GIYUS Targets Christian Science Monitor Message Board

Eli Clifton
Lobelog - Jim Lobe blog
June 18th, 2010

Last week I wrote about GIYUS—the “online public diplomacy platform of Israel” as the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Word document) describes it—and the powerful role it can play in shaping the results of online polls and changing the direction of message board discussions.

Yesterday GIYUS sent out an alert about a forum on The Christian Science Monitor’s website. GIYUS appears to have driven a lot of traffic to the discussion–which is titled “Israeli blockade of Gaza: What would you change?“–and has inundated the forum with pro-blockade comments.

Comments in favor of the blockade are consistently receiving “thumbs up” votes and those in opposition to the blockade, and the IDF’s lethal attack on the flotilla, are getting voted down.

As an example, here is the comment which is currently the most highly ranked.

“Johnny Gee” wrote:

I would stress the strongest support as possible for the beleaguered Israelis, who are threatened from every direction and by every mode, including missles [sic], suicide murderers, and of course arms from the sea. Remember, the Israelis are the canary in the coalmine – the real target of the Islamic fundamentalist murderers is the US, Europe, and the world.

“Sam from Oregon” didn’t have the same appeal to GIYUS users and has found his comment voted to the bottom of the thread.

Sam wrote:

I would eliminate all US financial and military support to Israel. Israel is not “too big to fail”, and if they can’t figure out a way to make nice with their neighbors, then they deserve to fail. The US habit of unconditional support for everything Israeli is the primary cause of middle east unrest. It’s time for US military adventures to come to an end. Bring home the troops, and use all the money for improving US infrastructure, education, and health care.

Bashir Insanity

Team Obama has just offered Sudan's genocidal tyrant one last olive branch. A hickory switch might work better.

BY JAMES TRAUB
ForeignPolicy
SEPTEMBER 17, 2010

This past Tuesday, when the punditocracy was raptly focused on the electoral results in Delaware and New Hampshire, the U.S. State Department quietly issued a policy statement on Sudan that offered the government of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir a path to escape sanctions and restore normal relations with the United States.

Why no fanfare? Perhaps an administration highly sensitive to accusations of equivocation in the face of evil was reluctant to call attention to a policy that emphasized carrots rather than sticks -- or rather, to use the splendidly mangled metaphor of one administration official, offered to the regime in Khartoum "a carrot painted with a finer degree of granularity." Bashir, who has been indicted on genocide charges by the International Criminal Court, doesn't deserve a carrot. But the Obama administration has rightly concluded that absent strong inducements, deserved or not, from the United States and other key actors, the regime in Khartoum could well plunge Sudan back into a horrendous civil war.

In January 2005, the regime and the breakaway government of the south put an end to almost 40 years of war by signing the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. The CPA gave southerners the right to choose independence or greater autonomy within Sudan. The referendum in which they will make that choice is scheduled for Jan. 10, 2011, and no one doubts that voters will overwhelmingly choose the former -- if the referendum is held, and conducted honestly. But Khartoum appears to have no intention of permitting that. Oil has turned Sudan into a boom economy, and 80 percent of the country's oil is located in the south. Moreover, the regime fears -- with good reason -- that granting independence to the South would embolden other regional insurgencies.

Suliman Baldo, a Sudanese scholar with the International Center on Transitional Justice, says that the Bashir government has been orchestrating a domestic media campaign to promote the fiction that all Sudanese seek national unity -- and thus that a vote for independence is intrinsically illegitimate. Baldo and others fear that if Khartoum blocks or refuses to recognize the election, provoking the government of the South to unilaterally declare independence, the decades-long civil war that led to the deaths of two million people will resume.

