A Saturday morning perusal of the liberal Israeli daily
brings up the following articles: A report on U.S. anti-terror funds and Jewish non-profit groups, and official recognition that Jewish communities in this country can be terrorist targets; a report on British academics dropping a planned boycott of Israel with background on the activist effort that resulted in preventing the enactment of so dangerous a precedent; and a guest commentary by Ruth R. Wisse, a Harvard professor of Yiddish and comparative literature, in the form of insightful answers to letters posing significant political and cultural questions.

Update from Steve Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism

Exiled Egyptian cleric Ahmed Subhy Mansour, whose teachings have earned him dozens of death “fatwas” from fellow Muslim clerics, uses the English translation for al Qaeda - meaning “the base” - to describe a plan to defeat Osama bin Laden and other terrorists, who he says have seized control of Islam. “Suppose you have here [in the United States] a base to counter al Qaeda in the war of ideas?” Sheik Mansour asked during a recent luncheon at The Washington Times.

“You could convince a large number - millions of silent Muslims. We can convince them very easily that the real enemy is not the United States. It is not Israel. The real enemy is the dictators in the Muslim world and the culture of the Wahhabis and Muslim Brotherhood,” he said, referring to the dominant arbiters of Islamic orthodoxy in Saudi Arabia and Egypt respectively. Sheik Mansour is the founder of a small Egyptian sect that is neither Sunni nor Shi”ite. They call themselves Quranists because they believe that the Koran represents the single authentic scripture of Islam. They especially anger Sunni Muslims by rejecting the Hadith and Sunna, purported sayings and traditions of the prophet Muhammad.

Project on Terrorism executive director Steven Emerson claims that radical Islam is alive and well in America - thanks to the tacit cooperation of government agencies which embrace the very groups they should be investigating, writes the Jerusalem Post of a lengthy interview with Emerson (a member of ALERT Advisory Board) when he was in Tel Aviv earlier this month to speak to the International Institute for Counterterrorism.

Reactions to Ahmadinejad in New York

New York Sun: Despite emphatic objection to the university’s invitation to the dictator, the conservative newspaper has praise for the concluding remarks of Columbia University President Lee Bolinger to the Iranian dictator:

I am only a professor, who is also a university president, and today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better.

FrontPage Magazine: This prominent publication of the counter-jihad movement deplores the extensive coverage that made the Holocaust denier’s visit to New York a “Propaganda Coup.”

Haaretz: The liberal Israeli daily contends that “The clear loser from Ahmadinejad’s visit is Israel,” portrayed by the Iranian president as the source of the region’s problems, and argues that the predominantly Jewish protesters only served to reinforce the idea that “Iran is only a problem for Israel, or at most for the Jews.”

Little Green Footballs: The feisty Jihad-watching, pro-Israel, award-winning blog quotes the Iranian press favorable coverage of their president’s New York visit as an object lesson in the folly of applying western “free speech” principles to a fascist Islamic regime.

This blog with its astute investigative bent also examines the Iranian press report of a meeting, largely ignored by the U.S. press, between Ahmadinejad and American Muslims during which the dictator reputedly referred to the Holocaust as “a pretext for occupation of Palestine and making over 5,000 innocent people homeless.”

The front page of today’s New York Sun provides a pair of items about the scheduled speech of Ahmadinejad at Columbia University. Columbia has long been the academic jewel in the Empire State’s crown, and that jewel is now on the verge of being irrevocably tarnished.

A feature story examines what Jewish students at Columbia learned about their university when they went online following the Yom Kippur fast–a telling portrait of the appeasement mentality in contemporary perspective and hypothetical retrospective

A news article explores the potential impact on state aid for Columbia should the Holocuast denying Iranian dictator be permitted to speak on the campus–possible legislative retaliation which we think of as The Empire Strikes Back.

The home office from which Alert Today is produced is moving to a larger space, so we will not be posting again until Friday 9/21. Beginning a new year in a new space, we are going to be making some changes to the blog: personalizing our notifications of new postings; profiling organizations that share our perspective; featuring people and organizations in whose endeavors ALERT (American League for Effective Responses to Terrorism) is participating.

Shana Tova!

