WarSclerotic

Why Did Kerry Lie About Israeli Blame? Commentary Magazine, Jonathan S. Tobin, April 8, 2014

(Maybe it’s not personal, just policy. — DM)

Kerry doesn’t want to blame the Palestinians for walking out because to do so would be a tacit admission that his critics were right when they suggested last year that he was embarking on a fool’s errand.

Today in testimony before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Secretary of State John Kerry performed a post-mortem on the recent collapse of the Middle East peace talks. According to Kerry, the Palestinian refusal to keep negotiating past April and their decision to flout their treaty commitments by returning to efforts to gain recognition for their non-existent state from the United Nations was all the fault of one decision made by Israel. As the New York Timesreports:

Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday that Israel’s announcement of 700 new apartments for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem precipitated the bitter impasse in peace negotiations last week between Israel and the Palestinians.

While Mr. Kerry said both sides bore responsibility for “unhelpful” actions, he noted that the publication of tenders for housing units came four days after a deadline passed for Israel to release Palestinian prisoners and complicated Israel’s own deliberations over whether to extend the talks.

“Poof, that was the moment,” Mr. Kerry said in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Poof? To say that this evaluation of the situation is disingenuous would be the understatement of the century. Kerry knows very well that the negotiations were doomed once the Palestinians refused to sign on to the framework for future talks he suggested even though it centered them on the 1967 lines that they demand as the basis for borders. Why? Because Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas wouldn’t say the two little words —“Jewish state”—that would make it clear he intended to end the conflict. Since the talks began last year after Abbas insisted on the release of terrorist murderers in order to get them back to the table, the Palestinians haven’t budged an inch on a single issue.

Thus, to blame the collapse on the decision to build apartments in Gilo—a 40-year-old Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem that would not change hands even in the event a peace treaty were ever signed and where Israel has never promised to stop building—is, to put it mildly, a mendacious effort to shift blame away from the side that seized the first pretext to flee talks onto the one that has made concessions in order to get the Palestinians to sit at the table. But why would Kerry utter such a blatant falsehood about the process he has championed?

The answer is simple. Kerry doesn’t want to blame the Palestinians for walking out because to do so would be a tacit admission that his critics were right when they suggested last year that he was embarking on a fool’s errand. The division between the Fatah-run West Bank and Hamas-ruled Gaza has created a dynamic which makes it almost impossible for Abbas to negotiate a deal that would recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders were drawn even if he wanted to.

Since Kerry hopes to entice the Palestinians back to the talks at some point, blaming Israel also gives him leverage to demand more concessions from the Jewish state to bribe Abbas to negotiate. Being honest about the Palestinian stance would not only undermine the basis for the talks but also make it harder to justify the administration’s continued insistence on pressuring the Israelis rather than seek to force Abbas to alter his intransigent positions.

Seen in that light, Kerry probably thinks no harm can come from blaming the Israelis who have always been the convenient whipping boys of the peace process no matter what the circumstances. But he’s wrong about that too. Just as the Clinton administration did inestimable damage to the credibility of the peace process and set the stage for another round of violence by whitewashing Yasir Arafat’s support for terrorism and incitement to hatred in the 1990s, so, too, do Kerry’s efforts to portray Abbas as the victim rather than the author of this fiasco undermine his efforts for peace.

So long as the Palestinians pay no price for their refusal to give up unrealistic demands for a Jewish retreat from Jerusalem as well as the “right of return” for the 1948 refugees and their descendants and a refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and end the conflict, peace is impossible no matter what the Netanyahu government does. Appeasing them with lies about Israel, like the efforts of some to absolve Arafat and Abbas for saying no to peace in 2000, 2001, and 2008, only makes it easier for the PA to go on saying no. Whether they are doing so in the hope of extorting more concessions from Israel or because, as is more likely, they have no intention of making peace on any terms, the result is the same.

