Britain, and other European countries denounced the bombing, the speaker of the Iranian parliament Ali Larijani once again repeated the assertion that the intelligence agencies of Israel and the United States were behind such attacks. “They are funded by the U.S. and Israeli intelligence service,” he was quoted as saying by the Iranian Mehr News agency. From what I had seen, this seemed highly unlikely. But given Jundullah’s record of deadly attacks against both military and civilian targets, and the country’s patchwork of religious and ethnic groups, many of whom chafe under Persian domination and religious Shiite rule, the Islamic Republic of Iran will struggle to banish the paranoia.

Willem Marx is a freelance writer and TV reporter based in London. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and Harper’s.

And yet, it was also one of the most depressing. Although many of the young Arab journalists with whom we had bonded were undoubtedly worldly, intelligent, curious, and open-minded, they were also operating on a completely different epistemological frequency. Whenever thorny topics came up—the Holocaust, terrorism, the Arab-Israeli peace process—we couldn’t really discuss any of these matters with any substance since we weren’t even able to agree on what we were discussing. How could one begin to challenge recurring comparisons between the Israeli occupation and the Holocaust when many of the young Arab journalists didn’t actually know what the Holocaust was? Or alternatively, how do you seriously discuss the threats of Islamic terrorism with people who deny that al-Qaida carried out the attacks of September 11? And finally, how could we debate why the peace process was failing with people who adamantly refused to acknowledge that such a process existed, maintaining instead that Israelis’ sole objective remains the conquest of Arab lands?

This last and most ubiquitous claim, I quixotically tried to refute. When I pointed to the fact that for well over a decade a majority of Israelis have consistently supported the recognition of an independent Palestinian state—and often voted that way—my words were met with a suspicion that eventually gave way to surprise. “So, why didn’t we ever hear about this?” one intrepid Jordanian journalist asked me with genuine concern. I shrugged my shoulders as if perplexed. But the answer was as obvious to me then as it is now: Despite their apparent cosmopolitan disposition, these young Arab journalists—many of whom represent the intellectual voice at the forefront of the Arab Spring today—didn’t know any of these things because there were, and still are, vested interests that purposely made sure they wouldn’t.

At a time when the Western media is busy extolling the virtues of this tech-savvy “new Arab generation” of 20- and 30-year-olds and branding them “the Arab world’s agents of change,” I can’t help but think back to that disenchanting week in Madrid, which taught me just how grossly ill-prepared, albeit well-intentioned, many of these agents of change are for the Herculean task that awaits them. Having recently broken free of the physical chains placed upon their bodies by repressive governments, millions of young Arabs have yet to liberate their minds from ideological bondage to the autocrats they have toppled. No matter how nobly dedicated this Arab revolutionary generation is to transforming the Middle East, it would be highly naïve, myopic, and even delusional to assume they have acquired the liberal values necessary to create democratic societies. For the fact remains that while corrupt and authoritarian political institutions can swiftly be destroyed, the tainted ideas they had implanted into the minds of their young subjects cannot easily be removed.

***

One example of the intellectual contamination of young Arabs by the political culture in which they have grown up is their inability to distinguish between fact and fiction, as indicated by the presence of conspiracy theories still prevalent throughout the Middle East. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fond of saying that “everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts.” The problem even with many of the educated and liberal-minded Arab journalists I met in Madrid was that they couldn’t always tell the difference between the two. And who could blame them? Arab elites had been able to employ what the French philosopher Louis Althusser called an “ideological state apparatus” that reinforced and reproduced their ruling ideology—while denying access and legitimacy to all of the alternatives.

The distorted public image of the Holocaust in the Arab world is a salient example of just how this apparatus functions. In preventing literary works such as the The Diary of Anne Frank from entering their classrooms and libraries (and in some cases formally banning them), and by barring films like Sophie’s Choice and Schindler’s List from their theaters, Arab governments succeeded in preventing widespread awareness of the gas chambers at Auschwitz or the mass graves at Babi Yar from the minds of their youths. That Arab intellectuals were accordingly “uninterested,” in the words of historians Meir Litvak and Esther Webman, who have studied the Arab reaction to the Holocaust, in the actual experiences of the victims explains why the mounds of documented evidence, testimonies, and confessions—or everything that makes this immense body of knowledge so incontrovertible—has deliberately been withheld from the impressionable minds of young Arabs. The result of this state-engineered project of mass censorship is that in the absence of any empirical evidence corroborating the experiences of the Holocaust, a false space of contention has been created into which dangerous pseudo-intellectuals like David Irving and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could freely inject their own denialist theories, and present fiction as fact. Having been denied the data with which to challenge such claims, too many young Arabs have unknowingly been suspended in a state of blissful ignorance that has led them to believe that the only Holocaust that ever took place—as one bright though hopelessly misguided young Arab journalist once told me—was the one perpetrated by Israelis upon Palestinians.

Pervasive ignorance about the Holocaust is emblematic of what has become the normative pattern of intellectual falsification and factual distortion permeating all levels of Arab society. This institutionalized culture of fabrication and fantasy that rules Arab political culture has come to encompass anything from the still widely believed myth that the Mossad orchestrated the September 11 terror attacks to equally preposterous though lesser known claims that America deliberately dropped humanitarian aid in Afghanistan on mine fields to lure innocent civilians into killing traps. Although outrageous conspiracy theories of this sort are a global phenomenon—persistent in the United States, too—what is so different and therefore ultimately disturbing about their manifestation in the Arab world is their source: Rather than originating and remaining on the fringes of society, they are the products of respectable mainstream elites and institutions—all of which naturally transformed these meticulously crafted prevarications in the eyes of the highly impressionable youths into “credible” sources of information.

When the leading newspapers of record, revered academic intellectuals, and admired cultural figures all tell the same lie, why would anyone go looking in search of the truth? No matter how progressive these sons and daughters of the Arab Spring are, the long-held prejudices of their fathers and mothers have already been learned by a state-run ideological apparatus that worked to condition their minds in a certain way. Having grown up watching a beloved Mickey Mouse-like television character extolling the virtues of violence and hatred to them as kids; having then encountered these same toxic messages reproduced and embellished in their elementary-school textbooks; having noticed that the prized dates at their local market were branded as “Osamas” for their exceptional taste; having walked on their way to and from school every day through streets named after suicide bombers; having seen the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on the best-seller shelf at their local bookstores and watched ancient Jewish blood libels reincarnated as their favorite primetime dramas, what chance did this revolutionary Arab generation ever really have for even engaging, let alone embracing, the values of tolerance and pluralism that are the sine qua non for the liberal democratic society they now wish to establish?

One need not be an expert on adolescent cognitive development to realize that by contaminating both the private and public spheres of Arab society with hollow truths and sophisticated lies that infested all facets of daily life—the household, schoolroom, mosque, media, cafés, and workplace—Arab governments had not only stolen the intellectual innocence of their youths, but have severely impeded their capability to ever get it back. To expect this young Arab generation to undergo a miraculous metamorphosis that could erase decades of institutionalized indoctrination and transform entrenched bigotry into tolerance, envy into cooperation, malice into concord, is akin to asking of them to eschew their entire life’s experience. George Orwell aptly captured the challenge facing millions of young Arab reformers today: When living in a corrupt society, one cannot remain uncorrupted.

***

But rather than account for the source of the disease, the pervasiveness of conspiratorial thinking in the Arab world is symptomatic of a much deeper problem. A civilization that voraciously consumes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion while refusing to even glance at the pages from The Diary of Anne Frank, apparently petrified of the insights a 15-year-old Jewish girl hiding for her life in an Amsterdam attic might have, is one profoundly consumed not only by fear, self-loathing, and parochialism, but by the threat of any genuine exercise of individual free thought. Conspiracy theories are so rampant in the Arab world precisely because the minds of so many young Arabs have been made fertile for their cultivation. Depriving their citizens not only of access to any alternative sources of knowledge that could counter such fraudulent theories, but also of the chance to develop the curiosity and willingness to think critically and independently is exactly what enabled Arab authoritarians to rule unchallenged for so many years.

Without engaging in the details of the long and tragic civilizational decline in the face of Western modernity that saw the gradual closing of the Arab mind to outside ideas, it’s worth reflecting, as many scholars have already done, upon the sad—and practically nonexistent—state of the humanities in the Arab world, where that ancient Socratic dictum that an unexamined life is a life not worth living has long been buried and forgotten. If anything, what both secularist and Islamist authoritarian regimes throughout the Middle East have always had in common is their shared animosity toward independent, original, and critical thought and their subsequent institutional attempts to stifle it through politicized knowledge that instilled in their youths offsetting values of obedience, submission, and conformity.

Even the United Nations Development Program reached a similar conclusion a few years ago in a report that recognized the absence of a well-balanced Western-style education and warned against an expanding “knowledge gap” gripping Arab societies. The report warned of “ideologies, societal structures and values that inhibit critical thinking, cut Arabs off from their knowledge-rich heritage and block the free flow of ideas and learning,” while calling for “a deep-seated reform in the organizational, social and political context of knowledge” that could potentially unleash “a human renaissance across the Arab world.”

Such proposals are neither Orientalist nor patronizing, as some might argue, but rather realistic. No matter how genuinely committed this Arab revolutionary generation remains to founding a just and democratic Middle East, without a vigorous cultivation of the humanistic proclivities for critical thought and independent reasoning, attempts to transplant “readymade” democratic institutions are destined to fail. The belief that periodic visits to the ballot box or the ratification of new constitutions will furnish Arab citizens with the values that bred these democratic instruments of government in the first place is akin to the madness Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver observed behind attempts to build a house from the roof down.

***

While the last few months have reminded us just how easily dictators can be deposed, bridges overtaken, and town squares overrun, the last few centuries teach us that it is often easier to liberate the body than the mind. In the West, as mass democracy began taking root over a century ago, progressive intellectuals like John Dewey and Matthew Arnold soberly understood that in order for the democratic system to sustain itself, people were going to have to acquire democratic skills and, quite literally, “learn” how to be free.

But who will teach this to the young Arab generations? The proliferation of the Internet and satellite television could be a good start if it was not as perilous as it is promising: The free flow of information can be counterproductive unless people know to discern fact from fiction and critically assess what they are consuming. Another encouraging sign is that Arab elites primarily in the Gulf have spotted this intellectual deficit and have begun inviting prominent American universities like NYU and George Mason to expand their pedagogical umbrellas over their youths in the hopes of importing the seeds of enlightenment for future Arab generations. But even that is insufficient.

The key to resolving this dilemma and ultimately liberating Arab minds lies in the hands of the revolutionary generation itself, and particularly in its capacity to bow humbly before the forces of history and recognize the extent—and especially the limitations—of its monumental accomplishments. Too many revolutions degenerated into tyranny precisely because they tried to create a brand new society purified of the ills inherited from the old one. If this Arab Spring generation, which has toppled the regimes in Egypt and Tunisia (and threatens those in Tripoli, Sana’a, and Damascus), is indeed committed to building a democratic Middle East, it must therefore start by forgoing the hubris of such utopian aspirations and accept that millions of young Arabs—many of whom have actively supported the revolutions—are nevertheless still beholden to many of the regressive ideas against which they were waged.

To expect that decades of indoctrination can be expunged with a couple of tweets and a few weeks of protests is brash, arrogant, and ultimately dangerous. Acquiring the democratic mindset is a process that requires incremental change, not sweeping transformation. A failure to comprehend this won’t simply lead the Arab Spring astray, but may very well cause the young members of the extraordinary generation behind it to rebuild even more malignant versions of the regimes they set out to replace.

Filiu has taken the issue one step further and looked at popular literature in the contemporary Islamic world. He examines how the apocalypse has been foretold in mass paperbacks and other forums designed to appeal to the average Muslim reader, and in so doing he tries to interpret the events of our time. What he has found is both amusing and disturbing.

First a bit of background. The Quran says very little on the apocalypse but subsequent Islamic oral traditions, including the hadith, say a lot. They generally tell a story that history’s end days will be prefigured by several signs. These can include wars, floods, and devastation. The end game will come when the prophet Jesus, who is revered in Islam, comes down from heaven and fights the anti-Christ. They will both appear first in Damascus, but their final battle will take place near Lod, in today’s Israel, where Ben Gurion Airport now sits.

There are many variations on this theme, of course, and Sunni and Shia Islam each has its own take. Sunnis stick with a relatively simple version while Shia include in the tale the 12 imams who descended from the Prophet Muhammad through his cousin and son-in-law, Ali. For Shia the end of time will also see the return of the last imam, who has been in occultation since 873 CE. His return will inaugurate a better world, and many Shia hold it is the duty of believers to be prepared for his return.

The modern apocalyptic Islamic writers have stolen themes from Western writers of science fiction and other genres to add more color to their work. Thus Filiu shows how the Bermuda triangle and space ships from other worlds have made appearances in modern Islamic paperbacks. This is the amusing part.

More disturbingly, a lot of Western anti-Semitism has also found its way into these works. In them, Jews are often portrayed as agents of the anti-Christ and Israel as his instrument for fighting Islam. The destruction of Israel is a staple in much of these apocalyptic modern potboilers. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a regular source. Books with titles like The Disappearance of Israel and Israeli Empire Collapses in 2022 are typical.

But the most alarming aspect is that, as Filiu writes, for “those who are busy preparing for it, the end of the world is a serious matter,” and there are serious political forces doing just that. For example, one of al-Qaida’s most important writers, Abu Musab al Suri, devoted a hundred pages to the study of the apocalypse in his seminal work The Call for Global Islamic Resistance. While Osama Bin Laden has not used apocalyptic references in his commentaries, certainly the events of Sept. 11 have had a huge impact on those who are looking for signs that the end is near. Filiu documents this in his analysis.

Iranian Shia revolutionaries and their Hezbollah allies in Lebanon have been far more willing to use the apocalypse and the return of the Hidden Imam, or Mahdi, in contemporary politics. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks of it openly and is the hero of an apocalyptic best-seller titled Ahmadinejad and the Forthcoming World Revolution, published in 2006 and widely distributed by the Iranian government. This book cites numerous real-world signs that the end is near, including the 2006 war in Lebanon and Hezbollah’s missile strikes on Haifa. Fictional but miraculous-seeming events also appear, like Hezbollah fighters borne on angels’ wings swooping down to kill Israeli soldiers. According to the narrative, U.S. Navy and Air Force bases in the gulf states are part of an evil Crusader plot to prevent the Mahdi from appearing in Mecca—but they are doomed to fail.

Hezbollah’s second-in-command, Sheikh Naim Qassim, wrote his own preview of the final days, which he published shortly after the 2006 Lebanon war, titled Mahdi the Savior. In the Shia jihadist narrative, Mahdi is an increasingly powerful metaphor and message used to suggest the Iranian revolution and Hezbollah’s existence are signs of the coming end of time.

Filiu’s book therefore is of more than just casual interest to students of religion. It is an insight into how popular literature is shaping modern thinking in some parts of the Muslim world and how extremists can use these apocalyptic stories for their own political purposes. Filiu has included in the book a selection of the covers of some of the books he has studied, which feature lurid pictures of Osama Bin Laden, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in flames, Ahmadinejad as the Mahdi’s messenger, and Israel being destroyed by conflagration.

