By now, the script should be disturbingly familiar. Whether in the Middle East, or increasingly in America, a fanatical Muslim blows up or goes on a shooting spree, killing many. This is quickly followed by “condemnations” from “Muslim civil rights groups,” like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). We are then warned by the president and some newspaper editorials not to jump to conclusions, or to stereotype. Yasser Arafat wrote this script, which he used with great success throughout his bloody career as a terrorist.

Suddenly, the issue of gays in the military doesn’t seem as important as jihadists in the military.
If you were an enemy of America, not only would you fight overseas and develop nuclear weapons (Iran), you would also engage in an even more effective strategy by striking at America’s underbelly. This is our most vulnerable region because we now tolerate virtually everything, indulge in political correctness and subscribe to a bogus belief that if radical Islamists can see we mean them no harm, they will mean us no harm.

The federal government at all levels has hired and promoted Muslims to influential positions. It requires “sensitivity training” for federal employees, including those who work at the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Last week, the House Judiciary Committee, dominated by liberal Democrats, defied the White House and removed from the USA Patriot Act a tool for tracking non-U.S. citizens in anti-terrorism investigations. As our enemies grow stronger and more emboldened, they see us becoming weaker and less committed.

No amount of evidence — from Koran verses urging the killing of “infidels,” to cries of “God is great,” reportedly shouted by the alleged Ft. Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan — will cure our self-deception. Sun Tzu famously wrote that all war is deception. But it takes two to deceive and the United States is behaving like a willing partner.

People claiming to know Hasan told interviewers he made frequent statements against the wars and the U.S. presence in Islamic countries. Texas Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, told reporters after he was briefed on the shootings that Hasan “took a lot of advanced training in shooting.” Why would a psychiatrist need advanced training in shooting unless he believed in murder as therapy? Shouldn’t that, coupled with his statements about “the aggressor” and other actions — including his preference for Muslim clothing — have alerted someone in authority that he might be a time bomb waiting to go off? Yes, absolutely. But who wants to jeopardize a career by raising such questions and becoming the target of “civil rights groups” and politically correct dupes? Intimidating Americans into silence when they know better is also a very effective strategy when fighting a war.

Sound minds not brainwashed by our own “re-educators” should have seen this coming. Though born in America to Jordanian immigrant parents, Hasan described himself as a “Palestinian.” He got into trouble by attempting to proselytize some of his patients.

Most top federal agencies, including the Pentagon and DHS, now have offices of “civil liberties,” offices recommended by the 9/11 Commission to focus on “outreach” to the Muslim community. In this, they follow efforts by the Bush administration, which dispatched Karen Hughes to tell Muslim women in Saudi Arabia that American women are so free they can drive their own cars. The Saudi women were not impressed.

It’s one thing to be suckered by others. It’s quite another to sucker yourself.

How much longer will we tolerate fighting this war as if it were a minor crime wave? Our enemies are fighting to win and they are fighting everywhere, including within our borders. People trained to appear non-threatening, until the threat becomes obvious and it is too late to do anything about it, are infiltrating our government and society at every level.

It is irrelevant that some have put the number of radicalized Muslims worldwide at 10 percent. Even if that figure is accurate, one hundred million jihadists can cause a lot of damage, as they plot the destruction of Western democracies. Other wars have been won with far fewer soldiers and far fewer dupes.

In a stunning display of political cowardice, the Obama administration has decided not to seek specific congressional authorization for a prolonged detention statute for Guantanamo Bay detainees deemed too dangerous to set free. It’s the latest troubling flip flop by the president, an utter abdication of the lofty promises he made during his much-heralded National Archives Speech just this May.

This decision not only weakens U.S. detention policy, it will regrettably serve as an invitation to the courts to expand their role in national-security affairs — an area that is properly the province of the executive and legislative branches.

During the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama constantly criticized the Bush administration for “going it alone” and creating a law-free zone for the terrorist detainees at Guantanamo. He rebuked President Bush for his cowboy mentality, and his administration for making a “series of hasty decisions” after 9/11.

He led us to believe that he would take a different approach with respect to Guantanamo, putting America on a stronger legal footing while re-establishing our “tarnished” image abroad. Turns out it was just another feel-good speech, soon forgotten.