Telling the truth about the Palestinians might make Kerry look foolish for devoting so much time and effort to a process that never had a chance. But it might lay the groundwork for future success in the event that the sea change in Palestinian opinion that might make peace possible were to occur. Falsely blaming Israel won’t bring that moment any closer.

Iran nuclear ‘breakout’ time at two months: Kerry – Latest – New Straits Times.

( As always, Kerry is his own best satirist… – JW )

AFP

WASHINGTON: Iran is two months away from breakout capability to produce enough nuclear material for a bomb should they resume their mothballed enrichment process, Secretary of State John Kerry warned Tuesday.

Tehran is in the thick of international negotiations over its nuclear  program, with a fresh round of talks beginning on Tuesday in Vienna aimed at  starting a draft of an historic final deal.

Under a temporary deal which took effect January 20, Iran froze certain  nuclear activities for six months in exchange for minor relief from sanctions  hurting its economy.

A full-bore resumption of enrichment — a gross violation of the temporary  accord — could see Tehran move swiftly toward nuclear breakout.

“I think it is fair to say, I think it is public knowledge today, that we  are operating with a time period for a so-called breakout of about two months,”  Kerry told US lawmakers.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Robert Menendez cited reports  that said UN Security Council permanent members Britain, China, France, Russia  and the United States, along with Germany, should focus on extending the time  it would take for Iran to produce nuclear weapons to between six and 12 months.

Kerry said the ultimate goal was assurance that Iran never build an atomic  bomb.

“So six months to 12 months is — I’m not saying that’s what we’d settle  for — but even that is significantly more” than the estimated two months to  breakout, he said.

With substantial pressure for concessions from both sides during the  current round of talks, US lawmakers urged Kerry to hold the line on Iran’s  Arak heavy water reactor, which they want to see fully dismantled.

Tehran last month insisted that the reactor, a concern to the West because  Tehran could extract weapons-grade plutonium from its spent fuel if it also  builds a reprocessing facility, will not be torn down.

Menendez said Arak remained part of a “worrisome” effort by Tehran to  advance its nuclear program in the midst of the negotiations.

“Their research and development capacity (is) still moving forward as we  speak, which only allows them to create more sophisticated centrifuges, which  closes the window for them even more quickly” towards breakout capacity,  Menendez told Kerry.

The top US diplomat stressed his team was “approaching these talks  seriously and with our eyes wide open,” and that international inspectors were  gaining “amazing capacity” to track Iran’s nuclear activity, including  first-time inspection opportunities in nuclear sites including Fordo and  Natanz, and fuller inspections of Arak.

“We’ve been very clear that there is no legitimacy to a full-on heavy water  plutonium reactor” for civilian use, Kerry said.

“That has to be dealt with in the context of the negotiations. It will be.”–AFP

The evil of banality – when blaming Israel becomes commonplace | JPost | Israel News.

( Painfully true… – JW )

04/08/2014 21:44

John Kerry’s peace process crusade has triggered moral vertigo in a region where false moral equivalence enables Palestinian extremism.

Desperate to scare Israel into compromise, convinced that democratic Israel can be bullied more easily than the fractured, autocratic Palestinians, Kerry and company have targeted Israeli wariness more than Palestinian intransigence.

In that spirit, last week, The New York Times ran a cloying, overly-sentimentalized article about a freed Palestinian murderer trying to rebuild his life. This week, its foreign policy columnist Thomas Friedman outrageously compared Sheldon Adelson, a Republican billionaire who happens to disagree with Freidman, with Ali Khameini, the Iranian ayatollah who would happily kill Friedman. A half-century ago Hannah Arendt said Adolf Eichmann’s plodding, fill-in-the-dots bureaucratic amorality reflected the “banality of evil.”

Today we are seeing the evil of banality. Genuine bad follows when otherwise good people join the conventional pile-on that overly faults Israel while excusing Palestinians.