It is impossible to know how much impact this literature has on the average man or woman in the streets of the Islamic world, but the large number of books published suggests people are buying and reading them. Now that the Arab world is consumed with revolutions against its dictators, it is reasonable to assume the amazing and unexpected events of early 2011, like the toppling of Hosni Mubarak and the NATO war in Libya, will add more grist for those seeking signs that the apocalypse is near.

Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow in the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, is the author of Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of the Global Jihad and The Search for Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology and Future.

Feeling a bit flummoxed at the request that I pare a couple of years of research and a complex legal proceeding down to something akin to a sound bite, I found myself momentarily and uncharacteristically at a loss for words. Did my interlocutor think that everything—including scholarship—could be reduced to an answer that would fit in a Twitter post?

As I tried to formulate a short but nonetheless nuanced answer, my friend popped up with another question: “And how does the Eichmann trial relate to all those years you have spent studying and fighting Holocaust denial?”

When he asked his second question, I knew the answer to the first.

***

First, some background. When I began my research on the Eichmann trial I told my colleagues and friends that I felt relieved to be dealing with something other than Holocaust denial. First of all, it was nice—if one can use that term in relation to anything associated with the Holocaust—to move on to another topic. When I first wrote Denying the Holocaust, published in 1993, I never imagined that I would become enmeshed in the topic in not just a scholarly way but also in a legal and personal context.

But having a new topic to investigate was not the only reason for my relief. Writing about the Holocaust is always a difficult proposition. One must analyze horrific events and information while maintaining a requisite scholarly distance. Allowing emotions to intrude only distorts one’s scholarship. It is neither easy nor pleasant. Yet when writing about Holocaust denial I was presented with an added discomforting element: I was not just studying a terrifying historical event. My subject was a movement that was alive, kicking, and working vigorously to distort history and inculcate anti-Semitism. There was immediacy to this issue that was not present when I dealt with events that happened seven decades earlier.

I encountered yet one additional challenge in my study of Holocaust denial. Many people consider deniers “nutters,” as the British would say. They dismiss them as the historical equivalents of flat earthers. These same people told me that I was making a mistake in taking deniers seriously. As I began my work many of my colleagues in the field of Holocaust studies told me that this topic was not worth my time. They said quite bluntly: “You are writing about crackpots, Deborah. Why bother?” In response I explained, generally to no avail, that, while I did not think deniers a clear and present danger, I did think that they were a potential future danger and that therefore it was important that we understand their modus operandi. Furthermore, I thought it crucial that the world recognize the inherent anti-Semitism girding their entire enterprise. Some of them may be nutters, but they are Jew-hating ones. As survivors die and the option of hearing about the Final Solution in the first person singular fades, deniers, I feared, would only find it easier to spread their pseudo-intellectual wares. It was important to expose them, their lies, and their tactics.

I encountered the same skepticism a number of years later when I was sued for libel by David Irving. Many people, among them leading scholars, counseled me to ignore the matter. “You should not take his threat seriously,” I was repeatedly told. I chose to ignore their advice. If I did not fight he would have won by default because British libel law puts the burden of proof on the defendant. Once again my explanations were to no avail. “So what if he wins by default?” I was told. “No one takes him seriously, anyway.” (With no sense of irony, some of the same people subsequently congratulated me on my “great victory” against this man and told me that what I did was very important.)

We convinced the court that the “proof” Irving claimed to have to validate his assertions regarding the Holocaust did not prove his claims at all. His arguments were, we demonstrated, a tissue of lies. What then does all this have to do with my work on the Eichmann trial?

***

Thinking about the anti-Semitism, which is the foundation stone of denial and the refusal—denial?—of so many people to take the topic seriously, made the “bottom line” of the Eichmann trial and, by extension, the Holocaust patently clear. It is quite simple and straightforward. Had the world taken Nazi anti-Semitism more seriously from the outset of the rise of the Third Reich the subsequent tragedy might have been quite different.

In the 1930s and 1940s, of course, observers—and the potential victims—could not fathom where Hitler and his cohort’s anti-Semitism might lead. They could, in retrospect, legitimately claim ignorance. Today we do not have that luxury. When anti-Semites speak of their hatred of Jews and their desire to do them harm, we should accept their threats at face value. That does not mean we should panic or declare that the sky is falling at every expression of anti-Semitism. It does not mean that every anti-Semite poses the same potential danger. It does mean that we should not reflexively dismiss anti-Semites as crackpots or the equivalent of flat earthers.

Most of all, the actions of not just Adolf Eichmann but all those who played a role in the Final Solution remind us that we should pay particular heed to threats that emanate from those who have the ability to do real harm. During the past five years we have heard a stream of Holocaust denial, overt anti-Semitism, and threats against Israel emanate from the mouth of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Many people have dismissed him as a deranged person whose crazy comments are best ignored. Some scholars have gone to great efforts to explain away his threats against Israel. That is to engage in a form of self-delusion, if not denial. Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial is linked directly to his animus toward Israel. In 2009, after questioning the existence of the Holocaust, he declared it a ploy used by the Jews to get the West to accede to the creation of Israel. This, of course, comes on top of his infamous Holocaust denial conference in 2006. The Iranian Foreign Ministry, which was an official host of the gathering, made common ground with some of the world’s most infamous deniers and anti-Semites. It offered them a chance to express their animus toward both Israel and the Jews. The conference constituted a virtual Who’s Who of Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, including Robert Faurisson, one of the leading “theorists” of the movement who lives in Vichy France; Australian Fred Tobin, whose Adelaide Institute is a bastion of denial activities; former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke; and Bradley Smith, founder of the Committee on Open Debate on the Holocaust, which was responsible for placing a series of ads in college and university newspapers denying the Holocaust. The conference itself followed the Iranian contest on Holocaust-denial cartoons, which had the official imprimatur of Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad did not, of course, introduce Holocaust denial to the Middle East and the Arab/Muslim world. Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser spoke of the “lie of the 6 million Jews.” Mahmoud Abbas, as a young student, wrote a dissertation that was pure denial, though he subsequently repudiated this view, and while I fully believe his repudiation, the fact that as a young man he could have been seduced by this falsehood is telling. Spokesmen for Hamas have also engaged in Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial themes can be found in newspapers in many parts of the Arab world, including in Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon.

In virtually every other part of the world where Holocaust denial can be found it is relegated to the extreme political fringe. Only in the Middle East can it be found in more legitimate circles. There is no counternarrative to challenge these claims. Young people are growing up convinced that the Holocaust is a myth produced to justify the existence of their enemy, Israel. In Iran, Ahmadinejad’s denial and hatred of Israel are particularly frightening because Iran is close, we are told, to having nuclear weapons. It would be a form of denial—that is, willful blindness—not to recognize the nexus of Iranian leaders’ overt Holocaust denial, threats to destroy Israel, unquestionable anti-Semitism, and possession of nuclear weapons. They are not separate and unrelated phenomena.

Seventy years ago people had an acceptable reason to say, “We could never fathom that Hitler meant what he said.” Today we no longer have that luxury. At the very least it behooves us to take Ahmadinejad and those among his fellow Muslim leaders and opinion-makers seriously. Their Holocaust denial is part of their contemporary political agenda.

Among many other things, that is one of the lessons that both The State of Israel v. Adolf Eichmann and David Irving v. Penguin UK and Deborah Lipstadt taught me. It is what I now know in my gut that I may not have really known before.

Deborah E. Lipstadt, author of Nextbook Press’ The Eichmann Trial, is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University.

• Kosher sex-ed. [Ynet/Failed Messiah]

• Henry Kissinger has called for Jonathan Pollard’s pardon. Great ammunition for those who oppose it. [Press Release/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Due to changing insurance rules, talk therapy will increasingly be the exclusive reserve of upper-middle-class Jews living in the capital of a great empire during its decline and fall. You know, like Freud’s Vienna. [NYT]

• Arnost Lustig, a Czech Jew who wrote fiction about Holocaust survivors, died at 84. [NYT]

• They’re going to be showing Shoah (say that ten times fast) on Iranian satellite TV dubbed into Farsi. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

A U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks calls Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the “George Steinbrenner of Iran.” Does this mean Larry David will play the Iranian president in the biopic?

This week I’ll argue the other side—not just that Israel will be fine but rather that it is the rest of the Middle East that is in big trouble. Recent history and statistics show that in order to survive Arab and Muslim societies are going to have to forget about the notion of an Islamic alternative to modernity and will instead have to adopt what they have typically described as Western values but are in reality the universal values of political modernity. Learning to live like the West is not going to come through buying more Western goods—from cell-phones to tanks—or even earning more Western diplomas but by embracing those values as embodied by the one country in the region that lives them. The Arab model for success is not Iran, or Turkey, but Israel.

In its essence, Israel is the West—a culmination of its successes and a symbol of its failures, a reminder of a millennia-old madness, anti-Semitism, and the failure of the Enlightenment. Criticism of Israel is very often a reflection of the bad faith of a Western intelligentsia and political class uncomfortable with its history and unsure of its moral bearings. That Europeans frequently hold negative attitudes toward Israel while the vast majority of Americans are favorable to it can be explained in part by how each society came out of World War II.

Europe’s war, and the mass slaughter of its Jews, revealed that the continent’s great cathedrals were built upon a bedrock of pagan barbarism celebrated in different ways by Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. It was left to the United States to pick up the banner of Western civilization and lead the West to victory during the Cold War after the Europeans had trashed it.

Unlike their European cousins, contemporary Americans still read the Bible and understand that the Jewish nation is a historical reality connected to a living narrative that shapes the present in a constructive and desirable way. Americans abandoned replacement theology (or the notion that Jesus’ resurrection superseded God’s covenant with the Jews) after the Holocaust in order to embrace their elder brothers—as did Pope John Paul II, who lent his moral authority to President Ronald Reagan’s conviction that America’s victory in the Cold War was a historical necessity.

That is to say, pro-Israel Americans have also tended to misunderstand Israel’s place in the world. Yes, the point of Jewish self-determination is that the Jews can protect themselves. Yet the West needs Israel to succeed, because its success is a marker of our ability and determination to defend our values and our interests, in the Middle East and elsewhere.

And the truth is that Israel has been doing a remarkably good job of it, especially in the past 20 years. Israel is an IT powerhouse with more companies listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange than any other country except the United States, and its scientists have produced more tech patents than all of Asia. Last year Israel ranked 17th out of 58 of the world’s most economically developed nations, while the country’s economy was rated the most durable in the face of crises and rated first in investments in research and development centers. The Bank of Israel was ranked first among central banks for its efficient functioning.

Contrasting Israel’s performance with that of its neighbors, most of whom still abide by the half-century-long Arab boycott of the Jewish state, throws Israel’s achievements into even sharper relief. Consider Egypt, with a literacy rate anywhere between 50 to 70 percent, and considerably lower among women. The country’s unemployment rate is believed to be twice the official level of 10 percent, and 40 percent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. While the Syrian regime proudly supports the resistance, thousands of its own people are suffering with a drought in the eastern part of the country that has ravaged crops and livestock. Iran’s nuclear program and full-throated opposition to the United States and the Zionist entity may make it the envy of some fans of resistance in the region, but the fact is that an Iranian bomb is the Hail Mary pass of a dying society where there’s been no economic development for 30 years.

If you follow these two trend lines, it is easy to project what the fate of these two different civilizations is likely to be. Israel will enjoy the ups and navigate the downs of the global economy and, if the last two years are any indication, will weather those setbacks better than most. For the Arabs things are only going to get worse.

The college graduates who took to the streets in Cairo to protest their lack of opportunity are going to have to keep coming back because the problem was not simply the corruption of the Mubarak regime. Rather, the issue is that the Egyptian people themselves are deluded if they think bogus business degrees are going to earn them a place in a globalized economy. By and large, the Arabs are simply not prepared to compete with the rest of the world. When the oil runs out, it will crush not only the energy-exporting nations but all of the Arab countries whose economies, like Egypt’s, depend heavily on guest-worker receipts from the Arab Gulf states. As such, every weapon purchased by an Arab regime is effectively a down payment on a forthcoming Mad Max vision of the Middle East—including a series of civil wars like the one now under way in Libya.

The only way for the Arabs to avoid that scenario is for them to become more like Israel. Because Israel is the West, it is essential for Arab political, social, and economic development that the people of the region break with the past and embrace the Israelification of their societies. If not, the current popular demonstrations will end in yet another round of benighted dictatorships, as has repeatedly happened in the region, starting with the era of Arab independence in the 1940s.

The other choice—the typical choice—is to fight Israel, which is in the end little but a token of Arab despair. As the Arab uprisings have shown, the problems of Middle Eastern societies have little to do with Israel. So even if the dreams of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the other guardians of the resistance were fully realized and they were able to destroy Israel tomorrow, corruption, repression, and obscurantism would still be rotting away Middle Eastern societies.

The West and its values—what Israel stands for—will survive, no matter how many suicide bombers the Islamic resistance throws at it. That tactic, even if tied to religious concepts like jihad, has a built-in limit to its effectiveness in the face of people who are determined to defend themselves. Hassan Nasrallah mocks those who love life and boasts that the resistance loves death. But in the end, it will make little difference if Egypt eventually joins its army to the forces of the resistance bloc, adding tanks and planes to Hezbollah and Hamas’ rockets, Syria’s missiles, and Iran’s forthcoming bomb. The reality is that the party of life will fight to preserve it, while the party that cherishes death will reap what it desires in abundance.

Nonetheless, I do believe that, as I argued last week, events over the last few years have presented serious threats to the Jewish state—not least of which is a delegitimization campaign waged not in the region itself but from the capitals of Europe. It is a peculiar moment in history, to see Europe tottering on the precipice of resentment and obscurantism while the uprisings in the Middle East over the last two months have shown that the Arabs are perhaps on the verge of something new. Maybe the protests reveal not a revolution as such but a recognition.

Up until now, one of the more bizarre and widespread beliefs in the region is that Israel wants to be the only democracy in the Middle East—as if democracy were a limited resource it needed to hoard, like oil. The uprisings suggest that the Arabs may have come to recognize that, to paraphrase the late Egyptian writer Taha Hussein, liberty is free to everyone, like air and water.

I certainly hope so, for Israel is doing fine and the conclusion of my brief dialectic is that it will continue to thrive. The real concern is for the fate of the Arabs. The longer they continue to make Israel the focus of rejectionism and hatred, the more impossible it will become for them to join the West and arrest the death-spiral of their societies and economies. The inability of Western observers who claim to care about the fate of these societies and their people to make this point clearly and repeatedly has only damaged the cause of Arab social and political development. Now, in the midst of all the excitement following the Arab uprisings, is a moment that calls for such clarity.

Since the beginning of the Zionist enterprise, supporters like Winston Churchill have argued that the Jews of Israel would have a positive influence on their neighbors—that their industry and their values would rub off on the Arabs. Outside of Israel’s own Arab community, that hasn’t yet been the case. Either that will change now or it won’t. But whether the Arabs embrace Israel and the West, or decline into total economic, cultural, and military irrelevance within the next generation, Israel will survive and prosper.

