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TRANSCRIPT

Interview with Caroline Glick by Roger Aronoff

The “Take AIM” show on BlogTalkRadio, Thursday, August 5, 2010

ROGER ARONOFF: Good afternoon, and welcome to Take AIM, Accuracy in Media’s weekly talk show on BlogTalkRadio.  AIM is America’s original media watchdog, and every week we point out biased coverage and bring you the stories the mainstream media ignore.  We encourage you to visit our website at aim.org, and sign up to receive our daily E-mail so you can keep track of what the media are up to.  I am Roger Aronoff, a media analyst with AIM, and we have a very special guest today: We’re going to be talking to Caroline Glick, the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post and a columnist whose writing has appeared in many publications.  The Chicago-born Caroline Glick is a former officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and was a core member of Israel’s negotiating team with the Palestinians, and later served as an assistant policy advisor to the Prime Minister.  During Operation Iraqi Freedom, Glick was an embedded journalist with the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division.  She was awarded a Distinguished Civilian Service Award from the U.S. Secretary of the Army for her battlefield reporting.  She is also a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy, and the author of the 2008 book Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad.  Caroline, welcome to Take AIM!

CAROLINE GLICK: Great to be on your show, Roger.  Thanks for having me.

ARONOFF: Great.  I want to note that this afternoon, for a rare moment, you and President Barack Obama are both in Chicago, and then it’s fitting, this line from your bio on your website, carolineglick.com, and it starts out, “I grew up in Chicago’s ultra-liberal, anti-American and anti-Israel stronghold of Hyde Park.  Hyde Park’s newest famous resident is Barack Obama.  He fits right into a neighborhood I couldn’t wait to leave.”  So why couldn’t you wait to leave there?  And tell us how you ended up going to Israel.

GLICK: I think that you have a lot of—you have a lot of pressure on young people, in places like Hyde Park, or Morningside Heights and Columbia, or Cambridge, Massachusetts—or all these other college-town areas or neighborhoods—to conform to very strict liberal orthodoxies.  And, unfortunately, as time goes by, those orthodoxies become more and more blatant in their anti-Americanism, in their anti-Israel positions that are really indistinguishable from anti-Semitism, and it just becomes less and less pleasant to be in those areas.  I think that many people who are in college today, or work on college campuses, can attest to the fact that there really is a sort of Thought Police operating in these areas, telling people what they can or cannot say and think, and it’s a very oppressive atmosphere.

ARONOFF: What happened that you decided to move to Israel?  Tell us a little more about your journey, how you became—ultimately, after the military—a journalist.

GLICK: I had already decided, as a young girl, that I was a Zionist, that I believed that it was an amazing thing that, after 2,000 years, that the Jewish people reasserted our freedom and our sovereignty in our homeland.  It was a very inspirational story to me in history, Jewish history, as a Jewish girl growing up here, and it just seemed to me like it would be a great privilege in my life to join that journey of the Jewish people back to freedom and sovereignty in the land of Israel after 2,000 years of exile.  It was something that I had felt very strongly, even when I was ten and eleven years old, and I ended up going to college here in the United States, at Columbia in Morningside Heights in New York City, and then making aliyah, which is what it’s called when a Jew immigrates to Israel—it means a lighting—two weeks after I graduated from college.  And then I joined the army, the Israel Defense Forces, and I served there for many years as an officer.  I worked in the negotiations with the PLO, and then I left the army and I worked for Prime Minister Netanyahu during his first stint in office, and then I went back to graduate school in the United States.  When I came back, I began writing as a columnist in a Hebrew newspaper there.  Then, later, The Jerusalem Post.

ARONOFF: Your columns are among the most highly anticipated among many people that I know, and each one is viewed as a treasure.  I receive them from a number of sources, a number of lists that I’m on, and I get it every week, each one maybe half a dozen times! And I think the feeling is, no one better explains what’s going on behind the scenes in Middle Eastern politics than you.

