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Jerusalem News 905. Views, Jews, Ten Tribes News
8 March 2010, 22 Adar 5770
Contents:
1. Debka Reveals: Dubai Hit Men Were Aware of Cameras and Controlled Them!
2. Why Israel is the world's happiest country by Spengler
3. Americans Love Israel Even More Than You Think by Barry Rubin
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1. Debka Reveals: Dubai Hit Men Were Aware of Cameras and Controlled Them!
[Brit-Am Note: It is commonly claimed that Debka is a mouthpiece of the Israeli Mossad. We doubt this for several reasons. Nevertheless, it appears that from time to time DEBKA has been a party to information from Israeli Intelligence sources.]
Date: Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:29:33 -0500
From: Debka@thejmg.com
Subject: DEBKA Newsletter Mar 6, 2009
Dubai police "discovery" of DNA not credible
DEBKAfile Special Analysis
26 Feb. Dubai's police chief Dhahi Khalfan said Friday, Feb. 26, that DNA and fingerprint evidence of at least one of the 26 team of assassins had been found in the hotel room where Hamas commander Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh died on Jan. 19. Our intelligence experts report the suspects' appearance was disguised from head to toe and fingerprints probably faked. Therefore, the fingerprints along with the Dubai police's fine collection of video clips and passport photos are of little use in the inquiry.
DEBKAfile sources therefore dismiss the claims by the Dubai police and certain Israeli publications citing "security experts" that the Mossad was caught unawares by the security cameras which tracked the death squad's movements. They missed the fact that the team was not only aware of the cameras but controlled them and used them in support of their mission. The footage is short of the vital 19-minute segment when the Hamas arms smuggler was killed inside his hotel room. The hit-team only kept the cameras running when it suited them to show their ease in penetrating the most secure sites.
2. Why Israel is the world's happiest country
by Spengler
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/
Middle_East/JE13Ak01.html
Extracts.
Envy surrounds no country on Earth like the state of Israel, and with good reason: by objective measures, Israel is the happiest nation on Earth at the 60th anniversary of its founding. It is one of the wealthiest, freest and best-educated; and it enjoys a higher life expectancy than Germany or the Netherlands. But most remarkable is that Israelis appear to love life and hate death more than any other nation. If history is made not by rational design but by the demands of the human heart, as I argued last week , the light heart of the Israelis in face of continuous danger is a singularity worthy of a closer look.
Can it be a coincidence that this most ancient of nations, and the only nation persuaded that it was summoned into history for God's service, consists of individuals who appear to love life more than any other people?...Those who believe in Israel's divine election might see a special grace reflected in its love of life.
Nations go extinct, I have argued in the past, because the individuals who comprise these nations choose collectively to die out. Once freedom replaces the fixed habits of traditional society, people who do not like their own lives do not trouble to have children. Not the sword of conquerors, but the indigestible sourdough of everyday life threatens the life of the nations, now dying out at a rate without precedent in recorded history.
Israel is surrounded by neighbors willing to kill themselves in order to destroy it. "As much as you love life, we love death," Muslim clerics teach; the same formula is found in a Palestinian textbook for second graders. Apart from the fact that the Arabs are among the least free, least educated, and (apart from the oil states) poorest peoples in the world, they also are the unhappiest, even in their wealthiest kingdoms.
The contrast of Israeli happiness and Arab despondency is what makes peace an elusive goal in the region. It cannot be attributed to material conditions of life. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia ranks 171st on an international quality of life index, below Rwanda. Israel is tied with Singapore on this index, although it should be observed that Israel ranks a runaway first on my life-preference index, whereas Singapore comes in dead last.
Even less can we blame unhappiness on experience, for no nation has suffered more than the Jews in living memory, nor has a better excuse to be miserable. Arabs did not invent suicide attacks, but they have produced a population pool willing to die in order to inflict damage greater than any in history. One cannot help but conclude that Muslim clerics do not exaggerate when they express contempt for life.
Israel's love of life, moreover, is more than an ethnic characteristic. Those who know Jewish life through the eccentric lens of Jewish-American novelists such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, or the films of Woody Allen, imagine the Jews to be an angst-ridden race of neurotics. Secular Jews in America are no more fertile than their Gentile peers, and by all indications quite as miserable.
For one thing, Israelis are far more religious than American Jews. Two-thirds of Israelis believe in God, although only a quarter observe their religion strictly. Even Israelis averse to religion evince a different kind of secularism than we find in the secular West. They speak the language of the Bible and undergo 12 years of Bible studies in state elementary and secondary schools.
Faith in God's enduring love for a people that believes it was summoned for his purposes out of a slave rabble must be part of the explanation. The most religious Israelis make the most babies. Ultra-Orthodox families produce nine children on average. That should be no surprise, for people of faith are more fertile than secular people, as I showed in a statistical comparison across countries.
Traditional and modern societies have radically different population profiles, for traditional women have little choice but to spend their lives pregnant in traditional society. In the modern world, where fertility reflects choice rather than compulsion, the choice to raise children expresses love of life. The high birthrate in Arab countries still bound by tradition does not stand comparison to Israeli fertility, by far the highest in the modern world.
The faith of Israelis is unique. Jews sailed to Palestine as an act of faith, to build a state against enormous odds and in the face of hostile encirclement, joking, "You don't have to be crazy to be a Zionist, but it helps." In 1903 Theodor Herzl, the Zionist movement's secular founder, secured British support for a Jewish state in Uganda, but his movement shouted him down, for nothing short of the return to Zion of Biblical prophecy would requite it. In place of a modern language the Jewish settlers revived Hebrew, a liturgical language only since the 4th century BC, in a feat of linguistic volition without precedent. It may be that faith burns brighter in Israel because Israel was founded by a leap of faith.
Why are none of the Christian nations as happy as Israel? Few of the European nations can be termed "Christian" at all. Poland, the last European country with a high rate of attendance at Mass (at about 45%), nonetheless shows a fertility rate of only 1.27, one of Europe's lowest, and a suicide rate of 16 per 100,000. Europe's faith always wavered between adherence to Christianity as a universal religion and ethnic idolatry under a Christian veneer. European nationalism nudged Christianity to the margin during the 19th century, and the disastrous world wars of the past century left Europeans with confidence neither in Christianity nor in their own nationhood.
Only in pockets of the American population does one find birth rates comparable to Israel's, for example among evangelical Christians. There is no direct way to compare the happiness of American Christians and Israelis, but the tumultuous and Protean character of American religion is not as congenial to personal satisfaction. My suspicion is that Israel's happiness is entirely unique.
If the Israelis are the happiest country on Earth, as the numbers indicate, it seems possible that they will do what is required to keep their country, despite the odds against them. I do not know whether they will succeed. If Israel fails, however, the rest of the world will lose a unique gauge of the human capacity for happiness as well as faith. I cannot conceive of a sadder event.
3. Americans Love Israel Even More Than You Think
http://www.gloria-center.org/gloria/2010/
03/americans-love-israel
By Barry Rubin *
March 3, 2010
Extracts:
International relations isn't a popularity contest. But public opinion polls can be useful in countering myths and examining the impact of policymaker, elite, and media campaigns on the masses.
Which brings us to Gallup's latest poll measuring how Americans feel about different countries. The more one examines the results, the more amazing they are. Americans two favorites are, not surprisingly, fellow English-speakers Canada and the United Kingdom. Then come-Americans are very forgiving-two former enemies, Germany and Japan.
And next on the list is Israel. Even the basic numbers-67 favorable, 25 percent unfavorable-are impressive. But that's only the beginning. Around 10 percent of Americans don't like anybody, and only one-fourth of those 25 percent nay-sayers on Israel, that is 6 percent, are really hostile.
In other words, the percentage of Americans who hate Israel is only 6 percent and the number who single out Israel for partly unfavorable views among other popular countries adds about 10 percent more.
And since 10 percent of Americans say they like Iran (85 percent don't), having only a bit more than that number really disliking Israel isn't very impressive.
After 20 years or so of intensive media criticism, hostility on campuses, double standards, and controversy that's nothing short of remarkable.
This conclusion is intensified further by considering the equivalent results for the Palestinian Authority (PA). Remember that one can like both Israel and the PA. Moreover, the PA receives constant good publicity in the media, campuses, and among policymakers as moderate and friendly to the United States. Yet only 20 percent are favorable to the PA and a whopping 70 percent are negative.
Even that understates the results. How popular is the PA? Well, it's at the same level as Yemen, and that's after a suicide bomber trained and indoctrinated there was captured trying to blow up a U.S. airliner near Detroit.
What about the idea that young people are steadily becoming more hostile to Israel? There is a difference but not a huge one. While 70 percent of those over 55 are favorable to Israel, that number only sinks to 63 percent for those between 18 and 34. Given the fact that Americans become more moderate and less eager to rebel against prevailing norms as they get older that gap seems even smaller.
The other astounding result is the size of the Republican-Democrat gap on Israel. While 80 percent of Republicans are favorable, only 53 percent of Democrats are. Democrats are twice as likely to like the PA. In comparison, 64 percent of Democrats like Egypt, a repressive dictatorship despite its moderate foreign policy, and 56 percent like Russia.
Two fascinating questions arise from this analysis: What does all this matter, since public opinion doesn't make foreign policy, and why is there such a gap between the most vocal elites and masses on Israel?
The answer to the first question is that it matters to members of Congress who are running for election in November and know that voters don't want to see them bash Israel or support a president in doing so. Indeed, as President Barack Obama's popularity has fallen and even the media has become more critical, Congress is reclaiming an independent role on foreign policymaking.
And of course the White House, too, is watching the polls. This is one of the most elections' conscious, always campaigning presidencies in history-and the standard there is very high-and clearly attacking Israel either isn't seen as beneficial for its ambitions. This isn't the only factor affecting its behavior but it is one of them.
As to the second issue, there are many factors but let me try to list them briefly. Those who are unhappy with the status quo-that is, the U.S.-Israel special relationship, are going to be noisier. Another is the concept of "Realism" which is, unfortunately, extraordinarily unrealistic, the idea that all governments think alike, defining interest the same way regardless of all other factors. To assume that type of government, political culture, distinctive history, and ideology plays no rule in Arab politics ensures you don't understand them. And so much of the Western elite assumes Israel is the only problem preventing Arab rulers and Islamist revolutionaries from loving the West.
Another issue is narrative, with much of the elite believing that the conflict is one of Palestinians and Syria desperately wanting peace but Israel saying no. In the American elite, there is also more of a yearning to be like Europe.
But American public opinion has more common sense to see through these myths. It understands that there are huge differences between democracies and dictatorship. It knows demagoguery and extremist ideology on sight and doesn't like them. Thus, matters are precisely the opposite of what much of the elite thinks: public opinion, not elite institutions, accurately predicts where policy on these issues will go in future.
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