• The death-by-tear-gas of a 36-year-old Palestinian protestor has become increasingly hot-button, with the IDF alleging that she almost certainly had a pre-existing condition that helped lead to her death. [NYT]

• In late 2009, according to a new WikiLeaks cable, President Ahmadinejad was willing to play ball on a nuclear fuel swap deal with the West, but top Iranians more hardline than he nixed it. [Arutz Sheva]

• The 112th U.S. Congress begins tonight with four fewer Jews but the highest-ranking Jew—soon-to-be Majority Leader Eric Cantor—in history. [JPost]

• After the recent blizzard, New York City snowplows toppled several tombstones at a gigantic Jewish cemetery in Brooklyn. [City Room]

• Energy companies, mostly Israeli and American, are pissed at the higher tax rates proposed on gas following the gigantic offshore find. [LAT]

At its height, in the 1940s, the Jewish community of Tajikistan—a poor, Muslim country in the heart of Central Asia that shares an 800-mile border with Afghanistan to the south—numbered nearly 30,000 people. That population was composed mostly of Persian-speaking Bukharan Jews who had lived in the region for millennia, in addition to Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe who came here (some by choice, others by force) during Soviet times. Today, the Jews of Tajikistan number less than 500, about half of whom live in Dushanbe. These negligible figures are themselves estimates, according to Abdurakhmanov, who is Bukharan. Most of the remaining Jews, he said, do not regularly practice, and many are “mixed,” that is, either the offspring of a Jew and non-Jew or themselves married to a gentile. When I asked if he is able to form a minyan, the quorum of 10 men required for prayer sessions, he replied, “Sometimes.”

Dushanbe’s previous synagogue, built in 1947 and located on a plot of land in the central part of the city where Jews had prayed for centuries, was razed in 2006 to make way for a gaudy, massive, presidential “Palace of Nations.” The destruction of the synagogue did not occur without controversy, although the Jewish community was quick to deny that anti-Semitism had anything to do with the building plans, which also saw the tearing down of a Russian military base and many private residences. The new synagogue is located in a converted house donated by a relative of the country’s authoritarian president, Emomali Rahmon.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, most Central Asian Jews made a quick exit for Israel, and Tajik Jews were no exception. According to Abdurakhmanov, 12,000 left in the years following the Soviet empire’s collapse, an exodus spurred by the Tajik civil war that raged from 1992 to 1997 and took the lives of 50,000 people. That conflict pitted a shaky coalition of Islamic fundamentalists and democrats against a government composed of former Soviet apparatchiks, and it was settled with an agreement that allowed some opposition figures into parliament. Earlier waves of Jewish emigration occurred in 1917 (the year of the Russian revolution) and in 1948, during Israel’s war of independence.

Like their Muslim countrymen, Tajik Jews faced severe difficulties while living under the Soviet Union, which repressed religious expression throughout the diverse lands it controlled. Jews had to seek permission from the state bureaucracy to celebrate holidays, and in 1946, the city’s three synagogues were nationalized so the government could monitor their activities. And while Abdurakhmanov pointed out that “the authorities have especially good relations with the Jewish community,” he also said that there isn’t much of a Jewish community to have relations with. “It’s very difficult to say that we have a community here,” he told me. “It’s not a community. When you have a Jewish community, you gather together, discuss social issues, attend funerals together, attend weddings together. It’s not happening here.”

***

Since the end of the Tajik civil war, Jewish life in Central Asia has been largely quiet and uneventful. That was until a series of surprising anti-Semitic incidents targeted the small Jewish community of Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, following the violent ouster of the country’s dictatorial president in April. Unlike the situations in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, where Jews have lived for ages and are intrinsic parts of the national culture, Judaism is foreign to Kyrgyzstan, with nearly all of the country’s Jews being ethnically eastern European or Russian. Accusations that a Russian-Jewish businessman had helped the former president’s corrupt son rob the country sparked an attack on the city’s ramshackle synagogue, followed months later by a bombing on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and saw the rise of an anti-Semitic discourse that foreshadowed the ethnic riots targeting minority Uzbeks two months later, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds and the displacement of 400,000. Since then, a small number of Kyrgyz Jews have made aliyah to Israel.

Tajiks are ethnically Persian, and their language is nearly identical to Farsi. Iran and Tajikistan are close diplomatically, and, as the constant stream of Farsi music videos that seem to play on television screens at every restaurant here attests, Iranian pop culture predominates. But neither the government of Tajikistan nor its people share the anti-Semitism that has become such a crucial feature of the Iranian revolutionary regime, particularly under the rule of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Nor does anti-Semitism figure prominently in the rhetoric of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU, an al-Qaida-affiliated group that seeks the overthrow of Central Asian regimes and their replacement with Islamic states, and that is alleged to have staged operations within Tajikistan over the past few years.

Reliable information about the IMU, its structure, and size is hard to come by, as it is in the interests of both the IMU and the region’s governments to exaggerate the organization’s importance, the former so it can attract recruits to what it tries to portray as a triumphant cause, and the latter to secure backing from Western governments intent on stamping out Islamic extremism. Earlier this year, an ambush on Tajik security forces alleged to have been perpetrated by the IMU resulted in the deaths of 23 soldiers, leading the Tajik government to launch a months-long security operation in the country’s central Rasht Valley to eliminate what it claims are IMU hideouts. Whatever the apparent success of its recent attacks, however, the IMU is far from posing a serious threat to the stability of the Rahmon regime, and its fundamentalist ideology seems to hold little sway with ordinary Tajiks.

During my visit to Tajikistan in November, I didn’t once hear an anti-Semitic remark or sentiment expressed, either offhand or when I specifically raised the question of Judaism with ordinary Tajiks. Jews have been living in Tajikistan for thousands of years, speak the same language as their fellow Tajik citizens, and appreciate the same cultural mores. Bukharan Jews are physically indistinguishable from non-Jewish Tajiks. Some of the most prominent Tajik figures in culture and the professional world have been Jewish. Tajikistan enjoys diplomatic relations with Israel, and President Rahmon is said to pay regular calls upon New York’s relatively large Tajik diaspora when he visits for the annual United Nations General Assembly. “I don’t feel anti-Semitism, organized anti-Semitism on behalf of the government or ordinary people or organizations,” Abdurakhmanov said. “I haven’t seen any of this.”

This sentiment is echoed by Akbar Turajonzoda, a Tajik legislator and erstwhile foe of the regime. Turajonzoda, whom I met at his office in a small cotton-processing factory in the Bahdat district, 12 miles east of Dushanbe, was once Tajikistan’s Qazi Qalon, or highest-ranking Islamic cleric. “We don’t have any dislike toward Jews,” he told me before going on to explain that whatever anti-Jewish sentiment does exist owes itself to Islamic extremists who use the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to elicit Muslim antipathy toward a convenient target. “There is a very small minority in Central Asia, including Tajikistan, that has some opinions about unresolved issues between Israel and Palestine,” he said. “That small minority consists of some students who have studied abroad and still travel there or have access to certain Internet sites.” (Over the past year, the Tajik government has made concerted efforts to discourage young men from studying at madrassas in Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.)

But while airing grievances against Israel is a surefire way to generate anger on the Arab Street, Turajonzoda says that similar efforts by the likes of the IMU or Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist organization that seeks the restoration of the caliphate in Central Asia, are unsuccessful. “Our people have so much on their own plates that they don’t think about [Palestinians]; we have far too many pressing issues at home to care about other people’s problems. Besides, our people don’t speak Arabic to follow Middle Eastern [media] coverage of Israeli-Palestinian issues.”

***

Dushanbe’s Jewish cemetery, which occupies several steep hills on the plot of a larger ecumenical burial ground, speaks to a rich history, standing in melancholy contrast to today’s dwindling Jewish presence. A thousand headstones, many of them featuring Soviet-style etchings of the deceased’s visage, dot the landscape. They showcase an erstwhile community of lawyers, doctors, and performers, many of whom, according to my Tajik guide, were once well-known figures throughout the country. The Jewish section is noticeably better maintained than the Muslim and Christian areas of the cemetery, where vegetation crawls over dislodged headstones. The close tending is attributable, I am told, to the full-time caretaker whose salary is paid by Jewish aid organizations and Tajik émigrés. He says that “a lot of visitors” from the Unites States and Israel, relatives of the buried and Jewish delegations, come to the cemetery.

The Tajik attitude toward Jews has an endearingly protective quality to it. “Our Jews,” is how one Tajik woman described her country’s Jewish population, to differentiate Tajikistan’s Bukharan Jews from the rest of the world’s. “Unfortunately, they left for Israel,” a Tajik man explained after regaling me with a list of professions in which the country’s Jews had distinguished themselves during the Soviet era (that sentiment is especially strange to hear in the Muslim world, where Jews have all but disappeared). This evident philo-Semitism, however, was never enough to convince the majority of Tajikistan’s Jews to remain in a place where they were welcome, and it probably will not be long before the country’s Jewish community, unable to form a regular minyan, all but disappears. As I left the Dushanbe synagogue, I asked Rabbi Abdurakhmanov if he presided over bar mitzvahs. “We don’t have children here,” he answered. “How can we have that?”

James Kirchick is writer at large with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and a contributing editor to The New Republic.



• Ahmadinejad sacked his foreign minister and replaced him with the head of Iran’s nuclear energy agency, in a sign that the president has successfully consolidated power. [Laura Rozen]

• Bernard Madoff is likely not eligible for a furlough to attend the funeral of his son, who killed himself over the weekend. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Vox Tablet contributor Hugh Levinson has a podcast about Safed, a northern Israeli town with a fascinating spiritual past. [BBC]

• Hitch on Kissinger. Always a good time. [Slate]

• Classic headline: “Suspected Israeli Neo-Nazi Arrested in Kyrgyzstan.” It’s like I always say, those crazy Kyrgyz! [Haaretz]

Somebody was listening in on that argument you were having with your uncle about Israel (h/t Goldblog).

I have yet to visit Israel, but when I was young, my family made a number of trips to Iran even after immigrating to the United States. Those visits occurred before the Islamic revolution, when Iranian Jews were reasonably free and reasonably prosperous. Everyone in my family assumed that we would be able to visit Iran as we pleased.

But 1976 was the last time I visited Iran. After the Islamic revolution of 1979, the country of my mother and father became closed to them and to much of the rest of my family.

Plenty of Iranians abroad have made trips to and from Iran ever since the revolution, of course. But as Iranian Jews, we have had to endure a greater sense of insecurity and a relationship with the Islamic regime that has been fraught with tension. That tension has only increased in recent years, with the regime having become increasingly hardline, and with Muslim Iranian-Americans like Roxana Saberi, Haleh Esfandiari, Ali Shakeri, Kian Tajbakhsh, and Parnaz Azima having been imprisoned on trips to Iran, despite the fact that they did nothing to merit their sentences.

I watched the Iranian revolution unfold on American television. I saw the images of the demonstrations in the streets and the unforgiving mien of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as he declared that the monarchy must come to an end and a theocracy must take its place. From the very beginnings of the revolution, it was made clear to me that our family could not possibly visit Iran until a fundamental governmental change took place. In a phone call as a child, I once told my grandmother, who’d remained in Iran, that I probably would not be able to see her until there was a counterrevolution; an indiscretion that prompted my parents to quickly take the phone out of my hands, for fear the line was eavesdropped and I might get my family in trouble.

The images from Iran made me intensely political in 1978, at the tender age of 6. My family and I believed that something was happening in Iran that would be profoundly destructive to the country. Because of our religious identity, our concerns were heightened by the theocratic aspect of the revolution. Sadly, those concerns turned out to be justified; while Iran’s Jewish population has some rights, the Jews of Iran are forced to denounce Israel with great frequency and fervor.

Being an Iranian Jew is a great source of pride, but it is also a great burden. It meant a difficult life for family members who tried to leave Iran in the early 1980s, only to be caught, imprisoned, whipped, and threatened with execution unless they signed a statement acknowledging their “guilt” in relation to vague and nonsensical allegations. It meant a difficult life for a relative who did not want to go to the front to kill Iraqis—or be killed by them—and who was threatened with expulsion from the University of Tehran unless he dropped his resistance to being drafted for war. It meant difficulties for another family member, who went back to Iran to see my grandmother (for what turned out to be the last time) and was prevented from returning to the West for two weeks while various corrupt officials demanded bribes and threatened to take my grandmother’s home—where I remember playing as a child—away from her.

I try to be patient, waiting for change to come to Iran. But even as the regime gives observers every reason to be outraged at its actions, global indifference seems to outweigh any sense of justified indignation regarding the actions of the regime. I am impatient with an American society that would rather focus on Bristol Palin’s appearance on Dancing With the Stars than on Iran. I am impatient with the current U.S. administration, which has done little to speak up for the proposition that people should not be beaten up, that their votes should not be stolen, and that their political and human rights ought to be respected, for fear of appearing to be imperialist.

Of course, protesters in Iran are not likely to castigate the Obama Administration as imperialist in the event that the administration ever chooses to forcefully argue on behalf of human rights and political liberalization in Iran; indeed, if anything, the Iranian people have made clear that they want more American assistance in their effort to bring about political change. But for whatever reason, the Obama Administration chooses not to side with the Iranian people against their repressive leaders. From a realpolitik perspective, I am frustrated with the lack of pressure that has been put on Iran thus far, pressure that might have created divisions within the regime that might help the United States achieve crucial national security interests. (And, no, an ineffective sanctions regime does not count as “pressure on Iran.”)

It is obvious that a renewal in protests will result in more injuries and deaths to the many who brave the streets to demonstrate for things we in the West take for granted; free elections, free speech, basic political and human rights. The prospect of further bloodshed horrifies me. It certainly horrifies those living in Iran whose lives and well-being may be threatened by another flare-up of political violence. But ever since the revolution ousted one dictator—the shah—and put another far worse in his place, the need for political liberalization has become overwhelming and undeniable. Iran has had its chances for political liberalization, only to have seen them slip away. On June 29, 1981, an assassin just missed killing the father of the Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, with a bomb (the bomb blast ended up severely injuring the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose right arm is useless and withered as a result of the assassination attempt). I remember being angry and infuriated that a rare chance to kill Khomeini—and perhaps (at least to my 9-year-old mind) reverse the effects of the revolution—was missed. I thought that perhaps the regime would be toppled when the student revolts of 1999 began, only to watch in despair as the uprising was brutally put down by the thugs the regime employs to keep order. How many more missed chances can the country’s body politic afford?

And, finally, there is Iran’s conflict with Israel. It’s an issue that torments Iranian Jews, who care deeply about what happens to Iran but are not willing to see the Islamic regime harm Israel’s security interests or the lives of innocent Israelis—many of whom are émigrés from Iran. Were it a conflict with any other country antagonistic toward Israel, Iranian Jews would have significantly less hesitation—if any—in endorsing a military response to any threat to Israel. But in this case, the country antagonistic toward Israel is Iran, to which Iranian Jews naturally and obviously continue to feel a deep tie. As such, Iranian Jews are faced with a revolting choice: endorse military strikes against Iran that may—or may not—set back the nuclear program but may also kill scores of Iranians, or do nothing and gamble that Israel will not be consumed by a nuclear conflagration.

Thus the life of an Iranian-American Jew. It entails conflicted emotions, constant apprehension, intense frustration, the fear of being forgotten and ignored, and a sense of exile, a longing for what so many take for granted—the ability to visit home. The Iranian Jew is heir to a glorious legacy; our ancestors helped author the Babylonian Talmud. The Iranian Jew looks to an uncertain future; we do not know how long our exile will last, whether it will end in our lifetimes, or whether the various and distinct parts of our lives will ever stop being in conflict with one another. We only know how to persevere. We have had thousands of years of practice at persevering, and we do what we can to effect positive change where we are able, in the hopes that we will be able to build a life for ourselves that does not entail the sense of sorrow, fear, and disconnectedness that we have felt for so long.