Addressing Bush’s “ad hoc legal approach” at Gitmo in his National Archives speech, Obama said, “I can tell you that the wrong answer is to pretend like this problem will go away if we maintain an unsustainable status quo.” He continued, promising to “reshape these [legal] standards to ensure they are in line with the rule of law . . . Our goal is to construct a legal framework for Guantanamo detainees — not to avoid one.”

Yet yesterday’s announcement that he won’t seek legislation specifically authorizing prolonged detention means he is embracing the very thing he was most critical of, and purposefully avoiding that which is most necessary: establishing a durable, long-term, and sustainable framework for legal detention, not just for detainees currently at Guantanamo, but for future high-value captures outside of Afghanistan.

Instead, he will rely on the current congressional Authorization of Use of Military Force, which authorizes the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks.” Thus, President Obama will decide who is to be detained, where, and for how long. Yet, when addressing this very issue in his National Archives speech, President Obama asserted, “In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man.” Apparently, there is the Obama exception to the one-man prohibition.

So what is really going on here? To those of us who have either served in senior policy posts and dealt with these issues on a daily basis, or followed them closely from the outside, it is becoming increasingly clear that this administration is trying to create the appearance of a tough national-security policy regarding the detention of terrorists at Guantanamo, yet allow the courts to make the tough calls on releasing the bad guys. Letting the courts do the dirty work would give the administration plausible cover and distance from the decision-making process. The numbers speak for themselves.

Of the 38 detainees whose cases have been adjudicated through the habeas process in federal court in Washington, 30 have been ordered released by civilian judges. That is close to an 80 percent loss rate for the government, which argued for continued detention. Yet, how many of these decisions has this administration appealed, knowing full well that many of those 30 detainees should not in good conscience be let go? The answer: one.

Letting the courts do it for him gives the president distance from the unsavory release decisions. It also allows him to state with a straight face, as he did at the Archives speech, “We are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security, nor will we release detainees within the United States who endanger the American people.”

No, the president won’t release detainees; he’ll sit back and let the courts to do it for him.

And the president won’t seek congressional authorization for prolonged detention of the enemy, as he promised, because it will anger his political base on the Left. The ultra-liberals aren’t about to relinquish their “try them or set them free” mantra, even though such a policy threatens to put terrorists back on the battlefield.

Moreover, the president would have to spend political capital to win congressional authorization for a prolonged detention policy. Obviously, he would rather spend that capital on other policy priorities.

Politically speaking, it is easier to maintain the status quo and let the detainees seek release from federal judges. The passive approach also helps the administration close Gitmo without taking the heat for actually releasing detainees themselves.

Practitioners, scholars, policy wonks, and experts from across the political spectrum have written about the need for a prolonged-detention legal framework. Without it, there can be no long-term solution to the vexing problem of how to incapacitate stateless terrorists during the ongoing conflict.

President Obama’s decision to punt this issue will come back to bite America and our allies. It’s a missed opportunity to solve the detention issue once and for all.

President Obama recently told the United Nations that the era of George W. Bush’s foreign policy was over and that he is taking a bold new approach to international diplomacy and dealing with the world’s troublemakers.

He declared that he has ended Mr. Bush’s policy of conducting aggressive interrogation techniques against some of the most dangerous terrorists in the world, that he is closing down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, that he ended the war in Iraq and that he’s determined to defeat the Taliban offensive in Afghanistan.

But much of the president’s speech was filled with pomp, exaggeration, political posturing and over-the-top promises that he is going to have a hard time fulfilling – from climate change to persuading the world’s thugs and despots to abandon their nuclear threats and be nice to their neighbors.

Ending “enhanced interrogation” methods, which intelligence reports tell us have yielded critical information about al Qaeda’s operations and foiled terrorist plots against us, certainly isn’t going to make the United States or the world safer. To the contrary, the terrorists couldn’t be happier to hear this, and no doubt some of the U.N. member nations that harbor terrorists or support them were applauding Mr. Obama the loudest.

Other changes on the terrorist front would move a number of detainees through the U.S. court system, where, presumably, their rights can be better protected, resulting in prolonged, if not endless, litigation – but to what end?

