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May 2017

Ending North Korea’s Cyber Impunity Evidence suggests Pyongyang is behind the Wannacry ransomware.

The world will have to take Pyongyang’s hackers as seriously as its nuclear weapons and missile programs. That’s one conclusion from Monday’s evidence from a private cybersecurity firm that North Korean hackers are behind the Wannacry ransomware that froze computers and encrypted data around the world on May 12.

Symantec says it found the digital footprints of the Lazarus Group, a hacking syndicate that took data from Sony Entertainment in 2014 and stole $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank last year. While computer forensics can’t finger hackers with 100% certainty, the code, techniques and servers point to Pyongyang.

The Symantec findings come as Reuters published new details this week about North Korea’s growing cyberwarfare capabilities. According to a former computer-science professor who defected in 2004, a unit within the country’s spy agency hacks into foreign financial institutions to steal cash. The Wannacry worm demands that victims pay in Bitcoin to get their data back. So far it’s extorted about $100,000. But the North’s hackers are capable and persistent. They appear to have built the worm in part with hacking tools stolen from the U.S. government and released on the internet last month.

State-sponsored hacking for profit is unique to North Korea—a useful reminder that it isn’t so much a country as a criminal syndicate operating for the benefit of the Kim family. As sanctions close off other avenues for earning foreign currency, Pyongyang will likely step up its cyberattacks.

Pyongyang has suffered little retaliation for its cyberwarfare, which includes the hacking of a South Korean nuclear plant. After the Sony attack three years ago, Barack Obama promised to retaliate: “We will respond proportionally, and we’ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose.” But the follow-through was underwhelming: A few North Korean institutions and individuals were barred from doing business in the U.S.

Last year Congress passed Rep. Ed Royce’s bill to sanction banks facilitating North Korea’s finances, and the Trump Administration can move to implement it. This month a new bill from Rep. Royce to toughen sanctions on the North’s shipping and exports of slave labor passed the House with bipartisan support. That would be another good way to make Pyongyang pay a price for its criminal acts.

Philippines Declares Martial Law on Southern Island Move on Mindanao follows battle between government troops and militants from Islamic State-linked rebel group By Jake Maxwell Watts

MANILA—Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law in the southern island of Mindanao following fighting between the army and an Islamic State-linked militant group.

The declaration, in effect for 60 days, follows a battle between government troops and militants from the armed rebel Maute group, which took place in a small southern city on Tuesday.

Fighters from the group clashed with the country’s police and army after gunmen seized several buildings in Marawi, including the city jail and a hospital, subsequently setting them on fire and parading the black Islamic State flag through the city streets.

Martial law marks an escalation in a longstanding battle between authorities in the Philippines and several heavily armed Islamist groups in the southern provinces, whose jungle strongholds and deep community links in predominantly Muslim areas have made them hard to defeat despite years of efforts.

In a separate incident in Marawi on Tuesday, police and army units exchanged fire with gunmen while seeking to serve an arrest warrant on Isnilon Hapilon, a militant seen as a senior leader of the Abu Sayyaf Group, another Islamist organization that has declared allegiance to Islamic State.

Presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella said during a news briefing in Moscow, where Mr. Duterte is in the middle of a four-day official visit, that the martial law was possible “on the grounds of existence of rebellion because of what is happening in Mindanao.” He didn’t give details about what conditions martial law would include.

The declaration is likely to be controversial in the Philippines, where martial law is remembered by many for its adoption by former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who was ousted by popular revolt in 1986 after a 21-year rule. Mr. Duterte floated the idea of martial law several times in the past, mostly in the context of justifying additional powers for police to continue a bloody antinarcotics campaign. CONTINUE AT SITE

Daryl McCann Violent Co-Existence in the Middle East ****

…….Donald Trump jets about the Middle East distributing olive branches it is timely to recall the Oslo Accords and the folly of cutting deals with remorseless killers. Enabling the PLO to build a terrorist kleptocracy in the West Bank has achieved nothing, other than stressing the need for a new approach.

The 1993–95 Oslo Accords bore the promise of peaceful co-existence between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). The Palestinian political leadership would reconfigure itself as the Palestinian Authority (PA) and begin an interim period of self-government in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) followed by the establishment of an independent Palestinian mini-state. Israel and the PLO were going to “beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks” and neither nation would “train for war any more”.

