Mere Rhetoric: OneJerusalem.org Bloggers Conference Call: Natan Sharansky

One Jerusalem arranged a bloggers' conference call this morning with their Chairman, soon to be Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Natan Sharansky. Sharansky, of course, is all kinds of important - author, former minister, Congressional Medal of Freedom recipient, human rights advocate, etc etc. Bloggers on the call: Jerry Gordon (IsraPundit), David Bogner (Treppenwitz), Anne Lieberman (Boker Tov, Boulder!), Chad (Granddaddy Long Legs), and Joel Rosenberg (Joelrosenberg.com) Allen Roth (One Jerusalem) was also on, in his usual role as ringmaster. As always, the audio recording will be up on the One Jerusalem frontpage later in the day.

Minister Sharansky tore into the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group in response to the opening question from Allen Roth, and he did it with a fervor and a clarity that's genuinely rare. When you're going over this call, you shouldn't settle for reading a transcript. Go and download the mp3. It's almost an experience to listen to Sharansky talk informally. You're listening to a true believer - and you just might find yourself getting convinced.

Regarding the substance of the ISG, he made a point that is so overwhelmingly obvious hat we literally cannot imagine what an answer to it might be: giving the Golan back to Syria will do absolutely nothing to get Sunnis and Shiites to stop killing each other in Iraq. They're not fighting over anything having to do with Israel, they're fighting over control of Iraq. It's our job to come up with even absurd arguments, and we've just go nothing - we don't know how you answer this. And remember - stabilizing Iraq is what the ISG is actually supposed to be focusing on. And there's this simple point: Israel has nothing to do - absolutely nothing - with the motives for the sectarian conflict in Iraq. It's so obviously true, and the ISG analysis is so fundamentally flawed. Experts analyzing Baker's obsession with Israel are starting to pile on:

As a front-row observer of similar efforts over the past 15 years, I could muster neither response. In lumping the Iraq mess in with the Palestinian problem - and suggesting the first could not be fixed unless the second was too - the Baker-Hamilton commission lent credibility to a corrosive myth: that the fundamental problem in the Arab world is the plight of the Palestinians. It is a falsehood perpetuated not just by the likes of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, who came late to the slogan after their actual beefs - Saddam with his neighbors; bin Laden with the Saudi royals - gained insufficient traction in the Arab world. The mantra is also repeated like an axiom in the U.S. - in parts of the State Department, in various think tanks, by editorial writers and Sunday talk-show hosts...

[T]he pan-Arabism that once made the Palestinian cause the region's cause is long dead, and the Arab countries have their own worries aplenty. In a decade of reporting in the region, I found it rarely took more than the arching of an eyebrow to get the most candid of Arab thinkers to acknowledge that the tears shed for the Palestinians today outside the West Bank and Gaza are of the crocodile variety.

The lunatics literally threatening the free world do not care about the so-called plight of the Palestinians. Even if they did care about the Palestinians in a broad sense, the sectarian extremists tearing Iraq apart - the ones who the ISG are supposed to be dealing with - are certainly not killing each other on account of Israel. Solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would not alleviate the threat to the West or stabilize Iraq. It's not unfair to ask, therefore, why James Baker and his realist friends seem so intent on undermining Israel.

As to the rest of the call, you really should go and download the mp3. Seriously. The man sparkles with passion and belief. You can hear it. So one last teaser to get you to the One Jerusalem page: Minister Sharansky said explicitly - explicitly - that the best Israeli intelligence indicates that Iran will pass the nuclear point of no return within a year. This is the intelligence that was ahead of the rest of the West on Russian arms sales by about a decade. So that's comforting.

Previously: OneJerusalem.org Conference Call: Robert Spencer, OneJerusalem.org Conference Call with Senator Rick Santorum, OneJerusalem.org Conference Call: Mark Steyn