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Dear Reader,

Below is the final editorial I have written for The Jerusalem Post in my capacity as Editorial Page Editor.

I am delighted to tell you that I have accepted a new job with the Jewish Ideas Daily website as managing editor. It is an ideas-driven (as opposed to news driven) site and I look forward to the challenge. I join an outstanding team of editors.

So, please visit Jewish Ideas Daily: http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/ and take a moment to register.

My thanks to all my friends and colleagues at The Post for nearly 11 fascinating years of creativity.

Elliot


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Passport ‘rage’


Dahu Khalfan Tamim now has a world-class reputation for detective work. The head of the Dubai police swiftly determined that Hamas’s Mahmoud Mabhouh did not die of natural causes at the five-star Bustan Rotana Hotel on Jan. 20. He was assassinated.

Let’s for the sake of argument grant that Israel did away with Mabhouh; that he was not killed by Iran or over some intra-Palestinian dispute, and that clues pointing to Israeli culpability are genuine.

Mabhouh certainly deserved to be assassinated by Israel. Hamas declared war on Israel. And he co-founded its military wing and was personally involved in the (separate) 1989 killings of IDF soldiers Ilan Sa’adon and Avi Sasportas.

Mabhouh was a key link in the unlawful syndicate which delivers Iranian weapons to Gaza. He was apparently tasked with importing an arsenal that would make life hellish for Israelis living in metropolitan Tel Aviv. He was, perhaps, Hamas’s equivalent to Hizbullah’s Imad Mughniyeh, whose car blew up in Damascus two years ago.

YOU CAN tell a great deal about the moral compass and political leanings of a society by observing its reaction to the Mabhouh liquidation.

There is unease in Europe because the purported assassins identified by Dubai were travelling under forged French, German, Irish and British passports; and identities of Israelis with dual-citizenship were utilized.

Even The Times of London, whose editorial page has been sympathetic toward Israel, expressed chagrin over the affair, saying this country had shown poor regard for the “future security of British passport holders overseas.” Frankly, there is little reason to think that the tradecraft employed in this assassination – which we will not second guess at this stage – jeopardizes anyone.

Actually, what troubles us is the question of whose passport Mabhouh was traveling under and why he was allowed to enter neutral Dubai on gun-running business.

Of course, that’s not how the British see it. The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen warned that if Israel had used British passports for “nefarious” purposes – meaning sending Mabhouh to his Maker – Bowen expected, or would it be more accurate to say, hoped for, “a crisis” in relations between London and Jerusalem.

The Guardian quoted a Foreign Office mandarin as gloating: “Relations were in the freezer before this. They are in the deep freeze now.” The paper then grumbled about the British government’s “supine” response to the assassination, editorializing against the government’s proposal to lift the threat of lawfare. The Guardian wants visiting Israeli ministers to continue to worry about facing Palestinian-inspired “war crimes” charges.

With the British media delighting in the assassination-passport kerfuffle – a Daily Mail headline screamed: “Dragged into a Mossad murder plot” – Menzies Campell, a routinely anti-Israel elder of the Liberal Democrats, declared that “Israel has some explaining to do.”

An anyway beleaguered Prime Minister Gordon Brown intoned: “We have got to carry out a full investigation into this. The British passport is an important document that has got to be held with care.” Sentiments echoed by Opposition Leader David Cameron.

The most encouraging view – paradoxically – came from Robert Fisk, the Independent’s inveterate Israel-basher: He suspects that London and Paris colluded with Jerusalem in Mabhouth’s assassination, in a reprise of the 1956 Sinai Campaign. That explained, he wrote, the flawless biometric passports.

What an uplifting (if improbable) scenario: MI6 and the Directorate-General for External Security working in tandem with the Mossad to stop Iranian arms from reaching Hamas.

PERHAPS the shrill reaction in some (though certainly not all) British quarters is not rooted purely in anti-Israelism. Chances are that at least parts of the British intelligentsia and media would have reacted similarly if the man in that hotel room had been Osama bin Laden... or Adolf Eichmann. And this pigheaded refusal to acknowledge that sometimes the ends do justify the means reflects a moral impoverishment that’s not limited to Britain.

Some pundits here have also gone wobbly, asking whether the Mabhouh hit was worth the trouble; others are rashly calling for the resignation of Mossad chief Meir Dagan.

In fact, removing a Mabhouh or a Mughniyeh – agents of evil engaged in sensitive compartmentalized work – significantly disrupts Hamas and Hizbullah. It sows distrust within enemy ranks. And it forces whoever replaces them to dissipate their energies just trying to stay alive.

Iran...as time runs out

The eleventh hour


The Islamic Republic of Iran celebrated its 31st anniversary yesterday with an enormous rally held in the shadow of the Azadi Tower. The monument was built by the Shah in 1971 to commemorate the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire. The plaza surrounding the monument has been cynically renamed Freedom Square.

One day, when the Iranian people overthrow this evil regime, perhaps they will rededicate the square as a memorial to the victims of the Khomeinists – dissidents such as Muhammad Reza Ali-Zamani and Arash Rahmanipour, who were judicially executed last month. Of the 5,000 people arrested since the country’s June 2009 “elections,” 11 have met a similar fate.

