Dancing Around Genocide

From David Feith, at the Wall Street Journal:

Is promoting genocide a human-rights violation? You might think that's an easy question. But it isn't at Human Rights Watch, where a bitter debate is raging over how to describe Iran's calls for the destruction of Israel. The infighting reveals a peculiar standard regarding dictatorships and human rights and especially the Jewish state.

Human Rights Watch is the George Soros-funded operation that has outsize influence in governments, newsrooms and classrooms world-wide. Some at the nonprofit want to denounce Iran's regime for inciting genocide. "Sitting still while Iran claims a 'justification to kill all Jews and annihilate Israel' . . . is a position unworthy of our great organization," Sid Sheinberg, the group's vice chairman, wrote to colleagues in a recent email.

But Executive Director Kenneth Roth, who runs the nonprofit, strenuously disagrees.

Asked in 2010 about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statement that Israel "must be wiped off the map," Mr. Roth suggested that the Iranian president has been misunderstood. "There was a real question as to whether he actually said that," Mr. Roth told The New Republic, because the Persian language lacks an idiom for wiping off the map. Then again, Mr. Ahmadinejad's own English-language website translated his words that way, and the main alternative translation—"eliminated from the pages of history"—is no more benign. Nor is Mr. Ahmadinejad an outlier in the regime. Iran's top military officer declared earlier this year that "the Iranian nation is standing for its cause that is the full annihilation of Israel."

Mr. Roth's main claim is legalistic: Iran's rhetoric doesn't qualify as "incitement"—which is illegal under the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948—but amounts merely to "advocacy," which is legal.

"The theory" to which Human Rights Watch subscribes, he has written in internal emails, "is that in the case of advocacy, however hateful, there is time to dissuade—to rebut speech with speech—whereas in the case of incitement, the action being urged is so imminently connected to the speech in question that there is no time to dissuade. Incitement must be suppressed because it is tantamount to action."

Mr. Roth added in another email: "Many of [Iran's] statements are certainly reprehensible, but they are not incitement to genocide. No one has acted on them."

A ghoulish imitation of human being, that Kenneth Roth. But continue reading.

And human rights? Not if you're Jewish according to the left's human rights policeman. Just watch your back, Jewish or not. Progressives have their knives out.

'The ideology of Islamism has been on the rise for generations and now aims to expropriate the Arab Spring...'

From Charles Hill, at The Caravan, "World Order in the Age of Obama" (via WSJ):

The ideology of Islamism has been on the rise for generations and now aims to expropriate the Arab Spring. The ambitions of the1979 Iranian Revolution and Sunni fanaticism are transmogrifying into the kind of major religious war that the Treaty of Westphalia sought to forestall.

Thucydides traced the war that ruined ancient Greece to Sparta’s fear that Athens’ growing power was crossing the line where it would be impossible to contain. Israel faces that threat from Iran, as today’s international structures for the maintenance of international security have failed to halt Iran’s drive, propelled by religious ideology, to possess nuclear weapons. Israel, bereft of its traditional sense of American support, is making ready to act against Iran’s menace to its existence. President Obama’s priority must repair relations with Israel by visiting the Jewish state and convincing its leaders that the U.S. understands Israel’s uniquely dangerous position.

And there now grows a deepening appetite for gain. America, perceived as eager to shed the burdens of world order in order to be “fundamentally transformed” through European-style social commitments, talks of engagement even when Iran’s “diplomacy” is a form of protracted warfare. The enemies of world order translate the American election results into the lexicon of abdication, telling themselves that their time has come: there is a world to be gained.

Only America’s return to world leadership can halt this deterioration. “Sequestration” will relegate the U.S. to a second rate power and must be reversed to enable American strength and diplomacy to be employed in tandem. Without this the prediction of a Kepler for today must be grim. As the biographer of Augustus Caesar wrote in the years just before the Second World War, “Once again the crust of civilization has worn thin, and beneath can be heard the muttering of primeval fires. Once again many accepted principles of government have been overthrown, and the world has become a laboratory where immature and feverish minds experiment with unknown forces. Once again problems cannot be comfortably limited, for science has brought the nations into an uneasy bondage to each other.”

In this maelstrom lie opportunities not for idealism but for the cold, austere use of power, soft and hard, in order to, as Augustus was advised, teach the arts of peace to all. The old platforms for the region, including the “peace process,” are gone. New structures must be built and only the US can lead the construction job. Peace is not at hand, but statesmen can see the possibility of laying foundations for a new Middle East in Syria-Lebanon, Egypt-Gaza, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and even, should we finally get serious, in Iran.

Iran Shipping Rockets to Gaza

At the Times of Israel, "Fresh shipment of Iranian-made rockets reportedly already en route to Gaza":

Less than a week after the conclusion of Operation Pillar of Defense, and with Hamas boasting of an imminent increase in military aid from Iran, Israeli satellites have spotted a ship at the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas being loaded with rockets and other military supplies ostensibly bound for Gaza, the British Sunday Times reported.

The report cites Israeli intelligence sources who surmised that the cargo, loaded a week ago, would be shipped to Sudan and from there smuggled over land to Gaza.

According to the report, the cargo may include Fajr-5 rockets of the likes already fired by Hamas during the recent conflict, and whose stocks were reportedly depleted by Israeli bombings. Also possibly included: components of Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, which could be stationed in Sudan and used as a direct threat to Israel.

“With a lot of effort, Iran has skillfully built a strategic arm pointing at Israel from the south,” an Israeli source was quoted as saying.

Obama Plays Politics With National Security

It's so transparently political it's ridiculous.