Pejman Yousefzadeh is an attorney and writer in Illinois. He blogs at A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days.



• An Orthodox man was beat up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last night. It is being investigated as a potential bias crime. [WABC]

• This water slide you ride down two-by-two. [NYT]

• Bagelfuls. Kraft ought to be ashamed of itself. [Contentions]

• “Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer are ruthless people who faithfully follow the rules of classical economics, even if they violate the dictates of decorum. In one episode, Jerry barters away the intellectual-property rights to one of his sexual techniques. Where the rest of us laugh and gasp, an economist would only nod in understanding.” [Business Week]

• Did Mossad try to kill Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he was in Lebanon earlier this fall? They would never do anything like that! [Ynet]

The original “Eight Days of Hanukkah,” written and sung by the great and late Tuli Kupferberg.

With all due apologies to Oliver Stone (and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey), what the Wikileaks documents reveal is not a conspiracy of any kind but a scary and growing gap between the private assessments of American diplomats and allies in the Middle East and public statements made by U.S. government officials. The publication of these leaked cables is eerily reminiscent of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed a decade-long attempt by U.S. officials to distort and conceal unpalatable truths about the Vietnam War, and manipulate public opinion. The difference is that while the Pentagon Papers substantially vindicated the American left, the Wikileaks cable dump vindicates the right.

Here are eight of the most obvious examples from the initial trove of documents that has appeared online:

1. While the Israelis are deeply concerned about Iran’s march toward a nuclear program, it is in fact the Arabs who are begging the United States to “take out” Iranian installations through military force, with one United Arab Emirates official even proposing a ground invasion. Calling Iran “evil,” King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia repeatedly urged the United States to “cut off the head of the snake” by attacking Iranian nuclear installations.

2. It is not just Israeli leaders who believe Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is reminiscent of Hitler; U.S. officials think so too, as do Arab leaders, who use the Hitler analogy to warn against the dangers of appeasing Iran.

3. North Korea, an isolated country that enjoys substantial diplomatic and economic backing from China, is supplying Iran with advanced ballistic missile systems that would allow an Iranian nuclear warhead to hit Tel Aviv—or Moscow—with a substantial degree of accuracy. Taken in concert with the North Korean-built nuclear reactor in Syria, it would appear that North Korea—acting with the knowledge and perhaps direct encouragement of China—is playing a significant and deliberate role in the proliferation of nuclear equipment and ballistic delivery systems in the Middle East.

4. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not a model Middle Eastern leader who has found the right admixture of religious enthusiasm and democracy, as U.S. government officials often like to suggest in public, but “an exceptionally dangerous” Islamist. U.S. diplomats have concluded that Erdogan’s anti-Israel rhetoric is not premised on domestic Turkish electioneering or larger geo-strategic concerns but rather on a personal, visceral hatred of Israel.

5. Tehran has used the cover of the ostensibly independent Iranian Red Crescent—a member of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, whose pledge of neutrality allows it access to war zones—to smuggle weapons and members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Qods Force into Lebanon during the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war, and into Iraq, to fight against U.S. soldiers.

6. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his intelligence chief Omar Suleiman are more worried about Hamas than about Israel and are staunchly opposed to the expansion of Iranian influence in the region.

7. The Amir of Qatar is a dubious ally, who plays Washington and Tehran off each other. “The Amir closed the meeting by offering that based on 30 years of experience with the Iranians, they will give you 100 words. Trust only one of the 100.”

8. America’s Arab allies do not believe that the Barack Obama Administration can separate Syria from Iran through any foreseeable combination of carrots and sticks. According to one cable, the UAE’s Sheik Mohamed Bin Zayed “showed no confidence that Syria could be separated from the Iranian camp” and quoted him directly as saying “If you want my opinion … I think not.” He advised that Syria would continue hedging on key regional issues (Iran, support for Hezbollah, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process) for the foreseeable future.

If these cables make many on the right look prescient, or at least in touch with reality, it is hardly a surprise that their domestic U.S. rivals are trying to spin the Wikileaks cables to their own advantage. For instance, leftwing academic specialists on the Middle East who have argued that the peace process is the key issue in the region and that the Gulf Arab states do not want the United States or Israel to bomb Iran are nonetheless celebrating the Wikileaks documents, even as their argument is now vitiated. Some university professors claim that their analysis is better than those of Washington’s Arab allies anyway. The New York Times is trying to make the case that in the wake of George W. Bush’s mismanagement the Obama Administration has managed to build a strong sanctions regime against Iran that includes Russia and China. Unfortunately, the cables prove only that Russian envoys are working to frustrate the U.S. effort by selling the Iranian position to the Arabs.

What comes through most strongly from the Wikileaks documents, however, is that U.S. Middle East policy is premised on a web of self-justifying fictions that are flatly contradicted by the assessments of American diplomats and allies in the region. Starting with Bush’s second term and continuing through the Obama Administration, Washington has ignored the strong and repeated pleas of its regional allies—from Jerusalem to Riyadh—to stop the Iranian nuclear program. Perhaps the most disturbing revelation in the documents is the extent to which both the Bush and Obama Administrations have concealed Iran’s war against the United States and its allies in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states, even as those same allies have been candid in their diplomatic exchanges with us. U.S. servicemen and -women are being dispatched to combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan where they are fighting Iranian soldiers and assets in a regional war with the Islamic Republic that our officials dare not discuss, lest they have to do something about it.

Members of the Washington policy establishment should be considerably less worried about how the foreign ministries of allied countries respond to the leaks than how the American electorate does. Even in a democracy, we accept that a key part of our diplomacy depends on concealing the truth, or even lying, in order to advance the interests of one’s own country. But it is hard to see how the public, mendacious, face of U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, serves American interests. By systematically misleading the American people, our policymakers have undermined the basis of our democracy, which is premised on the existence of a public that is capable of making informed decisions about a world that is only becoming more dangerous.

• The Knesset passed a law, supported by Prime Minister Netanyahu, requiring a referendum before Israel cedes land it annexed, which means East Jerusalem and the Golan. It will make it more difficult for Israel to negotiate land swaps involving those territories. [NYT]

• Iran’s parliament made moves to impeach President Ahmadinejad; the grand ayatollah stopped them. But clearly there are some legitimacy problems and general dissatisfaction. [WSJ]

• More than 40 Saudi-sponsored part-time schools in Britain are programmatically teaching anti-Semitism and homophobia, a BBC documentary revealed. [NYT]

• A profile of David Nyer, the Orthodox resident of Monsey, New York, who has been a prime mover behind the recent efforts to free Jonathan Pollard. [JTA]

• Israel honored its 3,000,001st tourist of the year (a record). Perhaps inevitably, he is a pastor leading a Christian evangelical tour from Brazil. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

On the highway that connects Saida, a major city in the south, to Tyr, further down along the Mediterranean coast, posters of countless martyrs and huge banners accentuating the need for resistance signal that leaving Beirut is like entering another country. “You are the most honorable people,” one banner tells the people of the south. The posters welcoming Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the occasion of his visit to Lebanon last month, have not yet been removed.

The Iranian president’s visit came as Hezbollah launched an aggressive campaign against the United Nations’ Special Tribunal for Lebanon, set up to prosecute people responsible for the death of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Ahmadinejad termed it an Israeli tool to destroy the resistance. With this rhetoric, Hezbollah managed to mobilize its Shia base around their collective identity as a sect threatened by everyone else in Lebanon.

While most of Lebanon seemed to be on hold during Ahmadinejad’s visit, the streets leading to the south filled with supporters holding Hezbollah and Iranian flags. Lebanon seemed like two entities: those who preferred to stay indoors, nervously watching the events unfold on TV, and those who gladly went out to greet Hezbollah’s guardian.

That division, however, was not as clear-cut here as it was portrayed in the Western media. Those who were cheerfully greeting Ahmadinejad were Hezbollah supporters, but they did not represent the whole Shia community. Many in the south were as anxious as other Lebanese in Beirut and the north. My aunt, for example, had her suitcase ready in case she had to flee the south in a hurry, and my grandmother, a huge Hezbollah supporter, had mixed feelings of excitement and fear. Ahmadinejad’s visit was a high moment in her monotonous daily life, but the timing of the visit carried major concerns for her, as it did for other Lebanese.

After the liberation of the south from Israeli occupation in 2000, Lebanese Shia regained both their land and a sense of political power. But due in part to Hezbollah’s aggressive rhetoric and practices toward other communities in Lebanon, this power backfired on the Shia. The 2006 war, the 18-month sit-in against the government that followed, and the strikes and protests of May 7, 2008 led to a huge rift between the Shia and Lebanon’s large and influential Sunni community.

Now the special tribunal, which most observers agree will soon accuse as-yet-unnamed Hezbollah members for the killing of Lebanon’s former prime minister, is widening that rift.

Nobody knows when the tribunal’s indictments will be announced, or who they will target, but some media reports cite sources that say that several Hezbollah members will be accused. In Lebanon, this was enough to put Hezbollah and its supporters on high alert.

In The Hague, meanwhile, tribunal staff try to keep out of the political bickering and threatening rhetoric of Hezbollah and its media by stressing confidentiality, reliance on evidence, and the need for justice to achieve long-term peace and security. But in Lebanon, Hezbollah argues for security over justice, and ignorance of the tribunal’s proceedings and structure allows divisive politicized rhetoric to consume any kind of logical thinking.

The deepening isolation of the Shia community within Lebanon makes the likelihood of a violent response to the tribunal’s findings all the more threatening. Samer, a 40-year-old man who owns a small restaurant in Tyr, said that he recognizes Hezbollah’s protecting role. (Samer and other local Shia quoted in this article preferred not to provide last names, for fear of reprisal for expressing opinions on Hezbollah.) “But we all know that Israel will strike again, and when they do, it is not going to be the same as in 2006,” he said. “The problem is that this time, we cannot escape to other areas in Lebanon. The Sunnis will not receive us like they did in 2006, and no one knows if the rest of Lebanon will be safe.”

Samer worries that the Shia will be treated like the Palestinians were treated after the 1982 Israeli invasion that led to the end of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Lebanon. “Everybody will eat us alive,” Samer said. “It has already started. We cannot find jobs outside the Shia-owned institutions. We cannot buy property outside Shia areas.”

Amira, a 35-year-old woman from Nabatieh, a village in the south, agreed. Her husband used to work at a company owned by a Sunni businessman in Beirut. After May 2008, he was fired and had to settle for a low-paying job in the south. “I have never felt so insecure,” Amira told me. “Israel is waiting around the corner, the international tribunal will indict Hezbollah, and we will be more fragile and more isolated than ever. Our children are leaving the country to look for life elsewhere. There is nothing left here.”

Amira lived all her life in the south of Lebanon. She witnessed the 1982 Israeli invasion as an 8-year-old child, and during the 2006 war she lost friends and family members who died only because they lived in the south. Israeli military planes still fly over her village every day, reminding her that the war is not really over.

Hezbollah is not perfect, she said. “But at least it is the only force that is resisting the Israelis. Without Hezbollah, the Israelis would have taken over Lebanon a long time ago.” Amira said she has no choice but to stay and expect the worst. She has little hope of emigrating or leaving to safer areas of Lebanon. “I cannot live in peace,” she said. “Anything can happen any day, and I feel stuck here. I am suffocating.”

Amira is like many Shia in Lebanon, who still support and vote for Hezbollah but on the other hand feel that they cannot take the tension anymore. “It is true that the Shia are today more critical of Hezbollah’s practices and politics, but we really don’t have anyone else,” she said. “There is no guarantee that other political leaders will take care of us. It is a sectarian system, and each leader cares about his own sect. That’s why we cannot but stick to Hezbollah.”

According to Mona Fayyad, a writer and professor of social psychology at the Lebanese University, the Shia are afraid but helpless. “It is too late for them now to leave Hezbollah,” she said. “There is no one else ready to receive them, and Sunni street sectarian rhetoric is not helping.”

The Shia are afraid of losing power because everyone will turn against them, but they know that any street violence by Hezbollah will make the situation worse for them as Lebanese. “The Sunni-Shia conflict has already started in the street, and there is no way to stop it if no real effort is made to resolve the political problem,” Fayyad said. “On the other hand, the Israeli government is becoming more and more uncompromising, and this gives the Shia no choice but to stick to Hezbollah, leading to more isolation of the community. And this is exactly what Hezbollah wants.”

But the isolation is intensifying, and the stereotypes are becoming more rooted. A few weeks ago, a local TV channel aired a report alleging that an Islamic educational organization headed by Agriculture Minister Hussein al-Hajj Hassan—who is one of Hezbollah’s ministers—is buying land tracts in the northern Beirut suburb of Jdeideh. This started a dangerous Christian-Shia quarrel over who controls which part of Lebanon, which in turn revealed deep-rooted sectarian resentments.

Christian politicians say transactions like the one in Jdeideh are taking place all over Lebanon. In some neighborhoods of Beirut, such as Hadath, Christians have agreed not to sell property to Shia buyers in order to “preserve their community.” But the agreement also applies to Shia members who don’t support Hezbollah.

Meanwhile, some Lebanese complain that certain neighborhoods in Beirut, considered Hezbollah strongholds, are controlled by party-led militias. “After May 7, 2008, the edges of Beirut’s neighborhoods became more apparent,” said Kamal, a liberal independent Shia who lives in Beirut. “You don’t see arms in Beirut’s Shia neighborhoods, but you know they’re there, so if you get bullied by a guy in the street over a parking space, it is advisable to avoid the confrontation. As for resorting to the rule of law, forget it. Security forces do not interfere with these people.”

Both the Lebanese army and the Internal Security Forces prefer to sit back and watch each time street clashes erupt in a Sunni-Shia neighborhood. Instead, and in an attempt to reassure other citizens, they deploy in Christian areas such as Achrafieh, in eastern Beirut, or other upper-class neighborhoods where people never clash. This is understood to be a way of protecting the institutional integrity of the army, which suffered severe division during the civil war.

The army, like any other state institution, cannot impose its authority on Hezbollah, which is the main representative of the Shia community. This means that the Shia, living outside the authority of the state, can overstep the rule of law. It also means that the Shia are becoming more and more isolated in a self-made sectarian ghetto.

Iran took very good care of the Shia in Lebanon when no one else did. Now it is the time for repayment. When Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to Lebanon, many Shia were afraid of an Israeli reaction, but only the cheerful welcoming crowd was heard and reported in the media.

“Eventually, we will have to pay the price, because Hezbollah will not remain that powerful forever,” said Maha, a 40-year-old woman from Dahiyeh, Beirut’s southern suburb. “We sometimes overlook the problematic connection of Hezbollah to Iran. The money that poured from Iran after the 2006 war was never for free.”

Hanin Ghaddar is a Lebanese journalist based in Beirut.