The Times profile “Remaking a Life, After Years in an Israeli Prison,” was terror porn. Using relativistic comparisons and focusing on every life’s banal, meaning mundane, aspects, the article humanized a freed terrorist and implicitly excused his crime – although in fairness it also introduced readers to his victim, Israel Tenenbaum, a 72-year-old Holocaust survivor. Still, “Muqdad Salah is a man in a hurry,” we learned, eager to compensate for his lost years.

This murderer is “one of 78 long-serving Palestinian prisoners freed from Israeli jails,” who are “Demonized as terrorists by Israelis and lionized as freedom fighters by Palestinians” – there being no objective standards.

These nice “middle-aged men” now work hard at “earning their first driver’s licenses, leveraging $50,000 grants from the Palestinian Authority to build apartments or start businesses, searching for wives and struggling to start families.”

Predictably, the Times found an accidental terrorist.

Despite being treated as a Palestinian “hero,” poor “Mr. Salah” reported of his crime: “I wasn’t planning it… I didn’t intend to kill him.”

Did the New York Times call Osama bin-Laden and his al-Qaida thugs people “demonized as terrorists by Americans and lionized as freedom fighters by Muslims?” Did any features follow poor “Mr.” bin-Laden on the lam, unable even to patronize his favorite hummus place?

Similarly, I saw no articles disrespecting the Boston Marathon victims by wondering how comfortable the younger bomber, Dzohkar Tsarnaev, is in his jail cell. What kind of Internet access does he have? Have his feelings been hurt by all the anger against him?

The article notes that “Mr. Salah was welcomed…  by a cacophonous crowd in this village of 4,000 near the Palestinian financial hub of Nablus.” That proves that the PA celebrates killers. And if Palestinians have a “financial hub,” maybe there is more autonomy and better Palestinian quality of life under Israeli rule than the propagandists admit.

While this Times article was morally obtuse, Thomas Friedman’s column was obscene. Called “Sheldon: Iran’s Best Friend,” its tagline was “How Sheldon Adelson and Iran are both trying to destroy Israel.”

Really? Adelson is “trying” to destroy Israel? Adelson, an American patriot exercising his right of free speech, is an “ally” of the Tehran terrorists who squelch free speech? I understand. Sometimes as a columnist, your own shtick shackles you.

Friedman thought he found a clever way to show that Israel’s most ardent supporters unknowingly aid Israel’s enemies by perpetuating a status quo Friedman abhors. But what might have worked as a rant over drinks seemed mean and amoral in print.

In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt’s supporters did not compare Wendell Willkie to Adolf Hitler even though Willkie, a wealthy corporate executive, opposed FDR. Today, Friedman (and I) would object if someone called Barack Obama a Hamasnik because both the president and those Islamist hooligans oppose Israeli settlements.

Politics is not mathematics. The transitive property “a = a” cannot equate genocidal theocrats like Hamas and Khameini with democrats playing politics like Obama and Adelson. (Yes, that sentence may mark the first time Obama and Adelson are compared favorably or that Adelson is called a democrat!) Friedman’s diatribe also incorrectly called Israel’s settlements “colonialism.” Colonialism involves settling foreign areas, as England did with India. Israel’s legal, historical and ideological ties to the West Bank should force even Israel’s critics to use different words.

Friedman echoed Kerry’s camp in boosting the boycott movement as a threat to Israel, suggesting BDS is “gaining adherents.” These are vague weasel words.

The movement for conservative “red” states to secede from the US is also “gaining adherents” – one at a time in a nation of 300 million-plus – does that convince Friedman America should separate?

I want Kerry to succeed. I wish Israel was leading the peace process, tapping its collective genius to solve this problem whereby the intractability of continued Palestinian intransigence nevertheless does not negate the impracticality of perpetual Israeli control over millions of unwilling subjects.