As for closing the Guantanamo Bay prison, eight months into his presidency, it is still open and operating and detaining some very dangerous people who should never be let out – which was Mr. Bush’s policy and which we now learn Mr. Obama apparently has embraced.

Indeed, The Washington Post reported last week that the Obama administration “has decided not to seek legislation to establish a new system of preventive detention to hold terrorism suspects and will instead rely on a 2001 [Bush era] congressional resolution authorizing military force against al Qaeda and the Taliban to continue to detain people indefinitely and without charge.”

But the Obama administration – against the advice of its top intelligence advisers – has begun an investigation into the CIA’s interrogations under Mr. Bush’s presidency, with the inherent threat of criminal prosecution. That has plunged morale among our best intelligence officers, but no doubt has improved it among the terrorists.

Despite Mr. Obama’s repeated claims that he has ended the Iraq war – or at least America’s participation in it – the fact remains that America’s role there was in the process of winding down at the end of the Bush presidency. The United States and Iraq already had worked out a troop-withdrawal schedule as Mr. Obama was preparing to take office, and to a large degree, it was the Iraqi government that accelerated that process.

In effect, the Iraq war that Mr. Bush handed off to Mr. Obama was all but over, U.S. troops were being redeployed, al Qaeda attacks had plummeted, the Nouri al-Maliki government was arguably more secure, and Iraqi military forces were fully in charge, with U.S. backup as needed.

Afghanistan now looms as the greatest national-security test of Mr. Obama’s presidency. U.S. forces liberated Afghans from the Taliban during the Bush era, and Mr. Bush installed a friendly pro-Western government. But the Taliban have come roaring back since Mr. Obama came into office, and he is, for all intents and purposes, pursuing Mr. Bush’s existing military policies to stabilize that nation by adding more troops to the fight.

When the war in Iraq was going badly, Mr. Bush gave Gen. David H. Petraeus the funds and forces he needed to defeat al Qaeda. Now Mr. Obama faces the same decision in Afghanistan that Mr. Bush faced in Iraq: whether to agree to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for up to 40,000 more troops or else lose the war.

Gen. Petraeus and the rest of the Pentagon’s top brass have endorsed the request, but Mr. Obama has publicly expressed his doubts about a wider war and has delayed a decision until he can complete a further review.

Earlier this year, Mr. Obama said his Afghan war strategy would be “stronger and smarter.” Last week, doubts were beginning to creep into his mind. “Are we pursuing the right strategy?” he asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Elsewhere on his global agenda, things are looking more dangerous than ever since he has taken office. North Korea has grown far more belligerent and dangerous, firing off missiles that threaten its neighbors and possibly the United States. Iran continues apace with its nuclear ambitions and its short-range and midrange missile program. Russia scored a major victory by getting Mr. Obama to kill the anti-missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic that it opposed.

Indeed, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin may be getting more than he hoped from Mr. Obama, who has proposed slashing President Reagan’s visionary Strategic Defense Initiative program by 15 percent.

Mr. Obama talked big in his U.N. speech, but the foreign-policy threats that loom on the horizon are growing bigger.

It’s been a busy summer at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. The joint task force in charge of the 226 remaining detainees is spending about $440,000 to expand the recreation yards at Camp 6. At nearby Camp 4, which offers communal living for the most “compliant” captives, the soccer yard is being enlarged. At Camp 5, a maximum-security facility, a $73,000 classroom is under construction. In March, the task force added art classes to the thrice-weekly instruction it offers in Arabic, Pashtu and English, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.

Though President Obama vowed on his second day in office to close the detention center within a year, Gitmo’s officers say they intend to continue spending previously budgeted funds to improve life at the center until the last detainee leaves. “It’s business as usual around here,” the task force’s deputy commander, Brig. Gen. Rafael O’Ferrall, told me two weeks ago during one of the official tours that Gitmo offers outsiders.

The point of the tour is to show that Gitmo, which Obama called a “stain” on America’s reputation, has become a model, if somewhat surreal, detention center. And therefore that closing it and relocating its inmates is a largely empty political gesture that makes little sense.