GLICK: I really appreciate that.  Thank you.

ARONOFF: In one of your columns this week, you cite media reports that “Obama has pledged that if Abbas agrees to negotiate, the administration will coerce Netanyahu into submitting to the Palestinians’ demands on substantive issues.  These include borders, Palestinian militarization, ethnic cleansing of Jews from Judea and Samaria and large portions of Jerusalem, and other issues.”  So what exactly is the leverage that Obama has over Israel, that he is able to coerce concessions out of Israel that seem antithetical to their interests?

GLICK: I think that there are two aspects of that coercion that have to be borne in mind.  One is psychological, and one is substantive.  On a psychological level, I think we’ve seen, over the past generation or more, 40 years or more, that Israel has been the victim of a campaign that grows stronger with each passing year to isolate it and to delegitimize it internationally, to try to argue that Israel has no right to exist and no right to defend itself.  For the past decade or so, the United States has really been the last stalwart who has refused to engage in this kind of demonization of Israel.  So from psychological perspective, Israel feels very dependent on the United States as its only ally in this political war that’s being fought against it, that’s being fought against the very notion of Jewish nationhood and of Jewish national rights in the land of Israel.  And so the idea that the United States will abandon Israel—and the Obama administration almost continuously has this threat over Israel’s head, like a Sword of Damocles, saying, “If you don’t do what we demand that you do, then we’re going to stop vetoing anti-Israel resolutions in the U.N. Security Council, and a whole host of other areas where the United States has traditionally sided with Israel, in the U.N. and other international forums—so that’s the psychological aspect of it, although it has a substantive consequence in terms of further isolation, and boycotts, and things of that nature.

And then in substantive, the main substantive area where the United States has enormous leverage is in military support, specifically the sale of weaponry, of advanced weapons platforms and materiel, to Israel for means of its own defense.  That also is a threat that the Obama administration has wielded against Israel continuously.  For instance, in the issue of the advanced jet fighter that the United States is developing, the F-35, and how, and to what degree, it will allow Israel to purchase and to tailor-make those aircraft, or not tailor-make those aircraft, to its specific needs, and things of that nature.  So there are a lot of things that the United States has holding over Israel, and the Obama administration has basically been wielding all of them against the government of Israel.

ARONOFF: Something in the news just this week, and is relevant to the first, the psychological, which is, at the U.N., where, just this week, the U.S. pushed for, and the U.N. is now going to participate in, this commission looking into what happened with the so-called “Gaza flotilla.”  This is kind of a first, where the U.S. is going along with the U.N. to put this added pressure on Israel, and Israel seems to have agreed to that.  Bring us up to date on this.

GLICK: One of the things that’s disturbing about this whole push for an investigation into what happened on the flotilla, the Turkish Hamas terror-ship, the Mavi Marmara, that confronted, and whose passengers attacked, Israel naval commandos who were engaged in maintaining and enforcing a lawful blockade of the Gaza seacoast on May 31^st, is that this story, for anybody willing to pay attention to the truth, is cut and dried—that Israel was behaving lawfully, that the passengers on board that ship were behaving unlawfully, that the entire ship itself was illegal in the sense that it was launched to provide aid and comfort to an illegal terrorist organization, Hamas, which controls the Gaza strip.  An objective observer of what happened there would recognize that Israel behaved with utmost restraint—above and beyond what is called for in international law, and that in carrying out their routine duties in enforcing a lawful blockade of the Gaza coastline, these commandos in the Israeli navy were attacked, unprovoked, by the passengers aboard the ship.  Now, what has ensued is really just a kangaroo court atmosphere, which, unfortunately, has accompanied Israel on every step that it’s taken to defend itself and its rights for the past decade, which is, you had this pile-on, led by Turkey, but immediately joined by the United States in the United Nations—specifically, in the Security Council—pretending, for an international audience, that there’s something unclear about what happened there, that it isn’t clear that this is an act of aggression by the Turkish government against the state of Israel.