• However, the new top U.N. nuclear inspector said he was amenable to turning a more focused eye onto Syria. [WSJ]

• Speaking on U.S. cable news, Prime Minister Netanyahu cautioned that Iran wants to control the region’s oil supply. [JPost]

• Opposition parties boycotted Jordan’s parliamentary vote; the results are likely to strenghten the monarchy’s allies while increasing popular disaffection. [NYT]

• Jewish federations, gathered in New Orleans, are concerned less about the current economy and more about their long-term futures as their biggest donors age, with younger people not replacing them. [JTA]

• Famed realist painter Jack Levine died at 95. [NYT]

My bet, however, is that the most dangerous moment we have yet seen will come next month, when the United Nations tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri is expected to indict several members of Hezbollah, Iran’s chief Lebanese proxy. If/when that happens, Hezbollah may attempt what amounts to a coup (although given how much power it already has, perhaps that is too strong a word). “Washington has organized a coalition, including Russia, to support the tribunal’s work,” reports Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. “If indictments are issued, Hezbollah may move to topple the Lebanese government—creating a new showdown. How the United States and Israel would respond isn’t clear, but their options would be limited.” It is plausible to see Israel dragged into this showdown and then Iran, too.

So is there also cause for optimism?

Yes, in two different ways. One is that, as many have observed, including Tablet Magazine contributing editors David Samuels and Jeffrey Goldberg, the more threatening Iran gets, the more clear become the benefits of Israeli-Palestinian peace to all parties that are not Iran or direct Iran allies.

The other is that the sanctions against Iran—both the Security Council-approved ones and the much sharper, bilateral ones imposed by various Western countries—are having real bite, substantially lowering the quality of life inside Iran and thereby putting the current regime of President Ahmadinejad—which is of questionable legitimacy already—in that much more difficult a spot domestically.

How will Ahmadinejad respond to decreasing support at home? Well, his weakness could plausibly prompt him to take a more moderate path, and agree to real talks and a real deal. It could also plausiby prompt him to take a more extreme path. Ignatius called his column “Obama’s Game of Nuclear Chicken with Iran,” and that really is right: Both sides have cause to blink; the question is, which will first?

U.N. Indictments Near in Lebanon Killing [WSJ]
Obama’s Game of Nuclear Chicken With Iran [WP]
U.S. Says Sanctions Against Iran Are Working [Reuters]
Iran’s Middle Class to be Hard Hit as Subsidy Program Is Overhauled [WP]
Netanyahu To Tell Biden: Only Military Threat Can Stop Iran [Haaretz]
Iran Could Ignite Israeli-Palestinian Agreement [JPost]
Iran Pushes for Nuclear Talks in Turkey [LAT]
Related: Cinders of Lebanon [Tablet Magazine]
The Next Lebanon War
Earlier: Iran Dangles Prospect of Talks

• This after President Ahmadinejad stood a few miles from the Israeli border and loudly praised Hezbollah. [NYT]

• He also reportedly met with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut. [Jewish Journal/Haaretz]

• The Arab League warned that continued West Bank construction could lead it to ask the U.N. to recognize an independent Palestine. [JPost]

• President Abbas punted on the question of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, saying how Israel defines itself is up to Israel. [JPost]

• All the major world powers, including the United States and China, have proposed nuclear talks with Iran for next month. [Laura Rozen]

• Prominent Palestinian intellectual Mustafa Barghouti proposes a unilateral declaration of independence “on the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, including East Jerusalem.” (And Gaza?) [IHT]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Jon Kalish reviews Mark Jacobson’s The Lampshade. [Forward]

• Iranian President Ahmadinejad has formed an “independent and neutral team” to investigate U.S. complicity in 9/11. [NY Daily News/Vos Iz Neias?]

• New York Mets first baseman Ike Davis has promise, even if the Mets don’t. [Kaplan’s Korner]

Rabbi Levin on the teevee last night.

But while members of all sects and political parties attended Ahmadinejad’s welcoming luncheon, a letter signed by 250 Lebanese politicians and activists played a different melody. “One group in Lebanon draws its power from you,” it argues—that would be Hezbollah again—“and has wielded it over another group and the state. You are repeating what others have done before you by interfering in our internal affairs.” Average persons-on-the-street also have mixed emotions about Ahmadinejad’s visit (well, except for average Shiite persons-on-the-street—they like him). “It’s a complete disaster for Lebanon. We have had a lot of foreign countries want to use us in their games, but Iran is definitely the worst,” a Sunni woman told the Wall Street Journal.

Whether or not Iran is the worst, it certainly has a use for Lebanon. A provocative new article from the Asia Times columnist Spengler (who I’m told bears a striking resemblance to Tablet Magazine contributor David P. Goldman) argues that Iran’s alliance with Hezbollah and its short-range, low-accuracy missiles in southern Lebanon will only increase in strategic importance as Iran, which functions largely on stolen (and therefore highly vulnerable) software, continues to suffer economic damage due to Western hacking efforts.

So the United States has spoken out, Lebanese activists have spoken out, and even average Lebanese citizens have spoken out. Yet most Israeli officials, with a few exceptions (including the rule-proving one of Opposition Leader Tzipi Livni), are staying quiet (one IDF official did cannily refer to Ahmadinejad as “a man who is not Arab”). “We don’t need a campaign, because Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is creating a negative PR campaign for himself,” an Israeli diplomat said. “The Lebanese are this first to understand the severe ramifications this visit has for their country. We have no reason to intervene.”

Ahmadinejad Draws Large Crowds, Wary Officials in Lebanon [LAT]
U.S.: We Suspect Iran Doesn’t Have Lebanon’s Interest at Heart [Haaretz]
Lebanese Opinions Differ on Ahmadinejad Visit [WSJ]
What Really Bugs Iran [Asia Times]
Israel Silent Ahead of Ahmadinejad Visit to Lebanon: ‘He’s His Own Worst Enemy’ [Ynet]
Related: Cinders of Lebanon [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Iran: Stuxnet Isn’t Harming Nuclear Weapons Program

• U.S. diplomats are seizing on a PLO official’s willingness to recognize Israel this way at the pre-1967 borders as a welcome place to start negotiating. [JPost]

• The rift between Prime Minister Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Lieberman is growing, and Bibi’s biggest fear is moving so far to the center that Lieberman and his nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu come to define the right. [NYT]

• After Israeli security razed illegal outposts in the northern West Bank, settlers and Palestinians clashed. [JTA]

• Ahmadinejad says: Nuclear power plants for everyone! [Haaretz]

• This article. More at 10. [NYT]

• President Ahmadinejad arrives in Lebanon tomorrow even as officials there have tried to downplay the visit. [LAT]

• Excellent reporting on how New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino ended up talking to Brooklyn Hasidim in the first place. [NYT]

• Dubai police disclosed that two months ago someone who played “a key role in the killing” of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was arrested, though they won’t say for what, by whom, or what nationality he is. [Haaretz]

• Sanctions have taken a genuine toll even on Iran’s day-to-day economy. [WSJ]

• A committee-approved bill to require a national referendum for land cessions in the West Bank and the Golan still faces important opposition: From both Labor Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Likud Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin. [JPost]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu has another couple days to consider the U.S. plea to extend the construction freeze, as the Arab League meets Friday to debate President Abbas’s decision to withdraw from talks without an extension. [NYT]

• Speaking stateside, Opposition Leader Tzipi Livni slammed Netanyahu for waiting two years to engage the Palestinians. [Haaretz]

• A YouTube video of an Israeli soldier apparently dancing next to a blindfolded female Muslim prisoner has prompted a criminal inquiry. [NYT]

• What President Obama’s attempted Mideast dealmaking could net him. [NYT]

• Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Florida) has become one of the most outspoken critics, and therefore biggest targets, of the right. [NYT]

Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s general secretary, is credited by many Arabs and Westerners, including his adversaries, as among the greatest of all modern Arab statesmen and warriors, a man of probity and honor. Unlike other Arab leaders, he makes his threats against the Jewish state come true, sometimes even before the very eyes of his captivated audience, as when Hezbollah struck an Israeli boat in the first week of its summer 2006 war with Israel. “Look at the warship that has attacked Beirut, while it burns and sinks before your very eyes,” Nasrallah said on live television, as though he were directing a movie. This was one of his most famous information operations, but the fact is that everything Hezbollah does is part of its information-warfare strategy.

The Hezbollah T-shirts and lighters sold to tourists are Hezbollah media, and the coloring books that indoctrinate children into Nasrallah’s cult of personality are as much a part of Hezbollah’s information war as the party’s Al-Manar TV station. Even Hezbollah’s military operations are part of its larger information-warfare strategy. Kidnapping Israeli soldiers and firing missiles on civilian population centers are real military actions, but sinking a single ship is of little strategic value against a state with an army, lots of other boats, and even nuclear submarines. As an asymmetrical warrior, Nasrallah understands that even his most capable guerrilla units are no match for Israel, so he wages war against what he correctly perceives as the Jewish state’s center of gravity—public opinion. Hezbollah’s information operations are among the most sophisticated in the history of modern warfare because the Party of God is itself an information operation, designed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

What makes the relationship between Iran and Hezbollah seem complex is the fact that the Party of God is an information operation directed at several audiences at once. For instance, when Nasrallah says that Israel is like a spider’s web, flimsy and on the verge of being swept away by the winds of history, he is speaking not only to the Israelis. He is also addressing a Lebanese and a regional Sunni Arab audience and even an Iranian audience. And yet even with all the smoke and mirrors, the multiple audiences, and Nasrallah’s reputation, there is nothing ambiguous about the fact that Hezbollah is a projection of Iranian military power on the Eastern Mediterranean. There is nothing Lebanese about Hezbollah except the corporal host; its mind belongs to the Revolutionary Guard.

“During the 2006 war, we captured a number of Hezbollah documents, dealing with everything from religious ideology to military doctrine, the lion’s share of the important texts was clearly written by and for the IRGC and then translated into Arabic,” Shmuel Bar, a former Israeli intelligence officer, told me. “In human influence operations, Hezbollah’s modus operandi is the same as Iran’s.”

Bar, the founder of IntuView, an Israeli tech firm that does automated meaning-extraction from terrorist-related documents, likens it to how the Soviets produced material for their Arab clients, from Syria to Palestinian organizations. “We couldn’t understand the Arabic used to explain how to utilize a certain weapon, so we translated the Arabic into Russian, then went to our Russian linguists, who explained what it meant. The Iranians have done the same with Hezbollah. These documents were not authored by Hezbollah but translated from Farsi and prepared by the Iranians.”

The difference is that the Palestinians were notoriously difficult to control, with Yasser Arafat often playing the Soviets against his various Arab backers. “But unlike the Palestinian organizations of the 1970s and 1980s, which jockeyed back and forth between Syrian, Libyan, and Iraqi patrons,” Bar said, “Hassan Nasrallah cannot wake up one day and decide that he has chosen to side with someone else. Hezbollah is a surrogate; it has no existence without Iran.”

This interpretation of course runs counter to the standard account, which sees Hezbollah as a strictly Lebanese entity—a militia that may receive support from Iran, as well as Syria, but has steadily integrated itself into the fabric of Lebanese politics and society. Known as the Lebanonization thesis, this idea is itself a Hezbollah information operation, one whose target audience consists of the Western intelligentsia and, more dangerously, policymakers like the White House’s counterterrorism czar, John Brennan, who would like to find a way to engage Hezbollah but need a cover story that whitewashes Tehran’s real role. In this account, Hezbollah owes its existence less to Iran than to the Israeli occupation that brought it to life.

A Hezbollah poster prepared for the arrival of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Lebanon next week. The text reads “Welcome” in Arabic and Farsi.

“The popular view of Hezbollah’s origins sees it as a reaction to Israel’s 1982 invasion, which presumably radicalized the Shi’a,” said Tony Badran, a Hezbollah specialist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (and a Tablet Magazine contributor). It’s not just left-wing academics hostile to Israel and war correspondents stage-managed by Hezbollah’s media handlers who believe that Israel’s 18-year occupation, from 1982 to 2000, gave rise to the party. Even Israel’s current defense minister, Ehud Barak, argues that, “It was our presence [in southern Lebanon] that created Hizbullah”—a rationalization for his decision as prime minister to withdraw from Lebanon that dovetails perfectly with this Hezbollah info op.

In reality, Hezbollah’s conception pre-dates the Israeli invasion, Badran said. “Hezbollah is the result of an inter-factional struggle between two strands of the Iranian regime, who fought bitterly between 1979 and 1981. The faction that prevailed, the Islamic Republic Party, dubbed itself the Party of God and created its namesake in Lebanon, which was a critical theater for projecting power, including against its domestic enemies in Iran.”

There were also Iran’s Arab enemies, especially Saudi Arabia, and hence one of the audiences for Hezbollah is the Arab political arena, both the ruling regimes and the masses, which the Iranians hoped to set against each other. By continuing the fight to liberate Jerusalem, Tehran had picked up the banner of Arab nationalism that the Sunni Arab regimes had tossed by the wayside. Here was another reason for the Arab masses to despise their cruel and now obviously cowardly rulers—and admire a Shia and Persian power they might otherwise fear and detest: As the Arabs got weaker, Iran got stronger, even in the eyes of the Arabs.

In other words, what seems like Hezbollah’s war with Israel is in reality the Iranian Republican Guard’s 30-year war against almost everyone else. The Zionist entity in this contrived scenario is a little like the Washington Generals to Hezbollah’s Harlem Globetrotters—except that here it’s the eternal rival who sets the tempo and the Globetrotters who can’t get a break. Nasrallah boasts that he understands his Israeli enemy well, that he has made a study of their society and mores. But the fact that he says he reads biographies of all of Israel’s military and political leaders is just an index of how much time he has on his hands, hiding underground since the end of the 2006 war in fear of an Israeli assassination attempt. Hezbollah is never going to tip the balance of power against Israel, but that was never Iran’s main project. Understanding the political terrain of their real target audiences, the Republican Guard sought to create an effect that was best elicited by making war against the Jewish state.

Lebanon was fertile ground for such an info op, where any arms taken up against Israel are considered sacred. The Palestinians set the precedent in the 1970s by using Lebanon to wage war against the Zionists, so Iran could do the same, through Hezbollah. And yet now the Lebanese are confounded that Hezbollah calls anyone who doesn’t stand entirely behind the resistance and all of its actions an Israeli agent. But this turn of events is the logical outcome of the information war that Iran has been waging against Lebanon, with Lebanese connivance, for three decades.

Consider that it took most Lebanese some five years to recognize that the organization that pioneered the car-bombing during the 1980s might have had a hand in assassinating former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri with a massive car bomb. Few Lebanese believed that the resistance would ever turn their arms against fellow Lebanese before Hezbollah killed their Sunni and Druze neighbors in the streets of Beirut in May 2008. Those arms were pure, the Lebanese thought, because they had been directed at Israel—even as few asked what it means to “resist” an enemy whose enmity you have brought upon yourself with acts of terror. Iran can destroy Lebanon anytime it likes, either by getting Israel to retaliate massively, or directly through Hezbollah.

If Hezbollah engineers the coup against the Lebanese government that many dread—there is speculation that this is why Ahmadinejad is coming to Lebanon—and finally takes total control of the country, the most significant audience for this info op is domestic—not Lebanese but Iranian. The Iranian foreign legion that runs Lebanon has no problems slaughtering their Lebanese countrymen in the streets of Beirut, and the Iranian people should understand that the Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s supreme leader, and its president will do at least as much in the streets of Tehran to hold on to power.

