by Professor Alan M. Dershowitz
from the Wall Street Journal
The gravest threat faced by the world today is a nuclear-armed Iran. Of all the nations capable of producing nuclear weapons, Iran is the only one that might use them to attack an enemy.
There are several ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons. The first is by dropping an atomic bomb on Israel, as its leaders have repeatedly threatened to do. Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran, boasted in 2004 that an Iranian attack would kill as many as five million Jews. Mr. Rafsanjani estimated that even if Israel retaliated with its own nuclear bombs, Iran would probably lose about 15 million people, which he said would be a small "sacrifice" of the billion Muslims in the world.
The second way in which Iran could use nuclear weapons would be to hand them off to its surrogates, Hezbollah or Hamas. A third way would be for a terrorist group, such as al Qaeda, to get its hands on Iranian nuclear material. It could do so with the consent of Iran or by working with rogue elements within the Iranian regime.
Finally, Iran could use its nuclear weapons without ever detonating a bomb. By constantly threatening Israel with nuclear annihilation, it could engender so much fear among Israelis as to incite mass immigration, a brain drain, or a significant decline in people moving to Israel.
These are the specific ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons, primarily against the Jewish state. But there are other ways in which a nuclear-armed Iran would endanger the world. First, it would cause an arms race in which every nation in the Middle East would seek to obtain nuclear weapons.
Second, it would almost certainly provoke Israel into engaging in either a pre-emptive or retaliatory attack, thus inflaming the entire region or inciting further attacks against Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas.
Third, it would provide Iran with a nuclear umbrella under which it could accelerate its efforts at regional hegemony. Had Iraq operated under a nuclear umbrella when it invaded Kuwait in 1990, Saddam Hussein's forces would still be in Kuwait.
Fourth, it would embolden the most radical elements in the Middle East to continue their war of words and deeds against the United States and its allies.
And finally, it would inevitably unleash the law of unintended consequences: Simply put, nobody knows the extent of the harm a nuclear-armed Iran could produce.
In these respects, allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons is somewhat analogous to the decision by the victors of World War I to allow Nazi Germany to rearm during the 1930s. Even the Nazis were surprised at this complacency. Joseph Goebbels expected the French and British to prevent the Nazis from rebuilding Germany's war machine.
In 1940, Goebbels told a group of German journalists that if he had been the French premier when Hitler came to power he would have said, "The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!"
But, Goebbels continued, "they didn't do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the war!"
Most people today are not aware that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain helped restore Great Britain's financial stability during the Great Depression and also passed legislation to extend unemployment benefits, pay pensions to retired workers and otherwise help those hit hard by the slumping economy. But history does remember his failure to confront Hitler. That is Chamberlain's enduring legacy.
So too will Iran's construction of nuclear weapons, if it manages to do so in the next few years, become President Barack Obama's enduring legacy. Regardless of his passage of health-care reform and regardless of whether he restores jobs and helps the economy recover, Mr. Obama will be remembered for allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. History will not treat kindly any leader who allows so much power to be accumulated by the world's first suicide nation-a nation whose leaders have not only expressed but, during the Iran-Iraq war, demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice millions of their own people to an apocalyptic mission of destruction.
If Iran were to become a nuclear power, there would be plenty of blame to go around. A National Intelligence Report, issued on President George W. Bush's watch, distorted the truth by suggestion that Iran had ended its quest for nuclear weapons. It also withheld the fact that U.S. intelligence had discovered a nuclear facility near Qum, Iran, that could be used only for the production of nuclear weapons. Chamberlain, too, was not entirely to blame for Hitler's initial triumphs. He became prime minister after his predecessors allowed Germany to rearm. Nevertheless, it is Chamberlain who has come to symbolize the failure to prevent Hitler's ascendancy. So too will Mr. Obama come to symbolize the failure of the West if Iran acquires nuclear weapons on his watch.
Prof. Dershowitz is a leading law professor at Harvard.