The Obama administration has responded to this apocalyptic prospect with a belated, but very concentrated, diplomatic surge. Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and National Security Advisor James Jones have spoken with Salva Kiir, the southern leader, and Ali Osman Taha, Sudan's vice president, urging them to make progress on the terms laid out in the CPA, which they have so far failed to do. President Obama announced last week that he would personally attend a U.N. Security Council session on Sudan chaired by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during the upcoming General Assembly meeting; that in turn has persuaded other heads of state, as well as Kiir and Taha, to attend. The administration has beefed up its diplomatic representation in Sudan, in part by naming Princeton Lyman, a veteran diplomat with long experience in Africa, to work with the two sides. And last weekend Scott Gration, Obama's special envoy to Sudan, went to Khartoum to deliver the administration's new offer.

That offer is at the heart of the strategy document released earlier this week. Gration presented the regime with four ascending "stages" of granularized carrot. The administration will immediately change the rules governing the export of agricultural equipment to Sudan, now tightly controlled by sanctions. "Previously there had been an assumption of no," a White House official explained to me. "Now we're going to shift to an assumption of yes." This is, in effect, a gift for showing up -- no strings attached. If the regime permits the referendum to proceed and respects the outcome, the White House will lift further trade restrictions (though not on the all-important oil sector). If Khartoum also reaches agreement on key North-South issues, including the drawing of boundaries and sharing of oil revenue, Washington will appoint an ambassador (the last ambassador, Timothy Michael Carney, was withdrawn in 1996 after Sudan was declared a state sponsor of terrorism). Only, however, if Khartoum also resolves the Darfur conflict does the administration promise to seek full normalization and the lifting of sanctions.

Administration officials present the package as an "intensification" of existing diplomacy, but that is slightly disingenuous. After long, and reportedly heated, arguments inside the White House over the proper balance between carrot and stick, officials have produced a document that is highly specific about inducements and carefully vague about threats. Despite veiled references to "accountability," the statement is silent on the ICC indictments. And after much discussion over whether it's acceptable, or effective, to address the North-South conflict separately from Darfur, the administration plan will allow Khartoum to profit from compliance on North-South issues, though Bashir wins the jackpot only for restoring peace to Darfur.

Some, though not all, members of the advocacy community are appalled at the decision to, quite literally, let the regime get away with murder. John Norris, a Sudan expert at the Center for American Progress and former head of the Enough Project, calls the package "unseemly." Norris points out that in 2005 Western diplomats made a calculated decision to bless the North-South peace agreement even as the regime perpetrated mass slaughter in Darfur. Indeed, from the very beginnings of the killings in Darfur, in 2003, Bashir responded to pressure from the West by threatening to scuttle negotiations over ending the civil war. "Once again," Norris says, "you've got a bunch of diplomats saying that this current situation is so serious that we need to ignore all this other stuff."

So there is both a moral case and a strategic case against offering Khartoum goodies in exchange for behaving itself on the referendum. But if the derailing of the referendum really would lead to mass killing (and some experts I spoke to are skeptical on this score), then it's patent that the moral imperative is to give Bashir incentives to behave himself, and to leave the issue of just deserts to a future date. The only real question is effectiveness. A number of studies (pdf) have concluded that marginalizing Darfur to get the CPA signed was a disastrous mistake that sent Bashir a signal that he could do as he wished with the people of Darfur. Why is it correct now?

Gration was foolish enough to say earlier this year that what remained in Darfur, seven years after the killing broke out, was only "the remnants of genocide." He was quickly forced to retract the comment in the face of outrage from activists. But he was right. Civilians in Darfur still live in a state of terror, and millions remain displaced; but much of the killing now pits rebel groups, or Arab tribesmen, against one another. On the other hand, the steadily rising levels of violence in the South, much of it probably instigated by Bashir and his colleagues, could explode into the kind of mass ethnic reprisals provoked by the partition of India and Pakistan in 1948. As a State Department official puts it delicately, "There is a sense of urgency on both Darfur and the CPA, but there is a growing sense of immediacy on North-South issues." The situation in 2005 was the exact opposite.