Can you spot the glitch in this fine-sounding sentiment? You are exactly right—the PLO was never a nation. Yasser Arafat’s PLO was a militia-terrorist coalition formed in 1964 with the connivance of the Soviet Union and, by various accounts, the Romanian secret service. Clearly the establishment of a Palestinian mini-state in Judea and Samaria was not the PLO’s original goal since, at the time, Jordan occupied those territories. The PLO’s agenda, according to its 1968 Covenant, demanded the liberation of the lands of the Palestinian mandate—“an indivisible territorial unit”—in its entirety. In other words, the PLO’s maximalist objective was to subjugate every last town, village and city “from the river to the sea”, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

The PLO, by the time of the Oslo Accords, was claiming to have down-scaled its goal from crushing the “Zionist invasion” to co-existing with the State of Israel. For instance, the September 9, 1993, letter from Yasser Arafat to Israeli Prime Minister Rabin: “The PLO affirms that those articles of the Palestinian Covenant which deny the right of Israel to exist … are now inoperative and no longer exist.” I recall, as a young man, wondering if Yasser Arafat’s volte-face might turn out to be as significant as the November 9, 1989, opening of the Berlin Wall or even the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991. The notion of “the end of history”, à la Francis Fukuyama, was not entirely nonsensical in the early 1990s.

In one sense, at least, the PLO’s seeming compliance with the vision (or fantasy) of Western statesmen, diplomats and idealists can be linked to the collapse of the Soviet empire. Moscow was quick to recognise the State of Israel in 1948 but, by the time of Leonid Brezhnev, the Kremlin had accomplished the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic trifecta. However, the downfall of the Soviet Union and its satellite states left the PLO without a major power sponsor. In this context we begin to understand Yasser Arafat’s “epiphany” and subsequent participation in the Oslo Accords, not to mention his apparent acquiescence to the two-state solution.

In reality, neither Yasser Arafat nor Mahmoud Abbas ever abandoned the rejectionism of their antecedent, Haj Amin al-Husseini. The Arab nationalist leadership spurned a two-state solution in 1936, 1947, 1948, 1950, 1967, 2000, 2001, 2008 and 2013-14. Some might detect a pattern here. These days, regrettably, PA Television, the Palestinian Teachers’ Union, PA educators and PA schools all routinely—in the words of the Palestinian Media Watch site—“glorify and honour terror, demonise Jews and Israel, and deny Israel’s right to exist in any borders”. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama each insisted that some version of “the two-state solution” was the only viable answer to the Israeli-Arab problem, even though the Arab population of the West Bank has become, if anything, less reconciled towards the State of Israel over the past quarter-century.

Fatah and its Arab nationalist allies who control the PA were always more secular than the apocalyptic millennialist rulers in Gaza. That said, Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has proven to be somewhat pragmatic on occasion given its neo-Salafist/violent jihad ideology. The PLO, on the other hand, has gone in the opposite direction. The 1968 Covenant made no mention of religion, and yet in 2003 the Fatah-dominated PA recognised Islam as the only official religion in Palestine and sharia law as the basis for all future legislation. Fatah and the PA progressed from Arab chauvinism to Islamic supremacism, the common factor being Judeophobia. Today the “experts” on PA TV insist there was never any Jewish presence in Jerusalem, Solomon’s Temple and the Second Temple included, and that the ancient (and non-existent) Canaanites are one and the same people as modern-day Palestinian Arabs.

The Obama administration’s confidence that it could impose a two-state solution on such fantasists beggars belief, and yet Secretary of State John Kerry visited Israel at least thirteen times in a futile attempt to force a round peg into a square hole.

Manchester Ariana Grande Concert Bomber is Yet Another ‘Known Wolf’ Terrorist By Patrick Poole

Reports are now identifying the suicide bomber who struck following an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester as 23-year-old Salman Abedi:And ISIS has claimed credit for the attack:

As with virtually all Western terror attacks (as I’ve reported many times here at PJ Media — see below), this appears to be yet another case of “Known Wolf” terrorism. The suspected bomber had been known to authorities beforehand.

In this case, as in so many others, he apparently had been deemed not a threat: The “Known Wolf” terrorism problem has become so ubiquitous in these Western terror cases that it has become the rule, not the exception:While I have been reporting on the “Known Wolf” phenomenon since October 2014, others are now just starting to catch on:

The UK’s parliamentary elections are in just a few weeks, and undoubtedly Prime Minister May’s opposition will try to capitalize on last night’s security failure.