My hosts would never dare publicly challenge their commander in chief’s orders. But they clearly believe that Gitmo no longer deserves to be seen as a symbol of human rights abuses. “This place is synonymous with military abuse, and it’s just not fair,” said Rear Adm. Thomas H. Copeman III, the task force’s commander.

Officers at Gitmo are eager to distance themselves from the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that senior Bush administration officials approved soon after 9/11. “No one was ever waterboarded at Gitmo,” said Army Col. Bruce E. Vargo, commander of the Joint Detention Group.

Although it’s true that a 2005 Pentagon report concluded, after examining 26 complaints from FBI agents involving a small portion of more than 24,000 interrogations at Gitmo, that a few “high-value detainees” had been subjected to treatment that was “degrading and abusive,” it “did not rise to the level of prohibited inhumane treatment” or torture. Furthermore, those techniques — such as loud music, sleep deprivation, temperature manipulation and prolonged shackling — ended long ago at Gitmo, officers say. Since 2004, interrogation methods have adhered to the Army Field Manual, said Paul B. Rester, the Pentagon official in charge of interrogations: “Loud music has no place in my world.”

Officials are sparing little effort or expense to improve Gitmo. They provide captives with prayer rugs, beads, caps and Korans in their native languages. Arrows point toward Mecca. The center spends about $4 million a year offering detainees a choice of six different halal meals a day. The kitchen prepares two Islamic “feast” meals a week and offers fresh food — such as yogurt, veggie-burger patties with fresh garlic and onion, and scrambled eggs and waffles.

In fact, obesity is increasingly a problem, one Navy doctor said. He knows, because the detainees make roughly 7,800 visits a year to the medical center to receive state-of-the-art care. That includes colonoscopies for “age-appropriate” detainees; 25 have been performed so far. The medical center has one staff member for every two detainees

Hunger strikes are allowed, but only along with “voluntary force-feeding” — a phrase admittedly worthy of Orwell. Each day, most of the hunger strikers (about 18% of the detainees) line up for Ensure nutritional supplements. They ingest the supplements not through the mouth but through the nostril, via a yellow, spaghetti-size tube lubricated with olive oil. (Butter pecan is the most popular of the five available flavors, the doctor said.) Of course, those who don’t “volunteer” are shackled and force-fed anyway. “They have a right to protest, and we have an obligation to keep them alive and healthy while they do so,” Copeman explained.

Detainees are also screened for a variety of illnesses — diphtheria, tuberculosis, flu and HIV. “This place embodies the best of what we do as Americans,” the Navy doctor told me, without a trace of irony. Are the detainees grateful? “Some are, some aren’t,” he said. But like his clientele back in California, “most detainees don’t want to die.”

Still, some clearly do: There have been five documented suicides so far at Gitmo and many more unsuccessful attempts. The latest — Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, a 31-year-old Yemeni held here since 2002 — killed himself in June, apparently by hoarding pills and downing them all at once. (An internal investigation is ongoing.) Depression and other mental ailments among detainees are common, doctors acknowledged.

So Gitmo continues to expand its “intellectual stimulation program”: a library of more than 15,000 books, magazines, puzzles, electronic games and newspapers, as well as satellite TV and more than 315 movies on DVD.

Gitmo’s “compliant” detainees have access to recreational activity for as much as 20 hours a day — including soccer, basketball, foosball, ping-pong and gardening. “Noncompliant” detainees are confined to individual cells, about 10 feet long by 8 feet wide, for 22 hours a day, with two hours of daily recreation. That’s an hour more than most civilian prisoners get in American maximum-security prisons, officers pointed out — but then, American civilian prisoners have been tried and convicted of crimes.

This is the real problem with Gitmo — the fact that most of the detainees have not been charged with terrorism or any other crime. Satellite TV is all well and good, but not if you’re being held indefinitely without trial.

Ending the detainees’ legal limbo and ensuring them due process is far more important than closing down the prison they’re being held in. Yet there is little difference between Obama and his predecessor on some of the key due-process issues. Not only has Obama embraced George W. Bush’s notion of military commissions to try some detainees, with ostensibly bolstered rights for the defendants, but he has endorsed Bush’s position on “renditions” to countries with suspect human rights records. And he agrees with Bush on preventive detention for a “fifth category” of detainee: captives who cannot be prosecuted by a civilian court or even by a military commission because of torture-tainted evidence or the need to protect intelligence sources and methods, but who “pose a clear danger to the American people,” as Obama puts it, and may be too dangerous to release. It is unclear how many detainees fall into this category.

While the administration ponders the detainees’ legal fate, it seems pointless to spend more money and energy moving them to “Gitmo North” — maximum-security prisons in the United States where they may be far more harshly treated.

It’s time for the Obama administration to acknowledge that Gitmo, or another center like it, will be needed as long as the war on terrorism — no matter what our commander in chief calls it — endures. But to ensure that such places do not become legal black holes, detainees should be assured of some kind of periodic, independent review of the allegations against them. They should have not only decent physical treatment but the legal right to challenge their detention in a way that does not jeopardize intelligence sources and methods.

Several legal experts have proposed legal compromises that would authorize preventive detention for terrorism suspects but with bolstered rights and a guaranteed, periodic, impartial review of the allegations that led to their detention. These schemes may not be perfect. But they may be the most effective way to protect American values while we continue fighting a war that we cannot afford to abandon.

What follows is the transcript of an address by Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, delivered to the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, 2009.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen…

Nearly 62 years ago, the United Nations recognized the right of the Jews, an ancient people 3,500 years-old, to a state of their own in their ancestral homeland. I stand here today as the Prime Minister of Israel, the Jewish state, and I speak to you on behalf of my country and my people.

The United Nations was founded after the carnage of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust. It was charged with preventing the recurrence of such horrendous events. Nothing has undermined that central mission more than the systematic assault on the truth.

Yesterday the President of Iran stood at this very podium, spewing his latest anti-Semitic rants. Just a few days earlier, he again claimed that the Holocaust is a lie.

Last month, I went to a villa in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee. There, on January 20, 1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people. The detailed minutes of that meeting have been preserved by successive German governments.

Here is a copy of those minutes, in which the Nazis issued precise instructions on how to carry out the extermination of the Jews. Is this a lie?

Netanyahu shames a degenerate United Nations

A day before I was in Wannsee, I was given in Berlin the original construction plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Those plans are signed by Hitler’s deputy, Heinrich Himmler himself. Here is a copy of the plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million Jews were murdered. Is this too a lie?

This June, President Obama visited the Buchenwald concentration camp. Did President Obama pay tribute to a lie? And what of the Auschwitz survivors whose arms still bear the tattooed numbers branded on them by the Nazis? Are those tattoos a lie?

One-third of all Jews perished in the conflagration. Nearly every Jewish family was affected, including my own. My wife’s grandparents, her father’s two sisters and three brothers, and all the aunts, uncles and cousins were all murdered by the Nazis. Is that also a lie?

Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honor to your countries.

But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency? A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state. What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations!

Perhaps some of you think that this man and his odious regime threaten only the Jews. You’re wrong. History has shown us time and again that what starts with attacks on the Jews eventually ends up engulfing many others.

This Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism that burst onto the world scene three decades ago after lying dormant for centuries.

In the past thirty years, this fanaticism has swept the globe with a murderous violence and cold-blooded impartiality in its choice of victims. It has callously slaughtered Moslems and Christians, Jews and Hindus, and many others. Though it is comprised of different offshoots, the adherents of this unforgiving creed seek to return humanity to medieval times. Wherever they can, they impose a backward regimented society where women, minorities, gays or anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated.

The struggle against this fanaticism does not pit faith against faith nor civilization against civilization. It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death. The primitivism of the 9th century ought to be no match for the progress of the 21st century. The allure of freedom, the power of technology, the reach of communications should surely win the day.

Ultimately, the past cannot triumph over the future. And the future offers all nations magnificent bounties of hope. The pace of progress is growing exponentially. It took us centuries to get from the printing press to the telephone, decades to get from the telephone to the personal computer, and only a few years to get from the personal computer to the internet.

What seemed impossible a few years ago is already outdated, and we can scarcely fathom the changes that are yet to come. We will crack the genetic code. We will cure the incurable. We will lengthen our lives. We will find a cheap alternative to fossil fuels and clean up the planet.

I am proud that my country Israel is at the forefront of these advances – by leading innovations in science and technology, medicine and biology, agriculture and water, energy and the environment. These innovations the world over offer humanity a sunlit future of unimagined promise.

But if the most primitive fanaticism can acquire the most deadly weapons, the march of history could be reversed for a time. And like the belated victory over the Nazis, the forces of progress and freedom will prevail only after a horrific toll of blood and fortune has been exacted from mankind.

That is why the greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction, and the most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Are the member states of the United Nations up to that challenge? Will the international community confront a despotism that terrorizes its own people as they bravely stand up for freedom?

Will it take action against the dictators who stole an election in broad daylight and gunned down Iranian protesters who died in the streets choking in their own blood? Will the international community thwart the world’s most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism? Above all, will the international community stop the terrorist regime of Iran from developing atomic weapons, thereby endangering the peace of the entire world?

The people of Iran are courageously standing up to this regime. People of goodwill around the world stand with them, as do the thousands who have been protesting outside this hall. Will the United Nations stand by their side?

Ladies and Gentlemen, the jury is still out on the United Nations, and recent signs are not encouraging. Rather than condemning the terrorists and their Iranian patrons, some here have condemned their victims. That is exactly what a recent UN report on Gaza did, falsely equating the terrorists with those they targeted.

For eight long years, Hamas fired from Gaza thousands of missiles, mortars and rockets on nearby Israeli cities. Year after year, as these missiles were deliberately hurled at our civilians, not a single UN resolution was passed condemning those criminal attacks.

We heard nothing – absolutely nothing – from the UN Human Rights Council, a misnamed institution if there ever was one. In 2005, hoping to advance peace, Israel unilaterally withdrew from every inch of Gaza. It dismantled 21 settlements and uprooted over 8,000 Israelis. We didn’t get peace. Instead we got an Iranian backed terror base fifty miles from Tel Aviv. Life in Israeli towns and cities next to Gaza became a nightmare.

You see, the Hamas rocket attacks not only continued, they increased tenfold. Again, the UN was silent. Finally, after eight years of this unremitting assault, Israel was finally forced to respond. But how should we have responded? Well, there is only one example in history of thousands of rockets being fired on a country’s civilian population. It happened when the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II.

During that war, the allies leveled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties. Israel chose to respond differently. Faced with an enemy committing a double war crime of firing on civilians while hiding behind civilians – Israel sought to conduct surgical strikes against the rocket launchers.

That was no easy task because the terrorists were firing missiles from homes and schools, using mosques as weapons depots and ferreting explosives in ambulances. Israel, by contrast, tried to minimize casualties by urging Palestinian civilians to vacate the targeted areas. We dropped countless flyers over their homes, sent thousands of text messages and called thousands of cell phones asking people to leave.

Never has a country gone to such extraordinary lengths to remove the enemy’s civilian population from harm’s way. Yet faced with such a clear case of aggressor and victim, who did the UN Human Rights Council decide to condemn? Israel. A democracy legitimately defending itself against terror is morally hanged, drawn and quartered, and given an unfair trial to boot.

By these twisted standards, the UN Human Rights Council would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth! What a perversion of justice!

Delegates of the United Nations, will you accept this farce? Because if you do, the United Nations would revert to its darkest days, when the worst violators of human rights sat in judgment against the law-abiding democracies, when Zionism was equated with racism and when an automatic majority could declare that the earth is flat.

If this body does not reject this report, it would send a message to terrorists everywhere: Terror pays; if you launch your attacks from densely populated areas, you will win immunity. And in condemning Israel, this body would also deal a mortal blow to peace. Here’s why. When Israel left Gaza, many hoped that the missile attacks would stop. Others believed that at the very least, Israel would have international legitimacy to exercise its right of self-defense.

What legitimacy? What self-defense?

The same UN that cheered Israel as it left Gaza and promised to back our right of self-defense now accuses us –my people, my country – of war crimes? And for what? For acting responsibly in self-defense. What a travesty!

Israel justly defended itself against terror. This biased and unjust report is a clear-cut test for all governments. Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists? We must know the answer to that question now. Now and not later. Because if Israel is again asked to take more risks for peace, we must know today that you will stand with us tomorrow. Only if we have the confidence that we can defend ourselves can we take further risks for peace.

Ladies and Gentlemen, all of Israel wants peace. Any time an Arab leader genuinely wanted peace with us, we made peace. We made peace with Egypt led by Anwar Sadat. We made peace with Jordan led by King Hussein. And if the Palestinians truly want peace, I and my government, and the people of Israel, will make peace. But we want a genuine peace, a defensible peace, a permanent peace.

In 1947, this body voted to establish two states for two peoples – a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews accepted that resolution. The Arabs rejected it. We ask the Palestinians to finally do what they have refused to do for 62 years: Say yes to a Jewish state.

Just as we are asked to recognize a nation-state for the Palestinian people, the Palestinians must be asked to recognize the nation state of the Jewish people. The Jewish people are not foreign conquerors in the Land of Israel. This is the land of our forefathers.

Inscribed on the walls outside this building is the great Biblical vision of peace: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. They shall learn war no more.” These words were spoken by the Jewish prophet Isaiah 2,800 years ago as he walked in my country, in my city – in the hills of Judea and in the streets of Jerusalem. We are not strangers to this land. It is our homeland.

As deeply connected as we are to this land, we recognize that the Palestinians also live there and want a home of their own. We want to live side by side with them, two free peoples living in peace, prosperity and dignity. But we must have security. The Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves except those handful of powers that could endanger Israel.

That is why a Palestinian state must be effectively demilitarized. We don’t want another Gaza, another Iranian backed terror base abutting Jerusalem and perched on the hills a few kilometers from Tel Aviv.

We want peace.

I believe such a peace can be achieved. But only if we roll back the forces of terror, led by Iran, that seek to destroy peace, eliminate Israel and overthrow the world order. The question facing the international community is whether it is prepared to confront those forces or accommodate them.

Over seventy years ago, Winston Churchill lamented what he called the “confirmed unteachability of mankind,” the unfortunate habit of civilized societies to sleep until danger nearly overtakes them.

Churchill bemoaned what he called the “want of foresight, the unwillingness to act when action will be simple and effective, the lack of clear thinking, the confusion of counsel until emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong.”

I speak here today in the hope that Churchill’s assessment of the “unteachability of mankind” is for once proven wrong. I speak here today in the hope that we can learn from history — that we can prevent danger in time.

In the spirit of the timeless words spoken to Joshua over 3,000 years ago, let us be strong and of good courage. Let us confront this peril, secure our future and, God willing, forge an enduring peace for generations to come.

More than most Americans, New Yorkers remember September 11. Almost everyone in this city lost someone, or knew someone who lost someone, in the Twin Towers. For months following the attack, our air was filled with acrid smoke and the smell of death. Some New Yorkers have never stopped grieving for those who died in the deadliest terrorist strike in American history. But if other Americans need reminders of why we forget terrorism at our peril, this week provided them.

On Monday came the belated conviction in London of three British Muslims—Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 28; Assad Sarwar, 29; and Tanvir Hussain, 28—on charges of conspiring in 2006 to blow up at least seven airliners bound for the United States or Canada in what was intended to be the deadliest terrorist strike since 9/11. Had the attack succeeded, an estimated 2,000 passengers, most of them American, would have died. The jury was told that the plotters were only days away from launching their planned suicide attacks when British police began rounding up some 25 suspects in the plot.

This was the second time that a London court had tried to convict the men. The first jury found insufficient evidence that airplanes were the target. And even in this second attempt, the jury acquitted four more alleged conspirators and failed to reach a verdict on an eighth.

While the planned use of airliners as terrorist weapons was hauntingly familiar, these homegrown plotters had devised several ingenious new twists. Rather than fly the planes into buildings, the men had planned to assemble liquid bombs in the planes’ bathrooms, using hydrogen-peroxide-based explosives that they would carry on board in soda bottles. The plotters intended to detonate the bombs simultaneously as their planes were midway across the Atlantic, guaranteeing that evidence of the plot would disappear along with the bombers and passengers, the jury was told. The arrests triggered a virtually worldwide ban on carrying all but tiny amounts of liquid onto commercial aircraft, a restriction that persists to this day.