Faust’s First Move

New York Sun Editorial

September 18, 2007

It didn’t attract much notice at the time, but one of the first moves of the new president of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust, was to write to the chief of the union of British academics that was proposing a boycott of Israeli professors and universities. According to a statement from Ms. Faust’s office, she wrote the letter on her second day on the job at Harvard, expressing her own “conviction that such a move subverts the academic values and freedoms necessary to the free flow of ideas that are the lifeblood of universities and, ultimately, that of the societies and world we serve.”

Ms. Faust’s statement said that she joins “many colleagues throughout the international academic community in denouncing unequivocally an action that would serve no purpose and would fundamentally violate the academic freedoms we must defend at all costs.” It was a milder statement than the one from the president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, who called the proposed boycott an “intellectually shoddy and politically biased” attempt “to hijack the central mission of higher education.” But it nonetheless made clear where Ms. Faust stood in respect of fair treatment of Israel.

The stance taken by Ms. Faust on the matter is closely watched, and is particularly welcome, because there was more than a whiff of anti- Israel - even anti-Jewish, some students sense - sentiment in the faculty rebellion that forced Ms. Faust’s predecessor, Lawrence Summers from Massachusetts Hall. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences motion in March 2005 expressing no confidence in Mr. Summers was made by a Harvard professor, J. Lorand Matory, who had signed a petition calling on Harvard to divest from Israel.

That petition, like the British boycott effort, singled out Israel for opprobrium among all the countries of the world, and Mr. Summers, showed the courage to reject it, more bluntly than other university presidents, as being anti-Semitic in effect, if not intent. That position earned Mr. Summers the enmity not only of Mr. Matory but no doubt others on the faculty who are hostile to Israel. With Mr. Summers gone, there is no doubt that the anti- Israel camp at Harvard will try to gain ground.

Mr. Matory himself surfaced last week with an opinion piece in the student newspaper, the Crimson, with a new sneer at Zionism. “The convention that persecuted Europeans had the right to safe havens on lands stolen from non-Europeans was, by the mid-20th century, as outmoded as the Confederacy’s defense of slavery in the mid-19th,” he wrote. A professor at the Kennedy School of Government, Stephen Walt, has joined with a former colleague at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer, in writing a book that blames Israel and its American supporters for inspiring everything from the Iraq War to Al Qaeda terrorism against America.

Israel has its defenders on Harvard’s campus, including, among others, Alan Dershowitz at the Law School, Ruth Wisse, the Peretz professor of Yiddish literature, and an active group of Jewish students. But there is a sense after the ouster of Mr. Summers and the animus of Messrs. Matory and Walt that things are in the balance. There is room within any large institution for divergent points of view, even on questions as basic as the existence of Israel, but there is also room for a dominant point of view - which throws into sharp relief Harvard’s responsibilities as an American university in wartime.

* * *

Harvard rose to the occasion in World War II. It may have been slow to support the war before it began, but once it did, Harvard’s president, James Bryant Conant, turned the campus over to training troops and the development of radar countermeasures. Conant himself served as chairman of the National Defense Research Committee and helped to develop the atom bomb that beat the Japanese. In the Cold War, while Harvard students eventually fell away from the fight for Vietnam, the cause of anti-communism was, at least for years, championed by such Harvard men as McGeorge Bundy, who left his post as dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences to serve as national security adviser to that great cold warrior, President Kennedy, and Henry Kissinger, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Peace.

With the outbreak of a new world war on September 11, 2001, Mr. Summers tried to rally Harvard to the American cause, going so far as to begin attending ROTC commissioning ceremonies. He had, after all, served as Treasury Secretary, the officer to which presidents often turned to raise an army. The reserve officers training corps had been thrown off the Harvard campus after Vietnam, and kept off ostensibly in response to the ban on gays in the military. Ms. Faust took office in July, but her formal installation is scheduled for October 12 in a ceremony with traditions dating back to Harvard’s founding in the 17th-century. One of the things people will be watching for her to say at that moment will be some words about the responsibilities of a university to its country in a war against an enemy determined not only to destroy Israel but also the rest of Western civilization.

We who are committed to educating the American public about the Jihad threat have our work cut out for us in the coming year–and for a great many years to come–as evidenced by the following op-ed piece appearing in the Washington Post on the anniversary of the Jihad attacks on the World Trade Center.