But has any major Western political party made the problem of “Known Wolf” terrorism an issue?

Back in March, after two “Known Wolf” terror attacks in only five days, I asked here how many more have to die before Western authorities begin to address the issue. The resounding answer has been: many more.

Sadly, I’ll have to continue updating the ever-growing list of “Known Wolf” terror attacks:

Oct. 24, 2014: ‘Lone Wolf’ or ‘Known Wolf’: The Ongoing Counter-Terrorism Failure

Dec. 15, 2014: Sydney Hostage Taker Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Syndrome

Jan. 7, 2015: Paris Terror Attack Yet Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Syndrome

Feb. 3, 2015: French Police Terror Attacker Yesterday Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Syndrome

Feb. 15, 2015: Copenhagen Killer Was yet Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Terrorism

Feb. 26, 2015: Islamic State Beheader ‘Jihadi John’ Yet Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Terrorism

Apr. 22, 2015: Botched Attack on Paris Churches Another Case of “Known Wolf” Terrorism

May 4, 2015: Texas Attack Is Yet Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Terrorism

June 26, 2015: France’s Beheading Terrorist Was Well-Known By Authorities

July 16, 2015: Report: Chattanooga Jihadist Was Yet Another ‘Known Wolf’ Terrorist, Anonymous Feds Dispute

Aug. 22, 2015: European Train Attacker Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Terrorism

Oct 14, 2015: Yet Again: Turkey, Israel Terror Attacks Committed by “Known Wolves”

Nov 14, 2015: One Paris Attacker Was Previously Known to Authorities, Marks Fifth ‘Known Wolf” Attack in France This Year

Feb 16, 2016: Machete Attack in Ohio Yet Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Terrorism

May 16, 2016: News Reports Yet Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ U.S. Terrorists

June 12, 2016: Orlando Night Club Attack by “Known Wolf” Terrorist Previously Investigated by FBI

July 14, 2016: Senate Intelligence Committee to Investigate “Known Wolf” Terrorism Problem

July 26, 2016: ISIS Suspect in Normandy Priest’s Killing Already Known to French Authorities

August 10, 2016: Canadian ‘Known Wolf’ Terrorist Planned Suicide Bombing of Major City, Killed in Overnight Police Operation

August 19, 2016: Man Who Stabbed Rabbi Thursday in Strasbourg, France Involved in Prior Attack

Sept. 20, 2016: NY-NJ Bomber Ahmad Khan Rahami Already Known to Law Enforcement Authorities

Sept. 28, 2016: “Known Wolf” SCANDAL: In at Least 12 of the 14 Terror Attacks Under Obama, FBI Already Knew Attackers

Dec. 21, 2016: Suspect Sought for Deadly Berlin Terror Attack, Anis Amri, Yet Another Known Wolf

March 23, 2017: Five Days and Two ‘Known Wolf’ Terror Attacks, Yet No Apparent Concern From Western Governments

March 26, 2017: ’60 Minutes’ Whitewashes Massive FBI Failure in 2015 ISIS Texas Terror Attack

March 26, 2017: ’60 Minutes’ Whitewashes Massive FBI Failure in 2015 ISIS Texas Terror Attack

Condemning Manchester Terrorist Murder of Children … in the Company of Abbas By Andrew C. McCarthy

No exception to the perennial folly of American administrations, regardless of party, President Trump dreams of forging peace between Israel, our ally in the Western democratic tradition, and the Palestinians, an amalgam of sharia supremacists and hard-Left kleptocrats, for whom the obliteration of the Jewish State is the ne plus ultra. Thus, did the president have the misfortune of being in the company of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas when news broke of the terrorist attack targeting children and young adults at a concert in Manchester.

Trump and Abbas stood side-by-side in Bethlehem as the American president condemned the terrorists as “evil losers in life” — “radical Islamic terrorism” having evidently been retired from Trump’s repertoire while he meets with regimes that support radical Islamic terrorism.

Abbas, it bears emphasizing, is an utterly unfit “peace partner.”

Though he still clings to power in the thirteenth year of his four-year term, he does not even control the Palestinian territory — his rival, the Hamas jihadist organization, runs Gaza. His Fatah faction, the legacy of master-terrorist Yasser Arafat, sports its own terrorist wing (the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade). It spends much of its time glorifying jihadists who mass-murder Jews, including Jewish children, naming streets and monuments in their honor.