Similarly, I distinguish between the Boycott Israel crowd’s anti-Israel intent and the Blame Israel First crowd’s anti-Israel effects. The Boycotters diabolically mask harsh animus against the Jewish people with human rights rhetoric. Most Blame Israel Firsters are simply sloppily following a Western trend that excuses Palestinian sins.

Nevertheless, treating Israel as the problem is convenient albeit false, as PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s actions in sabotaging the peace process this week confirmed. But with his people cast as the innocent Jesus to the dastardly collective Jew, Abbas knows he can appear blameless.

If this peace process fails, expect more articles comparing Abbas and Netanyahu or Abbas and Adelson.

After all, Abbas and Netanyahu each have two “a”s in their last names, while Abbas and Adelson have names starting with an “a.”

But even as blaming Israel becomes banal, it will still have harmful, even evil, consequences, making peace more elusive than ever.

The author is professor of history at McGill University and the author, most recently, of Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight Against Zionism as Racism published by Oxford University Press.

US races headlong for final nuclear deal with Iran – irrespective of program’s military dimension.

Iran domestic tensions boil as West battles its nuclear program |.

Internal political and economic turmoil is blurring Iran’s stance ahead of talks for comprehensive deal.

By Zvi Bar’el | Apr. 8, 2014 | 4:00 AM

Israel Hayom | Ensuring an Iranian bomb.

Ruthie Blum

New Iranian Ambassador to U.N. Denied Entry to America | United with Israel.

The United States senate unanimously voted to bar the new Iranian ambassador to the United Nations – a man with terrorist ties – from entering the country.

Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations Hamid Aboutalebi, who was directly involved in the hostage-taking incident in 1979, when 52 Americans were held for 444 days by supporters of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, will be barred from entering the United States, according to a newly approved U.S. senate bill.

Iran’s Rouhani government, which was viewed by many as more “moderate” than the previous administration, recently appointed Aboutalebi to the post. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had warned that Rouhani was a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

“It is unconscionable that in the name of international diplomatic protocol, the United States would be forced to host a foreign national who showed a brutal disregard of the status of diplomats when they were stationed in his country,” declared Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the bill’s lead sponsor. “This person is an acknowledged terrorist.”

Iranian Ambassador Helped Siege of U.S. Embassy

The bill, supported by Republicans and Democrats alike, designates that anyone who had been involved in terrorism or espionage or who is deemed a potential security threat would be denied entry to the U.S. The new Iranian ambassador, who had participated in the siege of the U.S. embassy during the hostage-taking crisis, claims he was merely acting as a translator and negotiator.

According to the Washington Post, “several aides confirm that Cruz talked over the weekend with Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-NY), the chamber’s third-ranking Democrat, who also has been pushing aggressively for sanctions against Iran and for the Obama administration to block granting a visa to the new envoy.”

“As host nation of the United Nations headquarters,” the Post explains, “the US generally admits the chosen representatives of U.N. members, with limited exceptions.”

“We’re taking a close look at the case now, and we’ve raised our serious concerns about this possible nomination with the government of Iran. I’m not going to get into specifically how we’ve done that, but we have done that,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said at a press briefing last week.

American President Barack Obama had called Aboutalebi’s nomination “deeply troubling,” while Cruz, discussing the issue more recently at the Senate, labelled Rouhani’s choice a “deliberate and unambiguous insult to the U.S.”

Choice of Iranian Ambassador a ‘Slap in the Face’

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called it “a slap in the face to the Americans that were abducted and their families. It reveals a disdain for the diplomatic process and we should push back in kind.”

Fox News reports that although the U.S. had objected to Iran’s anticipated selection of Aboutalebi, “the Obama administration stopped short last week of saying it would refuse him a visa to enter the U.S. The State Department said it had raised the issue with Tehran.”

“It may be a case of strange bedfellows, but I’m glad Sen. Cruz and I were able to work out a bill that would prevent this terrorist from stepping foot on American soil,” Schumer stated. “We ought to close the door on him and others like him before he even comes to the U.S., and that’s exactly what this bill will do.”

