It’s hard to say which is worse – the behavior of racist fans, or the tacit approval they get from Israeli sports officials and media.

I like to think that if you discount for the century of fighting with Arabs, Israel is still plenty racist, but no more than most societies. I remind myself that even the absolute worst display of Israeli racism – the chanting of monkey noises (“hoo-hoo-hoo!! hoo-hoo-hoo!!”) and the throwing of bananas at black players during soccer games – has been going on in Europe, too, and probably elsewhere. But what happened this week to Nigerian-born Israeli player Toto Tamuz shows a level of callousness to blatant, raw racism that I wonder how many countries could match.

On Monday, Tamuz scored the go-ahead goal against Beitar Jerusalem in the capital’s Teddy Stadium, and right afterward looked out at the crowd and put his index finger up to his lips to shush them. Immediately the referee penalized him for unsportsmanlike conduct: “provoking the crowd.” Since this was Tamuz’s second penalty of the game, he was automatically disqualified. His team, Hapoel Tel Aviv, went on to lose, 3-2.

It was only after a day of sports reporters and commentators praising the Beitar crowd for firing up the atmosphere with their mad-dog spirit that it became known why Tamuz tried to shush the crowd in the first place. He told Yediot Aharonot:

Another black Hapoel player, Eric Djemba Djemba from Cameroon, told the newspaper:

From the media coverage I saw (which was not by any means comprehensive), these remarks were treated as “their side of the story,” but the “objective” story was mainly about a hugely exciting soccer game in which there probably was a bad call by the ref, along the lines of:  you shouldn’t throw a player out of the game for “shushing” the crowd, but then those are the breaks …

What’s shocking about all this is that everyone in Israel knows that what Tamuz and Djemba Djemba described is what happens at any given game in which black players are on the field, especially if they score a goal. I witnessed it myself at a game in Tel Aviv’s Bloomfield Stadium in 2006, one of the very few Israeli soccer games I’ve been to. When an opposing black player would get the ball, a few Maccabi Tel Aviv fans several rows up from me would...

By unifying himself and the country’s ruling party with an internationally despised neo-fascist, Netanyahu has brought Israel a sizable step closer to the limits of Western tolerance. Ultimately, that’s good news.

The only way Israel is ever going to give up the occupation and its habit of military aggression is by going too far – by becoming such a Goliath that the Western world finally tells it to clean up its act or find some new allies. Tonight’s union between Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud and Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu into one big Likud Beiteinu – “Likud Is Our Home” – marks a sizable step in that direction.

Netanyahu hurt himself. I don’t know whether the new party will win more Knesset seats in the January 22 election than Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu could have won separately, but Netanyahu has dirtied himself in the eyes of the world, including even a lot of his mainstream Jewish supporters in the United States. Avigdor Lieberman has a thoroughly deserved international reputation as an Arab-hating, war-loving neo-fascist (this last label having been pinned on him even by Martin Peretz, the stridently pro-Israel ex-publisher of The New Republic.)

Foreign Minister Lieberman calls for expelling, by means of a land swap, hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens simply for being Arab. He ran an election campaign highlighted by the slogan, “Only Lieberman understands Arabic.” He was a member of Kach in the late 1970s, which he understandably denies but which Kach veterans from that era swear to. He’s fantasized aloud in the Knesset about executing Arab MKs and threatened to bomb Egypt’s Aswan Dam. Plus, of course, he’s been under Israel Police investigation for corruption for nearly 15 years, and could face indictment pretty soon.

And now Netanyahu, who made Lieberman his right-hand man during his first term as prime minister, has identified himself completely with this guy. There was a report tonight by Channel 2′s well-connected Amnon Abramovitch that the unity deal calls for Lieberman to take over as PM in the fourth year of the next term, which Likud Beiteinu is likely to win in the upcoming election.

A lot of people in Israel, the U.S., Canada and maybe some other countries, and certainly a lot of Jews all over the world, think Netanyahu is a centrist, if for no other reason than that he demonstrably represents the Israeli consensus. But even these people realize...