Two themes have emerged in media coverage of Stuxnet: that it is a “cyber weapon” designed to disable critical infrastructure computer systems, and that its sophistication is such that only a powerful nation-state could have created it. The reality is that Stuxnet is something special, but not in the way that most observers have noted.

The weaponization of computer code and the targeting of adversary computer systems is not a new phenomenon. It is simply an extremely rare one. What is significant is that the Stuxnet code focuses on critical infrastructure systems, which for a long time were thought to be too arcane and obscure to be targeted by online subversives.

Some background: Stuxnet is a worm, which is a subset of a larger body of computer programs called malicious software, or “malware.” You are probably already familiar with the most common form of malware: the computer virus. Worms differ from viruses in that worms operate independently of other programs; a virus must attach itself to some legitimate program in order to spread. A worm may not damage a computer or network, but its replication may degrade bandwidth and consume CPU power to the detriment of legitimate uses; viruses inevitably corrupt or otherwise modify legitimate programs to do things other than what their creators intended or their users desire.

There is no evidence that Stuxnet targeted the Bushehr nuclear facility specifically. What it does is look for systems that contain a particular kind of Siemens Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) software: specialized software that interacts with mechanical controls, used to operate things like power plants, water treatment facilities, and oil pipelines. The Siemens equipment targeted by Stuxnet happens to be installed at facilities in Iran, as well as in Germany (where most of the infections have been reported), the United States, and other parts of the world.

Stuxnet was probably not created in response to any recent developments in Iran. Earliest indications are that it was first seen in the wild in the summer of 2009. Does that coincide with the delivery and installation of Siemens software in Bushehr? That information is not likely to be in the public domain, and it’s something that Siemens, which does a lot of business with Iran, would not want to divulge. But Siemens officials have been quick to point out that the company has nothing to do with Bushehr, which suggests that any Siemens software running at the facility is unlicensed. If that’s the case, the only way Bushehr became a specific target of Stuxnet would be if someone who knew Bushehr is running Siemens software passed that information to Stuxnet’s creator or creators.

Siemens also does a fair bit of business in Israel, in both the public and private sectors, which would make Israeli access to the information needed to create Stuxnet fairly straightforward. Would Siemens work cooperatively with an Israeli organization that wanted to impact Siemens systems in specific Iranian locations? Software companies come to all sorts of arrangements with nations in order to do business with them. The alternative to not cooperating is often the inability to do business overseas. You could make the argument that such an arrangement is coercion, or in the case of trying to prevent a regime like Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, you could say it was the right thing to do.

Creating malware is like creating other types of computer programs: You have a specific goal for what you want the program to accomplish, and you write instructions in a language that the computer will understand to accomplish those goals. Libraries of pre-written code exist so that you don’t have to write common functions from scratch. There is actually a market for malicious code—like modern Willie Suttons, criminals know that cybercrime is where the money is. Successful malware of this sort is fairly sophisticated, as evidenced by how often it sneaks past anti-virus products and how much money their masters are able to obtain from both individuals and large financial institutions.

Stuxnet is not run-of-the-mill malware, which is why so many are attributing its creation to a sophisticated, well-funded, probably state-sponsored organization. But building malware that stands out from the run-of-the-mill is not a particularly expensive or herculean effort. The assembly of such parts is not for amateurs, but the necessary skills are not as scarce as some would lead you to believe. What leads people to think that a very powerful actor is behind Stuxnet is that so many amateurs churn out so much crappy malware on a daily basis that anything sufficiently unique is a rarity and treated as such.

Perhaps the most important feature of Stuxnet has nothing to do with its construction, technical capabilities, or its speculative link to a contentious real-world situation, but the fact that it is much more in-line with traditional military or intelligence thinking than most malicious activity noted online to date. Malicious online activity linked to a real-world political-military situation is not new. Whether it’s a plane crash, an accidental bombing, or an all-out war, such attacks almost never cause any irreparable damage, and in most cases it becomes clear that the attackers targeted any system they could find; they did not take the time to identify and focus their energies on what is commonly referred to as a “legitimate military target.” Stuxnet does nothing but seek out legitimate targets, in the context of total war. It is an indicator that, at a minimum, confirms what observers of the information warfare field have suspected for some time: When the enemy comes, he’ll turn out the lights first. The worst-case scenario is that the ability to negatively impact critical infrastructure is becoming democratized, and claims about being able to do things like shut down the Internet won’t be far-fetched but instead commonplace.

It is not unrealistic to think that the authors of Stuxnet are Israeli. Like the United States, Israel has long been interested in developing and deploying cyber capabilities in its war-fighting arsenal. Like the United States, it also has seen those with advanced technical talent migrate from the armed forces and intelligence services into the private sector. It is also not unrealistic to think that Israel has access to the kind of information that would be required to target Siemens SCADA software. So, we have the means and the opportunity, now we need to look at the question of motive.

If the existence, much less the successful operation, of Bushehr is unacceptable to Israel, the means available to destroy, disable, or delay its launch must be evaluated. I cannot speak to the effectiveness of Israel’s capabilities in the first two categories, but Stuxnet is an excellent way to delay—even if briefly—activity at Bushehr.

For all its sophistication, though, Stuxnet is not really that effective a digital weapon. Digital weapons are not analogous to just any physical weapons; they’re disposable sniper rifles, not cluster bombs. They are meant to perform specific tasks, and because the arms race between cyber defenders and attackers is so close, attackers go into battle assuming that their weapons will work only once. To that end, Stuxnet may not have been designed to kill, but simply to disorient: cyber tear gas, if you will. It is also sophisticated enough, it is targeted enough, to make the sufficiently suspicious in Iran wonder if there is in fact not someone on the inside who has passed information about Bushehr’s SCADA systems to Israel.

Stuxnet may be Israeli-by-proxy. It is not clear to me that enough data exists to point to the ethnicity or country of origin of Stuxnet’s author or authors, but it is not unheard of for malware to have words, phrases, or names written inside the code that suggest its author wrote in a given language. Linguistic clues like the inclusion of the word “Myrtus” in Stuxnet’s code are an interesting hint, but it almost seems too obvious by half. Regardless, it would not be the first time that a nation had contracted out its offensive cyber capabilities.

The strategic advantages Israel gains via Stuxnet—regardless of whether or not it has any connection to it at all—are significant. Without launching a single aircraft, without firing a shot, without endangering the life of a single soldier, Stuxnet has provided Israel with a means to slow down activities at Bushehr, a means to occupy the time and energy of the Iranian intelligence and security apparatus, and a means to enhance its reputation—deserved or not—as a player in the realm of cyber conflict.

That is what we are really witnessing here in the Stuxnet case: the evolution of conflict. Nations do not have friends or enemies, they have allies and adversaries. The more connected we all become at local, national, and global levels, the more the destruction brought on by conventional war becomes undesirable. Effects-Based Operations, the early 1990s idea that military and nonmilitary methods had to be combined for a desired effect, has lost its luster in military circles, but the reasoning is sound enough: If you’re not actually going to bomb your adversaries back into the Stone Age, you don’t want to destroy the power plant, you just want to turn it off, because eventually you want the lights to come back.

To a large extent it doesn’t matter who was behind the creation and release of Stuxnet; that it compromised computer systems at Bushehr is almost beside the point. Its mere existence provides both sides interested in Bushehr with ammunition to support their own agendas. The Iranians get to feel both smug and scared in that Stuxnet probably won’t neutralize activity at Bushehr (Stuxnet will naturally not be the cause of any delays, and the resumption of work will be quickly and loudly promoted), but the fact that it looks for systems they have may be enough to convince their security apparatus that someone on the inside cannot be trusted. Adversaries of Iran—whether they wrote Stuxnet or not—get to look alternately very scary in their ability to know what sort of systems are running in Bushehr and fairly inept in that they let a digital weapon get loose in public. Both the mullahs and their adversaries get a boogie man; both also get plausible deniability.

Michael Tanji is a former supervisory intelligence officer who worked on information warfare issues at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He is the editor of Threats in the Age of Obama.

Complaints about the dubious deal were brought to Uzi Arad, the national security adviser who, together with his boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, rarely misses an opportunity to sound alarms over the threat of Iran destroying the Jewish state with a second Holocaust. Arad shrugged the situation off, explaining that the matter was neither under his watch nor part of his turf; instead it was for the Ministry of Finance. But that ministry also did nothing.

The Siemens deal was interpreted at the time as a typical Israeli bureaucratic entanglement—or an example of official Israeli hypocrisy. But with the discovery of Stuxnet, the malicious software—a “worm”—that was eating and damaging Iran’s nuclear computers and slowing down at least two key installations (the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and the nuclear reactor at Bushehr), a third possibility suggests itself: a hidden connection between the Israeli intelligence community and a German company that was selling advanced machinery to Israel’s most dangerous adversary.

Computer experts agree that the Stuxnet worm was created by a powerful, resourceful, and technologically skillful organization—and not by freelance hackers. The worm contaminated Siemens control software that was sold by the company to Iranian civilian projects but somehow found its way into its nuclear sites despite U.N. Security Council sanctions.

The major question is how the creators of Stuxnet did it. There are a few possibilities. One is that the intelligence agency behind the attack recruited a Siemens programmer who sold his secrets for financial gain or for other reasons. Another explanation could be that Siemens, suffering from a degree of liability and guilt—Germans perpetrating a second Holocaust—willingly cooperated with Israeli intelligence, which in return offered Siemens a way out of being implicated if and when the worm was discovered.

This last seems to be the least plausible scenario, since the German corporation admitted that 15 of its customers have been affected—including chemical and power plants and production facilities. Five of the 15 companies affected have their headquarters in Germany, while the others are based in the United States, other Western European countries, and Asia. But even if Siemens itself didn’t cooperate, it’s also possible that the BND—Germany’s foreign espionage agency, which is a strong ally of both the Israeli Mossad and the CIA and is a partner in the battle against Iranian nuclear program—was somehow involved in the operation.

Whatever the facts are, Siemens has invested extensively in Israeli high-tech and industrial companies.

According to computer security experts, the worm managed to penetrate the Siemens software and find its way into Iran via Taiwan. Two and a half years ago, the writers of Stuxnet broke the security protections of two Taiwanese firms and planted the worm on their equipment. One, JMicron, is a small and relatively unknown company. The other, Realtek Semiconductors, is large and fairly well-known in its field. A few months later, both the Mossad and the CIA filed complaints to the Taiwanese government that Iranian agents had penetrated the market and acquired 100 transducers, which were secretly shipped to Tehran. The transducers, an essential component for operating centrifuges in Natanz, were originally manufactured in Europe and then sold to a company in Taiwan, which then sold them to Iran’s defense ministry.

Can it be that the complaints about the transducers were a decoy to divert attention from the original Mossad or CIA break-in via Taiwan? In the dark world of secret intelligence operations, characterized by disinformation and webs of lies, everything is possible.

There could be, however, a simpler version of what happened.

Iran’s intelligence minister said on Saturday that authorities had arrested several “nuclear spies” who were working to derail Tehran’s nuclear program through cyberspace.

Without saying how many people had been arrested or when, Heydar Moslehi, the intelligence minister, was quoted on state television’s website as saying Iran had “prevented the enemies’ destructive activity.” He added that intelligence agents had discovered the “destructive activities of the arrogant (Western powers) in cyberspace, and different ways to confront them have been designed and implemented.” Behind Moslehi’s vague words was the suggestion that the enemies of Iran had planted the worm using the techniques of classical intelligence work: recruiting Iranian agents and providing them with the malicious software.

If indeed Israeli intelligence independently (or in a joint operation with its U.S. counterpart) is behind this unique and unprecedented cyberattack, they will never admit it. These are the rules of the espionage game. You spy, you steal secrets, you bug phone lines, you plant viruses that sabotage, and you even kill, but you never take the responsibility, even if you are caught red-handed. A worldwide search is now under way for clues to the identity of the creators and spreaders of the worm.

Last week the New York Times reported the discovery of the word “Myrtus” in the Stuxnet code, which corresponds to the Hebrew word for the Bible’s Queen Esther. The article noted that the Book of Esther describes “the Jews preempt[ing] a Persian plot to destroy them.” The computer security firm Symantec analyzed another data point about the worm. It found the digits 19790509. This is thought to be an infection marker, which, if set correctly, allows infection to occur. The digits appear to point to the date of May 9, 1979.

While a variety of historical events occurred on May 9, 1979, one of them, according to Wikipedia, is that “Habib Elghanian was executed by a firing squad in Tehran sending shock waves through the closely knit Iranian Jewish community. [Elghanian] was the [president of Tehran’s Jewish society] and the first Jew and one of the first civilians to be executed by [Iran’s post-revolutionary] Islamic government. This prompted the mass exodus of the once 100,000 member strong Jewish community of Iran which continues to this day.”

These explanations have an anecdotal value. When you plan such an operation, you check and recheck and double check each digit and each letter. Israeli and U.S. intelligence are not so sloppy as to leave behind such clumsy fingerprints. If they wanted to engage in a mind game, they would have done it in a more amusing and sophisticated manner.

The evidence pointing to Israel remains circumstantial. Israel is threatened by Iran, whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, continues to talk about the need for history to wipe the Jewish state from the face of earth. Israelis fear—rightly or wrongly—that once Iran has nuclear weapons, Israelis might be victims of a nuclear attack. The Israeli government has attempted to mobilize international diplomatic pressure on Iran and utilize friendly intelligence agencies to collect data on Iran’s nuclear program. Since Meir Dagan was appointed as head of Mossad eight years ago and assigned to coordinate Israeli efforts, Iran’s nuclear program has topped Israel’s list of intelligence priorities.

Israel has recruited top agents among the upper echelon of Iran’s nuclear scientists and directors. Alone and together with other international espionage agencies, Israeli intelligence has been trying to sabotage Iranian facilities in order to slow down progress toward a bomb. Iran’s uranium enrichment complex is the prime target for any future Israeli or U.S. military assault. A glimpse into the shadow war against the Iranian nuclear program was provided in the sections of James Risen’s 2006 book State of War, in which he detailed joint Mossad and CIA plans to sabotage the electrical grids leading to Iranian nuclear sites—plans that failed to materialize.

Over the past decade, Mossad and CIA planners successfully set up front and dummy companies all over the world with the aim of gaining the trust of Iranian purchasing networks and then selling them flawed components—a method known in intelligence parlance as “poisoning” enemy systems. So, why not try to “poison” Iranian systems further by planting malicious worms?

Israeli intelligence was one of the first in the world to understand the importance of computers and to apply them for military-intelligence use. Rafi Eitan, a former Mossad agent who specialized in covert operations and served as a chief adviser to several prime ministers, told me that already in the late 1970s he realized the significance of the evolving Internet and the virtual world for intelligence-gathering operations. Since then, Israel’s unit 8200 of the military intelligence branch—the equivalent of the National Security Agency in the United States—has been at the forefront of military efforts into technological attacks. Unit 8200 pioneered sigint (signals intelligence—listening to, intercepting, and deciphering enemy communication lines), elint (electronic intelligence), visint (visual intelligence—the collection of data and imagery from satellites and reconnaissance flights), and, in the last decade, netint.

Netint is the art of using cyberspace for intelligence purposes: You engage and try to recruit enemy agents by emails and chat rooms, send coded messages, “poison” computers. A few months ago, General Amos Yadlin, the commander of Israeli Military Intelligence, gave a public lecture at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. His topic was the changing nature of intelligence in the 21st century. The virtual world, he said, is important to the daily work of intelligence in two ways: defending one’s secrets and assaulting the enemy. His lecture was delivered long before the world learned about Stuxnet.