Ya’alon: Iran sanctions violated ‘more than a few times’ | JPost | Israel News.

( Ya’alon: The next PM of Israel… – JW )

By YAAKOV LAPPIN

04/07/2014 22:23

Defense minister says Israel must continue to prepare for Iran threat based on approach of “if I am not for myself, who will be for me?”; On peace process, minister says PA is partner willing to receive but not to give.

Since Iran and the international community reached an interim deal over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program in November 2013, there have been “quite a few violations” of economic sanctions on Tehran, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said Monday, during a meeting with reporters at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv.

Ya’alon said Israel is “closely following” the US-led diplomatic process with Tehran, adding that the results of the talks will have consequences for Israeli security. He hinted that Israel was continuing to prepare for the possibility that it may have to eventually act alone if the talks proved fruitless, and Iran carried on making advances in the nuclear program.

“We have to prepare, based on the ‘if I am not for myself, who will be for me?’ approach,” Ya’alon said. “The Iranians are not as isolated as they were. From their perspective, the situation has improved [since the interim agreement],” he added.

Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, continue to support the Assad regime in Syria in the civil war against rebels, a conflict that has seen 150,000 casualties so far, Ya’alon noted. Hezbollah has lost hundreds of fighters and suffered thousands of casualties in Syria, he added. The Syrian opposition is “struggling to present an alternative” due to infighting among multiple factions.

The defense minister said the rebels had launched new offenses in several areas recently, including Damascus, Aleppo, Dara, and the northern Syrian coast, near the Turkish border. Despite Syrian army efforts to push them back, the rebels control most of the Syrian Golan near the Israeli border, with the exception of Al-Khader and Quneitra – two areas that recently served as staging grounds for terrorist attacks against Israel, Ya’alon continued.

“This activity [the attacks] serves the interests of the Assad regime and Hezbollah, and was carried out by ’emissaries.’ We place the responsibility on the regime. It could have prevented the attacks,” Ya’alon added.

In neighboring Lebanon, Sunni-Shi’ite fighting has spilled over from Syria, reaching Beirut, Tripoli, and the Bek’a Valley, and is claiming dozens of casualties every month, Ya’alon said. The fighting has taken the form of car bombs, exchanges of fire, and rockets.

Despite accusing Israel of being a recent air strike on a convoy of advanced weapons in eastern Lebanon, and carrying out a bombing in the Hard Dov sector that injured four paratroopers last month, Hezbollah does not want to initiate an escalated conflict with Israel, Ya’alon said.

Turning his sights to the West Bank, the defense minister said unorganized mass rioting rises and falls due to a host of developments, including the status of talks between the PA and Israel, and the economic situation in the West Bank, The violence is ultimately rooted in incitement by official Palestinian Authority media, Ya’alon said.

“We are in the midst of a crisis [with the PA],” Ya’alon said. “The PA is a partner that is prepared to receive, but not to give. it is unwilling to talk about recognition of a Jewish state, or about ending its demand of a right of return, or an end to the conflict,” he added.

In the Gaza Strip, Hamas continues to manufacture rockets and dig attack tunnels, but it is not initiating terror attacks against Israel. Palestinian Islamic Jihad, meanwhile, is “acting as an Iranian arm in our back yard. It is growing more powerful with the help of Iranian funding and training,” Ya’alon said. Smaller terror groups, dissatisfied by the reduction in violence between Gaza and Israel, are challenging Hamas due to the regime’s attempts to enforce a truce, he added.

Russia’s Ace in the Hole: a Super-Missile It Can Sell to Iran, Daily Beast, Eli Lake, April 8, 2014

(Food for thought perhaps suggesting that, in the unlikely event that the Obama Administration intends to provide Israel super-bunker buster bombs and aircraft with which to deliver them, it had best do it soon. — DM)

It’s Washington’s nightmare scenario: an aggressive Moscow deciding it’s time to arm Tehran with sophisticated weapons. And it may be closer to reality than you think.