Americans should be scared to vote for Romney, but they’re too scared and antagonistic toward Muslims for Obama to tell them why. 

Tonight’s Obama-Romney foreign policy debate is no doubt going to go heavy on the issues of Iran and Israel. By rights, Obama has a powerful argument to make against his opponent, one that, in a more perfect America, could scare a lot of those “floating voters” who’ve deserted him into floating back to his corner. And it wouldn’t be demagoguery – it would be taking a legitimate fear of a Romney presidency, one that’s based strictly on the candidate’s own words, and focusing in on it. In a more perfect America, Obama could do that tonight; in America such as it is, he can’t.

The argument to be made is that if Romney gets elected, there’s a much greater chance America will go to war in Iran, because when it comes to Iran – or anything else having to do with Israel and the Middle East – Romney swears by everything Bibi Netanyahu says. He keeps stressing that there must be “no daylight” between America’s policy and Israel’s. Well, Israel’s policy on Iran, as laid out for a decade or more by Netanyahu, is that America should bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities to rubble, and that if America won’t do it, Israel must.

While Romney hasn’t committed himself to attacking Iran, he has very publicly agreed with Netanyahu that the bar for American military action should be set much lower that where Obama has put it. According to Obama’s strategy, which calls for attack if and when Iran starts weaponizing its nuclear program, war is not inevitable. According to Netanyahu’s strategy, which calls for an attack if Iran continues to refuse to dismantle its nuclear program, war is already overdue. From the New York Times story on Romney’s fundraising speech in Jerusalem at the end of July:

JFK courted nuclear war with the Soviets, now Israel is courting a confrontation with the Iranians. But how can Israel contemplate starting a war against another country, a war that will not be negligible and could be devastating, for doing the same thing that it has been doing for over 40 years?

I love it when people say there’s no comparing a nuclear Iran to a nuclear Soviet Union because, after all, the Soviets weren’t really a threat to blow up America, people weren’t afraid they would just go crazy and push the button – they weren’t religious fanatics like the Iranians, they were a stable, rational regime. Definitely. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, which happened 50 years ago this week. I was 11, and one night towards the end of it, when the U.S. had blockaded Cuba and was threatening to invade if Russia didn’t take down its nuclear missiles in that little Commie country “90 miles off our coast,” the topic of conversation among the kids on my block was the possibility of nuclear war. Growing up in the early 1960s on that block in Los Angeles, there were only two news events big enough to warrant our attention: the Kennedy assassination and the Cuban missile crisis. During that last week of October 1962, we were too young to be really afraid of a nuclear war, but the fear in the country was so intense that it trickled down to us; we were giddy with excitement over this real-life Twilight Zone drama.

So please don’t anybody tell me that Americans weren’t scared shitless of Russia’s nuclear weapons. Yet we survived, thanks to Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). I see no reason why nuclear Israel can’t survive a nuclear Iran the same way.

I’m sure that if Americans of mainstream political views were reading this, most of them would say: you just disproved your point. America almost didn’t survive the Soviet Union’s nuclear power during the Cuban missile crisis – do you want to take that sort of chance again with a nuclear Iran?

But this is the thing most Americans don’t know – it wasn’t Russia that was threatening war 50 years ago, it was the U.S. People in America believed their country was acting in self-defense. The Russians wanted to point nukes at us from 90 miles away, and we had to stop them. And that’s...

After being accused of promoting a video which places the blame for the Holocaust on the Zionists, Greta Berlin tells her side of the story.     

I just finished about a 20-minute phone interview with Free Gaza Movement spokeswoman Greta Berlin, who spoke from Los Angeles. I exchanged some e-mails with her, I asked her several questions, I read quite a bit of the criticism and condemnations of her from left and right, and the bottom line is that I find her defense to be completely credible. She is not, to my mind, any kind of anti-Semite or wacko. Even if I find some of her terminology about Gaza (“slow-motion genocide” and “extermination camps”) to be awfully exaggerated and dangerous, I see no evidence that she’s the monster she’s been made out to be. She’s a self-described anti-Zionist, but I see nothing she’s done or said that I, at least, would consider beyond the pale.