So you have this crazy situation—and the worst part about it is, the United States has now pushed for the formation of what you were talking about, this U.N. panel that is supposed to oversee and investigate Israel’s own investigation, that Israel was coerced by the United States into establishing some weeks ago.  So the United States, first, forced Israel to investigate itself as if it had done something wrong; second, it forced Israel to accept international participants in its own investigation, because Secretary of State Clinton and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice claimed that there was something untoward about Israel investigating itself, that is, that Israel could not conduct a credible investigation of itself, because there’s something wrong about Israel, something basically discreditable about Israelis that can’t investigate ourselves.  So that, in and of itself, was a huge insult.  And then, afterward, Susan Rice continued prying, piling on Israel, and demanded that Israel not—that, after Israel had already succumbed to American pressure and agreed to investigate itself, then Susan Rice came and began—was up with this other idea, that no, in fact, this wasn’t going to be enough, Israel wasn’t sufficiently credible, even with international participants, the United States demanded on its own investigation to investigate the lawful conduct of soldiers.  Now it has to succumb to international—an international investigation of itself with Turkish involvement, New Zealand leadership—New Zealand’s government has been extremely anti-Israel, and indeed, anti-Semitic, in the past decade—and this is what the United States is pushing Israel to agree to, and the threat that Obama wielded over Netanyahu was that the United States would not veto anti-Israel resolutions in the Security Council, and would not vote with Israel in the General Assembly, and other things of that nature.  And, I think, wrongly—I think stupidly, actually, but, whatever—the Netanyahu government succumbed, again, to American pressure on Israel, and, essentially, elected to, or agreed to, surrender its right to investigate itself, and surrendered the notion that Israel is a country that is capable—as a democratic state that is ruled by the rule of law—to investigate its own operations.

ARONOFF: That’s a great point, and I think one factor that maybe Netanyahu’s overlooking is just how strong the Congress supports Israel, even while the Obama administration is trying to exert this pressure.  One of the Congressmen told me, not too long ago, that they stand there, sort of like a big brother to Israel, and aren’t going to let anything happen, but I guess Netanyahu wants to work with Obama to that extent.  And I want to mention one other thing while we’re talking about this, which is this amazing video that you helped create as part of your role as editor-in-chief of—what is it, Latma?

GLICK: Yes. It’s a Hebrew-language website that I edit.

ARONOFF: “We Con the World” is—an amazing—I guess if they just go to YouTube, and do “We Con the World,” it’ll come up?

GLICK: Yes, it will.

ARONOFF: Okay.  Well, I recommend that to everyone, to check it out.  It’s very moving, and funny, when Bob Dylan, Tom Waits—and Caroline’s in there singing, too!  So it is a powerful—

GLICK: And Bruce Springsteen, and Cyndi Lauper, too!  [Laughs.]

ARONOFF: Exactly!  [Laughs.] So that’s an amazing one, as well—while you’re at it, look up “The Three Terrors” another great one that has been around the Internet, but I’m sure a lot of people still aren’t aware of it.  Let me do another issue, kind of the big issue.  It seems to me we have this situation where there’s always this intense pressure to solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue, as if this will cool all the world’s tensions, if only a deal can be reached.  But I think, now, we’re really farther away than we’ve been in a long time.  The Palestinians are divided between Hamas and Gaza, and Fatah and the West Bank, and with this situation where Obama demanded the freeze on the settlements in the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria, only hardened the views of the Palestinians.  That wasn’t even high on their priority list until then.  The question is, is there a deal to be had?  Or is this kind of—almost a PR battle for Israel to show its willingness to do this?  It seems that there’s really no deal that’s even close to being able to be had.