Abbas’s presence during Trump’s remarks about an especially barbaric terrorist attack called to mind a similarly savage incident I described in The Grand Jihad:

In 1979, Smadar Kaiser, her husband Danny, and their two small daughters, four-year-old Einat and two-year-old Yael, were awakened in their northern Israel apartment at midnight by gunfire and exploding grenades. A team of terrorists sent by Abu Abbas’s Palestine Liberation Front was in the neighborhood. While a trembling Smadar hid with Yael in the dark, suffocating crawl space, the terrorists grabbed Danny and Einat and marched them down to a nearby beach. There, one of the four shot Danny in front of his daughter so that his death would be the last sight she’d ever see. Then the ruthless ringleader, Lebanese-born Samir Kuntar, bashed in the four-year-old’s skull against a rock with the butt of his rifle.

Hours later, upon finally being “rescued” from the crawl space, two-year-old Yael, too, was dead — accidentally smothered by her petrified mother in the effort to keep her quiet as the terrorists searched for more Jews to kill.

The Israelis captured Kuntar, who was sentenced to life in prison. For years, however, Palestinian leaders and masses agitated for his release,lionizing this monster as a “brave leader” and “model warrior.” In 2007, the [Israeli] government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert finally capitulated, exchanging Kuntar and other imprisoned terrorists for the remains of two deceased Israeli soldiers.

Enabling Murder Western politicians worry more about being called “Islamophobic” than they do about stopping jihadist slaughter. Bruce Bawer

Damn these jihadist murderers of children. And damn the politicians who have, in many cases, helped make these murders possible but who are quick, this time and every time, to serve up empty declarations of “solidarity”even as the bodies of innocents are still being counted.

London mayor Sadiq Khan (who recently dismissed terrorist attacks as “part and parcel of living in a big city”): “London stands with Manchester.” Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer (who, in the wake of the Pulse nightclub massacre, proclaimed a CAIR-backed “Muslim Women’s Day”—you know, the kind of event that proclaims hijabs “empowering”): Orlando “stands in solidarity with the people of the UK.” L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti (who went berserk when Trump tried to impose that temporary travel ban from a half-dozen Muslim countries): “Los Angeles stands with the people of Manchester.”

Meaningless words, all of them. But Angela Merkel takes the cake: “People in the UK can rest assured that Germany stands shoulder to shoulder with them.” Well, isn’t that . . . reassuring. In what way do such words help anybody to “rest assured” of anything? In any case, how dare she? This, after all, is the woman who opened the floodgates—the woman who, out of some twisted sense of German historical guilt, put European children in danger by inviting into the continent masses of unvetted people from the very part of the world where this monstrous evil has its roots.

Then there was this from European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker: “Once again, terrorism has sought to instill fear where there should be joy, to sow division where young people and families should be coming together in celebration.” Beneath the innocuous-seeming surface of this statement is a slick rhetorical ruse: Juncker to the contrary, these savages aren’t out to “sow division”—they’re out to kill infidels. By introducing the concept of “division,” Juncker, like so many others, is implying that the important message here is: Hey, whatever you do, don’t let this little episode put any bad thoughts about Islam into your head!

Manchester City Council leader Sir Richard Leese also spoke of “fear” and “division”: “Manchester is a proud, strong city and we will not allow terrorists who seek to sow fear and division to achieve their aims.” Guess what, pal? Theydid achieve their aims: they killed 22 people, including children, and injured several dozen. Dead infidels: that’s their objective, period. (Or, as you would say, full stop.)

Naturally, Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham, put out a statement. Burnham, as it happens, is a radical socialist who has wrung his hands for years about Islamophobia and has fought tooth and nail against a nationwide “anti-extremism” program called Prevent on the grounds that it “singles out one community for different treatment.” After yesterday’s atrocity, Burnham said: “We are grieving today, but we are strong.”

Strong? No, Mr. Burnham, you are anything but strong. You are cowards, all of you. You are more scared of being called bigots than of the prospect of children under your official protection being slaughtered by jihadists.

Three-quarters of a century ago, Britain stood shoulder to shoulder in true solidarity while under violent assault by the diabolical ideology of Nazism. Today, its leaders speak of the same kind of solidarity—but it’s nothing but talk. In Rotherham, gangs of Muslim men sexually abused 1,400 girls—and police and other officials who knew about it did nothing for years lest they be accused of racism or Islamophobia. Almost certainly, similar mass-scale rapes are still occurring right now in other British cities, with similar silence and inaction on the part of pusillanimous authorities. Today, British leaders refuse to deport imams who preach murder but ban from their shores respected writers and knowledgeable critics of Islam who dare to take on those imams and their theology.