That said, Bashir must be made to feel that there is a powerful, and imminent, "or else." So far, the Obama team has hesitated to make threats. Gration in particular has been far too willing in the past to accept the regime's bona fides, as if unaware of the bland reassurances and bald-faced lies that frustrated his predecessors. Even now, he and his team may be putting too much stock in the influence of "moderates" inside the ruling National Congress Party, whom Western officials have been banking on -- fruitlessly -- for years. Bashir is likely to "accept" the State Department's proposal, and then add onerous conditions of his own. A White House official insists that the administration is prepared for that eventuality, and adds that the ability to marshal an international response in case of rejection is "a very important part of the thinking" that went into the new offer. As with Iran, that is, the regime's rebuff of what is seen as a fair offer will help the United States build the case for tougher sanctions than those Sudan now faces.

Will Bashir be suitably impressed by that prospect? Over the years, he has blithely ignored Security Council resolutions, sanctions, threats of prosecution, and global public opprobrium. He has learned all too well how to exploit the weakness of international diplomacy. Now he holds a lit match over a vast bonfire. Perhaps he fears the consequences of flicking it on to the pyre, but the irresolute response of years past have ensured it's his choice -- and his alone.

Egyptian paper doctors photo of Mubarak and Obama

By Michael Calderone michael Calderone
Yahoo
Thu Sep 16, 2010 10:57 am ET

Al-Ahram, the state-run newspaper in Egypt, recently ran the above photo of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak leading President Obama and other world leaders during Middle East peace talks at the White House.

But that's not quite how the walk to the East Room played out. The BBC reports that Al-Ahram apparently had some fun with Photoshop, and placed the country's leader up front.

You can see the original Getty photo below.

Egyptian media has long faced government censorship, so it's not surprising the state-run newspaper would opt to place Mubarak ahead of the pack. News of the re-cut photo drew a swift rebuke from one of Egypt's leading opposition groups, the 6 April Youth Movement. "This is what the corrupt regime's media has been reduced to," a statement on the group's website said. The state-owned press had "crossed the line from being balanced and honest," the statement continued. But the specific reason for doctoring this photo is unclear, since Al-Ahram did not respond to the BBC's request for comment.

[Related: Doctored cover of beauty magazine causes controversy]

(Photo of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Barack Obama, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and King Abdullah II of Jordan at the White House on September 1: Getty/ Alex Wong)

One in seven Americans is living in poverty, Census shows

By Carol Morello
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 16, 2010; 3:08 PM

One in seven Americans is living in poverty, the highest number in the half-century that the government has kept such statistics, the Census Bureau announced Thursday.

Last year was the third consecutive year that the poverty rate climbed, in part because of the recession, rising from 13.2 percent in 2008 to 14.3 percent, or 43.6 million people, last year.

Asians were the only ethnic group whose poverty rate did not change substantially; every other race and Hispanics experienced increases in poverty rates.

In addition, 51 million Americans were uninsured, as the number of people with health insurance dropped from 255 million to less than 254 million -- the first decrease since the government started keeping track in 1987. The number would have been worse because 6.5 million fewer people got insurance through their jobs, but it was offset by a leap in government-backed health insurance. More than 30 percent of Americans now get coverage from the government.

"Given all the unemployment we saw, it's the government safety net that's keeping people above the poverty line," Douglas Besharov, a University of Maryland public policy professor and former scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Associated Press.

The grim statistics reflect the depth of the recession that began almost three years ago and could have an impact on midterm elections less than two months away.

"These numbers should be a wake-up call," said Peter Edelman, a Georgetown University professor and co-director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy. "These are deeply disturbing numbers."

At organizations where the unemployed come to get help finding a job or seek food, the numbers were no surprise.

"In the decade I've been doing this work, this is a low point," said Jason Perkins-Cohen, executive director of the Job Opportunities Task Force in Baltimore. "We're getting a real feeling of desperation. For sheer numbers, it's a new, unhappy world."