The author of this outrageous article, Alan B. Krueger, Princeton economist and author of a book about terrorism, supposedly explodes popular myths about terrorism without once alluding to an international Jihad movement intent upon world domination. The omission is clear indication that behind the façade of simplistic explanation is a voice speaking of root causes while enabling Jihadists to take root in Western democracies.

That this Jihad-enabling fluff piece should appear in a major American newspaper on the anniversary of 9/11/01 is a disgrace, and an indication of how entrenched are Islamist apologists in the national discussion of terrorism.

5 Myths About Terrorism

By Alan B. Krueger

Tuesday, September 11, 2007; 12:00 AM

Six years after 9/11, all too many Americans still have only a vague idea of what does — and doesn’t — motivate terrorists. It doesn’t help that many politicians exploit the anxiety that terrorism evokes to to promote their own agendas. Here are five key urban legends:

1. Terrorism is a random act carried out by irrational people who hate our way of life.

If only it were that simple. In fact, terrorists are typically motivated by geopolitical grievances, not blind hatred. The agendas of individual terrorist groups vary, but their tactical goal is always more or less the same: to sow fear and confusion by deliberately targeting civilians in order to intimidate a country into changing its policies and ways.

So political calculations are key here. Citizens of countries that occupy other countries, for example, are more likely to be targeted by terrorists. In addition, wealthy democracies are more likely to be the targets of terrorist strikes than are totalitarian regimes, which suggests that terrorists deliberately strike countries that are susceptible to public pressure.

Another reason not to see terrorist attacks as random: They’re often timed to occur when they can have maximum impact, such as the eve of pivotal elections. In Israel, for example, attacks by Palestinian terrorist groups bent on sabotaging peace talks are more frequent before elections when left-wing governments hold power, in hopes of pushing Israeli voters in a more hawkish direction, according to research by Claude Berrebi of the Rand Corporation and Esteban F. Klor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

There’s even a cold logic to the time of day that terrorists pick for their attacks, which also suggests a rhythm that’s far from random. My analysis of U.S. government data from the National Counterterrorism Center reveals that terrorists are most likely to strike in the morning — in time to enter the day’s news cycle.

2. Terrorists are no different than ordinary criminals.

Wrong. Criminals tend to be poor and uneducated. But terrorists tend to come from families with above-average means and are often well-educated. For example, Jitka Maleckova of the Russell Sage Foundation and I found that members of the military wing of the radical Shiite group Hezbollah who were killed in action in the 1980s and early 1990s were better educated and less likely to be poor than their Lebanese countrymen. Other researchers have found similar results for other terrorist groups. People who join terrorist organizations often have legitimate, well-paying jobs, unlike common criminals.

3. Terrorists are likely to cross into the United States from Mexico.

This is a favorite chestnut of some activists and politicians keen to tighten immigration and build a fence on the Mexican border. But the historical record doesn’t bear it out. Of course, the past may not be a good predictor of the future, but terrorists have rarely crossed into the United States from Mexico. In a recent Nixon Center study of 373 Islamist terrorists, Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke concluded: “Despite widespread alarms raised over terrorist infiltration from Mexico, we found no terrorist presence in Mexico and no terrorists who entered the U.S. from Mexico.” By contrast, the authors found “a sizeable terrorist presence in Canada and a number of Canadian-based terrorists who have entered the U.S.” For example, Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian terrorist who tried to blow up Los Angeles International Airport in December 1999, was caught trying to cross the border from Canada into Washington state.

4. Terrorism is mainly perpetrated by Muslims.

Wrong. No religion has a monopoly on terrorism. Every major religious faith has had followers involved in terrorism. (Sri Lanka, for instance, has grappled for decades with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a separatist group that pioneered suicide bombing as a terrorist tactic and hopes to create a homeland for the country’s mostly Tamil minority, who are largely Hindu.) Although radical Islamic terrorists are the worry du jour because of 9/11 and Iraq, the data show pretty clearly that the predominant religion of a country is not a good predictor of whether its people will become involved in terrorism.