GLICK: I think you’re absolutely right.  I discussed it, actually, in my article—I think it was on Tuesday.  People can also read it on my website, carolineglick.com, but the basic notion, I think, behind all of this is attention, or addiction, to political theater.  Because, really, what Israel is, is an international dog-and-pony show, that people can pull out and coerce into making concessions against the Palestinians so that American leaders and Europeans and Israeli leftists can all say, “Look!  There’s progress on the road to peace!”  Because we all know, now, that we’ve been going through this charade since 1993.  For 17 years, we’ve been going through this charade, time after time after time after time, where we’re told that peace is in the offing, that the PLO and the Palestinian Authority—whatever you happen to call them on any particular day of the week—has finally agreed to accept Israel’s right to exist, and that, really, what we need to do is form a Palestinian state.  And time after time, the Palestinians say, “No, in fact we have not accepted Israel’s right to exist.  We’ll take whatever concessions Israel coughs up, and we’ll use them as a starting point for our next round of demands against Israel.  Our goal remains what is has always been: the destruction of Israel.  If we do it incrementally, if we do it in a big bang—however we do it, we feel that whatever weakens Israel, whatever forces Israel to yield power and give it to us, we’re going to take, and we love everybody who’s pushing Israel into these concessions.”

And then you have these governments—whether it’s in Washington, or Brussels, or London—you have these politicians who say, “We need an achievement, an accomplishment, in foreign policy.  We need to show the voters that we’re not incompetent, that we know how to run foreign policy.  Well, you can’t get Saudi Arabia to stop funding terrorism.  You can’t get Iran’s mullahs to stop developing nuclear bombs.  You can’t get Hugo Chavez, in Venezuela, to stop hating the United States and destroying America’s alliance structure in Latin America.  So what can you do?  You can force Israel to stop building Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria, to stop building Jewish homes in Jerusalem, because the United States always knows that Israel doesn’t have anybody but the United States.  So if an American President is desperate for an accomplishment in foreign affairs, he knows that the quickest way to get one is to put pressure on Israel—and that is what we have had, time after time after time, in Washington over the past 17 years, and it is just killing, killing us.  Killing us.

ARONOFF: But the reality is, they never reach that deal, and so I’m not sure what victory it is for any American administration, when it ends up, always, the same.  And it also makes you wonder why Arafat, in 2000, didn’t accept the deal and get the statehood created, and then lie and break the agreement after that—or Abbas, in 2008, with Olmert, when he offered it on his way out the door—which also leads to the next thing that’s being contemplated, which is just a declaration of independence, that they get the backing at the U.N., whether Israel is along or not.

GLICK: Well, the only thing about a unilateral declaration of independence—if the Palestinians were to declare independence and statehood outside of the framework of an agreement with Israel—the only thing that would be barring them from doing so, is that they don’t actually want a state.  We saw, with Arafat—and, like you said, in 2008, we saw with Abbas—that every opportunity the Palestinians have had to declare statehood—and in 2005, when Israel left Gaza and gave the Palestinians sovereignty over a piece of land for the first time in human history—because, you know, there never was a “Palestine,” and there wasn’t a “Palestinian people” until 1969, when Leonid Brezhnev invented them.  They have refused statehood every single time that it has been offered to them.  The only thing, probably, that would prevent them—[from unilaterally declaring]—statehood is the fact that they don’t actually want one.  Their goal remains destroying Israel.  I think that the United States has been signaling—with the upgraded PLO mission in D.C. to a Delegation General, and allowing them to fly the PLO flag in the U.S. Capitol, alongside the Union Jack and Canada’s Maple Leaf—you have a situation where the United States is signaling that it would accept a unilateral Palestinian declaration of independence, even though that would mean that the state of Palestine that the United States was recognizing would be a Palestinian state that would be in a state of war with Israel.  So you’re getting this push, you’re getting these signals, from Washington to the PLO, and to  Israel—you’ve always had these signals from Europe to the Palestinians that they don’t really care whether the Palestinians live at peace with Israel.  The United States is developing a Palestinian army, is building a Palestinian army that is capable of doing massive damage to Israel, and it knows that the officers and soldiers in the army that it’s building do not accept Israel’s right to exist—and yet they’re doing it.  This is also a signal that, in time of war between Israel and the Palestinians, next round of war, it’s possible that no one will stand with Israel, and that everybody will stand with the Palestinians against Israel.