Strength? Don’t you dare speak of strength. You have the blood of innocent children on your hands.

Appointed Dean at Dartmouth Steps Down After Anti-Israel Activism Revealed

The president of Dartmouth College announced in an email to faculty on Monday that a recently appointed dean of faculty has declined the position following widespread outcry over his support for academic boycotts of Israel.

Professor N. Bruce Duthu’s appointment in March came under heavy criticism after it was revealed that he co-authored a 2013 declaration backing boycotts of Israeli universities for the council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).

President Phil Hanlon said that Duthu will remain at Dartmouth as a professor of Native American studies.

Duthu, who was set to assume the position of dean of the faculty of arts and science in July, also stepped down as associate dean of the faculty for international studies and interdisciplinary programs.

The decision to appoint Duthu, an advocate of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, to a top administrative post raised questions about Dartmouth’s commitment to academic freedom. BDS aims to restrict engagement with Israel, academic and otherwise, until it accedes to a number of unilateral Palestinian demands, and many of its leaders have affirmed that they seek Israel’s destruction. The campaign was rejected by the president of Dartmouth and many other university heads, including former President of Harvard University Lawrence Summers, who warned that academic divestiture and boycott movements singling out Israel were “anti-Semitic in effect if not intent.”

In a faculty-wide email on May 3rd protesting Duthu’s promotion, Dartmouth Economics Professor Alan Gustman noted:

The chant of the BDS movement, from the river to the sea, is anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and profoundly anti- Jewish. It refers to sweeping the Jews out of Israel. Where else do we find movements advocating action against the academic institutions in any country but Israel, including many truly bad actors in the world?

BDS is singling out Israel – the one country in the world that has a majority Jewish population. Indeed, this movement has become a cover for many anti-Semites who like nothing better than to once again be free to exercise their prejudices. It also is important to understand, especially when evaluating the significance of appointing a BDS advocate as the Dean of the Faculty, that BDS is not just a statement of beliefs or a philosophical movement: it is a statement of action.

Oregon State Government’s $278 Million Self-Promotion ‘PR’ Machine by Adam Andrzejewski ,

Oregonians deserve a safe space from government manipulation, propaganda and bloated contracts.

Remember, Cover Oregon? A national laughing stock with over $3 million spent on this ad and cited in ‘Wastebook 2013’ by then-U.S. Senator Tom Coburn.

State government, agencies and commissions are shelling out hundreds millions of dollars to public relations firms. Eighty-seven state agencies spent $278 million dollars to convince citizens to spend more taxpayer or gaming dollars on bigger government, higher taxes, more regulations, or more gambling from 2012 through 2016.

Here’s how the numbers breakdown. Since 2012, taxpayers paid $110 million to employ 303 public affairs employees, spokespeople, advertising, video, print, web, graphic designers, marketing and communications managers. But, it wasn’t enough. The state shelled out an additional $168 million to outside PR and advertising firms. Some of those firms charge fees up to $260 per hour and one company reaped total payouts of $34 million – convincing Oregonians to gamble.
The Oregon Public Relations Machine Overview

OpenTheBooks.com

Oregon Public Relations Machine Overview

In Oregon, the public relations industry is a favor factory for insiders. Thebiggest agencies are doling out extremely lucrative PR contracts.

Since 2012, the Oregon State Lottery Commission awarded contracts and payments of $34.5 million (from gaming dollars) to one vendor: Borders Perrin and Norrander (BPN). During this period, data at OpenTheBooks.com shows that BPN gleaned $34.5 million of the $55.9 million paid to outside PR/advertising vendors at the lottery. BPN handled the Lottery’s sponsorship of the Portland Trailblazers, ‘Wheel of Fortune’ television ads, Jackpots Scratch ads, and other campaigns.

In 2013, Borders Perrin and Norrander signed two major contracts with the Lottery. First, a ‘Price Agreement’ contract allowed BPN to charge up to $260 per hour for their ‘Creative Director.’ The contract was then amended or extended four times without competition until May 2017. In fact, BPN billed $200 or more per hour for five additional positions (see graphic).

End Propaganda Myth That Jerusalem is Holy to Muslims By Morton A. Klein and Daniel Mandel

Morton A. Klein is National President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Dr. Daniel Mandel is Director of the ZOA’ s Center for Middle East Policy and author of H.V. Evatt & the Establisment of Israel (Routledge, London, 2004).

