The Wall Street Journal

How Israel Was Disarmed
News analysis from the near-future.

By BRET STEPHENS

Jan. 20, 2010

NEW YORK—When American diplomats sat down for the first in a series of face-to-face talks with their Iranian counterparts last October in Geneva, few would have predicted that what began as a negotiation over Tehran's nuclear programs would wind up in a stunning demand by the Security Council that Israel give up its atomic weapons.

Yet that's just what the U.N. body did this morning, in a resolution that was as striking for the way member states voted as it was for its substance. All 10 nonpermanent members voted for the resolution, along with permanent members Russia, China and the United Kingdom. France and the United States abstained. By U.N. rules, that means the resolution passes.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meets IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei.

The Wall Street Journal
SEPTEMBER 4, 2009

How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade

By SIOBHAN GORMAN

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- From a Silicon Valley office strewn with bean-bag chairs, a group of twenty-something software engineers is building an unlikely following of terrorist hunters at U.S. spy agencies.

One of the latest entrants into the government spy-services marketplace, Palantir Technologies has designed what many intelligence analysts say is the most effective tool to date to investigate terrorist networks. The software's main advance is a user-friendly search tool that can scan multiple data sources at once, something previous search tools couldn't do. That means an analyst who is following a tip about a planned terror attack, for example, can more quickly and easily unearth connections among suspects, money transfers, phone calls and previous attacks around the globe.
Helping Hunt Terrorists From a Bean Bag-Strewn Office

Palantir's software has helped root out terrorist financing networks, revealed new trends in roadside bomb attacks, and uncovered details of Syrian suicide bombing networks in Iraq, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the events. It has also foiled a Pakistani suicide bombing plot on Western targets and discovered a spy infiltration of an allied government. It is now being used by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

OPINION WSJ.COM
SEPTEMBER 1, 2009, 7:13 P.M. ET

Gadhafi Shows His True Colors
Libya's dictator has contempt for democracy. Surprise, surprise.

By BERNARD-HENRI LéVY

On Thursday, Aug. 20, Abel Basset Ali Megrahi, the mastermind of the Lockerbie bombing, returned to a hero's welcome in Tripoli. It was an astonishing event.

The official line from Scotland is that Megrahi has terminal prostate cancer and thus was being released on "compassionate grounds." In theory, I support the humane principle of allowing people to die in their home countries. But the reality seems to be that Megrahi's release was, as Moammar Gadhafi's son proclaimed in the Scottish daily The Herald, negotiated in exchange for oil and gas exploration contracts for British companies.

The former spy—who is responsible for the deaths of 259 passengers on the Pan Am flight, as well as 11 villagers who were crushed by the wreckage—was repatriated in one of Gadhafi's private jets.

As if that weren't enough, Gadhafi arranged for a large audience to greet him on the tarmac. The crowd was delirious, singing patriotic songs. And this was in a country where outbursts of jubilation are rarely spontaneous.

OPINION
AUGUST 24, 2009, 11:20 P.M. ET

Obama's Summer of Discontent
The politics of charisma is so Third World. Americans were never going to buy into it for long.

By FOUAD AJAMI

So we are to have a French health-care system without a French tradition of political protest. It is odd that American liberalism, in a veritable state of insurrection during the Bush presidency, now seeks political quiescence. These "townhallers" who have come forth to challenge ObamaCare have been labeled "evil-mongers" (Harry Reid), "un-American" (Nancy Pelosi), agitators and rowdies and worse.

A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the "loudest voices" are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.

* The Wall Street Journal

* OPINION: THE AMERICAS
* AUGUST 10, 2009, 1:46 P.M. ET

The FARC’s Honduran Friends

By MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY

President Barack Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderón are in Guadalajara, Mexico, today for the North American Leaders’ Summit. They will discuss, among other topics, what to do about the explosion in drug-trafficking violence on the continent. But they are also expected to address the political situation in Honduras.

Too bad the Colombian ministry of defense will not also be on hand. It could show them evidence of the connection between the Honduran supporters of deposed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya and the most important South American supplier of illegal drugs to North America—the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). I know this because recently that evidence landed on my desk.

April 25, 2009, 7:00 a.m.

The End of the World as We Know It
Welcome to the “post-American era.”

By Mark Steyn

According to an Earth Day survey, one third of schoolchildren between the ages of six and eleven think the earth will have been destroyed by the time they grow up. That’s great news, isn’t it? Not for the earth, I mean, but for “environmental awareness.” Congratulations to Al Gore, the Sierra Club, and the eco-propagandists of the public-education system in doing such a terrific job of traumatizing America’s moppets. Traditionally, most of the folks you see wandering the streets proclaiming the end of the world is nigh tend to be getting up there in years. It’s quite something to have persuaded millions of first-graders that their best days are behind them.

Obama's Intelligence Choice
The president picks a China apologist and Israel basher to write his intelligence summaries.

By GABRIEL SCHOENFELD

During the presidential campaign, a constant refrain of Barack Obama and other Democratic candidates was that the Bush administration had severely politicized intelligence, resulting in such disasters as the war in Iraq.

The irony of course is that, if anything, President Bush badly failed at depoliticizing a CIA that was often hostile to his agenda. Witness the repeated leaks of classified information that undercut his policies. It now appears Mr. Obama has appointed a highly controversial figure to head the National Intelligence Council, which is responsible for producing National Intelligence Estimates. The news Web site Politico.com yesterday reported that it could confirm rumors that a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles "Chas" Freeman Jr., has been appointed chairman. (My calls to the White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence produced neither confirmation nor denial.)

Obama Naïveté at the U.N.
By Anne Bayefsky

In a major foreign-policy decision taken over the weekend, President Obama has decided to legitimize the United Nations’s “anti-racism” forum known as Durban II. State Department officials announced in a press release buried on Saturday, that starting today the United States will attend for the first time the preparatory meetings of this controversial U.N. conference. The “Durban Review Conference,” scheduled for April in Geneva, is the progenitor of the anti-semitic hatefest that took place in South Africa in early September 2001.

The searing images of the demonization of America and Jews on the U.N.’s global stage, and the terrorism in New York 72 hours later, should have made joining this revived forum for U.N.-driven hate inconceivable. But President Obama seems intent on learning the lessons of history — and the relationship between hatemongering and violence — the hard way.

Benedict's tragedy, and Israel's
By Spengler

World history is the history of Israel, argued the great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig - not the tiny Jewish nation as such, but the Jewish idea, embraced by billions in the form of Christianity, or parodied and rejected by additional billions in Islam. The trouble is that no one wants to actually be Israel, least of all the Jews, who recite with fervor the prayer of Sholom Aleichem's Tevye: "God of mercy, choose a different people!" Jealousy at Israel's Election has provoked the persecution of the Jews for millennia, and it is not surprising that many Jews look for safety in insignificance.

Like many Jewish prayers, Tevye's prayer to be un-chosen also has become popular among some Catholics. The Catholic Church holds itself to be Israel, the People of God descended from Abraham in the Spirit. But many Catholics, including some in leading positions in the Roman Curia, think it an affront to the sensibilities of other cultures to insist on the unique role of the Church. At the other extreme , misnamed traditionalists do not think that the mustard-seed of faith is sufficient, and that the Church cannot fulfill its function without returning to the bygone days of state religion. Pope Benedict XVI, like his predecessor John Paul II, has fought manfully against these prospective deserters within his ranks. The tawdry burlesque over the case of the paranoid Jew-hater and Holocaust denier Richard Williamson is a sad gauge of his degree of success.