At the nonprofit Action Though Service in Prince William County late Thursday morning, the shelves of the agency's pantry were starting to empty, as the line for help snaked out the door with a few dozen people seeking assistance.

Prince William resident Carol Williams said she has come to the shelter once a month since January, when she was laid off from her job at United Medical Center due to budget woes.

"I worked since I was 15, and, now, for the first time I don't have a job and I can't feed my family," said Williams, 55. "I have a degree; doesn't matter. The jobs aren't there."

Williams said she has been applying for dozens of jobs a week and had about 20 interviews since January. "I think people are scared to hire someone who is not working," she said, adding there also is just a lot more competition because of the high unemployment rate.

A single mother, Williams has five mouths to feed -- children and grandchildren-- ranging in age from 17 months to 28. Williams said she was able to raise three sons on her own, but she now turns to the food pantry at ACTS and her father and friends for help.

"We had no bread, no nothing last Friday because the pantry was closed," she said. "Luckily a friend helped me or we would have had no food for the weekend."

Advocates said they're seeing a lot more people like Williams.

"We have definitely seen many more individuals who are very well-educated, with high degrees, where it's the first time to ever be in a situation to ever have to ask for help for food or shelter," said Vickie Koth, executive director of Good Shepherd Alliance in Loudoun County.

Koth recalls one family of four in particular, where both parents were highly educated -- the mother was a lawyer, and the father was a mortgage broker. "They were in the business of buying and selling homes, and they had three foreclosures within the same span of time and were homeless for the first time.

"We're full all the time and we turn people away every day, and that's always been true. But the types of people that call have changed," Koth said. "Time after time I've heard individuals say, 'I've given to shelters, I've volunteered at food pantries. I've never thought I'd be here myself.' "

Prescriptions for an Inquisition

Daniel Luban
Lobelog - Jim Lobe blog
September 16th, 2010

I wrote earlier for IPS about the new Center for Security Policy report “Shariah: The Threat to America,” authored by a team billing itself as “Team B II” (in reference to the 1970s Team B notorious for its alarmist and now-discredited estimates of Soviet military capabilities). The group that produced the report featured a number of the right’s nuttier Islamophobes, including Frank Gaffney, Andy McCarthy, and David Yerushalmi. Given that this sort of thinking is making inroads among congressional Republicans — the report was endorsed by Reps. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), Trent Franks (R-AZ), and Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) — it’s worth taking a closer look at some of the report’s prescriptions to see just how extreme it is.

The central problem with the report is that the authors identify “sharia” with the most literalistic and brutal versions of sharia, and therefore fail to understand what the term might actually mean to the bulk of Muslims worldwide. (When Matt Duss asked Gaffney at Wednesday’s press conference to name any Muslims scholars or theologians who had been consulted in the writing of the report, Gaffney was unable to produce any names.) As a result their prescriptions would amount in practice to a criminalization of virtually any form of Islam.

Here are some of their policy recommendations (p. 143 of the report):

“…extend bands currently in effect that bar members of hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan from holding positions of trust in federal, state, or local governments or the armed forces of the United States to those who espouse or support shariah.”

“Practices that promote shariah – notably, shariah-compliant finance and the establishment or promotion in public spaces or with public funds of facilities and activities that give preferential treatment to shariah’s adherents – are incompatible with the Constitution and the freedoms it enshrines and must be proscribed.”

“Sedition is prohibited by law in the United States. To the extent that imams and mosques are being used to advocate shariah in America, they are promoting seditious activity and should be warned that they will not be immune from prosecution.”

“Immigrations of those who adhere to shariah must be precluded, as was previously done with adherents to the seditious ideology of communism.”