A recent Amnesty International report tells the stories of some of the regime’s victims who were simply murdered: Amir Javadifar, a 25-year-old student of management at Qazvin Azad University, was beaten and tortured to death. Twenty-eight-year-old Taraneh Mousavi was raped and tortured before her burned body was dumped in an open field. Those who speak against the regime place not only themselves but also family members in jeopardy. This is true even for disillusioned Khomeinists.

ALL THIS helps explain why the regime’s celebrations went unmolested. Dissidents previously released from custody were warned to stay home. State-controlled media were reminded to watch what they disseminated. All images coming out of the country were carefully controlled by the regime. Foreign media outlets such as CNN and BBC have been banned from Iran. Internet and other new media (Twitter, Facebook) were disrupted.

Opposition figures who did try to rally supporters were intercepted by government thugs and intimidated into returning home; others were arrested. The AP, relying on opposition Web sites, reported on clashes between security forces and protesters away from the pro-government rally. Police fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators, and paintballs to mark them for arrest.

Footage broadcast on YouTube showed small numbers of – undoubtedly courageous – opposition demonstrators waving green ribbons. But an unprecedented police clampdown appears to have snuffed out any hope that the opposition could parlay the regime’s party into a day of meaningful protest.

Instead, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad harangued – Castro-style – those who turned up for over an hour, telling them that Iran had already produced its first batch of uranium enriched to a 20-percent level. If true, it’s a step that brings an atomic bomb exponentially closer. In his next breath, the disingenuous dictator declared: “When we say we do not manufacture the bomb, we mean it.”

ON Wednesday, the Obama administration intensified existing US sanctions against the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. It blocked the assets of an Iranian general and four companies affiliated with the IRGC.

The administration argues that its unsuccessful year-long effort to reason with the mullahs has given it the political capital to ask the UN Security Council to support a system of sanctions that would further hinder Iran’s banking, shipping and insurance industries. The world will soon learn whether Russia and China will feign cooperation while working to water down President Barack Obama’s proposed resolution.

David E. Sanger of The New York Times suggests Obama is gambling that a global agreement on sanctions will persuade the mullahs to stop spinning their centrifuges. We’d like the president to raise the stakes and press the UN to prohibit the export of refined petroleum to Iran.

Some say tough sanctions will send the masses into the arms of the government and undermine the opposition. But yesterday’s rally showed that the regime doesn’t have a problem putting on a show of support; and that the opposition is weak, fragmented and under siege.

The prospects of the opposition are unpredictable, regardless of what happens on the sanctions front. Pretending otherwise strikes us as a lame excuse for doing nothing.

We also understand that sanctions on gasoline could enrich the IRGC, which already controls Iran’s black market in commodities. Still, the debilitating impact on the regime of endless lines at petrol stations should not be underestimated.

Dawdling by two US administrations and by an international community preoccupied with immediate economic gratification has brought the world to this eleventh hour. It may already be too late for the real sanctions option.

But given the stark alternative – isn’t it worth a try?

IT IS TOUGH TO BE PRO-ISRAEL ON CAMPUS? IT ALWAYS WAS!

Away with campus timidity


In the Name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful… The members of the Muslim Student Union at the University of California, Irvine, condemn and strongly oppose the presence of Michael Oren on our campus… Oren personally participated in the Israeli Defense Force in wars that took place in Lebanon and Palestine…Oren and his partners should only be granted a speakers platform in the International Criminal Court...


IN THE name of demonizing the Jewish state, intimidating its supporters and making it ever more difficult to present Israel’s case, Muslim campaigners and their allies at the UC-Irvine campus on Monday repeatedly disrupted a talk by Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren. Eleven of the louts were detained, issued summonses and released.

In trying to silence Oren, they made a mockery of the university’s commitment to freedom of speech and treated its dedication to respectful dialogue with downright disdain. Yes, they probably discomfited our ambassador, but they shamed UC-Irvine and its alumni.

UNFORTUNATELY, what happened on Monday in southern California mirrors the experience of Israeli spokespeople on the European continent, in Britain and increasingly on liberal American campuses. Former prime minister Ehud Olmert’s address last October at the University of Chicago was disrupted by Muslim student organizations and their fellow-travelers. Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s, described efforts in British universities to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish state as a “daily obsession.”

Next month, Israel’s enemies on campus will hold a series of vitriolic, well-orchestrated events aimed at delegitimizing this country and hammering home the poisonous idea that the Jewish people has no right to self-determination or a national homeland. In the words of Jerusalem Post columnist Gil Troy, they will be continuing the campaign to “make Israel toxic.”

A colossal untruth promoted by the anti-Zionist camp – that Israel is “an apartheid state” – is starting to be believed by the gullible or intellectually dishonest. The old Arab boycott of Israel has been reinvigorated by calls for “divestment.”

Troy is right to argue that friends of Israel can hardly expect to sway those who have “swallowed the apartheid libel and drunk the anti-Israel Kool-Aid.”

The Zionist goal, he argues, should be bolstering “wavering Jewish students and the vast uninformed and uninterested middle.”

WE SUSPECT Jewish college students are doing a bit too much “wavering.”

It is true that Jerusalem speaks with many voices – but it has done so since the 1970s. Spurious efforts to “redefine” what “being pro-Israel means” are also not new.

Moreover, campuses have never been bastions of pro-Israelism. Not in the 1960s, when America’s black power movement became enamored with the Arab cause; not in the 1970s, when Jimmy Carter struggled in vain to conceal his contempt for Menachem Begin, and when Time magazine demonized our premier as a modern-day Fagin.

It was no picnic being on campus in the 1980s, when an NBC anchor stood on a Beirut rooftop, with smoke billowing in the background from burning PLO targets, and declared, “…Nothing like it has ever happened in this part of the world. I kept thinking... of the bombing of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War…We are now dealing with an imperial Israel.”

Nor did pro-Israel activism come easy in the early 1990s, when a “pitiless” Yitzhak Rabin expelled 415 Islamic fanatics to southern Lebanon; international pressure eventually forced him to rescind the move, setting the stage for the flowering of Hamas.

In the 21st century a difficult campus situation got even worse, partly due to an influx of Muslim students and the affinity of the anti-globalization movement for the Palestinian cause.

NONE OF this absolves the current cadre of Jewish student activists from stepping up to the plate. The Twitter generation even has the advantage of circumventing the silencing of Israel by utilizing new media.

Never has it been more important to cast timidity aside. To reassert that no one has a stronger claim to this land than the Jewish people; to denounce the notion that Israel’s “original sin” was being re-born after 2000 years; and to explain that the “occupation” and settlements are fundamentally red-herring issues that would fade away, were the Palestinians to negotiate in earnest for a two-state solution.

Mumps

Viral irrationalism


More than 300 people in Monsey and New Square, two hassidic enclaves north of New York City, have contracted the mumps, a disease spread by coughing and sneezing. Symptoms include fever, headache and swollen glands. Now the disease has reached haredi communities in Brooklyn and New Jersey.

Epidemiologists suspect the outbreak started in August in a Catskills summer camp with an 11-year-old boy who brought the mumps to the US from England. In London, the Health Protection Agency reported over 800 cases in 2009 – a significant uptick over the previous year.

By age four, children ought to have been immunized against polio, diphtheria, tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, whooping cough, and several other diseases which strike in childhood, yet can have deleterious life-long consequences.

Unfortunately, a not-insignificant minority of parents are refusing to immunize their children, fearing vaccines contain harmful side effects and/or out of conviction that Mother Nature would not approve.

The Jewish community, here and in the Diaspora, is not immune to such irrationalism. Some people have been instructed by their clerics not to immunize; some have been swept up in the quagmire of medical quackery, while still others are convinced profiteering pharmaceutical companies are conspiring to promote unnecessary vaccines.

As a consequence, Israel’s Arab sector is, overall, better immunized than its Jewish population. Among Jews, unvaccinated children are thought to be found mostly among hassidim, back-to-nature secular bohemians, and their settler counterparts.

THE phenomenon of children not being immunized has increased in parallel with the growth of the Internet and the dissemination of junk science. Yet the medical community shares some of the blame.

In 1998, The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, published a study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield which linked vaccinations for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) with autism. As The New York Times recently pointed out, the editors of the journal did not know that Wakefield had an interest in promoting a single measles vaccine and that he was being financed by a lawyer campaigning against the MMR combination vaccine. In any event, Wakefield’s sample group was only 12 children.

As a consequence of the publicity generated by the Lancet article – only now retracted – some parents decided against the prevailing view of the medical community and did not immunize their children. Equally tragic, many parents of autistic children were made to feel responsible for their children’s disability. The emotional damage to these parents is incalculable.

Obviously, no vaccine is 100 percent safe or 100% effective. But scientists insist that there is no causal relationship between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism.

On mumps, the blogosphere is full of rumors that even those vaccinated have been struck by the disease because there is an “unusual strain going around.” In fact, the mumps vaccine does not provide total protection; it does require a booster jab and failure to get this follow-up dose can leave a person exposed.

Not being immunized, however, leaves you 100% vulnerable.

Science is about probabilities. Case in point: Just because Israel was not hit by a swine flu pandemic does not mean that the Health Ministry was wrong to consider a worst-case scenario in its planning (even though it erred in its ultimate assessment and consequently overreacted). Immunizations against the regular flu and the swine flu are still indicated, say physicians.

IN NEW York City, which has one of the finest public health systems in the world, youngsters are not permitted to enter elementary school without proof of immunization. Unfortunately, proof of immunization is generally not required for admission by the various municipal school systems in this country.


Thankfully, most Israeli children are immunized through the Tipat Halav well-baby clinics. Under the health basket, childhood vaccinations are completely free. Boosters are provided (free) by school nurses. But lack of money is no excuse for failing to immunize.

We urge the Health Ministry to consider requiring parents to provide a child’s pinkas hisunim – immunization record – when they register their youngsters for school. The enforcement tool would be simple: Any municipality or stream, including most of the haredi sector, which is found to admit unimmunized children, would face loss of funding from the national government.
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