After all, it was not long ago that homegrown villains such as Timothy McVeigh and the so-called Unabomber were the most notorious terrorists. That makes sense; the vast majority of terrorist incidents are local, motivated by local concerns and carried out by natives. Even international terrorist events tend to be local affairs, most frequently carried out by local militants who target foreigners who happen to be in their country. (Just think of last week’s foiled plot to attack U.S. targets in Germany.) This suggests that the likelihood of attack by homegrown terrorists is far greater than the threat of another 9/11-style attack by foreigners.

5. Terrorism never succeeds.

If terrorism didn’t work, it would be far more rare than it now is. Sometimes terrorists do achieve their goals, which is why others continue to try the tactic.

Of course, it’s not always easy to determine what the terrorists’ objectives are, but sometimes their goals are pretty clear. Consider the devastating commuter-rail bombings in Madrid in March 2005, three days before Spain held congressional elections. The Islamic radicals who set off the bombs reportedly hoped to change the Spanish government. It worked. A new study by Jose Garcia Matalvo, an economist at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, compared absentee ballots cast before the bombings with votes cast after them on a province-by-province level. His work convincingly shows that the shock of the bombings led the Socialist Party to defeat the incumbent conservative government. Upon assuming power, the Socialist Party immediately withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq.

Alan B. Krueger is the Bendheim professor of economics and public policy at Princeton University and the author of “What Makes a Terrorist.”

FOREIGN INFLUENCE

Anti-Semitism and the Anti-Israel Lobby
What’s so nefarious about Jews exercising their right to speech?

BY JEFF ROBBINS
Sunday, September 9, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

A crop of Israel’s critics–most prominently Jimmy Carter and now Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the authors of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”–have managed something of a feat: They express no concerns about the massive pro-Arab effort, funded in significant measure by foreign oil money, taking American Jews to task for participating in the American political process; meanwhile, they inoculate themselves against charges of anti-Jewish bias by pre-emptively predicting that “the Jewish lobby” will accuse them of it.

Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer, in particular, have been heralded by Israel’s critics for their “courage” in attacking American Jews, who have allegedly “strangled” criticism of Israel. Their case seems one part laughable, and one part eyebrow-raising.

An anecdote from my own experience with the anti-Israel lobby may shed some light on the absurdity of the Walt-Mearsheimer offensive. Not long after Sept. 11, 2001, I received a call from a major defense contractor asking for a favor. I was serving as president of the Boston chapter of the World Affairs Council, a national organization that debates foreign policy, and the defense contractor was one of the Council’s principal sponsors.

The Saudi Arabian government was sponsoring a national public relations campaign to cultivate American public opinion, and was sending Saudi emissaries around the country to make the case that Saudi Arabia was a tolerant, moderate nation worthy of American support. Would the Council organize a forum of Boston’s community leaders so that the Saudis could make their case?

While this was patently no more than a Saudi lobbying effort, we organized the forum, and it was well-attended by precisely the slice of Boston’s political and corporate elite that the Saudis and their defense contractor benefactor had hoped for. The Saudis maintained that their kingdom should be regarded as a promoter of Middle East peace, and that the abundant evidence that Saudi Arabia was in fact promoting a virulent brand of extremist Islam should be discounted.

Saudi Arabia paid for the trip of its emissaries to Boston, for the Washington-based public relations and lobbying company that organized the trip, and for the Boston public relations and lobbying company that handled the Boston part of the visit. And it drew upon the resources and relationships of the defense contractor, which sells hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment to Saudi Arabia, to support and orchestrate its public relations effort.

The billions in petrodollars Arab states spend in the U.S. for defense, construction, engineering and consulting contracts position them nicely to win friends in high places, and friends are what they have. That is true all over the world, is true in this country, and has been true for quite some time. As Secretary of State Cordell Hull noted 60 years ago, “The oil of Saudi Arabia constitutes one of the world’s great prizes.” His successor, Edward Stettinius, opposed the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East, stating, “It would seriously prejudice our ability to afford protection to American interests, economic and commercial . . . throughout the area.”

The Saudis and their allies have not been shy about supplementing their considerable leverage in the U.S. by targeting expenditures to affect the debate over Middle East policy by funding think tanks, Middle East studies programs, advocacy groups, community centers and other institutions.