ARONOFF: Let me clarify: When you say the Palestinians don’t really want a state I think you’re meaning they don’t want a two-state solution.  They would like one state, called “Palestine,” that they can overrun and, basically, take control over.  Would you agree with that?  Or do you think they don’t want statehood, period?

GLICK: It’s not clear.  Look: Hamas doesn’t want a state.  Their charter talks about an enclave of the global Caliphate in Palestine, but it doesn’t talk about a state because, as a jihadist group, a Muslim Brotherhood group that is aligned with the same goals as al-Qaeda, Hamas is not a nationalist movement.  They don’t see themselves as Palestinian nationalists.  They see themselves as Muslims who are on a jihad, and their particular campaign is being waged against the state of Israel.  But it’s part of a global campaign—as their own constitution, or covenant, says, it’s a part of a global jihad—whose aim is the establishment, just like Osama bin Laden says, of a global Caliphate.  So that’s Hamas’s aim.  The Fatah, the PLO, it’s no longer clear what their aim is.  I think that, mainly, their objective is to maintain power so that they can continue enriching themselves from international donor money, because that really seems to be the only thing that motivates its leaders to act.  But the PLO never amended its charter—that called for the destruction of Israel—and it continues to educate its children through its media, through its school system, that they should seek the annihilation of the Jewish state, and the genocide of the Jewish people.  And so if there’s a distinguishing feature between what the PLO wants and what Hamas wants, I think it’s, at this point, that Hamas is more specific about what its ultimate goal is than the PLO is, but I don’t see statehood figuring very centrally in either view.

ARONOFF: Right.  And this—what you were just saying—sort of puts the lie to this idea that Abbas is this moderate.  When they celebrate these terrorists, and the incitement that you were talking about—that’s another, just a myth, yet Israel is working with them on the economy, and, as you point out, building up this sort of military—police/military—in the Palestinian territories.  So what about that?  Abbas?  Is he someone that Israel can live with, and work with?  Or is it just an illusion?

GLICK: It’s an illusion—and it’s important to understand that the United States is building a Palestinian army.  It calls it a “security force”—it is an army.  It is an army, it is trained as an army, it is trained in warfare by the U.S. Army, and Israel’s Central Command, which is basically the center of the country, the commanding general of Israel’s Central Command warned his troops in May that the Palestinian force that is being built by the United States in Jordan, and they’ve already forced Israel to agree to deploy four of these battalions in Judea and Samaria.  They’re demanding, over time—that’s 2,000 fighters, and the United States wants Israel—expects Israel to accept the deployment of another 5,000 of these soldiers that the U.S. is training.  And the commanding general of Israel’s Central Command warned his soldiers, at a training exercise in the south in May, that this was a Palestinian army unlike any that Israel has seen in the past, that it is an infantry force, that the training that they received at the hands of the United States puts Israel in a situation that it hasn’t been in before, that we can expect that there will be many more casualties on the Israeli side at the beginning of the next round of war with these people—and we also have to remember that there’s massive precedent for Palestinian security forces that are trained and armed by the West to turn their guns on Israel.  It has happened in every major Palestinian terror onslaught against Israel since 1996, and the Palestinian terror-war that Arafat began in 2000 was commanded and organized, financed, and trained by Palestinian security services.  So the United States is playing with fire—at best—when they’re putting together this Palestinian army.  They’ve already spent 400 million dollars of U.S. taxpayer money building this army.  President Obama has pledged another 100 million dollars for next year, for continuing to build this army, and this is, quite simply, a hostile act against the state of Israel on the part of the United States government.

