There was no US media coverage of the exchange, at the time or since.  But there should have been.   The Israeli letter exposes the open anti-Israel bias of the NY Times for all to see.

It comes to light now because of a recent particularly ugly bit of anti-Zionist anti-Semitism in the NYT.  Barry Rubin at Pajamas Media points out an article lionizing imprisoned Palestinian terrorists for their heroic hunger strike – without mentioning the murderous crimes that got the into prison.

Anyway, here is the letter

“Dear Sasha, [presumably Op-Ed Page Editor Sasha Polakow-Suransky]

“I received your email requesting that Prime Minister Netanyahu submit an op-ed to the New York Times.  Unfortunately, we must respectfully decline.

“On matters relating to Israel, the op-ed page of the “paper of record” has failed to heed the late Senator Moynihan’s admonition that everyone is entitled to their own opinion but that no one is entitled to their own facts.

“A case in point was your decision last May to publish the following bit of historical revision by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas:

“‘It is important to note that the last time the question of Palestinian statehood took center stage at the General Assembly, the question posed to the international community was whether our homeland should be partitioned into two states. In November 1947, the General Assembly made its recommendation and answered in the affirmative.  Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued.’

“This paragraph effectively turns on its head an event within living memory in which the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan accepted by the Jews and then joined five Arab states in launching a war to annihilate the embryonic Jewish state.  It should not have made it past the most rudimentary fact-checking.

“The opinions of some of your regular columnists regarding Israel are well known.   They consistently distort the positions of our government and ignore the steps it has taken to advance peace.   They cavalierly defame our country by suggesting that marginal phenomena condemned by Prime Minister Netanyahu and virtually every Israeli official somehow reflects government policy or Israeli society as a whole.  Worse, one columnist even stooped to suggesting that the strong expressions of support for Prime Minister Netanyahu during his speech this year to Congress was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby” rather than a reflection of the broad support for Israel among the American people.

“Yet instead of trying to balance these views with a different opinion, it would seem as if the surest way to get an op-ed published in the New York Times these days, no matter how obscure the writer or the viewpoint, is to attack Israel.    Even so, the recent piece on “Pinkwashing,” in which Israel is vilified for having the temerity to champion its record on gay-rights, set a new bar that will be hard for you to lower in the future.

“Not to be accused of cherry-picking to prove a point, I discovered that during the last three months (September through November) you published 20 op-eds about Israel in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune.   After dividing the op-eds into two categories, “positive” and “negative,” with “negative” meaning an attack against the State of Israel or the policies of its democratically elected government, I found that 19 out of 20 columns were “negative.”

“The only “positive” piece was penned by Richard Goldstone (of the infamous Goldstone Report), in which he defended Israel against the slanderous charge of Apartheid.

“Yet your decision to publish that op-ed came a few months after your paper reportedly rejected Goldstone’s previous submission.  In that earlier piece, which was ultimately published in the Washington Post, the man who was quoted the world over for alleging that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza, fundamentally changed his position.   According to the New York Times op-ed page, that was apparently news unfit to print.

“Your refusal to publish “positive” pieces about Israel apparently does not stem from a shortage of supply.   It was brought to my attention that the Majority Leader and Minority Whip of the U.S.  House of Representatives jointly submitted an op-ed to your paper in September opposing the Palestinian action at the United Nations and supporting the call of both Israel and the Obama administration for direct negotiations without preconditions.   In an age of intense partisanship, one would have thought that strong bipartisan support for Israel on such a timely issue would have made your cut. So with all due respect to your prestigious paper, you will forgive us for declining your offer.  We wouldn’t want to be seen as “Bibiwashing” the op-ed page of the New York Times.

“Sincerely,

Ron Dermer, Senior advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu”

Of course, the NYT could have published this letter on its op-ed pages.  But it didn’t.  You can see why.

I see Professor Stephen Walt is once again offering us his foreign policy insights (“Time to get US nukes out of Europe”.)