To recap in brief: Berlin has been accused of promoting a video by a crazy, dead Jew-hater, Eustace Mullins, who says the Zionists were behind the Holocaust. The accusation is that Berlin promoted the video on Sunday by tweeting it on the Free Gaza Movement’s Tweeter account. On its website, the FGM apologized for the tweet, condemned the video’s content and said it “came from Greta’s private Facebook page and was shared with a group of people who were discussing propaganda and racism, and this link was an example of the terrible propaganda that could be spewed on websites.” Berlin stated on the website:

It seemed the easiest way to determine if Berlin was telling the truth or lying would be for her to publish the Facebook...

A lie of omission is as good a lie as any other. 

It’s amazing how blatantly, how shamelessly a Jewish Agency official named Avi Mayer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the Jerusalem Post, Canada’s National Post and I don’t know how many other “pro-Israel” entities have slandered Greta Berlin, a prominent spokeswoman of the Free Gaza Movement, as an advocate of the worst, sickest kind of anti-Semitism. They’ve deliberately left out Berlin’s explanation for a tweet she sent out a few days ago, and without her explanation, one is indeed left to conclude that she’s a crazed Jew-hater. A lot of people, of course, want to believe that about a woman so closely identified with the flotillas that sailed to Gaza, so this story has gone viral.

And it is based on a lie of omission, which is as good a lie as any other. Here’s what happened:

On Sunday, Berlin tweeted the following: “Zionists operated the concentration camps and helped murder millions of innocent Jews.” The tweet linked to a video said to be of a deceased Jew-hater named Eustace Mullins going on about how the Jews plotted with Hitler to kill anti-Zionist Jews, how the “zi” in Nazi stands for “Zionist” – the worst sewage.

Mayer, who reportedly oversees social media for the Jewish Agency, noticed Berlin’s tweet, watched the video and starting tweeting and Facebooking it like crazy. Then the Jewish Telegraphic Agency did a story on Berlin’s tweet that was picked up in Haaretz and God knows where else, the Jerusalem Post did a story on it, the right-wing National Post ran a column on it.

All these stories referred to Berlin’s apology on the Free Gaza Movement website – but only to one part of it: the part where she explains that she didn’t mean for the tweet to go out on the Free Gaza Movement’s Tweeter account, but only to a group of people on her personal Facebook page. Reporting this and only this as her “apology” naturally made Berlin look even more evil.

What Mayer, the JTA, the Jerusalem Post and National Post left out was the other part of Berlin’s explanation that was posted on the Free Gaza Movement’s website: that her tweet was intended for a Facebook discussion among “a group of people who were discussing propaganda and racism, and this link was an example...

When Israeli bad taste meets Holocaust consciousness, the polite thing to do is nod your approval.

When I read this week’s New York Times story about Israeli grandchildren (and some children) of Holocaust survivors who have tattooed their elders’ concentration camp numbers onto their forearms (and in some cases ankles), I wasn’t sure what to think. Who am I to put down a memorialization of the Holocaust? These people obviously feel strongly about what they’re doing; what right do I have to judge them?

Mention of the Holocaust, of course, has a tendency to paralyze one’s critical faculties, and it happened to me upon reading this story. But something didn’t sit well. Young, modern Israelis tattooing themselves like Auschwitz inmates? (If you look at the photos, you see that the numbers, which were inscribed at Israeli tattoo parlors, are done much more aesthetically than the Nazis did the originals.) Isn’t this a little … over the top?

The young people interviewed said they did it to remember their grandparents and to remind people of the Holocaust.

I imagine being at a party and seeing some young person with a long number tattooed neatly on his or her forearm or ankle. A conversation-starter it would definitely be. And if I were throwing the party, nobody with a neo-Auschwitz tattoo would be allowed in.