It’s time to end the propaganda myth that Jerusalem is a holy city to Muslims.

The Muslim fixation and clamor on Jerusalem is actually a very recent historical development, a product of political conflict, not historical truth.

Jerusalem rates not a single mention in the Quran and Muslims face Mecca in prayer.

In the seventh century, the Damascus-based Umayyad rulers built up Jerusalem as a counter-weight to Mecca. This is when the important Muslim shrines, the Dome of the Rock (691 CE) and, later, the Al-Aqsa Mosque (705 CE), were intentionally built on the site of the destroyed biblical Jewish temples –– a time-honored practice to physically signal the predominance of Islam.

However, references in the Quran and hadith to Muhammad’s night journey to heaven on his steed Buraq from the ‘farthest mosque’ couldn’t mean Jerusalem because the Quran refers to Palestine as the “nearest” place. And it couldn’t have been a reference to the Al-Aqsa (‘Furtherest’) Mosque, for the simple reason that the Al-Aqsa Mosque didn’t exist in Muhammad’s day.

With the demise of the Umayyad dynasty and the shift of the caliphate to Baghdad, Jerusalem fell into a long decline, scarcely interrupted by occasional bursts of Muslim interest in the city during the Crusader period and the Ottoman conquest. Mark Twain, visiting in 1867, described it as a “pauper village.”

It did, however, become a majority Jewish city during the nineteenth century. The 1907 Baedekers Travel Guide lists Jerusalem with a population of 40,000 Jews, 13,000 Muslims and 7,000 Christians.

This Time, the Loser Writes History The Six-Day War by Gabriel Glickman

http://mailchi.mp/meforum/this-time-the-loser-writes-history?e=bb334ea86b

May 23, 2017: Fifty years ago today, state-run media in Cairo announced that Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, cutting off the Jewish state’s access to the Red Sea. Then-President Lyndon Johnson later said of the Six-Day War, which erupted two weeks later, “If a single act of folly was more responsible for this explosion than any other, it was the arbitrary and dangerous announced decision that the Straits of Tiran would be closed. The right of innocent, maritime passage must be preserved for all nations.”

A half-century later, however, a “historiographical rewriting” of the Six-Day War has “effectively become the received dogma, echoed by some of the most widely used college textbooks about the Middle East,” as Gabriel Glickman explains in this advance-release article from the Summer 2017 issue of Middle East Quarterly.

A cartoon from 1967 shows Nasser kicking Israel over a cliff. Jerusalem’s attempt before the Six-Day War to prevent hostilities is completely ignored or dismissed while the Arab war preparations are framed as a show of force against an alleged, imminent Israeli attack on Syria.

It is a general law that every war is fought twice—first on the battlefield, then in the historiographical arena—and so it has been with the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war (or the Six-Day War as it is commonly known). No sooner had the dust settled on the battlefield than the Arabs and their Western partisans began rewriting the conflict’s narrative with aggressors turned into hapless victims and defenders turned into aggressors. Jerusalem’s weeks-long attempt to prevent the outbreak of hostilities in the face of a rapidly tightening Arab noose is completely ignored or dismissed as a disingenuous ploy; by contrast, the extensive Arab war preparations with the explicit aim of destroying the Jewish state is whitewashed as a demonstrative show of force to deter an imminent Israeli attack on Syria. It has even been suggested that Jerusalem lured the Arab states into war in order to expand its territory at their expense. So successful has this historiographical rewriting been that, fifty years after the war, these “alternative facts” have effectively become the received dogma, echoed by some of the most widely used college textbooks about the Middle East.[1]
Grandstanding Gone Wrong

The first step to absolving the Arab leaders of culpability for the conflict—especially Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who set in motion the course of events that led to war—was to present them as victims of their fully understandable, if highly unfortunate, overreaction to a Soviet warning of an imminent Israeli attack on Syria. Taking at face value Nasser’s postwar denial of any intention to attack Israel, educated Westerners—intellectuals, Middle East experts, and journalists—excused his dogged drive to war as an inescapable grandstanding aimed at shoring up his position in the face of relentless criticism by the conservative Arab states and the more militant elements within his administration.

The remains of a Syrian fortification on the Golan Heights following the Six-Day War. Nasser realized that no Israeli attack on Syria was in the offing yet continued his reckless escalation toward war.