I am not a scholar of Islam, but any competent one will tell you that sharia is a far broader term than the “Team B” authors seem to think it is – it basically refers to Islamic religious precepts in general, to the point of being virtually synonymous with Islamic religious practice. As a result any practicing Muslim, no matter how moderate or extreme, will consider himself or herself to be “sharia-compliant” according to their own understanding of what sharia requires. This does not, of course, mean that they will endorse the brutal hudud penalties that have become the most notorious symbols of sharia to non-Muslims, that they will seek to impose these precepts on others, or that they will seek to make them the law of the land. But to demand that a practicing Muslim to renounce sharia is tantamount to demanding that they renounce Islam itself.

This is precisely what the report’s recommendations demand, whether or not it’s what the authors intend. Any Muslim who “espouses” or “adheres to” sharia – that is, any practicing Muslim – will thereby be banned from government or military service, prohibited from immigrating to the country, and even opened to prosecution for sedition. The only Muslims immune from this witch-hunt are those “who are willing publicly to denounce shariah” – a surefire recipe for the creation of conversos and crypto-Muslims, but hardly one consistent with the First Amendment.

We might be charitable to the “Team B” authors and argue that they’re simply ignorant: not understanding what sharia actually means, they have identified it with its most extreme manifestations, and therefore wrongly believe that by asking Muslims to renounce sharia they are simply asking them to renounce radical Islam. A less charitable explanation would be that they know exactly what they’re doing, and are seeking to outlaw Islam itself.

Mixed reactions to civil rights photographer's FBI ties

By Krissah Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 14, 2010; 3:51 PM

In many ways, civil rights photographer Ernest Withers would have been the perfect FBI informant, said leaders of the movement whom he photographed during quiet moments in their hotel rooms, at strategy meetings and in the midst of powerful street protests.

He was known to them as "Ernie" and later lionized as the "original civil rights photographer." It was Withers who took photos of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. the day he was slain on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and it was Withers who documented the trial of the men who killed young Emmett Till.

The revelation this week by the Memphis Commercial Appeal that Withers also assisted an organization that many in the movement considered an enemy further exposes the desperation of the federal government to gain access to the highest levels of the civil rights leadership.

The FBI kept an extensive file on King and his aides, and distrust between the movement's leaders and the agency was great. Civil rights leaders knew their hotel rooms were bugged and were careful about what they said even on their home phones, knowing that federal agents were listening. They felt like people inside and outside of their organizations were always watching them.

"It was just par for the course," said Juanita Jones Abernathy, widow of King's close friend Ralph Abernathy. "They could be in strategy sessions, and the FBI had a way of calling almost immediately after they had made plans for something to inform them of what they had planned to do. They would check into hotels, and the FBI was in the room across the aisle."

"But they kept moving," she said.

Withers, who died in 2007 at 85, provided photographs, scheduling information and biographical sketches to two FBI agents in Memphis, according to files the Commercial Appeal attained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The photographer was a former police officer, and the Memphis newspaper noted that Withers had eight children and may have needed the money paid to informants to support them.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, knew Withers well and said he is disappointed. The photographer moved freely in the tight circle of King's lieutenants, taking pictures and selling them to black magazines such as Jet and other outlets. He would give the photos free to the ministers who led the movement and could not afford to pay.

Those pictures have been collected in books and show a rare intimacy with civil rights leaders.

"He was very close," Lowery said from his home in Atlanta. "He was beloved. I'm surprised and I'm a little disappointed, but I suspect he did it with his tongue in check knowing that he was not doing anything to hurt the movement."

According to FBI files obtained by the Memphis newspaper during a two-year investigation, Withers worked closely with two FBI agents in the late 1960s.

"There was nothing he could report on us that would hurt us," Lowery said. "We were not an undercover group. We didn't have any need to hide. We weren't planning any ambushes or surprise attacks. We were quite open with what we were planning to do. We publicized it and invited people to join it. He probably knew that as well as anybody."

Julian Bond, a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, said FBI agents came to the group's office at least once a week to get information. Most often it was a matter of agents looking for runaway kids.

