Eric Holder's Troubling Decision

A matter of justice


It wasn't Osama bin Laden (OBL) who came up with the idea of using airliners
as ballistic missiles. The scheme had to be sold to him by Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed (KSM).

Born in Pakistan, raised in Kuwait and educated as a mechanical engineer in
America's South, the comparatively secular KSM became fixated on punishing
Washington for its support of Israel, even as OBL was focused on expelling
the infidels from Arabia.

On Friday, US Attorney-General Eric Holder announced that KSM, the brains
behind the 9/11 plot, in US custody since March 2003, would be put on trial
in Manhattan federal court along with his co-conspirators, Ramzi Binalshibh,
Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, Ali Abd al-Aziz and Walid Bin Attash. All face the
death penalty.

Holder insisted that the decision to forgo a military trial and place the
case before a civilian jury sitting just blocks from Ground Zero was his
decision alone; that President Barack Obama was informed after the fact
because the president, himself a lawyer, did not want to intrude in the
justice system.


BUT AREN'T the 9/11 attacks more a matter of national security than of
criminal justice?

Holder's decision regrettably treats what the conspirators did as a major
crime rather than an act of war.

Moreover, it provides KSM with the opportunity to turn the trial into an
enormous "reality TV" extravaganza, in the words of New York Times columnist
David Brooks.

It gives Islamist terrorists fresh incentives to target New York City.
It risks exposing in open court the methods US intelligence employs to
combat Muslim extremists.

Finally, although Holder insinuated that federal prosecutors have ample
admissible evidence against the plotters, an open, possibly televised trial,
will divert attention from the conspiracy to the fact that KSM ­-- a "ticking
bomb" if ever there was one ­-- was repeatedly tortured.

This will not play well on Al-Jazeera.

In 2008, the US Supreme Court ruled that alien terrorists were
constitutionally sheltered by the same protections US citizens enjoy,
because they were held at Guantanamo, an enclave in Cuba that is under US
jurisdiction. Similarly, they will enjoy the same appellate protections as
Americans.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vermont), chairman of the Judiciary Committee,
said, "By trying them in our federal courts we demonstrate to the world that
the most powerful nation on Earth also trusts its judicial system."

Yet does it not also reinforce a false and dangerous impression that the
shock troops of global jihad are, at the end of the day, mere criminals as
opposed to enemy combatants?

Indeed, in an interview with Jim Lehrer of PBS, Holder referred to the 9/11
attacks, which took over 3,000 American lives, as the "crime of the century"
pledging, "This case will be treated as any other criminal case" and not be
allowed to deteriorate into a "show trial"

But where will 12 New York-area jurors be found who are sufficiently
detached from their environment to assess the evidence and render a judgment
on the law to insure a fair trial?

On the flip side, what if a jury, falling
under the theatrical spell of KSM or his lawyers, repeats the stunning
behavior of the 1995 OJ Simpson jurors and acquits?

It would have been preferable, say many Americans, for the defendants to
have been put before a military commission that could have better protected
both US national interests and the constitutional rights of the accused as
defined by the Supreme Court.

As Brooks, the Times columnist, persuasively argued, 9/11 was not aimed
exclusively at the victims but at the United States. The purpose was to
terrorize the country and force a change in its policies. The attacks were
carried out as propaganda and trying their perpetrators in open court
affords them fresh propaganda opportunities that will be lapped up by
susceptible satellite TV audiences around the world.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed previously entered a guilty plea before a military
tribunal, but now has reason to delay his martyrdom. He does not see himself
as a bin Laden functionary, but as a major theoretician and consummate
jihadi.

Holder's protestations about a "show trial" notwithstanding, the US Justice
Department ­ with President Obama out of the loop ­ may have inadvertently
handed KSM a world-class stage to rationalize 9/11.

How do you say "chutzpah" in Arabic?

Save UN Security Council Resolution 242


How do you say "chutzpah" in Arabic? Because PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat showed unbelievable gall in telling Army Radio: "We're fed up with your time-wasting. We don't believe that you really want a two-state solution."

Talk about the kettle calling the pot black.

The Palestinian idea of negotiations goes something like this: Agree to our position in its entirety and then we can talk about the modalities of implementation. Lo and behold, this approach has not borne fruit so a frustrated PLO may turn to the UN Security Council to ask it to impose Palestinian demands on Israel.

To give Erekat and Mahmoud Abbas their due, today's Palestinian demands sound positively reasonable compared to those of PLO founder Ahmad Shukeiry, who in the days leading up to the 1967 war - when the West Bank and Gaza were in Arab hands - declared: "The Arab people's decision is unfaltering: to wipe Israel off the face of the map…"

And they're an improvement over what Yasser Arafat, post-Oslo, reportedly told a gathering of Arab diplomats in Europe: "We plan to eliminate... Israel and establish a Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare…"

NOW Erekat and Abbas are wasting time and torpedoing a two-state solution with their intransigence.

Successive Israeli governments have offered to recognize a Palestinian state in the West Bank and in Gaza. But Abbas rejected Ehud Olmert's offer of 93 percent of the West Bank, plus additional lands from Israel proper to make up the difference, all of Gaza, and a free passage scheme between the Strip and West Bank. Under Olmert's proposal, Israel would retain its strategic settlement blocs - but all other settlements and outposts on the "Palestine" side of the border would be uprooted.

Ehud Barak made slightly less generous offers to Yasser Arafat at Camp David in July 2000 and at Taba in January 2001.

Barak, like Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in his June 2009 Bar-Ilan address, asked that Palestine be demilitarized so that it does not again become a launching pad for fedayeen attacks or a base for Iranian aggression - a real worry if Palestine falls to the Islamists.

Israel is also asking that Palestine absorb any "returning" Arab refugees within its territory.

Finally, Israel wants the Arabs to recognize it as the homeland of the Jewish people just as Palestine would be recognized as the homeland of the Palestinian people.

Any fair-minded observer would acknowledge that the Israeli position is not unreasonable, especially given our awful experience after the Gaza disengagement.

As for Jerusalem, the city cannot simply be divided by UN fiat, because north, south, east and west, Jerusalem is an organic whole. It will take tremendous goodwill to come up with a livable compromise.

Today's publication by Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi in cooperation with Al-Quds University of Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem's Sacred Esplanade, might have suggested a modicum of helpfulness on the Palestinian side. Unfortunately, that Arab institution is now joining a PLO boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

BACK TO Erekat's chutzpah. The Palestinians created an artificial deadlock by suddenly insisting that they would not negotiate without a settlement freeze. Now Erekat's self-inflicted stalemate supposedly compels him to lobby the UN Security Council to, in effect, junk Resolution 242 - the edifice upon which the entire peacemaking process is constructed - and give its imprimatur to a new Palestinian declaration of independence claiming 100 percent of the West Bank and Gaza (though the Strip is under Hamas suzerainty) plus all of east Jerusalem including the Jewish holy sites. As it happens, Tuesday is the 21st anniversary of the PLO's unilateral declaration of statehood issued in Algiers.

It's clear why Erekat wants to abandon 242. The resolution's masterfully crafted language insists on an exchange of land for peace using the formula - "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" - that deliberately does not call for a pullback from all territories.

So rather than bargain in good faith to build a viable accord, Erekat and Abbas are betting on an outside imposed solution. Their way will not bring reconciliation, mutual security and peace, but doom yet another generation of Israelis and Palestinians to more bloodshed.

Would it not be better if the Palestinians returned to the bargaining table and the sooner the better?

More than Homesh is at stake

Samson's pillars


This week, 25 IDF reservists from the Shimshon - Samson - battalion presented their commanders with a petition saying they did not want to be involved in evacuating West Bank settlements or outposts. They wanted the unit to return to its core values rather than hounding wayward settlers who keep coming back to Homesh, one of the settlements in Samaria dismantled during the 2005 disengagement.

The reservists were further incensed about having to confront settlers on Shabbat. But their main complaint was of being "exploited to carry out political policies that have no relation" to Israel's security needs.

The reservists did not say they would refuse orders.

The Shimshon battalion was established in 1997 and initially confronted Palestinian rioters in the Gaza Strip; it now polices Judea and Samaria. By capturing hundreds of wanted Palestinians, Shimshon has done more than any other Central Command unit to secure the West Bank.

The battalion is part of the Kfir Brigade, two of whose soldiers interrupted an IDF ceremony at the Western Wall three weeks ago by holding up a "Don't Evacuate Homesh" sign. For their disobedience, Aryeh Arbus and Ahiyah Ovadya were handed 20-day sentences in a military lockup and expelled from their unit.

The two have nevertheless become poster boys in a campaign to prevent the IDF from serving as an "expulsion force." Indeed, an anonymous American benefactor has supposedly contributed NIS 40,000 to the families of the young martyrs.

IMPROBABLY, the defenders of Homesh can trace their "lineage of dissent" to another group - the 350 reservists who, in March 1978, sent a letter to prime minister Menachem Begin saying his attachment to the Land of Israel and to settlements had become an obstacle to peace.

At its inception, Peace Now received funding not from foreign governments and foundations, but from the Kibbutz Movement and a few wealthy industrialists. Within a month, the grass-roots movement had brought 30,000 demonstrators into the streets of Tel Aviv to put pressure on Begin as he negotiated with Anwar Sadat.

Because it was so showily led by reserve officers, Peace Now broke a taboo about the propriety of manipulating military rank to leverage political outcomes. Within three weeks of the Tel Aviv rally, a group of 37 liberal Jewish Americans signed a petition in support of Peace Now, making page 1 of The New York Times.

Over the years, some who started out with Peace Now began taking extremist positions - for instance, refusing to do army service in the "Occupied Territories."

A RECIPE for national disaster, brewed by the Left, is now percolating on the Right. We're witnessing a parallel "selective refusal." Right-wing soldiers will serve so long as they're not asked to do something that conflicts with their political views.

Left unchecked, this phenomenon could prove fatal to the Third Commonwealth.

For what is at stake is whether a free and independent Jewish people can govern themselves, or are doomed - like our ancestors - to break up into separate kingdoms and be swallowed by our enemies.

The issue is not the wisdom - or lack thereof - of government policies. It is almost beside the point that territorial compromise, in return for genuine peace, is the platform of all the major parties in the country.

It does not matter, for the purposes of this argument, that the Palestinian polity shows no genuine interest in coming to terms with a Jewish state in any boundaries.

It makes no difference that Israeli governments have pursued incoherent and flip-flopping polices on settlements.

What does matter is that the legitimacy of the regime - not any particular government, but of the Zionist idea - is being undercut.

Of course the government is using the army as a political tool. The army is nothing if not a means for the government to exercise its political will. It does so by protecting settlers against the wishes of some, and by dismantling outposts against the wishes of others.

This argument will prove unpersuasive to those whose allegiance is foremost to the land. But it behooves those who appreciate how fortunate our generation is to live in this imperfect, chaotic, frustrating country to maintain Zionist discipline.

To do otherwise, men of Shimshon, is to pull down the temple pillars upon us all.

Fort Hood is part of a strange pattern

Isolated incidents...

[Pictured: John Allen Muhammad]


Today is Veterans Day in the United States. President Barack Obama will be laying a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. The November 11 commemoration is intended to honor those who served in the military, while Memorial Day, observed on the last Monday in May, was originally set aside for remembering America's war dead.

Since al-Qaida launched its war of civilizations on Sept. 11, 2001, America's all-volunteer army in Iraq and Afghanistan has suffered 5,000 dead and over 30,000 wounded.

ARLINGTON is located 5 km. from the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. It was there that Nidal Hasan - the Muslim-American physician of Palestinian descent who murdered 13 people and wounded 29 last Thursday at Fort Hood, Texas - crossed paths with Nawaf al-Hamzi and Hani Hanjour, two of the 9/11 hijackers.

Many people came through Dar al-Hijrah, one of the largest mosques in America. Still, it is curious that in 2008 and early 2009 Hasan exchanged e-mails with Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born former imam at the mosque presently propagating al-Qaida's venom to English-speakers from Yemen. US intelligence picked up these communications, but determined they were part of the doctor's research on post-traumatic stress disorder.

Nor did anyone think it odd that in June 2007, Hasan delivered a PowerPoint presentation - "The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the US Military" - at what was intended to be a Walter Reed hospital medical seminar. Hasan told residents that Muslims love death more than Westerners love life, concluding with a slide: "Fighting to establish an Islamic state to please God… is condoned by the Islam."

In a Web posting Monday, Awlaki sang Hasan's praises: "He is a man of conscience who could not bear the contradiction of being a Muslim and fighting against his own people. No scholar with a grain of Islamic knowledge can deny the clear cut proofs that Muslims today have the right - rather the duty - to fight against American tyranny."

The FBI has no evidence that Hasan was part of a larger conspiracy. In the fullness of time he may explain why he carried out this massacre. But it hardly requires prophecy to intuit that he opposed the presence of foreign forces in the Middle East and believed Muslims shouldn't be killing Muslims on behalf of infidels.

Hassan and Awlaki are further proof that the war of civilizations is radicalizing American-born Muslims, while immigrants are certainly not immune. Hesham Mohamed killed without compunction at the El Al counter in Los Angeles (2002); Naveed Afzal Haq went on a fatal rampage at the Seattle Jewish Center (2006), and Sulejmen Talovic slaughtered shoppers in a Salt Lake City mall (2007). Yesterday, the US Supreme Court rejected a stay of execution against another US-born Muslim, John Allen Muhammad, "the Beltway sniper," who killed 10 in 2002. "Sniper's motive remains a mystery," said a BBC headline. Perhaps. But such "isolated incidents" reflect a bloody pattern pre-dating the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

IN THIS context it is only mildly reassuring that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a mainstream group, has strongly condemned the Fort Hood attack. Such declarations don't inoculate Arab moderates if they continue to champion the policies of terrorist organizations.

CAIR says it has "consistently denounced violence by Hamas, Israel and other groups." Very droll.

In fact, the group's founders are intimately linked to Hamas's "humanitarian" work.

Speaking in Istanbul on Tuesday, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared: "Obama … can't collect the support of the illegal murderous Zionist regime and the countries of the region as well. Earning friendship … is not compatible with the Zionist regime's friendship."

He was telling Obama, either ditch Israel or forget about a rapprochement with Iran. He's got a point. No one can have one foot in the Islamist camp while championing liberty, tolerance and coexistence. It really is "either/or."

So Muslim-American leaders need to do some soul-searching about the charities they support, the foreign causes they embrace and the clerics they tolerate.

In the wake of 11/5, President Obama needs to work on parallel tracks - to ensure that blameless individuals are not scapegoated for Hasan's crimes, and to press Muslim moderates to cut all links with those who run charities by day and guns by night.

Thinking about "Jewish Peoplehood"

Holding Jews together


This week's mega-Jewish conference in Washington - the GA - brings together lay leaders and professionals from most of America's alphabet soup of Jewish organizations. They're rubbing shoulders with politicos, networking and strategizing. And they're having several opportunities to participate in forums devoted to Jewish peoplehood.

In a sense, peoplehood leapfrogs the tiresome "Who is a Jew" issue and poses a different set of questions, starting with: What, if anything, holds 21st century Jews together? Is being Jewish a matter of synagogue attendance or theological faith? Is it nationalism, ethnicity, culture?

For the rigorously Orthodox, such questions have little resonance - a Jew is someone who, foremost, meets halachic criteria for being Jewish, and if a convert, leads a strictly Orthodox lifestyle. But for the bulk of the world's 13 million Jews, the subject of what being Jewish means ought to be highly relevant.

It is no less germane in Israel, where the largest Jewish community of 5.5 million is concentrated. A young person can graduate the public school system here, yet be scandalously unfamiliar with the Jewish canon, the basics of Jewish ritual, even how to navigate the standard prayer book. Haredi schools are rich in Jewish literacy, but favor parochialism over peoplehood. Perhaps 20 percent of our students attend Zionist-oriented religious schools that emphasize Judaism along with secular studies and presumably promote peoplehood in some fashion.

IN THEIR paper "A Framework for Strategic Thinking about Jewish Peoplehood," Ezra Kopelowitz and Ari Engelberg write that while the "Jewish people" is an ancient idea, the concept of Jewish "peoplehood" is new.

For some, peoplehood connotes the Jews' shared mission, while for others it can be as vacuous as saving the South American didelphid opossum.

Put another way: The goal of peoplehood should be to foster mutual responsibility, collaboration and continuity. It is inherently not about universalism, though it can spotlight uniquely Jewish approaches to solving problems facing humanity.

Diaspora young people in Western countries today choose whether to be Jewish, whereas their great-grandparents simply were. Likewise, young Israelis have to opt to make being Jewish a meaningful part of their lives rather than an accident of birth and geography.

Embracing Jewish civilization may be one attractive way to keep today's youth, here and abroad, connected to their people. However, such efforts are necessarily hindered because Israel's essentially ultra-Orthodox "church" monopolizes official Judaism in this country while complicating interdenominational relations with Jews abroad.

But is this discussion already coming too late? Historian David Vital, in The Future of the Jews, sees Jewish unity as an obsolete myth, arguing that nothing much holds Jews together anymore. We hope he's wrong.

In his new book, Future Tense, Lord Sacks, Britain's chief rabbi, argues that Judaism is not ethnicity or culture but faith, "and the people who are in a state of denial about this are Jews." Yet Sacks goes on to write that "in calling Judaism a faith, I do not mean to exclude secular Judaism's or interpretations of faith other than my own. In the widest sense, Judaism is the ongoing conversation of the Jewish people with itself, with heaven and with the world."

We'd also like to think the Jewish peoplehood concept could serve as a way of bridging gaps, a sort of work-around to obviate Vital's gloomy assessment of where we are. Peoplehood figures prominently in Sacks's vision of the future; it is a focus of Leonid Nevzlin's philanthropy, of the research conducted by The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, and, of course, it is high on the agenda at the GA.

PLAINLY, IDENTIFYING what it takes to create a sense of peoplehood is vitally important to the Zionist enterprise. In this regard, we're grateful that birthright has been bringing tens of thousands of Diaspora students to Israel, though most American Jews have never visited.

A connection to Israel also has the potential to stem the rate of "outmarriage" - as would more creative thinking on how to transform demographic hemorrhaging into an opportunity to expand the pool of new Jews.

From a Zionist perspective, peoplehood demands substance and sacrifice. It needs to combine a common historical memory, a sense of shared fate and a feeling of collective destiny.

No less important, peoplehood means appreciating the dialectic between Diaspora and homeland.