Tensions between Russia and the West are hitting a new peak. And in this face-off, Moscow has an extraordinary piece of leverage: a super-sophisticated, bomber-killing missile that it once threatened to sell to Iran.

Last week, Reuters first reported Russia was preparing an oil-for-goods deal with Iran worth up to $20 billion. An unnamed Iranian official told the news service that the barter would include Russian weapons. And that was before further signs of Russia’s shadow invasion of Ukraine emerged Monday, when crowds spontaneously appeared in three major eastern cities to welcome the troops amassed over the border. The Daily Beast reported that associates of Viktor Yanukovych, the deposed and Kremlin-friendly Ukrainian president, weremeeting with pro-Russian activists. One keen-eyed photographer captured a man wearing a Russian Airborne forces tee-shirt at one of the protests.

The trade between Moscow and Tehran would alleviate the economic pressure on Iran that the White House has said helped bring the Islamic Republic to the bargaining table. It may even sink the talks President Obama is hoping will persuade Iran to defang its nuclear program.

If those talks fail, then Russia has the leverage to equip Iran with the missile that could defend its centrifuges and reactors from allied air strikes, the S-300.

“I could see as part of this deal [between Tehran and Moscow] that they would agree to transfer advanced missiles to Iran,” said Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the hawkish Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and an expert in the Iran sanctions. “If [Russian president Vladimir] Putin became angry enough over the West’s financial punishment of Russia, he could put in play the S-300 deal.”

The S-300 has long been Moscow’s top-of-the-line air defense system. The current model is comparable to U.S. Patriot missile batteries. The S-300 deploys sophisticated radars, launch vehicles and missiles to shoot aircraft and even ballistic missiles out of the sky. Russia has also threatened to sell the system to Syria, whose hapless air force was hacked by Israel in 2007, rendering its anti-aircraft defenses useless when Israel bombed the al-Kibar nuclear facility.

In the second term of the George W. Bush, Russia came close to selling and training Iran’s military on how to use the sophisticated S-300 system. But then in 2010, the Russians pulled back from the sale during negotiations over U.N. Security Council resolution 1929, the resolution the Obama administration used to persuade banks and finance ministries all over the world to isolate most of Iran’s economy.

Moscow ended up supporting that resolution and cancelling the sale—which was considered a triumph of the Obama administration’s foreign policy at the time. But Russia also negotiated an important loophole. While the resolution bans almost every possible arms sale imaginable, it still technically allows U.N. member states to sell Iran air defense weaponry such as the S-300 system.

“There was no prohibition of the S-300 in the resolution,” said Michael McFaul, who left his post earlier this year as the U.S. ambassador to Russia and played a role in 2010 as a senior White House staff member in negotiating the Iran resolution. McFaul said Russia’s president at the time, Dimitry Medvedev, at first privately and then publicly said the spirit of the resolution would prohibit the sale of the S-300. “But he was not obligated to do that by the resolution itself,” McFaul said.

McFaul declined to comment on whether he suspected Russia would actually provide Iran with the air defense system. Dubowitz, however, says he is concerned Moscow could renege on its promise not to sell Iran the S-300.

One Obama administration official told The Daily Beast the United States has seen no evidence to date that Russia would renege on its promise not to sell Iran the S-300 system.

But signals from Moscow and Tehran have already drawn concern from Congress. On Monday, the two senators who drafted the crippling sanctions legislation Obama has implemented against Iran urged the White House to re-impose some of the sanctions it temporarily lifted this fall when the nuclear talks with Iran began.

In the letter, Sen. Mark Kirk, a Republican, and Sen. Robert Menendez, a Democrat, wrote that they were alarmed the barter agreement reported by Reuters “may provide for the transfer to Iran of items of significant value to Iran’s military and its nuclear program.”

From the IDF and WarSclerotic…
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