"We felt there was nothing wrong with saying who we had or hadn't seen. Lots of people talked to the FBI and did so innocently," Bond said. "They believed that they were helping in some legitimate law enforcement reason."

When agents began asking questions about politics - who was a communist, or about specific political figures - the SNCC leaders became more wary.

"We know some people in the movement were informants. I grew up in a political culture in which an informant - somebody who told on his friends - was the lowest form of life," Bond said.

Withers's daughter, Rosalind Withers, told local news organizations that she did not find the newspaper report convincing. "This is the first time I've heard of this in my life," she told the Commercial Appeal. "My father's not here to defend himself. That is a very, very strong, strong accusation."

Abernathy said Withers's family has her sympathy and concern. Withers was closer than any other journalist when King traveled to Memphis in 1968 for the sanitation workers' strike. It was there that King was assassinated, and Withers, who lived in Memphis, captured the sad, bloody aftermath beyond police lines.

Many details of Withers's relationship with the FBI have not been disclosed. The bureau keeps information on all its informers but has declined repeated requests to release any files on Withers.

As a whole, journalists were largely supportive of the movement's aims, said former Washington Post columnist William Raspberry, who was part of the small cadre of black journalists who covered civil rights. "There's a distinction to be made between those informants who pretended to be something other than what they were and those who were pressured," said Raspberry, who noted that civil rights activist Julius Hobson - who ran the D.C. chapter of the Congress on Racial Equity - was later revealed in FBI files to have been an informant.

"His experience was that sometimes you have to throw them a little something to get them off your back," Raspberry said.

Newt Gingrich: Did he go too far with comments about Obama?

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich accused President Obama of having a 'Kenyan, anticolonial' worldview in an interview Saturday with National Review Online.

By Amanda Paulson, Staff Writer
The Christian Science Monitor
posted September 13, 2010 at 2:25 pm EDT

Has Newt Gingrich gone too far?

The former speaker of the house is getting blasted for his comments over the weekend about President Obama, telling the National Review Online that the president is a con man who has a “Kenyan, anticolonial” worldview.

The comments are part of a pattern of extreme positions lately. Last month, Mr. Gingrich compared backers of the Ground Zero mosque to Nazis, and has said that if Republicans take back Congress in November they should consider a government shutdown over the budget.

He is considering a run for the presidency in 2012 – and was recently in Iowa, where he called Obama “the most radical president in American history – which may explain some of the attempts to grab headlines.

But the divisive rhetoric has also earned criticism from those on both sides of the aisle. And it has hurt his reputation as a fiery conservative who is also a man of ideas, someone more likely to rely on intellectual heft rather than appeal to voters’ basest fears or instincts.

“This crushes the hopes of those who thought Gingrich could bring ideas instead of smears to what the GOP was offering,” said Hari Sevugan, press secretary of the Democratic National Committee, about the most recent comments.

Andy Card, the former White House chief of staff under George W. Bush, said in an MSNBC video Monday morning that the comments could hurt Republicans up for election in November. “I don’t think the statements that Newt Gingrich made are helpful, no,” he said, when pressed.

Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, meanwhile, says the comments leave him confused.

“I don’t even have … the slightest idea what he’s talking about,” he told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s Good Morning America. Gingrich is "trying to appeal to the fringe of people who don't think the president was born in this country,” he added.

Gingrich’s comments came in reference to a Forbes article by conservative Dinesh D’Souza, which suggests that the president shares an anticolonial ideology with his father, a Luo tribesman from Kenya who Obama barely knew.

“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich told the Review, adding that “this is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.”

Gingrich’s comments – and Mr. D’Souza’s article – are fueling the storyline that some conservatives are banking on for the November elections: Obama as someone who isn’t American, by birth or beliefs, and who doesn’t belong in the Oval Office. But it’s an argument that leaves some Republicans uncomfortable.