Yossi Melman is a senior writer on strategic affairs, intelligence, and nuclear issues for Haaretz. He is writing a book about the Mossad’s wars in the last decade.

• The new Text/Context, which is published in a partnership between The Jewish Week and Nexbook Inc., has dropped. [Text/Context]

In a late article today, Mideast columnist Lee Smith profiles José María Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister who is now a major international actor in defending Israel. [Tablet Magazine]

• Noting that President Ahmadinejad is visiting Lebanon next month, influential columnist Aluf Benn has an idea: Kidnap him. [Haaretz]

• Arthur Penn, director of one of the most important films in American history, Bonnie and Clyde (to understand why, read this), died at 88. [NYT]

• They’re young. They’re in love. They’re Polish neo-Nazi skinheads who turned out to be Jewish and are now practicing Orthodox Jews. [JPost]

• Borat is please to explain how great and impressive Israeli coalition government function for benefit of mankind. [Haaretz]

• David Miliband, one-time foreign secretary and older brother of new Labour leader Ed, is backing away from high-profile politics in deference to his victorious sibling. [AP/NYT]

• Jewish Fiction.net. Bookmark it.

• Don Draper’s love interest on this season of Mad Men is (like in season one) a Jew. [LAT]

• Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon see their best hope for returning to the land not in a peace deal but in continued violence that eventually leads to Israel caving. [Christian Science Monitor]

• In 2000, as peace talks faltered, Yasser Arafat ordered Hamas to conduct terrorist attacks. [JPost]

• Jewish groups and U.S. museums are coming into conflict over art restitution claims, reports frequent Tablet Magazine contributor Robin Cembalest. [ARTnews]

• What is up with Jews not really drinking much alcohol? [Forward]

• There are more American Jews living in poverty than ever before. [Jewish Week]

• Why the rest of America is going kosher. [TNR’s The Book]

• A profile/interview of controversial Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. [The Independent]

• 63 percent of Jewish Israelis believe non-Orthodox converts ought to be considered Jews. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

• Rookie New York Mets first baseman Ike Davis’ paternal grandfather was a U.S. soldier who helped liberate a German concentration camp. His maternal grandparents survived one of those camps. [NYT]

• President Ahmadinejad will symbolically hurl a rock at Israel when he visits Lebanon next month. Be a terrible thing were said rock to ricochet off a tree branch and co fly right back at him. [JPost/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Hussein Ibish advocates an “informal compromise” to the settlement issue—which he frames as U.S.-Israeli as much as Palestinian-Israeli—that would allow for certain building but let President Abbas save some face. [Now Lebanon]

• Guess who loves Peace Now’s iPhone app that shows all the West Bank settlements? West Bank settlers! [Arutz Sheva]

See how many hip musicians you can recognize in this video of Duck Sauce’s “Barbra Streisand.” And what do we think of this Babs impersonator?

• President Obama gave over a large portion of his U.N. General Assembly speech to the peace process. [Laura Rozen]

• He also gave some of it over to chastising Iranian President Ahmadinejad for having said, “The majority of the American people, as well as most nations and politicians around the world, agree with this view,” “this view” being that some parts of the U.S. government had a hand in 9/11. [LAT]

• Yet Iran also seemed to encourage nuclear talks. [WSJ]

• Nine Jewish activists from America, Israel, Britain, and elsewhere departed Turkish-controlled Cyprus for Gaza in a flotilla reprise. [Reuters/NYT]

• Eddie Fisher, who got Elizabeth Taylor to convert, died at 82. [NYT]

• In the midst of his usual grandiose rhetoric, President Ahmadinejad, also in New York (it’s U.N. General Assembly week), predicted that talks over Iran’s nuclear program would soon resume. [LAT]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu pledged to put any Palestinian peace deal up to a referendum. [WSJ]

• The assassination of a West Bank Hamas operative has raised questions about the extent of Palestinian Authority cooperation with Israel. [WP]

• In New York, Secretary of State Clinton tried to coax Arab nations to offer more financial support to the P.A. and more general support to the talks (even as her husband gave the talks an optimistic 50 percent chance). [WP]

• Some excellent reporting on how American Jews are actively helping to sponsor Israeli settlements, including those not right near the Green Line—in this case, L.A. Jews and the town of Ariel. [Jewish Journal]

• A Palestinian Authority court confirmed that it is criminal for Palestinians to sell land to Jews or Jewish companies. Oh, yeah, and the penalty is death. Wait, what? [Haaretz]

• Rahm will (probably) run. [Politico]

• Ray Takeyh argues that President Ahmadinejad is in fact delusional, and the only real solution to the Iranian problem is the eventual takeover by the forces behind the Green Movement. [WP]

• Gentiles love mezuzahs! Can’t get enough of ‘em. [NYT]

• So Jewish pitcher Jason Marquis decided to pitch on Yom Kippur. The result? He was yanked after getting only one out in the first inning, having given up six earned runs. As a Nationals fan: Thanks a lot, Jason. [Kaplan’s Korner]

Perhaps you recognize the particular Old Jew who is Telling this Joke?

Abbas did not take this lying down. “He who does not represent the Iranian people, suppresses the Iranian people, and took power by fraud, has no right to talk about Palestine, its chairman or his representatives.”

We know Ahmadinejad is against Israel. But beyond the pure ideology behind the talks (the fact that talking to Israel acknowledges its existence and, implicitly, legitimacy), why is Ahmadinejad so down on them? Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, backing up Abbas’s line, hit the nail on the head: “The Iranians have been taking this aggressive line against the Palestinian Authority all along,” he said over the weekend, “and they have been supporting Hamas, the opponent of the Palestinian Authority.”

This is about Hamas, Iran’s proxy, and its rivalry with Abbas’s more moderate Palestinian Authority. Hamas, under tacit Iranian support, has tried to sabotage the talks with a series of West Bank attacks, including one last week that killed four Jews; these attacks have in turn prompted the P.A.’s arrest, under Fayyad’s lead, of hundreds of Hamas operatives and sympathizers. If the talks are seen as bringing good things to Palestinian residents of the West Bank—a big if, of course, but that is at least the idea—then that makes Hamas look bad. More importantly, though, Hamas’s (and Iran’s) ideology is one that essentially cannot accept the state of Israel.

But there is more: No matter what the talks and concessions mean for the P.A., for Israel they almost certainly mean increased U.S. support: In fact, Israel is reportedly seeking an arms package should it make peace Abbas. You do not have to be a regional expert to know which rival would be most threatened by further U.S. support: Iran. (Indeed, an expert close to the Obama administration has already suggested buttressing U.S. military aid and support to Israel in order to deter an Israeli strike on Iran.) Palestinian peace, the Iranian nuclear question: They are all connected, particularly given that Arab states like Jordan and Egypt—which are energetically backing the direct talks—share Israel’s fear of Iran, in a way that actually makes peace more likely.

It is easy to see the Israeli-Palestinian situation as a fairly binary one. One side wants borders here; the other wants them over there. One side wants a right of return for Palestinian refugees; the other doesn’t. One side wants Jerusalem to be one thing; the other wants it to be a different thing. But this simple view is immediately and hugely complicated by the fact that there is no one Palestinian leadership—Hamas is arguably more popular in the West Bank than Abbas’s Fatah, and in fact rules Gaza—and then further complicated by the Iranian nuclear issue, which is Netanyahu’s main focus and which affects how Hamas acts.

The good news this byzantine web brings is that, when there are enough actors with enough competing interests, occasionally you can bring a few of them together around a common goal. Regarding Iran, that is the peace-processors’ hope—and Iran’s fear.

Abbas vs. Ahmadinejad [JPost]
Day of Anti-Israel Protest Reveals Iran’s Internal Rift [WSJ]
Hamas Attacks Show Group Is Still Strong in West Bank [WP]
U.S. May Give Israel Arms in Exchange for Concessions [JPost]
Iranian Threat May Be Boon for U.S. Peace Talks [WP]
Earlier: Expert Argues for Accepting Nuclear Iran

• Do we really need that second day of Rosh Hashanah? [JTA]

• President Obama, as seen through the eyes of President Ahmadinejad’s supporters. (Eerily similar to President Obama as seen through the eyes of Tea Partiers.) [Guardian]

• The PLO Envoy complained that Yale’s recent conference on anti-Semitism was “racist propaganda.” [JTA]

• Our condolences go out to parenting columnist Marjorie Ingall on the loss of her grandmother. [Marjorie Ingall]

• Tel Aviv has been nominated for Sexiest Place on Earth for gay travelers. It is going up against Toronto (really?), Barcelona, Vegas (really??), and Rio. [Ynet]

Three-day weekend. How does it feel?

MARC TRACY, Tablet Magazine: David, in your comment on Dan’s piece, you said that “Jew hatred is part of the gospel of Islam and the practice of all Muslim states in the world today.” By contrast, a premise of Dan’s article is that there are in the world a relatively small group of Islamists—fundamentalists who subscribe to a violent, anti-Semitic, mutant strain of Islam—and, for the most part, ordinary Muslims who do no such thing, and that, contrary to the arguments of writers like Andrew McCarthy, most American Muslims are not Islamists. How do you respond to that? Is the problem with Islam or with Islamists? And if it’s with Islamists, how influential are Islamists in America? Are the people behind the Islamic center Islamists?

DAVID HOROWITZ: Like many Jews who are in denial about the existential threat to Israel and to Jews generally from the Islamic world, Daniel Luban thinks that the radical, Jew-hating element in Islam is relatively small, and consequently the threat is a pathology, which people like him call “Islamophobia.” Among such deniers there is a notable absence of attention to what the Islamic world actually does and says in relation to Jews or how seriously Muslims take the word of their God, who refers to Jews as “apes and pigs” and calls for their extermination (as per this infamous and well-known saying of the prophet: “The day of Judgment will come when Muslims fight the Jews and kill them”). Here are some corrective observations:

After the Sept. 11 attacks there were several public opinion surveys conducted in the Muslim world about Muslim views of Osama Bin Laden and his terror war against “crusaders and Jews.” The number of Muslims who supported Osama and the attacks ranged from a low 10 percent, or 150 million Muslims, to 50 percent, or 750 million (the latter figure coming from a poll conducted by Al Jazeera). These cannot be dismissed as insignificant minorities, even if reduced by a factor of 10.

The Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—head of a nation of 70 million and a man who claims to speak in the name of Islam—has called for wiping Israel from the face of the earth, a comment seconded by a former prime minister of Malaysia. Leaders of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank are openly opposed to the existence of the Jewish state, officially celebrate mass murderers of Jewish civilians as “martyrs” and “saints,” and run a school system that teaches kindergarteners to hate Jews and aspire to kill them. The charter of the Islamist terror organization Hamas calls for Israel’s extinction in the name of Allah, while the head of Hezbollah, the largest terrorist army in the world, armed with 30,000-plus rockets courtesy of Syria and Iran, has called for the liquidation of Israel and the extermination of the Jews.

That’s the open and frank admission side of the ledger, the millions of Muslims with genocidal designs on the Jews. Copping to genocide by the way is something that Hitler never dared to do. He thought it prudent to keep the Final Solution hidden until it was a fait accompli, lest he incite civilized opposition to his plan. In contrast, the demand for a second Holocaust has been trumpeted from the Islamic rooftops, and there has been no official opposition from the Islamic world. This is a reasonable indication that these open calls are the tip of a very ugly iceberg of Jew hatred that runs the length and breadth of Muslim ummah. There are some 57 Islamic nations in the world, and not one of them has condemned these genocidal proclamations. Au contraire. They have added their own condemnations of Israeli crimes in hundreds of U.N. resolutions they sponsored. But there is not a single U.N. resolution condemning 60 years of terrorist acts by Palestinians and Arabs, beginning with the creation of the Fedayeen in 1949. Not a single one.

The same silence over genocidal intentions blankets virtually all the mosques in America, at least 80 percent of which are funded by the rulers of Saudi Arabia, the most bigoted promoter of jihadism and its Jew-hating ideology in the world today. The same can be said of the principal Muslim organizations in the United States, the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

All of these organizations are elements of the Muslim Brotherhood network, which spawned al-Qaida and Hamas. (CAIR is a direct spinoff of Hamas.) None of them have condemned Hezbollah and Hamas or their patrons in Teheran. The same is true of the Muslim Students Association, representing most Muslim students in American universities, which is also a part of the Muslim Brotherhood network. The Muslim Students Association is currently conducting a nationwide campaign to support the Islamic crusade to eliminate the Jewish state, which it refers to as “occupied Palestine.” When I confronted a former officer of the Muslim Student Association on the University of California, San Diego, campus and asked her if she were for or against a genocide of the Jews she said, “For it.” Refusal to condemn Hezbollah and Hamas, which in my experience is universal among Muslim Students Associations, is tantamount to such an endorsement. (You can see our exchange here.) The same Judeophobic campaign is now a principal focus of the secular left, although these secularists don’t seem to fully grasp the implications of their support. All these elements are also supporting the Ground Zero mosque whose leader also finds Islamic terrorism “too complex” to condemn.

These are troubling indicators of evil afoot. Dismissing them as figments of a conspiratorial paranoia is a sign of intellectual bankruptcy and a form of psychological denial. It is not an argument that anyone, let alone a Jew, should take seriously.

DANIEL LUBAN: David Horowitz’s response to my article is primarily devoted to reciting a familiar litany of examples of anti-Semitism in Muslim-majority countries. Many of his arguments in this regard are cherry-picked or otherwise misleading, but I won’t spend time answering them, for they are irrelevant to the point of my piece. My argument was not about attitudes toward Jews in Syria or Saudi Arabia, but about attitudes toward Muslims in America.

Even if I were to concede all of Horowitz’s arguments about the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Muslim-majority countries, this would not answer the central question, which is whether the theories of the American “anti-jihadi” movement are a sane response to the situation in which we find ourselves. If they are not, if—as I argued—they represent a kind of bigotry and paranoia akin to anti-Semitism, Know-Nothingism, or McCarthyism, it is not particularly relevant whether equally paranoid or odious views are prevalent elsewhere in the world.

For Horowitz’s defense of the “anti-jihadis” to hold water, he needs to show not merely that many Muslims in other countries hold objectionable views, but that Muslim-Americans are actually engaged in the kind of conspiracy against the United States that people like Andrew McCarthy and Pamela Geller posit. On this count, his arguments are remarkably thin. The primary piece of evidence he offers to show that most Muslim-Americans are genocidal anti-Semites is that not enough of them for his liking are willing to publicly denounce Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist groups.

One does not need to be fond of either group to notice how shaky the logic is here. Peter King, the hawkish New York congressman who has been a leader of the anti-mosque campaign, is a longtime apologist for the IRA, and I similarly imagine that it would be nearly impossible to get New York Jewish politicians like Sen. Chuck Schumer or Rep. Anthony Weiner to publicly label as “terrorists” Zionist militant groups like the Irgun or the Stern Gang. What follows from this? That King, Schumer, and Weiner are terrorist conspirators against the United States? I suspect the reason that even many Muslim-Americans who privately abhor Hamas and Hezbollah’s attacks on civilians are reluctant to “denounce” them to David Horowitz is that they realize, correctly, that he will simply pocket these denunciations and use them in the service of a broader Likudnik agenda that they find abhorrent.