What is this weirdness about? It’s about commemorating the Holocaust, but it is also about Israeli bad taste, which unfortunately tend to go together. Reserve, subtlety – these are not well-known Israeli traits, and especially not when it comes to the Holocaust. With all things, and definitely with the Holocaust, the Israeli style is more along the lines of “if you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

If people want to remember their grandparents who went through the camps, if they want people to remember the Holocaust, let them find a less garish, grotesque way of doing it. (At this point we’re talking about a microtrend. The article says only a “handful” of Israelis have gotten the tattoos; 10 were interviewed. But with such a big story running in the New York Times, along with a series of arty, shadowy photos of young, hip-looking, numbered Israelis, who knows? It could catch on.)

A related Israeli trait that the tattoos represent, one that also meshes perfectly with popular Holocaust consciousness, is emotionalism. Give people a jolt, yank their heartstrings,...

A second-term President Obama wouldn’t be beholden only to himself, but to the Democratic Party, which is scared stiff of taking on Israel. 

I would love to share the hope that if Obama wins on November 6 – and at this point, going by the polls, it would take satanic intervention for Romney to beat him – he would “teach Bibi a lesson,” and, more importantly, make good on his horribly failed promise to do everything in his power to forge the two-state solution. But I don’t see it. After talking tough at the start of his presidency and getting his ass handed to him, Obama has gone along with everything Netanyahu has said or done to the Palestinians, and I don’t see anything that’s going to change that in the president’s second and last term.

Some people think Obama will be free or at least freer to do as he likes in a second term because he won’t have to worry about reelection. But if he were to try to act on his presumed instincts and pressure Netanyahu into giving up the occupation, he would set his fellow Democrats in revolt against him for destroying the party and their political careers. As can be seen in this election campaign, the Democrats are scared stiff of alienating Jewish donors and voters, so they’re bending over triple backwards to convince them that Obama is as “pro-Israel” as any president ever, even more so. When Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer wrote that angry letter to Netanyahu over his latest accusation that Obama was leaning on Israel, she didn’t say the president was right to lean, she said he wasn’t leaning at all – on the contrary, he was giving Israel all the guns and bombs it wanted. The Democratic Party’s case for Obama on Israel is not a dovish one, it’s a hawkish one.

If a second-term Obama goes back to calling for a settlement freeze or the ’67 borders or talking about “occupation” and “Palestinian freedom,” the Israel lobby and the Republicans will scream “we told you so,” they’ll call him an anti-Semite and supporter of terror, a lot of Jews and Christians who don’t hate him now will start to, and the Democrats will be apoplectic.

It’s not going to happen. America has changed radically in the last four years. It’s become so anti-Muslim that Israel is...

The U.S. Ambassador to Libya was killed by Islamic anti-American fanaticism.

By now there’s no need to point out the right-wing, anti-Muslim bad guys in the story surrounding Tuesday’s attack in Libya that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Mitt Romney is one of those heavies, and the Egyptian Copt and American hardass in California who made the film “Innocence of Muslims,” along with all those who promoted it on YouTube, are the others. (By now it should also be known that there was no “Israeli-American real-estate developer” named Sam Bacile behind the movie, nor was it financed by “over 100 Jewish donors” – that was all a cover story made up by the Egyptian Copt “producer,” a scam artist named Nakoula Bassely Nakoula, who was assisted by a Christian anti-Muslim fanatic named Steve Klein.)

Romney and the Republicans are paying electorally for his moral idiocy in denouncing the Obama administration (as well as the besieged U.S. embassy officials in Cairo) for making what he called an “apology for American values” by speaking out against the film. The Nakoulas and Kleins of the world will be back in action soon enough, but for now at least they are in the doghouse.

So enough said about those bad guys. What does, however, need to be said about this story, and said by opponents of right-wing Muslim-haters, is that the ultimate villains were the Muslim anti-American fanatics who killed Stevens and the three others, along with their soulmates outside the U.S. embassies in Egypt and Yemen, and their sympathizers in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East.