ARONOFF: Amazing.  You also wrote, in a column this week, that the U.S. General Accounting Office published a report criticizing Israel for not being sufficiently supportive of this force.

GLICK: And we have to remember that the United States is also training and supplying the Lebanese military that just opened fire, in an unprovoked ambush, against the Israeli army along the border with Lebanon—and killed a lieutenant colonel and seriously wounded a captain—on Tuesday.

ARONOFF: You’ve been very generous with your time.  I’m wondering if you’d give us a few extra minutes here.  Or do you need to—?

GLICK: Sure.

ARONOFF: Okay.  Great.  Let’s go into that, Lebanon.  This is another story breaking this week, and it’s another—and I want to kind of talk about the media in this context, because we’re already seeing the false reports out of Reuters, and the usual suspects, blaming Israel, and falsely reporting the facts on this.  So put on your media critic’s hat and talk about what’s going on in Lebanon in that context.

GLICK: Part of the problem is Lebanon, and I actually fault the media far less than the Obama administration in this, because what happened in Lebanon—Israel played absolutely by the book in terms of everything that it did.  It informed the United Nations’ international forces in Lebanon, which mans the border—has this mandate to do so—that it was going to be sending some troops to prune some trees on the Israeli side of the border—everything inside of Israel.  And the U.N. informed the Lebanese army that that was what Israel was going to do.  And then the Lebanese military prepared an ambush for Israeli forces, because they had four hours of prior warning that Israel was coming.  They brought journalists with them to film the killing of Israeli soldiers.  And then the Israeli military arrived.  The unit came to do exactly what they said, and the Lebanese army opened fire on them, sniper rifles—this is, by the way, equipment that was provided by the U.S. government to the military in Lebanon—shot and killed Lieutenant Colonel Harari, who was the battalion commander, and wounded a captain who was a company commander on the scene.  Shot him in the chest.  And then the Obama administration made a demand.  Its initial comment on this blatant act of aggression against Israel by the Lebanese army—not by Hezbollah, but by the Lebanese army—was to demand that both sides “exercise restraint.”  Israel has stated repeatedly that if it is attacked from Lebanon, it will hold Lebanon responsible, and it will attack with massive force.  And the United States said, “You’d better not do that!  You watch it—you’d better not do that!”  And so Israel responded only with a limited strike against the specific unit that had attacked its unit—and that is not a way to maintain, or build, deterrence against an encroaching enemy that is really playing with fire, and pushing us to the brink of a regional war.

And so the United States reacted exactly backwards, and Israel was so irate over this, the government sent the ambassador to the State Department to demand that the United States put out a more strongly worded statement acknowledging that the whole blame for this entire process was on Lebanon and not Israel.  I think it’s important to notice that the media, as is its wont, always tries to pretend that, if it’s a blatant act of aggression, like it was in the Mavi Marmara terror-flotilla from Turkey, or if it’s the issue here, along the Lebanese border, that there are two sides to every issue, and that you really don’t know what the truth is.  Even though it’s staring them, straight out, in the face.  You have a lot of vacillation on the media part, and trying to claim that Israel is doing something to provoke this kind of attack—and the only thing that Israel has done to provoke its attack is exist.  To the extent that people think that that is a provocation, these people are bigoted and really don’t deserve a place at the table.  Unfortunately, as you know, most of the military coverage of the Middle East is conducted by people who have a serious problem with the fact that Israel exists, and so we end up with this incredibly biased reportage on the region that distorts what happens, falsifies information, and then holds Israel to this double standard that compares Israel not to other countries, but to a theoretical notion of perfection that no state occupied by human beings rather than angels could possibly ever abide by.

ARONOFF: How do you explain Obama’s position, his worldview?  In other words, there was a McLaughlin poll in April that showed that 78% of the Jews had voted for him, and at that point, just over a year, a year and a half later, from when they voted, the support was down to 42%.  Seeing these polls in Israel, something like 6% believe that Obama is pro-Israel.  What do you think it is—whether it’s Hyde Park, Chicago, Jeremiah Wright—what is it that has shaped Obama’s views towards Israel?

GLICK: You know, I don’t really know.  I don’t know what it is.  I know that in his entire life, as you mentioned—I mean, he carpetbagged to Hyde Park.  He came to this neighborhood, where I grew up, because he knew that it was a very good place for an African-American politician on the make, and he actively sought out the companionship and shepherdship of anti-Semites like Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan.  His history—and Rashid Khalidi, who was at the University of Chicago when he was here, and Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who dedicated their book to the Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated Robert Kennedy—you know, you have a pattern here of Obama’s behavior, and his choice in friends and mentors.  Every one of them is anti-Israel and anti-Semitic.  I don’t like to psychoanalyze people, particularly the people that I have never met.  I don’t know how he feels towards Jewish people.  I don’t know how he feels towards Muslims.  I don’t know how he feels towards the United States.  But I do know, just judging from his behavior, from the choices that he’s made over his adult life span, he has consistent pattern of choosing, surrounding himself with, or seeking the counsel of, people who have very bad views of the United States and of Israel, very sympathetic views towards the likes of Fidel Castro, as well as the theoretical Muslim world, where everybody is a pure savage in a sort of British racist way, and they’re all pure and without sin, and the job of the West is to apologize to them, and the job of the Jews is to apologize for existing.  That is his consistent pattern, and I think it’s important to notice that.

And ahead of the elections—the U.S. Jewish community took a lead role in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and before that—and I think that there was an enormous amount of excitement among American Jews at the prospect of an African-American becoming President.  I think that that excitement, and that enthusiasm, that was seen as sort of a fruition of generations of activism on the part of American Jews on behalf of racial equality in America, that that sense that all of this work, all the hard work, all of the dedication that the American Jewish community had had to the cause of racial equality in the United States, was finally bearing the most amazing fruit: An African-American President.  A lot of American Jews were not willing to look into the quality of Obama’s character, and were just blinded by their excitement and enthusiasm, and after he came into office and they started seeing—many of them started noticing what he was doing to Israel, singling out Israel for abuse, and treating its leaders so shabbily and nastily—then American Jews were forced to reconsider their support, and recognize that behind the color of his skin, behind the extraordinary achievement for the Civil Rights movement that his election to the Presidency manifested, there was a troubling character of the President, and a troubling position that he consistently takes on issues related to the Jewish state.

ARONOFF: Just a couple more quick things.  One: What countries—top three or four—that Israel can still count on as open allies?  If the U.S. isn’t one, I don’t know how you look at that with Congress and all that—but what other countries are openly allied and supportive of Israel?

GLICK: Yes.  There are a lot of things that bind Israel to the United States specifically.  It isn’t just common interests, but it’s common values as democracies, and as democracies that are formed on the basis of the rule of law, and the Judeo-Christian—or, in Israel’s case, Judeo tradition, the Jewish traditions of law and morality—and so there are a lot of things that bring together the United States and Israel beyond common strategic interests, and that make the bond between Israel and the United States unique.  Having said that, there are a lot of countries in the world that have shared strategic interests with Israel, whether it’s India or South Korea or Georgia or Greece or—a whole host of other states.  Poland.  The Czech Republic.  There are a lot of states—Colombia—that have common strategic interests with Israel, and that Israel should be building alliances with, or has built alliances with and should expand them, because—I think, at base, the United States and Israel will always be allies because of the shared values that are common to both countries and to both peoples, and because of the democratic traditions of both countries and both peoples, and so I think that, despite Obama’s turn against Israel, that the basic rationale for the U.S.-Israel alliance remains strong, and the alliance itself will reemerge in the wake of the Obama administration, and it may even reemerge if the Republicans retake control over the Congress.  But at the same time, Israel has placed all of its eggs in one basket for a generation, in its alliance with the United States, and I think that the Obama’s turn against Israel serves as a warning to Israel that that is never a good idea for anybody, no matter who the friend is, and that Israel has to expand its web of alliances with other countries in order to ensure its long-term stability and security.

ARONOFF: Final question here: I want to read, from another of your columns, a sentence or two, and I would like you to expand on it.

GLICK: Mm-hmm!

ARONOFF: “What makes contemporary anti-Semitism unique is its purveyors’ great efforts to hide its very existence.  Their motivation is clear.  Outside the openly genocidal anti-Semitic Muslim world, most anti-Semites are self-described liberals who claim to oppose bigotry.  For these people, pretending away their prejudice is the key to their continued claim to enlightenment.”  I think you were talking in the context of Oliver Stone, his recent comments, but tell us what you’re talking about there.

GLICK: You know, in recent years—again, really since 1969, it was a KGB campaign that was cooked up by Yuri Andropov and Brezhnev: “Let’s hide the fact that we’re anti-Semites behind something we’re going to call ‘anti-Zionism.’  Let’s pretend that we’re not opposed to Jews, we’re not opposed to Jewish rights, we’re not opposed to Jewish freedoms, we’re just opposed to the Jewish right to exercise his freedoms in the land of Israel, in the historic homeland of the Jewish people.”  So we have seen, over the past 40 years, at the same time as we’ve seen the invention and rise of the new nation called “the Palestinian”—which was also a Soviet creation—we see this whole movement, on the Left, to say, “Oh, no, some of my best friends are Jews!  I don’t have any problem with Jews!  But the Zionists!  The Zionists are bad!  Israel is not a state that really has a right to exist.  We allow it to exist because we feel guilty over the Holocaust, but, really, the Jews are evil—their treatment of the Palestinians is the equivalent of the Nazi treatment of the Jewish people!  They really have no moral right to exist.  No moral claim.  No historical claim.  No legal claim to sovereignty in their historic homeland.”  And on and on and on.

And they wrap themselves in this web of lies that’s based on historical revisionism and outright falsification of the historical record, of the legal record, in order to attack Israel and claim to Israel has no right to exist.  And then they say, “No, this doesn’t stem from any sort of hostility towards Jews, only towards Zionism,” but, really, we have to remember what “Zionism” is: Zionism is the Jewish national liberation movement, and all of these people who claim that they’re opposed to “Zionism” have to explain how it is that there’s only one nation whose national liberation movement they oppose.  They accept everybody else’s, it doesn’t matter who they are, but the Jews, as Jews, don’t have a right to national self-determination—and you realize how absurd it is when you consider, for a fact, for a moment, the fact that the Jews were the first nation to ever determine who they were by themselves.  I mean, the Jewish people did that at Mount Sinai when they said they were going to be a nation under God’s Law.  So you have the first nation that self-defined itself—that defined itself as a nation, being told by the rest of the nations that followed it that it’s not a nation, and that it has no right to freedom.  And I think that when you look at how absurd the whole argument is, and you see why they’re doing it—they’re doing it because they want to pretend that they’re not bigoted, they want to pretend that they’re enlightened, but really, what they’re advancing is one of the darkest, most barbaric hatreds that the human race has seen in its history, and that is the hatred of the Jewish people.

ARONOFF: Our guest has been Caroline Glick, deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy, and author of the 2008 book Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad.  You can find most of her work at carolineglick.com—Also at The Jerusalem Post.  Any final links or thoughts before we go here?

GLICK: I think we basically covered it!

ARONOFF: Okay.

GLICK: I appreciate very much your time and your willingness to listen.

ARONOFF: Thank you so much for being with us today on Take AIM.

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3 Comments for Take AIM: Caroline Glick of The Jerusalem Post