The YouTube video that Horowitz posts is unintentionally revealing in this regard. A UCSD student confronts Horowitz over his allegation that her campus Muslim Students Association has financial ties to terrorist groups and presses him to provide some evidence for this claim. Rather than doing so, Horowitz—who is nothing if not a savvy showman—quickly changes the subject to the student’s own personal attitudes toward Hamas. Of course, whether an individual college student is willing to publicly denounce Hamas has nothing whatsoever to do with the factual question of whether the UCSD student association has financial links to terrorist groups, which Horowitz is content to insinuate without providing any evidence.

To determine whether people like McCarthy and Geller represent a measured response to a real threat or a hysterical response to a conspiracy of their own imagining, it might be helpful to examine the central claims that they make. Let’s leave aside the most obviously insane bits (Bill Ayers is the real author of Obama’s memoir; Malcolm X is Obama’s real father) and focus on their views about the Muslim threat to the United States. Does Horowitz really believe that the goal of the large majority of Muslim-Americans is “to supplant American constitutional democracy with sharia law”? Does he really believe that Muslims who privately live according to religious values within their own communities are doing so purely instrumentally, as a way to take over the country and impose these values on everyone else? Does he really believe that the president is a “neocommunist” who is secretly working in cahoots with these Islamists to implement a shared totalitarian vision in the United States?

If he genuinely does believe these things, I admit that there simply isn’t much more that I can say to him. But if he doesn’t—as I suspect he doesn’t—then I have to wonder how he feels about the fact that these views and those similar to them are rapidly becoming ubiquitous on the American right. Many hawks seem to feel that the Pamela Gellers of the world may be nutty and misguided, but that they make useful shock troops for fighting these political battles, so it’s best simply to hold one’s nose and make good use of them. It seems to me that there is something very dangerous in this logic, and that the anti-jihadis—egged on by conservative elites like Newt Gingrich, Bill Kristol, and Horowitz himself—are leading the country into a very ugly place.

MARC TRACY: David, I think Daniel is conceding—or if not conceding, at least saying that for the sake of argument he would concede—your point about Muslim anti-Semitism in other parts of the world, but he is challenging you on the question of Muslim anti-Semitism in the United States specifically. Can it happen here and does it happen here? Is the mosque a manifestation of it, or a potential manifestation?

DAVID HOROWITZ: Daniel Luban has failed to understand my comments and therefore dodged the issue between us. A sign held up at the counter-demonstration by supporters of the Ground Zero mosque summarizes the real nub of our contention: “Groundless Fear Is the Real Enemy.” Is it?

The point of my response was not that there is “anti-Semitism” and not just “in Muslim countries” but that there is a global Muslim movement for a genocide of the Jews, beginning with the destruction of the Jewish state; and that this movement was spawned by the Muslim Brotherhood and is supported by the major Muslim organizations in the United States including the main supporters of the Ground Zero mosque, and wittingly or unwittingly, enabled by their allies on the political left.

Luban does not challenge a single fact I presented, which shows how deaf, dumb, and blind critics of the “anti-jihadis,” as Luban calls us, can be. Luban studiously ignores the elaborate documentation of the political beliefs and aims of the Muslim Brotherhood network and of Islam itself, which we have presented and instead attempts to draw ludicrous parallels designed to show a moral equivalence between Jewish and Muslim terrorists and their apologists. The difference is obvious to all but the politically obtuse. When some Jews commit acts that are heinous, Jews condemn them, they don’t build $100-million monuments on or near the site where the crimes were committed. Only Islam would build a mosque—the Dome of the Rock—right on top of the holiest place of another religion and then name a terrorist army (the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade) after it. The silence of the central organizations of the Muslim world both here and abroad in the face of atrocities committed in the name of their God and their refusal to condemn by name those who commit them is both deafening and telling; and the failure of Daniel Luban and the left generally to appreciate this is ominous for Americans and Jews.

MARC TRACY: Dan, this one’s for you. In your piece, you credit Christopher Caldwell with providing one of the “more sophisticated treatments” of the Islamicization of Europe. I want your reaction to something Caldwell wrote on Slate this week:

There is no Christian equivalent—either for sophistication or influence—to the body of revolutionary political thought that arose among the Sunni Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the middle of the last century, or in Iran in the Age of Khomeini. To say this is not to confuse Islam and Islamism, or to imply that Islam is always and everywhere a violent religion. Nor is it to deny that the scriptural barriers to Christian violence are notoriously easy to breach. But Islam is equipped, as Christianity is not, with explicit contemporary doctrines of political violence.

While you and David could both find things in that paragraph to buttress your respective cases, I’d like to challenge you: Isn’t Caldwell correct that Islamic fundamentalism has uniquely strong resonance today? And, if so, isn’t the comparison of Islamophobia to anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism facile, as Judaism and Catholicism are not associated with similarly powerful fundamentalisms? (Yes, the Stern Gang existed, but its ideology was never as widespread and potent and universally violent as jihadism.) Even if most Muslims aren’t Islamists, doesn’t the unique resonance of Islamic fundamentalism pose a problem to the building of an Islamic center so close to the site of Islamic fundamentalism’s most notorious atrocity?

DANIEL LUBAN: Unlike the crop of self-proclaimed “Islam analysts” that has sprung up since Sept. 11—most of whom seem to think that their ability to use words like “sharia” and “jihad” in a sentence makes them experts on the finer points of Islamic theology—I will not pretend to anything more than an interested layman’s knowledge of Islam as a religion. For that reason I won’t speculate on the extent to which violent Islamist groups are rooted in true, or false, or mainstream, or deviant interpretations of Islam. I do wish that those on the other side would similarly resist the urge to issue authoritative pronouncements on subjects they know nothing about. (Lee Smith, with whom I frequently disagree on these issues, recently had a good piece in Tablet Magazine picking apart the absurd interpretations of “sharia” put forth by mosque opponents.)

But on the question of whether the “unique resonance of Islamic fundamentalism” poses a problem for the building of the Islamic center: First, what “resonance” are we talking about? That the center would resonate with and embolden violent Muslim radicals? I would expect quite the opposite. It is likely that radicals would be disgusted both with the center’s conciliatory theology and with the overall message it sends—namely, that the Unites States is so welcoming to Muslims that it is willing to let them practice their faith anywhere they choose, even a few blocks from the site of the Sept. 11 attacks. It is equally likely that these radicals are rejoicing at the current controversy, realizing that every Islamophobic speech or rally or ad simply bolsters their claim that the United States is at war with Islam itself. In fact, the only extremists that the project seems to have “resonated” with are the right-wingers who believe—or at least pretend to—that the building would be a “9/11 victory monument” intended as a beachhead for sharia law in the United States.

“Islamic fundamentalism” is also a troublesome term, since it often seems to be applied (along with similar terms like “radical Islam” and “Islamofascism”) to any Muslims whom the labeler doesn’t like, regardless of whether their politics are either violent or rooted in religion. Regardless, it is obvious that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Daisy Khan do not qualify under even the loosest definition of “Islamic fundamentalism,” despite the best efforts of their opponents to paint them as radicals. (Jeffrey Goldberg, another writer with whom I frequently disagree, has written persuasively on the ludicrousness of these charges.)

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that many of the mosque opponents themselves subscribe to a form of hardline Likudnik politics and therefore regard any view to the left of Norman Podhoretz as proof of radical anti-Semitism. We must also note the wild guilt-by-association tenor of the campaign against Rauf—as Robert Wright put it, a typical charge is that “Rauf’s wife has an uncle who used to be ‘a leader’ of a mosque that now has a Web site that links to the Web site of an allegedly radical organization.” It strikes me that similar chains of association could have been used to tie virtually any Jew in 1950s America to communism—you yourself may never have been a party member, but surely you had a cousin who had a wife who had a brother who was a member.

In any case, let’s accept that there are some significant, disturbing, and violent strains within Islam (regardless of what we call them and how extensive we think they are). Two points here. First, the fact that such radical elements do exist does not license us to descend into bigotry or conspiracy theories, just as the fact that many Jews in postwar America really were communists did not excuse the wild ravings that proliferated on the right about a “Judeo-Bolshevik” plot against America.

Second, the “anti-jihadi” extremists who have led the anti-mosque campaign present precisely the wrong way to respond to the existence of these radical elements. Their message is that Muslims should be regarded as threats simply for subscribing to religious precepts, even if they denounce violence and even if they adhere to the laws of the land. This, of course, removes much of the incentive to chart a moderate course—if nothing less than the full-blown atheism of an Ayaan Hirsi Ali will satisfy such critics, then why risk a partial assimilation that will only be rejected as proof of nefarious intentions? Imam Rauf was the guy who did everything right, who was conciliatory even to the point of alienating his constituents—if even he is now being tarred as a violent radical, I imagine many Muslims-Americans are asking themselves, then why even bother?

MARC TRACY: David, I’d urge you to consider: Are opponents of the center working to alienate American Muslims? And: Parse what exactly you think is different about the radical elements within Islam (as opposed to other religions/groups) that justifies special concern and vigilance.

DAVID HOROWITZ: The Ground Zero mosque is the project of an Imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, who in the age of Jimmy Carter supported the fundamentalist Islamic revolution of the Ayatollah Khomeni, replete with hangings of gays, oppression of women, sponsorship of Hezbollah, and the murder of Americans and Jews. In the age of Obama and Ahmadinejad and in the face of a revolt by the Iranian people against this medieval regime, Rauf counseled our president to support the “guiding principles” of the theocratic dictatorship whose leaders continue to hang gays, arm the world’s largest terrorist army, Hezbollah, and not incidentally threaten to wipe Israel from the face of the earth. (See Christopher Hitchens, “The Test of Tolerance.”)

Not surprisingly, the construction of the Ground Zero mosque is supported by the leader of Hamas and by the Muslim Brotherhood network, which includes the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Society of North America, CAIR, and other anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-jihadist groups with which Rauf is closely connected. Small wonder that he considers the United States an “accomplice to 9/11” (one of his associates, Sheik Muhammad Gemeaha, is actually on record saying that the Jews did it.)

Luban seems to think that it’s important to bend over backward to show Islamists that we are actually tolerant by allowing the construction of a $100 million dollar mosque adjacent to the site where Muslims killed 3,000 Americans in the worst attack on our soil in the history of the republic. Why aren’t they already impressed by the fact that there are mosques all over the Unites States but no churches or synagogues in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, or that America has sent its youth around the world to save the lives of millions of Muslims in Bosnia, in Somalia, and in Afghanistan? Why aren’t Israel’s Muslim enemies impressed by the fact that Israel grants more rights to the million-plus Muslims who are citizens of the Jewish state than are granted to the Muslim citizens of any Muslim country? Why do U.S. leftists and Jimmy Carter refer to the most tolerant country in the Middle East as an “apartheid state”?

Anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and sympathy for jihadists are not driven by rational considerations, as Luban seems to think, but by irrational hatreds and xenophobic religious creeds.

MARC TRACY: Dan, we can argue over Rauf’s intentions all day. It might be interesting to argue that it actually is important to bend over backward rather than to deny that that’s what we’re doing. But of course, it’s your argument, not mine, so we’ll give you the final word.

DANIEL LUBAN: The opponents of the Park51 project have now resorted to manufacturing an endless stream of out-of-context quotes and sensationalistic “revelations” about Rauf; the idea seems to be that even if no individual claim bears scrutiny, the succession of attacks will reinforce the impression that Rauf is a radical. Since I have limited space here, I won’t spend it answering David Horowitz’s latest attacks on the imam—suffice it to say that they are as cherry-picked and misleading the other charges that have been brought forth against him.

I am more interested in Horowitz’s claim that the controversy is about whether we will “bend over backward to show Islamists that we are actually tolerant by allowing” the construction of the center. How, exactly, does “allowing” Muslims to build what they like on property they own with their own money constitute “bend[ing] over backward” to them? On the contrary, it is simply allowing them the same freedom that we extend to all other religions. As I discussed in my piece, this is symptomatic of the way that Horowitz and his allies operate—they claim that they simply oppose any special advantage being granted to Islam over other religions, when in fact their prescriptions call for specific and intrusive forms of discrimination against Muslims in particular.

I would, however, like to thank Horowitz for the arguments he has not made. Much of this pointless controversy has been dominated by bad-faith arguments that opposition to the Park51 center has nothing to do with opposition to Islam. (It’s merely that the blocks surrounding the World Trade Center site are “sacred ground,” you see—notwithstanding the strip clubs and dive bars and fast food restaurants that fill them—and opponents of the center would quickly drop their objections if it were merely moved five blocks away rather than two.) Horowitz, with greater honesty, has focused in on the real issues at stake: the role of Islam in America, and whether we should assume until proven otherwise that the bulk of Muslim-Americans are enemies of the state.

Horowitz closes by attributing to me a position that I have never argued: namely, that anti-Semitism and violent Islamism are “driven by rational considerations.” My argument was a very different one: that whatever the roots of these tendencies and however repugnant they may be, we solve nothing—in fact, we make matters worse—by descending into the sort of paranoid Islamophobia that is currently ascendant on the right. Horowitz flirts with these conspiracy theories without giving any real evidence for the allegation that the bulk of Muslim-Americans are genocide-minded Muslim Brotherhood sleeper agents. (Hence his non-response to my first rebuttal, in which he merely reiterates the same flimsy “evidence” that he asserted the first time.) Whether he actually believes this stuff or whether he is cynically using it for political purposes is ultimately irrelevant; either way, he and his allies are treading on dangerous (and for a Jew, depressingly familiar) ground.

Daniel Luban is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Chicago. David Horowitz is the president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the author of Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. He recently published A Cracking of the Heart, a memoir about his daughter.

• Iran unveiled a new long-range unmanned bomber drone, which President Ahmadinejad called a potential “ambassador of death.” [NYT]

• Iran’s Russia-built Bushehr nuclear reactor will be fully ready in two to three months. The United States would prefer it hadn’t been built, but at the same time doesn’t consider it a big deal. [Laura Rozen]

• The Park51 debate is working at cross-purposes with post-9/11 U.S. efforts at image-building in the Islamic world, with many Muslims worldwide wondering why the prospect of a mosque near Ground Zero bothers people so much. [LAT]

• What does the new Gaza City mall symbolize? Well, that depends on whom you ask. [NYT]

• What the gigantic, newly discovered offshore natural gas deposits mean for Israel. [NYT]

• How the Flotilla Fiasco proved dialectically useful, opening up an opportunity for the diplomacy that culminated in today’s announcement of direct talks. [Ben Smith]

• As part of his rehabilitation tour, former Sen. George Allen (R-Virginia)—who was felled by the infamous “macaca” remark—described his exploration into his North African Jewish roots. [JTA]

• Israel formally complained to the U.N. about a Lebanon-sponsored ship set to sail for Gaza Sunday with activists onboard. [Haaretz]

• Some radical Muslims despise the Park51 project. In fact, to them it is such an evil thing that, yup, guess whose fault it really is. [Pajamas Media]

• Your weekend reading assignment is this really long and provocative blogpost that has been making the rounds, on why some segments of European society have such a problem with Israel. [Jerusalem Letters]

A kosher taco truck featuring brisket and latke? Los Angeles, you win this round.