Operation Overt—Britain’s surveillance of the plotters, involving hundreds of police—was also unprecedented. Months of 24-hour surveillance and electronic monitoring produced such evidence as martyrdom videos prepared by two of the men, flight itineraries and schedules, and a bomb factory on the edge of London that contained stocks of hydrogen peroxide, soda bottles, and cameras whose batteries were intended as detonators. But the investigation also soured Washington’s relations with London, which was forced to begin arrests after the Bush administration publicized the arrest of an alleged conspirator in Pakistan, forcing Britain’s hand. Britain’s MI-5 and MI-6 had wanted to continue following the plotters, but their American counterparts felt that waiting and watching was too dangerous. As a result, British officials have blamed Washington for their inability to convict some of the plotters, saying that America’s premature disclosures prevented them from assembling the evidence they needed to guarantee convictions. The episode demonstrates that the course of terrorism inquiries and trials rarely runs smooth.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003, left, and July 2009. Photographs: AP

Later this week came another chilling reminder of 9/11. A new photograph of 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of several “high-value detainees” currently being held at the Guantánamo Bay naval station in Cuba, began circulating on the Internet. The photo, depicting a thin, trim, full-bearded KSM sitting serenely in a clean white thobe and red-and-white-checkered headdress, came courtesy of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had given it to KSM’s family to assure them that he was alive and well. The family apparently provided the photo to a website sympathetic to al-Qaida, and this first photo ever of KSM in captivity is now being used to bolster the spirits of Islamic militants throughout the world. The incident reminds us that not a single 9/11 plotter has yet to be convicted. Nevertheless, President Obama has vowed to shut Gitmo, where 226 foreigners suspected of military or terrorist attacks are being held, by January 2010. The legal fate of the detainees remains uncertain.

Finally, a senior American envoy in Vienna warned on Wednesday that Iran has now accumulated enough low-enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb, provided the fissile material is further enriched to weapons-grade level. Speaking at a board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ambassador Glyn Davies spoke publicly for the first time about Iran’s movement toward a “break-out capacity,” the subject of another intelligence feud that has raged across the Atlantic—this one between American and Israeli experts on weapons of mass destruction. Israel has been urging Washington to take stronger actions now, before Tehran can build and test an atomic weapon, while the Americans have argued that there is still time for diplomats to try to dissuade Iran from pursuing nukes.

There was little indication this week, however, that the militant Islamic regime has any interest in negotiating away its capabilities. A ten-page package of proposals that Iran presented to America and its allies this week makes no mention of a suspension of its uranium-enrichment activities, which the United Nations Security Council has already demanded. The Obama administration has given Iran until the end of September to respond to its offer of talks. After that, officials warn, it will move with allies to tighten sanctions, though many critics fear that these too will fail to stop Iran from acquiring a bomb, especially since Russia says that it will not support tougher new sanctions. For its part, Tehran continues claiming that it needs enrichment for what is a purely peaceful nuclear energy program, a claim belied by years of clandestine enrichment and other activity that was only belatedly revealed by an anti-Iranian group.

In an appearance Thursday at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Lieutenant General Ronald Burgess, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said that while America has made strides against terrorism, America continues facing supporters of an uncompromising ideology and terrorists who have learned to increase their “lethality” as well as their political impact. Coupled with Iran’s seemingly unstoppable pursuit of nuclear weapons, the continued spread of anti-Western, antidemocratic, militant Islamic movements should remind us all of the danger inherent in the world’s most dangerous people acquiring the world’s most lethal weapons. That threat may be increasing by the day.

Yet many Americans seem intent on forgetting the lessons of 9/11. If we are what we remember, America’s willed amnesia about the danger of terrorism and other atrocities should be unsettling. Meanwhile, in another telling event this week, Russia ordered its high school students to start reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, the three-volume epic, published in 1973, that had long been banned. While Americans ignore lessons of the past, others are starting to remember them.