“It’s [Gingrich’s] mission now to present himself as the most ferocious right-winger in the race,” conservative commentator and former speechwriter David Frum wrote in his blog Monday, before going on to excoriate Gingrich’s comments and the D’Souza article. “Here is racial animus, unconcealed and unapologetic, and it is seized by savvy editors and an ambitious politician as just the material to please a conservative audience,” adds Frum. “That’s an insult to every conservative in America.”

Pentagon proposes huge sale of warplanes to Saudis

By ANNE GEARAN
AP National Security Writer
Mon Sep 13, 2010

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration is seeking a go-ahead from Congress to sell up to $60 billion worth of sophisticated warplanes to Saudi Arabia and could add another $30 billion worth of naval arms in a deal designed to counter the rise of Iran as a regional power.

The deal would apparently represent the largest single U.S. arms sale ever approved. It would allow Saudi Arabia, the most militarily advanced of the Arab Gulf states and one of the richest countries in the world, to buy top-line U.S.-made helicopters and fighter jets with ranges that would span the Middle East and beyond.

Unlike some previous sales to Saudi Arabia, this one is not expected to be derailed by opposition in Congress or from U.S. backers of Israel, who have worried in the past about blunting Israel's military edge over its Arab neighbors.

Iran is now seen by Israel, the Gulf Arab states and the West as a significant and unpredictable threat that has changed the old calculus of the region's balance of power.

The U.S. is realigning its defense policies in the Persian Gulf as Iran improves the range and accuracy of missiles and other weapons that could threaten Israel or U.S. allies in Europe. Besides the Saudi deal, the U.S. has pending or proposed arms sales to Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, and has repositioned some U.S. forces and military assets around the Gulf.

The Pentagon plans to notify Congress of the proposed Saudi sale within about a week, spokesman Col. David Lapan said Monday. Lapan would not confirm details of the Saudi shopping list pending congressional notification, but two senior defense officials said it includes up to 84 new F-15 fighter jets and three types of helicopters including the sleek Black Hawk and the missile-toting Apache.

The Saudi sale has been in the works for months, and U.S. officials have acknowledged its rough outline for months. Full details of the numbers and types of aircraft were reported by The Wall Street Journal on Monday.

The defense officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Congress has not yet seen the entire proposal, said the Pentagon expects that Saudi Arabia would initially select about $30 billion worth of aircraft. Approval of the larger proposal would give the kingdom room to buy more warplanes later.

Congress could ask for changes or try to attach strings. U.S. and Israeli officials said they expect some members of Congress will object strongly to the sale, but not enough to block it.

Separately, the Pentagon is considering an additional request to sell up to roughly $30 billion in advanced naval technology to Saudi Arabia. The defense officials said that plan was still in the preliminary planning stage and would not come before Congress for months. It could include new patrol ships to defend Saudi coastal waters and counter the growing naval capability of Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guards.

The sales acknowledges the shift in U.S. and Israeli security priorities in the Gulf region, defense analyst Anthony Cordesman wrote recently.

"Strong U.S. security ties to Saudi Arabia offer Israel a far better alternative than Saudi Arabia turning to European or other suppliers and questioning U.S. support if it faces a crisis with Iran," Cordesman wrote in a Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis.

The Obama administration has repeatedly assured Israel that it is committed to protecting the Jewish state's military advantage, said Jonathan Peled, spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

"We have had a close, consistent dialogue about it," and Israel accepts the U.S. rationale for the sale "even though we are not thrilled about it," Peled said.

U.S. and other diplomats said Defense Secretary Robert Gates laid out the reasoning behind the proposed Saudi sale during meetings with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak in recent months.

Washington plans to counterbalance the sales to Arab nations with $30 billion in military assistance to Israel over 10 years. Israel is buying about 20 advanced American F-35 fighter jets worth $4 billion, to be funded by U.S. military aid to the country.