They have no right to use violence against America or Americans – certainly not because of that or any other film, but also not because of American actions in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia or any other Muslim country. Agree with U.S. policy in the Mideast or not, America is not ruling any Muslim country against its will, it does not have troops in any Muslim country without the eager cooperation of that country’s leadership and much if not most of its population, it sent American troops and trillions of dollars against widely-hated Muslim leaders such as Saddam Hussein, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, and it supported and continues to support the Arab Spring, notably in Libya.

I’m not saying America acts in the Middle East purely out of altruistic motives,...

Message: The Palestinian refugees have nothing on the ‘Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries.’

As if Israel hasn’t been playing the victim long enough, as if it hasn’t exploited the Six Million to the absolute limit, now comes a new weapon: the “Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries.” This has long been an Israeli answer to the Palestinian refugees – that roughly as many Middle Eastern Jews as Palestinians lost their homes because of the 1948 war. This week, though, the government made the issue a major new front in its information war. Fittingly, the head of the “I Am a Refugee” campaign is Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, whose personality and politics were best conveyed a couple of years ago when he sat the Turkish ambassador to Israel on a much lower chair than his own, directing the Israeli photographers to emphasize the relationship of superior to inferior.

Ayalon and the movement had a big conference in Jerusalem, the World Jewish Congress was a co-sponsor, and Prime Minister Netanyahu sent along a supportive video. What’s more, according to Haaretz, “Israeli diplomats and representatives abroad have been instructed to raise the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries at every relevant forum.” And when Ayalon goes to New York in a couple of weeks, he “intends to call on UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to include the issue on the international organization’s agenda.” This is all “part of a new international campaign to create parity between the plight of Jewish and Palestinian refugees…”

Actually, the campaign is going for more than parity – it’s going for superiority. It’s staking the claim that the Jews who left Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Egypt and other Arab countries were bigger victims than the Palestinian refugees. From Haaretz:

So, all you goyim out there,...

Iran didn’t start the Mideast nuclear arms race – Israel did.

Nearly all the frightening forecasts of what life would be like with a nuclear Iran strike me as being hollow. I’m not worried about Iran nuking Israel – because the Iranians don’t want to commit suicide. I’m not worried about Iran giving nukes to terror organizations that would nuke Israel – because Israel’s second-strike capacity, with its estimated 200 nuclear bombs, would devastate the Islamic world and the Islamic world knows it. I’m not worried that Iran’s “proxies,” such as Hezbollah and Hamas, would feel free under an Iranian “nuclear umbrella” to attack  Israel at will – because, again, the Iranians don’t want to commit suicide. And I’m not worried that terrified Israelis or the money of terrified foreign investors would leave the country en masse – because this never happened in any of the many, many other countries of the world that have nuclear-armed enemies.

But I said “nearly” all the forecasts are hollow; one strikes me as being very realistic: that a nuclear Iran would set off a Middle East nuclear arms race, which would be highly destabilizing, escalate tensions and create the possibility that somebody would start a nuclear war simply out of fear of being attacked first.

If Iran gets nuclear weapons, it makes perfect sense to me that Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria and other countries around here would want to follow suit ASAP. In fact, even if Iran doesn’t get nuclear weapons, I see no reason why other ambitious countries, in the Middle East and elsewhere, wouldn’t want to build or otherwise acquire their own. All the best countries have them, don’t they? (Except Germany and Japan, but that could change one day.)

This is not good; nuclear proliferation is very dangerous, especially in a place like the Middle East, and it should be prevented if possible. So Israel and the U.S. do have one solid argument for why Iran must be prevented from going nuclear at all costs.

The problem is – who the hell is Israel or the U.S. to tell anyone not to go nuclear? Who is Israel or the U.S. to start a war with Iran for the sake of enforcing nuclear non-proliferation in the Middle East?

The nuclear arms race in the Middle East was started by Israel over 40 years ago. If Israel and the U.S. want...

An uprising within the Israeli establishment is preventing an insane war from being started. In how many other countries could such a thing happen? This is a proud moment for Israel’s democracy.