See the original article in the Wall Street Journal
See this article and more at Israel Behind the News
Showing posts with label Alan Dershowitz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alan Dershowitz. Show all posts
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
Endangering Lives to Sell Newspapers: Misrepresenting a Professional Critique of the Goldstone Report
by Professor Alan Dershowitz
Professor of Law, Harvard University
It all began with an innocent enough request for an interview about the Goldstone report and my 49 page response [1] to it. The Israeli Army radio station asked to interview me. The interview was conducted by an experienced host, Razi Barkai. Unbeknownst to me, Barkai had an agenda. He wanted to get me to say that I thought that Goldstone was a “moser.” He wanted me to use this Hebrew word, whose meaning I did not understand, because in Israel, this obscure theological term has taken on a meaning of its own. According to The Forward, “the term moser entered Israeli political discourse in 1995 in the wake of Rabin’s assassination by radical settler supporter Yigal Amir, when Amir cited some rabbis’ designation of Rabin as a moser as part of his justification for carrying out the murder.” The Forward quoted Michael Karpin, an Israeli journalist and the author of a book on Rabin’s assassination, as follows: “After the assassination, when Amir was interviewed by the police and he mentioned the term moser, people tried to find out what it is...Nobody used it here before the assassination.”
Unfortunately, I was totally unfamiliar with the “inside baseball”-or in this case “inside Israel”-use of this esoteric term.
Several times during the interview, Barkai tried to get me to agree that Goldstone was a moser, a word he pronounced with a thick accent. Since the interview was being conducted in English, I thought he was asking me to agree with him that Goldstone was a “monster.” I would never use the term “monster” since it suggests an inherent, even genetic, flaw in a person, without regard to what he has said or done. I was clear throughout my interview that I believed that Goldstone had exploited his Jewishness to lend illegitimate credibility to a false report [2]. In this respect, he had betrayed his people and deserved to be condemned in the marketplace of ideas. Accordingly, when Barkai asked me the following question, “Do you hint, Professor, that he is a moser, someone who betrays his own people?,” I focused on the part of the question I understood. Believing that he is someone who betrays his own people, I answered the question in the affirmative. Barkai had sprung the trap. Now he had me. He could send out press releases indicating that I had called Goldstone a moser, even though I never used the word and had no idea what it meant.
The story spread quickly around the world, and I was condemned, largely by the extreme left, for advocating Goldstone’s murder. As soon as I heard this, I immediately demanded a clarification from Barkai, which he ran on the air. I repeatedly emphasized, in subsequent interviews, that “I certainly did not mean to imply that any physical harm should come to Goldstone.” But this didn’t stop the incitement by those in the media more interested in sensationalism than truth.
M.J. Rosenberg, the former Director of Policy Analysis for Israel Policy Forum, wrote in his Palestine Note blog that I was “calling for Goldstone’s murder.” Even more insidiously, the Forward, a mainstream Jewish newspaper, ran a lengthy piece strongly implying that I must have known the theological (or “Halachic”) implications of “moser.” They went so far as to find an elementary school classmate at Etz Chayim Yeshiva in Boro Park who told them, quite erroneously, that I “must have heard it as a child.” (Another classmate wrote the Forward a letter confirming that he too had never heard it-and he was a good Yeshiva student!) The Forward then went on to quote another rabbi to the effect that “a moser can become a capital crime” under certain circumstances. At the very bottom of the article, so as not to detract from its sensationalism, the Forward included the following disclaimer:
“I do not want any harm to come to Richard Goldstone,” Dershowitz said. “I want him to be responded to in the marketplace of ideas.”
An article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by Ron Kampares was even more irresponsible. It “reported” the following:
“Most recently, Alan Dershowitz likened him to a “moser”, a Jewish traitor deemed in some interpretations as worthy of a death sentence.”
This was written days after I had made it clear that I wanted no harm to befall Goldstone. A response to the JTA article by Debra DeLee, President and CEO of Americans For Peace Now, accused me-also days after I made my position clear-of calling Goldstone a “moser,” which she said is “a term reserved in traditional Jewish law for a Jewish traitor who should be killed.”
She also showed her ignorance of the fact that I had written a 49 page substantive response to the Goldstone report, by saying that I “could have-and should have-aired substantive disagreements about the report that Judge Goldstone authored following the Gaza War.”
Finally, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (Bradley Burston) described me as “Kahane-sounding,” a reference for the radical rabbi who did in fact call for violence-as contrasted for my call for peace based on a two-state solution and the end of civilian settlements. But no matter, its sells newspapers.
It’s bad enough that there are some religious extremists on both sides who actually incite their followers to commit violence. But when elements of the mainstream Israeli and Jewish media twist the truth in the interest of sensationalism to imply-or state outright-that I am calling for the murder of Richard Goldstone, it is those irresponsible members of the media (and of Americans For Peace Now) who become the inciters.
See this article at Israel Behind the News
Professor of Law, Harvard University
It all began with an innocent enough request for an interview about the Goldstone report and my 49 page response [1] to it. The Israeli Army radio station asked to interview me. The interview was conducted by an experienced host, Razi Barkai. Unbeknownst to me, Barkai had an agenda. He wanted to get me to say that I thought that Goldstone was a “moser.” He wanted me to use this Hebrew word, whose meaning I did not understand, because in Israel, this obscure theological term has taken on a meaning of its own. According to The Forward, “the term moser entered Israeli political discourse in 1995 in the wake of Rabin’s assassination by radical settler supporter Yigal Amir, when Amir cited some rabbis’ designation of Rabin as a moser as part of his justification for carrying out the murder.” The Forward quoted Michael Karpin, an Israeli journalist and the author of a book on Rabin’s assassination, as follows: “After the assassination, when Amir was interviewed by the police and he mentioned the term moser, people tried to find out what it is...Nobody used it here before the assassination.”
Unfortunately, I was totally unfamiliar with the “inside baseball”-or in this case “inside Israel”-use of this esoteric term.
Several times during the interview, Barkai tried to get me to agree that Goldstone was a moser, a word he pronounced with a thick accent. Since the interview was being conducted in English, I thought he was asking me to agree with him that Goldstone was a “monster.” I would never use the term “monster” since it suggests an inherent, even genetic, flaw in a person, without regard to what he has said or done. I was clear throughout my interview that I believed that Goldstone had exploited his Jewishness to lend illegitimate credibility to a false report [2]. In this respect, he had betrayed his people and deserved to be condemned in the marketplace of ideas. Accordingly, when Barkai asked me the following question, “Do you hint, Professor, that he is a moser, someone who betrays his own people?,” I focused on the part of the question I understood. Believing that he is someone who betrays his own people, I answered the question in the affirmative. Barkai had sprung the trap. Now he had me. He could send out press releases indicating that I had called Goldstone a moser, even though I never used the word and had no idea what it meant.
The story spread quickly around the world, and I was condemned, largely by the extreme left, for advocating Goldstone’s murder. As soon as I heard this, I immediately demanded a clarification from Barkai, which he ran on the air. I repeatedly emphasized, in subsequent interviews, that “I certainly did not mean to imply that any physical harm should come to Goldstone.” But this didn’t stop the incitement by those in the media more interested in sensationalism than truth.
M.J. Rosenberg, the former Director of Policy Analysis for Israel Policy Forum, wrote in his Palestine Note blog that I was “calling for Goldstone’s murder.” Even more insidiously, the Forward, a mainstream Jewish newspaper, ran a lengthy piece strongly implying that I must have known the theological (or “Halachic”) implications of “moser.” They went so far as to find an elementary school classmate at Etz Chayim Yeshiva in Boro Park who told them, quite erroneously, that I “must have heard it as a child.” (Another classmate wrote the Forward a letter confirming that he too had never heard it-and he was a good Yeshiva student!) The Forward then went on to quote another rabbi to the effect that “a moser can become a capital crime” under certain circumstances. At the very bottom of the article, so as not to detract from its sensationalism, the Forward included the following disclaimer:
“I do not want any harm to come to Richard Goldstone,” Dershowitz said. “I want him to be responded to in the marketplace of ideas.”
An article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by Ron Kampares was even more irresponsible. It “reported” the following:
“Most recently, Alan Dershowitz likened him to a “moser”, a Jewish traitor deemed in some interpretations as worthy of a death sentence.”
This was written days after I had made it clear that I wanted no harm to befall Goldstone. A response to the JTA article by Debra DeLee, President and CEO of Americans For Peace Now, accused me-also days after I made my position clear-of calling Goldstone a “moser,” which she said is “a term reserved in traditional Jewish law for a Jewish traitor who should be killed.”
She also showed her ignorance of the fact that I had written a 49 page substantive response to the Goldstone report, by saying that I “could have-and should have-aired substantive disagreements about the report that Judge Goldstone authored following the Gaza War.”
Finally, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (Bradley Burston) described me as “Kahane-sounding,” a reference for the radical rabbi who did in fact call for violence-as contrasted for my call for peace based on a two-state solution and the end of civilian settlements. But no matter, its sells newspapers.
It’s bad enough that there are some religious extremists on both sides who actually incite their followers to commit violence. But when elements of the mainstream Israeli and Jewish media twist the truth in the interest of sensationalism to imply-or state outright-that I am calling for the murder of Richard Goldstone, it is those irresponsible members of the media (and of Americans For Peace Now) who become the inciters.
See this article at Israel Behind the News
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