He raises an interesting question about the future US role in Europe’s defense.  But he does so in a way that reminds of the kind of thinker he is. He is a thorough-going Chamberlainesque isolationist appeaser.  He is also an ntellectual leader and apologist for the anti-Zionist, anti-Israel left.

To start, he demonstrates US foolishness by wondering why we still worry about airport security “long after Osama bin Laden’s death.”  He believes Islamist terrorism was a one-man band, now deceased!

And how about his previous advice?

“The best way to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons is to engage it diplomatically and attempt to normalize its relationship with the US.”

This is from the his best-seller The Israel Lobby, published 2007. Its central thesis was that US foreign policy was directed by Israel and its friends, to the detriment of America’s real interests. In other words, the Jews are running this country.

Then Obama was elected, and instantly followed Walt’s advice.  For his outreach, he got the back of Iran’s hand, and found out that even this softer, gentler US was still “The Great Satan.”  See below: “Iran will never negotiate“, or ”Paging Dr. Walt and Dr. Mearsheimer“. Both Obama-era reality checks.

I’m sure Walt isn’t worried, since he also wrote that

 “There is good reason to think a nuclear Iran could be contained and deterred.”

He neglected to articulate those reasons, then or now.

So maybe his reasons for US withdrawal from Europe are sound.  And maybe they are a smokescreen for his ongoing effort to pull US power as far away from Iran and the Mideast as possible.  I don’t know.

But I’d prefer to hear foreign policy advice from voices less compromised than Professor Walt.

Any non-Catholic who presumes to judge the Catholic Church stands a considerable risk of sticking his nose where it does not belong.  I am not a Catholic, so I have no standing to criticize the Church’s internal decisions, or beliefs, or anything else internally Catholic.  (Of course this does not really apply to bloggers, or any other media opinionators, but I like to try to follow it anyway.)

However, the actions of the Church in the world, and especially of its pope, reach far beyond the Church’s Magisterium.   And the past few popes have cast giant shadows on us all.

John Paul II was a great voice, one may even say fighter, for human freedom and dignity.   He had positive impacts in many areas, but nowhere more than in the struggle against totalitarian dictatorship.  With his personal experience of both Nazism and Communism, he seemed immune to the modern disease of moral equivalency.  Nor was he inclined to speak in the soothing voice of a diplomat from a neutral state trying to coax the great powers to play nice.  He was a moral leader, and he knew that the fight against totalitarianism was first and foremost a moral fight.

In his trips to Poland, he insisted on meeting with the dissident anti-communists of the Solidarity movement.  He consistently stood with them, and refused communist offers for the Church to function as the in-house opposition.  The Polish regime refused to allow the meetings, of course, but JPII insisted…and prevailed.  His visit played  a crucial role in strengthening the real opposition, and in destroying communism in Europe.

With that as the background, we come to Benedict XVI’s recent visit to Cuba.  Many in and outside the Church had urged Benedict to visit with the Cuban opposition forces, personified at the moment by the Ladies in White, a persecuted group of brave Catholic women whose husbands, sons and fathers are political prisoners of the brutal Castro regime.   Benedict did not do so.  There is no evidence that he ever tried.

The full story, and theories for his failure, are laid out in an excellent essay by George Weigel in National Review.  Weigel is a Catholic, and well fitted to speculate on the reasons.  I urge you to read it and decide for yourself whether this qualifies as appeasement.

It must be said that Benedict has displayed both courage and wisdom in many other contexts, including his engagement with Islam.  Unlike other inter-faith outreach efforts that focus on Kumbayah evasiveness, his speech at Regensburg confronted the structural problem of modern Islam.  Benedict took some nasty shots from the left for his temerity in speaking an unpleasant truth about Islam.

Benedict pointed out that in orthodox Islam, the Koran is read as prohibiting reasoned investigation or philosophical questioning of the meaning of scripture.  This has been the case since the ninth century triumph of literalist Ash’arites over the rationalist Mu’tazalite school. (See the excellent book by Robert Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind; How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis.)

Where the Ash’arite mentality sometimes seems to have a foothold in some extreme Protestant Christian sects, the Catholic Church is a bulwark of the belief that both faith and reason are necessary for the righteous life.  In fact, John Paul II’s 1988 encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) is a good read on this point.