People don’t realize what a miracle is taking place in this country. A revolt by the Israeli military/intelligence establishment and Israel’s best reporters, helped along by President Shimon Peres and ultimately enabled by the Obama administration, is stopping an insane war from being launched by Israel’s two ideologically insane political leaders, a war they’ve been planning for years.

The eight-member inner cabinet, or “octet,” which in recent weeks has been reported to be split evenly between pro-war and anti-war ministers, has now tilted anti-war, write Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer today in Yedioth Aharonoth. Not coincidentally, this shift comes as the heads of all the military and intelligence branches continue to stand solid as a rock against Bibi and Barak’s plans. They haven’t budged from their position that an Israeli attack without America behind it – and America isn’t – would do little damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities in return for a lot of death and destruction in this country, and end up strengthening Iran while weakening Israel, especially its relationship with the U.S.

Meanwhile, a public opinion poll in Ma’ariv today finds that while a slight majority of Israeli Jews favor an attack and a large majority of Israeli Arabs oppose it, a clear majority of both sectors say the political leadership does not have the “legitimacy” to start a war if the military and intelligence leadership is against it. (Overall, 44% agree, 33% disagree). Another nail in the coffin of Operation Never Again.

Bibi is showing signs of panicking, such as his accusation last week that the generals and spooks counseling him against war were “covering their asses” in case there is a war, it goes wrong and a commission of inquiry comes afterward to assign blame. As Kadima chairman and former IDF chief Shaul Mofaz told Barnea and Shiffer: ”A prime minister who [publicly]  accuses the IDF chief of playing CYA in preparation for the day after is a weak prime minister.” A desperate one, I’d say.

Another blast of bad news for Bibi/Barak is that Obama has opened up a substantial lead over Romney; he’s in front by 4% in the polls, and way ahead in most of the “battleground states.” At this point, Israel’s two ubermenschen have to assume that they’re going to have Obama to deal with for a second term when he has no re-election to worry about, and that an attack on Iran on the eve of the November election would look like a Hail Mary attempt to save it for Romney,...

With Netanyahu and Barak desperate to sell their case for an attack on Iran, they’ve been repeating the urban legend that Israel’s 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor stopped Saddam’s nuclear ambitions permanently. Since we are getting down to crunch time, I am reposting below an excerpt from my March 2 post, ‘The myth of Osirak and the march to Iran.’

Like all Israelis, I believed that the Air Force had knocked out Saddam’s nuclear program for good in 1981, and that this had certainly proved a wise and brave decision. That was until 2007, when I was doing a story on Israel’s attack on the Syrian reactor, and I interviewed Yiftah Shapir, then and now the leading expert on missile warfare at the Institute of National Security Studies, Israel’s leading security think tank.

After telling me that the reactor that Israel destroyed was not exactly on the verge of threatening Israel’s existence, that for the Syrians to fire a nuclear weapon at Israel would require “decades of work by thousands of technicians that Syria doesn’t have,” Shapir gave me the consensus informed view about the 1981 attack on Osirak: that it didn’t mark the end of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program, but more like the beginning of it.

After that attack, said Shapir, Saddam cranked up Iraq’s nuclear production several times over, putting thousands of new technicians to work on the project. This was only discovered when the Americans questioned the Iraqi nuclear scientists they captured during the 1991 Gulf War. It was that war, and the  subsequent takeover of Saddam’s WMD, that prevented Iraq from getting the bomb – not the 1981 israeli attack on Osirak. In fact, the bombing of Osirak escalated the Iraqi nuclear project such that if Saddam had not become power-mad and invaded Kuwait in 1990, bringing on the American invasion, he would have achieved nuclear capability by 1994, said Shapir, who directs the INSS’s annual, highly influential ”Middle East Balance of Forces” report.

But you don’t have to interview Yiftah Shapir to learn this.  Look up “Operation Opera,” the code name for the Osirak attack, in Wikipedia, and read what other knowledgeable people, including Bob Woodward and former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry have to say: