In either case, the U.N. once again demonstrated its institutional contempt for Israel. Year after year, the U.N. has allowed itself to be used as a platform for virulent anti-Semitism, and not all of it from the mouth of Mr. Ahmadinejad. Indeed, the coddling of anti-Semites is one of the U.N.’s most durable traditions—remember that the General Assembly condemned Zionism as a form of racism in the mid-1970s.

That mind-set hasn’t changed much—otherwise the audience for Mr. Ahmadinejad’s diatribes would have disappeared years ago. It hasn’t. Indeed, the fact that he was allowed to speak on the topic of international law should tell us all we need to know about the view of some powerful functionaries at the U.N.

Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Ron Prosor, said that asking Mr. Ahmadinejad to speak about the rule of law was akin to “appointing an arsonist as fire chief.”

But it’s actually worse than that. Somebody at the U.N. clearly is willing to hand this arsonist a few matches. And somebody seems eager to see the results.

Israel has known for years that it should expect nothing but insults from the U.N. General Assembly. Still, it is imperative to remind fair-minded people in the U.S. and elsewhere of this ongoing outrage.

editorial@observer.com

That’s all good. But at this critical juncture in the U.S.-Israeli relationship, words are less important than actions. The president needs to show his support for Israel in tangible ways, both in public and behind the scenes. There can be no equivocation, no cool detachment, no mixed signals. Israel’s enemies and, indeed, the rest of the world need to understand that the United States and Israel stand together in the battle against global terrorism.

Nothing would please the world’s terrorists and terrorist sponsors more than the prospect of a bitter split between the U.S. and Israel. Since 2009, many have observed, the Obama White House has been tougher on Jerusalem than it has been on Teheran. That perception, whether justified or not, has to stop, now. Nobody should have any reason to doubt America’s support for Israel, and for the decisions that Israel will have to make about its own national security.

Washington must remind the world that Iran’s religious and secular leaders, including its grand ayatollah, have pledged themselves—in public—to Israel’s destruction. This sort of rhetoric would be condemned and sanctioned if it emanated from a European or Asian capital. But Iran’s leaders regularly and consistently make it clear that if they had the means, they would wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

Nobody can doubt that Iran’s leaders are intent on building a nuclear weapon, and if they succeed, who can doubt that the ayatollahs will use the weapon to target Israel? That’s why the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is, as Mr. Obama stated, intolerable.

So the questions become: What to do, and when to do it?

Like any other nation, Israel will act as it sees fit to defend its national security and its civilian population. Mr. Obama, with some justification, told the AIPAC gathering that loose talk about an attack on Iran could be counterproductive. He might be right: Over the weekend, followers of Iran’s grand ayatollah—a man who makes the country’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, seem reasonable—scored a big victory in the nation’s parliamentary elections. Tensions with the Israel, the U.S. and the West certainly played into the ayatollah’s hands.

An Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is not, in fact, inevitable, although Mr. Netanyahu rightly noted in his own speech to AIPAC that Israel will not stand idly by if Teheran persists in building a weapon of mass destruction. Israel remains skeptical about the power of diplomatic and economic sanctions, with good reasons—sanctions are a rational response to a crisis, but Iran’s leaders clearly are not rational. Nevertheless, time has not yet run out on diplomacy. But the diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran must be effective, indeed, it must be crushing, and it is up to the Obama White House to take the lead.

That course of action will require more than platitudes from Washington. It will require determination and passionate belief. It remains to be seen if Mr. Obama can summon those qualities on behalf of Israel—and, by extension, on behalf of American security as well.

The Swedish always bring the best delegates to the party

You can thank all that traffic in Midtown this week to the 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly, which brought in not only the world's most important leaders, but all their bodyguards and beefed up security as well. Don't even try going east of 3rd Ave today, is all we're saying.

But as President Barack Obama hangs out with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Iran's ultimate bad boy, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, we know the real question on your mind: "Where are all the hotties?"

http://www.observer.com/2011/09/theory-of-achievement/

So Rick Perry, President Barack Obama and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad walk into a bar…  It’s not a joke; it’s a scenario we imagined as a real possibility as all three were descending upon Manhattan this week.  (As long as they stay away from Miss Lily’s. It’s already crowded enough.)

We like to call this scenario “fantasy bar fight.” It’s probably fair to say that many New Yorkers aren’t too happy with any of them to varying degrees, and not just because the resulting security chaos means it takes four weeks to get across midtown in a taxi instead of the usual three.

We’ve examined the President’s new job plan, and subsequently have been attempting to make lemonade from lemons, but retailing homemade beverages to make money is far more complicated than it was when we were 10.  (The permits alone! And turns out our lemonade stand isn’t OSHA compliant.)  But maybe it’s for the best. If we were too good at the whole money-making thing, we’d just be taxed into oblivion—at least according to Bill O’Reilly, who expressed concern this week that any federal tax increases would effectively “tax achievement.” “Let’s take me,” he said, redefining achievement in his own charming way. “If Barack Obama begins taxing me more than 50 percent, which is very possible, I don’t know how much longer I’m going to do this.”

Which actually makes us root for a tax increase a teeny tiny bit. (Is that a promise?)

We’re sure Mr. O’Reilly believes he’s doing god’s work, if a little less literally than Michele Bachmann or, depending on which god we’re talking about, Mr. Ahmadinejad.  But it’s a little unclear what constitutes god’s work these days. According to a Baylor University study, one in five Americans believe God controls the economy, which is not exactly the sort of career we had in mind for Him. (“They say the invisible hand of the free market is really God at work,”  sociologist Paul Froese and co-author of the Baylor survey told USA Today.) If so, God’s invisible hand has been about as steady as Eli Manning’s earlier this week in the season opener at MetLife Stadium. But the Giants managed to pull off a win, which is more than we can say for God, looking at those unemployment numbers.  Maybe He’s just concerned about those high taxation rates that come with achievement.

In any event, we’re looking forward to the exodus of our early fall visitors.  We all have work to do—underachievement milestones to hit, illegal lemonade stands to run and the like. Or maybe we’ll scrap it all and go to Miss Lily’s.

"I'm actually not talking about it, I just wanted to set the record straight and, uh, that's it," Paterson said in a very brief question-and-answer session. He did an extensive radio interview this morning in which he did talk about it.

Paterson was asked about his wife, Michelle's comments that she wasn't sure if her husband would run for re-election.

"I appreciate my wife's comments all the time," Paterson replied. "Most people who read the New York Times article thought what she thought, but the administration never gave me an authorized invitation not to run next year."

He was asked if he wanted to run for re-election.

"I'm running," he said.

It’s not a stretch for Americans to look at the scenes of mass protest in Iran and think back to 1989, when popular uprisings toppled one Soviet-backed regime after another in Eastern Europe.

That mental association is one that Barack Obama’s critics have seized upon, arguing that the same presidential bully pulpit that hastened the liberation of those nations from Moscow 20 years ago should now be used to spur on the women, men and children bravely facing the Basiji militia in the streets of Tehran.   

Mike Pence, the third-ranking Republican in the House, succinctly expressed this view on Monday: “When Ronald Reagan went to the Brandenburg Gate, he did not say, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, that wall is none of our business.’”

It all sounds good enough—until you realize that the analogy that Obama’s critics are relying on is utterly false.

The people of Warsaw, Berlin, Prague and the like rose up against a system of government that had been imposed on them decades earlier by a foreign power. They had never accepted the legitimacy of Soviet rule and, often against violent repression, had worked to liberate themselves from it.

The Islamic government of Iran, by contrast, was created by the Iranian people themselves, who in 1978 and 1979 revolted against the repressive, American-backed Shah. An estimated six million Iranians joyously greeted Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini when, days after protesters forced the Shah to flee abroad, he disembarked from an Air France jet in January ’79 and ended his 14-year exile.

Khomeini then set about designing the framework for the modern Islamic Republic—with religious leaders, not elected civilians, holding the ultimate power—and his vision was quickly ratified through a nearly unanimous national referendum. This is a far cry from how Soviet communism came to the Warsaw Pact nations: In Iran, the people imposed Islamic rule on themselves, and still (by and large) consider the revolution their finest national hour.

This distinction is vital. Whereas the crowds in Eastern Europe were united in their desire to destroy their system of government—a goal shared by the United States—the Iranians who have taken to the streets (again, by and large) view themselves as protectors of the revolution and the system it created. As Fatima Hoghighatjoo, a reformist and former member of Parliament, explained to The New York Times: “The people inside Iran are not saying they want regime change. They are saying, ‘Where is my vote?’”

Americans might like to believe that, just like in ’89, the protests represent an overpowering thirst for freedom and democracy as Westerners define it. But this is not the same simple battle between Western democracy and repression. The masses in Eastern Europe may have been elated to know that the U.S. considered their cause its own, but the reaction of Iranians to a similar declaration now would be far different.

Moreover, America has (to put it mildly) an image problem in Iran that it didn’t have in Eastern Europe. Iranian history is marked by unwanted Western intrusion—the British plundering of oil fields, the C.I.A. overthrow of Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953, the “capitulation” of 1964 and so on. Those who demand that Mr. Obama forcefully insert himself into the current drama don’t seem to appreciate that words of support from an American president can be used to rile up popular sentiment against protesters—something that was hardly the case in ’89.

The best outcome in Iran for the United States would be the annulment of this month’s election, the scheduling of a new vote, and the election of Mir-Hossein Moussavi. This wouldn’t be a panacea for American-Iranian relations, but it would be a clear step forward. And, despite the government’s post-election crackdown, it’s still possible.

The key is for Mr. Moussavi’s movement to remain free of the taint of Western influence—a poison pill that would send the clerical elites who have tentatively sided with the opposition flocking back to the government fold. The support of clerics with impeccable revolutionary credentials is critical to Mr. Moussavi’s prospects for success; it reinforces his claim that he is not trying to dismantle Iran’s system of government. Without them, a far more violent—and successful—government crackdown seems inevitable.

Mr. Obama clearly understands the stakes. Right now, the conflict in Iran is still an internal battle between two factions loyal to the revolution. But the minute it becomes a battle between Washington and Tehran, Mr. Moussavi loses. As Mr. Obama pointed out on the campaign trail last year, words do matter. And in keeping them to a minimum, he’s doing more than any of the tough-talkers to help those crowds in Tehran.

This was back when memories of the disputed 2000 election were still fresh, so the sentiment that Giuliani, who typically mentioned the anecdote to Republican crowds, was really conveying was more like: “Thank God Al Gore isn’t our president! God help us if a Democrat had tried to lead America on 9/11.”

It was, of course, a thoroughly self-serving story—an expedient way for Giuliani to forge a connection with the Democrat-hating conservative Republicans he’d need to win over for a 2008 presidential bid. But, at a certain level, he was onto something: It can sometimes take a crisis to illuminate the real nature of the choice voters faced in the previous election.

That is certainly the case right now. Few Americans went to the polls last November with Iran on their minds at all, and yet it was one of the campaign issues on which the differences between Barack Obama and John McCain were the most clear. Now, as the Iranian government attempts to bloody its own people into submission while American politicians argue over the proper response, the wisdom (perhaps inadvertent) of the voters’ decision to entrust foreign policy to Obama has become clear.

Since hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets in protest of a stolen election last week, McCain has loudly and persistently called on Obama not to mince words in denouncing Iran’s rulers and to take every conceivable step short of an actual military campaign to buttress the protesters. Obama has resisted, at least as much as domestic politics will allow, making clear his concerns about the legitimacy of the election and the violence of the government while keeping the rhetorical heat and volume to a minimum.

This dispute actually reveals something fundamental about the two men and their understanding of history.

Appearing on Face the Nation on Sunday, McCain referred to himself as a student of history and invoked both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of the Solidarity movement as proof that the United States can play a critical role in supporting democratic uprisings around the world.