At the Wall Street Journal, "The Iran Talks Gambit":

'This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility." That's what President Obama was overheard telling then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in March on an open microphone when he thought he was speaking privately. The exchange is worth recalling with the weekend story that the White House has agreed "in principle" to a bilateral meeting with Iran on its nuclear weapons program—after the election.

A White House spokesman immediately denied the New York Times report "that the United States and Iran have agreed to one-on-one talks or any meeting after the American elections." But he added that "we continue to work" with other nations "on a diplomatic solution and have said from the outset that we would be prepared to meet bilaterally."

We'll go with the New York Times on this one. Someone senior clearly was bragging about the one-on-one deal, and probably because the source or sources thought it would help Mr. Obama. The timing also is suspicious coming before Monday's foreign-policy debate, and while the White House is on defense about its security failures in Benghazi. The Times's dispatch treated the news as a diplomatic breakthrough that could make Mr. Obama look like a peacemaker and put Mitt Romney on the spot. The safe bet is that something is going on that the President hopes to unveil formally after the election.

As with so much else about Mr. Obama's second-term agenda, the question is why he won't elaborate before November 6. On taxes and spending, Mr. Obama doesn't want to say because he knows more of the same economic policies aren't popular...

War On Our Minds

At the 2012 Academy Awards, the Oscar for best foreign film went to "A Separation." This category typically attracts some interest as it acknowledges geographic centers for filmmaking outside of Hollywood and brilliant filmmaking different from Hollywood. And because foreign films almost by definition contest the dominance of the American moviemaking machine, the category has a politics all its own. This year the winner was fraught with more politics than usual. Setting aside the controversy stirred up by the Iranian government when it trumpeted the award as a victory over Israel (film from Israel was also in the running) this moment allowed the film's director Asghar Farhadi to make a particular kind of plea.

In his acceptance speech he rejoiced with the Iranian people not merely for an award that they were proud to celebrate but also because "at the time when talk of war, intimidation and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country, Iran, is spoken here through her glorious culture. A rich and ancient culture," he concluded "that has been under heavy dust of politics. I proudly offer this honor to the people of my country, a people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment."

Talk and thought of war swirled around this moment. For at least three years now, Iran's nuclear program has come under increasingly intense scrutiny from Israel, the United States, and the IAEA. In a recent interview with the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, President Obama stated yet again, though perhaps more emphatically than before, that the United States has a clear position on the fate of Iran's nuclear ambitions: "I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say," the President demanded.

What the American position will mean in practical terms of action is yet to be determined. Perhaps we could be thankful for that. For the element that often (at least to me) gets overwhelmed by the diplomacy and power politics of such moment is what Farhadi mentioned in his brief acceptance speech. Eschewing the governments involved in this stand-off, he spoke about the people who will be caught in the crossfire. While not mentioning the Israelis who could be targets of an Iranian arsenal, his point suggested that nuclear ambitions do not properly capture the culture of the Iranian people--a culture that would be militarized by international conflict.

I don't have any great insight into the diplomatic machinations that might bring resolution to this crisis. I do have some thoughts on the issue of the people who become collateral damage of those machinations. It is relatively easy to point to moments in which American leaders have allowed themselves to dream of an age of culture rather than war. Among the most famous, I think, are John F. Kennedy's speech at American University in June 1963, in which he declared:

So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

In a similar vein there is Ronald Reagan's speech of January 1984, a year after his notorious "evil empire speech" and, of course, in the year of his landslide victory in the presidential election. In this speech, dubbed the "Ivan and Anya" speech, Reagan mused about two couples--one Russian, the other American--meeting by chance and chatting, not about nuclear weapons or ideology, but about hobbies, jobs, and kids. "People want to raise their children in a world without fear and without war," Reagan said, "Their common interests cross all borders."

Idealistic? Yes, though Reagan nearly made good on his idealism when he proposed eliminating nuclear weapons all together. But in the moment, Reagan's dreaming suggested people, not political machinations, dictate decisions to act violently. Is there a way to consider both people and power?

In his Nobel Peace Prize address, President Obama declared his allegiance to the idea of just war theory as a way consider might and what is right. Indeed, in theory, just war establishes a test not merely the understand a theoretical concept of war, but to protect potential victims from real war. Stanley Hauerwas argues in his latest book, "War and the American Difference," that allegiance to just war theory almost always favors the theory over genuinely considering whether war is just. The reason for such equivocation is that we live in a world that assumes war is part of it and not the exception. It is easier to nod when a leader says, as Obama did, "we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes." Fair enough, so the next step is to figure out how to act violently without seeming to give ourselves over to violence. Therein lies the unfortunate recognition that we grow comfortable with the thought of war because we cannot think of a world without it.

But then we remember that people are involved. I think that is what happened to me when Farhadi stood before an audience in Los Angeles, California and spoke of culture rather than war. It reminded me of a moment that defined the end of the Cold War for me on a personal level. I was in Tula, Russia in the winter of 1992-1993 and my father and one of my younger sisters came to visit. I took them to the circus. Tula's circus was a bit shabby, but these were the days of rapid decline in Russia, and the audience (including my family and me) didn't mind. As we sat watching the show my dad grew quiet as the scene of children around us began to sink in. With tears in his eyes he turned to my sister and me and said that for his entire life he hadn't really imagined what the Cold War was until now. This city--these families--were targets of American missiles. Tula produced armaments, presumably built to kill Americans. But now as we sat in the dreary aftermath of the Soviet empire, we looked at children.

I don't expect President Obama and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to chat about Iranian family life; nor would I imagine the Iranian leaders are letting similar considerations dictate their discussions. But the public can be different. Conversations out here can imagine different channels of discourse. And so, I suppose it was only appropriate that such imagining took place on a stage honoring the heart of America's dreamland.