Condoleezza Rice is one of the most accomplished non-politician people in America today.  Former Secretary of State, former National Security Adviser, author, concert pianist, professor and Provost of Stanford, etc., etc.

Politically, the election will likely come down to a referendum on an incumbent, as these things usually do.  And the true partisans among us always want the other party to field the weakest, lamest candidates possible.  That is what separates partisans from plain, non-political citizens, who want to see the best possible candidates square off.  Partisans don’t worry about how bad things will be for the country and world if the US elects a fool; the only risk is that it might not be their fool.  If the other party wins, it means the end of the world anyway.

But for us non-political types, I can’t imagine a better Republican team than Romney-Rice.   Of course I don’t know if she would accept.  She flatly rejected an attempted draft in 2008.

With all due respect to my friend Moleman, I say: Forget the 12th Imam.  Consider the Second Obama.

In one of those “I didn’t know the mic was hot” moments, President Obama was overheard reassuring the Russians that “After the election I will have more flexibility.”  He was asking them to be patient in their demands that we back off from building our long-promised missile defens shield.

You should read the ABC News story here.  You really should.

Obama has often been accused of “kicking the can down the road” by putting off controversial decisions until after he is re-elected.

The Keystone pipeline?  Sorry, I need more time to think about it.  Check with me in late November.

Action against Iran’s nuclear weapons program?  Sorry, I’m still not sure they really want to make warheads.  I’ll keep my eye on it.  Maybe by December the picture will be clearer.

Building a missile defense shield so no other country (or insane militant America-hating theocracy) can attack us?   Let’s talk about that next year.

This pattern raises a question.  How does this flexibility work?  What would he like to do but feels it unwise to do prior to the election?

The answer: Anything to lose votes.

Yes, but whose votes?

Hard-core Democrats will vote for him even if he allows oil drilling in the NPR building.

Hard-shell Republicans will vote against him even if he pilots the first bomber over the Iranian warhead factories.

So who decides elections?  Moderates and Independents, that’s who.

So here is the electoral calculus:  Do Moderates and Independents want us to promise not to defend ourselves against a missile attack?  Are they worried that Czar Vladimir might be angry with us?  Or do they want the president to defend the nation?

Do  Moderates and Independents  really want to protect us from Canadian oil?  Do they really want to pay European prices for gas?  Or do they want Obama to do everything possible to reduce gas prices?

Do  Moderates and Independents want us to abandon our most loyal ally, and to tell Israel to learn to live with a nuclear-armed nutcase neighbor whose official slogan is “Death to Israel, Death to the USA.”

You know the answers.  So does Obama.

So what would a re-elected Obama do with his new flexibility, when freed of the constraints imposed by his backwards-thinking fellow Americans?

1)  Decide that Canadian oil is too dirty for our green future?  Tell them to sell it to the Chinese?  Let oil prices rise to Euro levels while we have GM produce algae-powered cars?

2)  Decide to cancel that crazy Reaganesque missile-defense program?

3)  Tell Israel it is now too late, it looks like Iran already has nuclear warheads, so we will all have to learn to get along?

Put it another way.  If Obama, in the next few months, were to:

• Approve the Keystone pipeline, announcing “When I say all of the above, I mean ALL”;
• Tell Putin that we are going to install our missile shield for the US and Europe, saying “I cannot leave us needlessly open to nuclear attack from ANY quarter”;
• And cooperate with Israel in an attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, telling the world “We gave Iran every possible benefit of the doubt and opportunity to pull back from this madness.  When I said every option was on the table, I meant it.”

…Would he be re-elected?  Of course he would.  Even I’d vote for him.

He won’t because he wants to enact points 1-3 above instead.  And those will have to wait until November.

“The IAEA has already identified the Parchin military site as the location of suspected nuclear weapons-related testing. In a November report, it said it appeared to be the site of experiments with conventional high explosives meant to initiate a nuclear chain reaction.

“It did not mention a neutron initiator as part of those tests but in a separate section cited an unnamed member nation as saying Iran may have experimented with a neutron initiator, without going into detail or naming a location for such work.”

If you are wondering what a nuclear initiator looks like, don’t bother asking at your nearest nuclear power plant.  Peaceful users of nuclear energy don’t need them.  Only warheads need them.

This must all be very mysterious to the great minds in the Obama Administration who think Iran just can’t make up its mind.  As Obama’s Joint Chiefs Chairman said,

“We also know or believe we know that the Iranian regime has not decided that they will embark on the effort to weaponize their nuclear capability.…And we are of the opinion that the Iranian regime is a rational actor.”

In this administration’s mind, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are pacing up and down in their palaces, pondering whether it might be nice to have a nuclear weapon or not.  They chuckle quietly over the fun they have had, incurring UN condemnations and painful sanctions, while teasing the western devils.  But soon, they know, they will have to decide.  Perhaps they listen to the old Loving Spoonfuls hit, “Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind?” as they think.

But always, these two Persian Hamlets must come back to the infallible tool for correct thinking in the Islamic Republic.

“What would the 12th Imam do?” 

If you don’t know about the 12th Imam, check here and here, and here, to see the Iranian leaders’ belief in his imminent coming.

According to this Islamic site, ”He is the leader with the sword (sahib al-sayf).”

WW12ID?

Anyway, this is from the comediam Adam Carolla, via Pajamas Media contributor Kathie Shaidle:

“Carolla compared Israel  to the college roommate who just wants to study but shares a house with five berserk meth-heads.”

As the Cable Guy says, I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.”

If you’ve heard anything else that’s funny in this vein, please share it with us.  Click the “Leave a comment” thing above.

We also know or believe we know that the Iranian regime has not decided that they will embark on the effort to weaponize their nuclear capability.…And we are of the opinion that the Iranian regime is a rational actor.”

by Dave Smith

Iran continues to play “rope-a-dope” with the US and the world.  First, they rattle sabres, threatening Israel and the US with destruction (which they cannot yet carry out.  They threaten closure of the Straits of Hormuz, our terror of higher gas prices.  Then, they offer the “olive branch” of negotiations, to stall for a few months before they need to utter the next round of threats.  All the while, they openly develop the weapons that will make them truly dangerous and make a second holocaust possible.

And the US policy? Admit military impotence (even shrink our own forces), worry about offending Iran, and put off serious sanctions until we can be sure they won’t affect oil prices.  And warn Israel against taking action to defend themselves.  “Leave it to us,” the US says.

I don’t know what Israel should do about Iran. But it seems obvious what America and our president should do.

America should say to Israel and the world, both privately and openly, that we will stand by our ally Israel with our full support in whatever actions its government decides are necessary to meet the Iranian threat.

We should do this because:

1: Israel is the frontline target of the threat, and has the most to gain or lose as a result of the decision;

2: Israel has shown itself to be judicious and cautious in making such security decisions in the past;

3: Israel is our only ally in the region, the only stable, democratic, free government in the region;

4: Israel is the only government in the region with a long-standing commitment to live in peace with its neighbors if given the opportunity.

We should of course agree to negotiations; but they should be conducted in a one-shot, closed door session to last no more than a day or two.  If Iran really wants peace, they could have it in a day.  But if they want to continue stalling, we should walk out.

I myself don’t know what Israel’s leadership should do.  I have no inside information on Iranian defences or Israeli military options.

But I like what Tobin is saying.  He simply argues that the military option is not hopeless.  Iran is not invulnerable.  This doesn’t sound particularly controversial until you consider how many supposed “realists” treat with the contrary proposition as a default axiom, a matter that must be taken on faith.

Tobin also points to the similarity with 1967, when world opinion was united in urging Israel not to take preemptive action against Egypt’s planned holocaust.

What is most surprising is today’s “realist’s” claim that an Israeli strike would turn Iran into an implacable enemy of Israel!  Have these guys been listening to Iran’s leaders lately?  It’s worse, more openly genocidal, than anything Nasser ever spouted.