"At the core of our policy is making sure that there is stability in the region and part of that stability is making sure that Israel has what it needs to be able to provide for its own security," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Monday. "So the United States would do nothing that would upset the current balance in the region."

Mosque Madness: ADL Strikes Back, AJC Catches Up

September 12, 2010, 8:34pm
Forward
By J.J. Goldberg

In a nod, intentional or not, to the holiday spirit of atonement, the Anti-Defamation League announced just before Rosh Hashana that it has formed a task force, together with Christian and Muslim groups, to support Muslim congregations facing hostility around the country, particularly in connection with building mosques.

The September 7 announcement came five weeks after the ADL drew a storm of criticism for coming out against the building of an Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. The New York Times reported the ADL statement under a two-column headline at the top of its July 30 front page. Within days ADL had Joe Klein calling in Time magazine for Abe Foxman to be fired and a host of other pundits — in American Prospect, Vanity Fair, Salon and elsewhere — accusing Foxman and the league of betraying their anti-bigotry legacy by enabling bigotry.

Whether or not the ADL’s new Islam defense coalition is a reply to its critics or simply business as usual is hard to tell. What’s clear is that the criticisms stung. Foxman wrote a heated reply to his critics August 2 in the Huffington Post, calling the attacks “extremely painful” and reciting a list of ADL efforts against Islamophobia since 2001.

Since then the ADL has noticeably kicked up its anti-Islamophobia profile. Of course, that might simply reflect the fact that Islamophobia has been running wild in the streets. Either way, it’s on a tear. Key examples:

On August 26 the league issued a statement praising the NYPD for giving hate-crime status to the stabbing of a Muslim cabdriver, and it cited “elevated anti-Muslim sentiment” surrounding the Ground Zero debate as background to the crime. The same day it published a report on the Islamophobic record of anti-mosque firebrand Pamela Geller. The next day, August 27, Foxman had another Huffington Post piece, this time a wide-ranging attack on the current wave of Muslim-bashing. He cited several recent mosque bombings and called out the Rev. Franklin Graham, Billy’s kid, as a leading inciter.

On Rosh Hashana eve, the day after announcing the Interfaith Coalition on Mosques, ADL issued a statement condemning “anti-Muslim actions and rallies” set for September 11. It singled out the then-pending Koran burning in Florida, calling it “outrageous and horrific,” as well as a planned rally near Ground Zero by Pamela Geller and Dutch Islamophobe Geert Wilders, which it called “un-American.”Along the way it issued strong statements condemning Hamas for the killing of four Israelis near Hebron and demanding an apology from Time magazine for the “insidious subtext” of a cover story on Israelis and the peace process. It also criticized Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the former Israeli Sephardic chief rabbi and spiritual leader of the Shas party, for his “offensive and incendiary” homily calling for the Palestinians and their leaders to “perish.”

Lest we forget, the American Jewish Committee has also been active during these closing weeks of summer. Like ADL, it attacked Hamas for the Kiryat Arba murders, slammed Time magazine for its “malicious myth about Israel and peace” and praised the hate-crimes indictment of the alleged New York cabbie-killer.

And sort of like the ADL, the committee issued a condemnation of “provocative” actions planned for September 11. AJC’s formula was slightly different, though: Instead of pairing two anti-Muslim provocations in a condemnation of Islamophobia, it twinned the planned Koran burning with a planned 9/11 Ground Zero march against Islamophobia, for a general condemnation of, well, bad stuff. Coincidentally, the march AJC disliked resembled the one ADL disliked in one curious way: They both featured a duo of American agitator and European lawmaker — in AJC’s case, Israel-bashing former lawmakers Cynthia McKinney of Georgia and George Galloway of London.

The committee came back with an unambiguous condemnation of Islamophobia on September 11 itself, in the form of a Miami Herald op-ed article by AJC’s associate director of interreligious affairs, Rabbi Noam Marans.

So far there’s been no mention on the AJC website of Ovadia Yosef’s sermon.