Amid AIPAC's Big Show, Straight Talk With a Noticeable Silence

[norml]

Amid AIPAC's Big Show, Straight Talk With a Noticeable Silence

By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, March 7, 2006; Page A02


Words are seldom minced at the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

During a luncheon speech yesterday at the convention center, Daniel Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, shouted a barnyard obscenity involving a bull when he dismissed the theory that Iran and Hamas might soften their anti-Israel views. The audience gave Gillerman a standing ovation.


Daniel Gillerman, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, called the annual meeting of AIPAC "the greatest guarantee and insurance policy for the survival of Israel." (By Mike Segar -- Reuters)

The undiplomatic diplomat went on to describe a war on radical Islam: "While it may be true -- and probably is -- that not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim."

But ask people at this week's gathering about Steve Rosen, the father of modern AIPAC, who goes on trial next month for disseminating classified information, and you get the sort of look you'd expect if you inquired about an embarrassing medical condition.

"I'm not the person to ask about that," says Nathan Diament, a Washington representative for Orthodox Jews.

"Who?" responds Neil Cooper, a delegate from the Philadelphia area.

"Rosen? Which one is he?" answers a charity executive, with a smile.

"I need to read more about it," demurs Etan Cohen, a college student.


snip


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/06/AR2006030601466.html

[JohnyCanuck]

1. The Hitch declines to climb on board this latest Neocon/AIPAC bandwagon

Survey Says
Let the exchange of trade and ideas with Iran begin.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, March 6, 2006, at 5:03 PM ET

The most touching remark I heard during my time in Iran last year was from a woman in the wonderfully beautiful city of Isfahan. (It is just outside this cultural treasure house that the mullahs have chosen to place one of their mountain-dugout nuclear sites.) In the family home where I was staying, contempt and hatred for theocracy was a given, but this was a family friend, moreover draped in a deep black chador, who stayed on the edge of the conversation. Finally she broke in to ask shyly, in faultless English, "Would it be possible for the Americans to invade just for a few days, get rid of the mullahs and the weapons, and then leave?"

My heart went out to her. And I would guess, from traveling around several Iranian cities, that there are very many Iranians who are wishful along just those lines. They dream of some magic trick that would just make the bearded ones go away, restore Iran to the international community, and yet not compromise its cherished national pride and independence. My guess would also be that, of the millions who want the mullahs gone, very few would support an outside military intervention if it actually occurred. In other words, the most precious asset that the United States has in the current crisis—a large pro-American public opinion in Iran—is apparently not of much use to it in deciding what to do about the weapons program.

All the war games and simulations that I have seen have concluded that it isn't possible to disarm Iran by airstrikes. Learning perhaps from what happened to Saddam's nuclear plant at Osirak, the authorities have dispersed the program widely and put a lot of it underground. Nor can the Israelis be expected to do much by proxy: They would have to fly over Iraq this time, and it would be even more obvious than usual that they were acting as an American surrogate. Professor Edward Luttwak claims, in the Wall Street Journal, that selective strikes could still retard or degrade the program, but this, if true, would only restate the problem in a different form.

SNIP

Assume that the Iranians are within measurable distance of nuclear status. Appearances sometimes to the contrary, they are not mad—or not clinically insane in the way that Saddam Hussein was and Kim Jong-il is. The recent fuss about the obliteration of Israel is largely bullshit: Ayatollah Khomeini's call for this has been intoned pedantically and routinely ever since he first uttered it, and it only got attention this year because of the new phenomenon of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the scrofulous engineer who acts the part of civilian president for his clerical bosses. These people (who once bought weapons from Israel via Oliver North in order to fight Saddam Hussein) are cynical and corrupt. They know as well as you do what would happen if they tried to nuke Israel or the United States. They want the bomb as insurance against invasion and as a weapon of strategic ambiguity to shore up their position in the region.

http://www.slate.com/id/2137560/I

[MrPrax]

2. Where have I heard this before:

"The undiplomatic diplomat went on to describe a war on radical Islam: "While it may be true -- and probably is -- that not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim."--Daniel Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations

"Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims."--Ann Coulter