To take one obvious example, just last year Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal donated $20 million each to Harvard and Georgetown Universities for programs in Islamic studies. Prince Alwaleed, chairman of a Riyadh-based conglomerate, is the fellow whose $10 million donation to the Twin Towers Fund following the Sept. 11 attacks was rejected by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani after the Saudi Prince suggested that the U.S. “re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinians.”

Georgetown and Harvard had no apparent qualms about accepting Prince Alwaleed’s money. The director of Georgetown’s newly-renamed Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center rejected any suggestion that the Saudi magnate was attempting to use Saudi oil wealth to influence American policy in the Middle East. “There is nothing wrong with [Prince Alwaleed] expressing his opinion on American foreign policy,” he said. “Clearly, it was done in a constructive way.”

In other words, for those who accept the Arab line on the Israel-Arab conflict–namely, that it is the product of Israeli intransigence in some form or another–the increasing proliferation of Middle East-funded enterprises all across the country aimed at advancing the Arab view of the conflict constitute “nothing wrong.” Nor are those hewing to the anti-Israel line troubled by the way in which the massive Islamic bloc of nations, by dint both of their number and their economic leverage over the rest of the world, are able to guarantee an incessantly anti-Israel agenda at the United Nations and other international fora.

Although the aggressive deployment of petrodollars and oil-based influence from foreign sources aimed at advancing a pro-Arab line constitutes “nothing wrong” as far as Israel’s critics are concerned, a new political fashion holds that there is something very wrong indeed about American Jews and other American backers of Israel expressing their support for Israel, and urging their political leaders to join them in that support.

Our major newspapers and networks, with correspondents in Israel able to take advantage of an Israeli political system that is a free-for-all and an astonishingly vibrant and self-critical Israeli press, report daily on every twist and turn of the conflict and are very frequently critical of Israel. As for American campuses, most objective observers would have little difficulty concluding that far from being criticism-free, they are in fact dominated by critics of Israel. Clearly, as strangleholds on criticism go, whatever stranglehold the pro-Israel community has on debate in the U.S. is a very loose one indeed.

If the charge that American Jews are able to stifle criticism of Israel is simply silly, the leveling of the charge that there is something nefarious about Jews urging support for the Jewish state raises questions about whether Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer have descended into a certain ugliness. And the tactic of trying to neutralize those questions by loudly predicting that they will be asked, however clever a tactic it may be, does not neutralize them.

It is apparently the authors’ position that, even in the face of the overwhelming leverage of an Arab world swimming in petrodollars, with a lock on the U.N. and an unlimited ability to pay for pro-Arab public relations, American Jews are obliged to stay silent. In essence, Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer have repackaged the “the-Jews-run-the-country” stuff which has long been the bread and butter of anti-Semites.

Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer deny that they are anti-Semitic, and that is certainly good news. But where they are apparently content with foreign oil money being used to advance a pro-Arab position on the Middle East, but devote themselves to criticizing American Jews for lobbying their public officials in support of the Jewish state, one may legitimately wonder what phrase would apply. Surely, one’s denial that he is anti-Semitic, while welcome, is hardly dispositive; after all, the marked increase in anti-Semitism around the world is well-documented, and yet one rarely hears anyone actually announce that they are anti-Semitic, or that their views are anti-Semitic.

But if anti-Semitism is too harsh a term, and if the word “bigoted” is also taken off the table, perhaps one can be forgiven for concluding that “anti-Jewish bias” fits the bill here. After all, where there is nothing wrong with foreign money from Arab countries advancing a pro-Arab agenda in Messrs. Walt’s and Mearsheimer’s world–but there is something very wrong with American citizens who are Jewish exercising their civic right to speak out on behalf of Israel and taking issue with the pro-Arab agenda–even the most vehement disclaimers of any bias against Jews lack a certain credibility.

The potency of the Middle East-funded anti-Israel lobby around the world and in the U.S. is difficult to ignore. Yet, Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer and others who adhere to an anti-Israel line ignore it. In and of itself, this is not surprising. When at the same time they portray American Jews’ efforts to make the case for Israel as morally suspect, however, they open themselves up to reasonable charges of something far more troublesome than mere hypocrisy, and that is anti-Jewish bias, by whatever name.

Mr. Robbins, a U.S. delegate to the U.N. Human Rights Commission during the Clinton administration, is an attorney at Mintz, Levin in Boston.