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The Consequences of a “Chickensh*t” Policy

October 29, 2014

The Consequences of a “Chickensh*t” Policy, Commentary, , October 29, 2014

There is no doubt that Obama’s lame duck years will be stressful for Israel and its friends. As Seth noted earlier today, the administration’s full court press for détente with Iran is setting the table for a strategic blunder on their nuclear quest that will severely harm the balance of power in the Middle East as well as lay the groundwork for challenges to American national security for decades to come.

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No doubt the gang in the Obama administration have been congratulating themselves for planting some juicy insults aimed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest column in The Atlantic. But now that the wiseacres in the West Wing and/or the State Department have done their dirty work the question remains what will be the consequences of the decision to widen as well as to embitter the breach between the two countries. While most of those writing on this subject, including Goldberg, have emphasized the real possibility that the U.S. will sandbag Israel at the United Nations and otherwise undermine the Jewish state’s diplomatic position in the last years of Obama’s term in office, that won’t be the only blowback from the administration’s “chickenshit” diplomacy. Rather than harm Netanyahu, this ploy, like previous attacks on the prime minister, will strengthen him while making mischief for the president’s party in both this year’s midterms and in 2016.

There is no doubt that Obama’s lame duck years will be stressful for Israel and its friends. As Seth noted earlier today, the administration’s full court press for détente with Iran is setting the table for a strategic blunder on their nuclear quest that will severely harm the balance of power in the Middle East as well as lay the groundwork for challenges to American national security for decades to come.

Nor should anyone discount the potential for severe damage to Israel’s diplomatic standing in the world should Obama decide to collude with the Palestinian Authority and to allow them to get a United Nations Security Council resolution on Palestinian statehood, borders, and Jerusalem. The Palestinians’ drive to annul Jewish rights and to bypass the peace process could, with Obama’s support, further isolate Israel and strengthen the efforts of those forces working to promote BDS—boycott, divest, sanction—campaigns that amount to an economic war on the Jewish people.

This is a dire prospect for a small, besieged country that still relieves heavily on U.S. security cooperation and defense aid. But for all the huffing and puffing on the part of Obama’s minions, the administration’s real objectives in all this plotting are not likely to be achieved. That’s because nothing published in a Goldberg column or leaked anywhere else will weaken Netanyahu’s hold on office or prompt the Palestinians to make peace or Iran to be more reasonable in the nuclear talks. The only people who will be hurt by the attacks on Israel are Obama’s fellow Democrats.

As I pointed out yesterday, Obama’s barbs aimed at Israel haven’t enticed the Palestinians to negotiate seriously in the past and won’t do so in the future. If the Palestinian Authority really wanted a state they would have accepted the one offered them in 2000, 2001, or 2008 or actually negotiated with Netanyahu in the last year after he indicated readiness to sign off on a two-state solution.

The boasts about having maneuvered Netanyahu into a position where he may not have a viable military option against Iran (actually, Israel may never have had much of an option since it can be argued that only U.S. possesses the forces required to conclusively knock out Iran’s nuclear facilities) is also nothing for the U.S. to be happy about since it will only strengthen the Iranians’ conviction that they have nothing to fear from Israel or a U.S. president that they think is too weak to stand up to them.

But Obama should have also already learned that challenging Netanyahu and insulting the Jewish state in this manner has one definite side effect: strengthening the prime minister’s political position at home. The same thing happened after Obama’s attacks on the status of Jerusalem in his first term. The administration thought it could topple Netanyahu soon after his election in February 2009 and failed, but even after his election to another term in 2013 as well as the absence of any viable alternative to him, they are still clinging to the delusion that the Israeli people will reject his policies. But that isn’t likely to happen for one reason. The overwhelming majority of Israelis may not love the prime minister but they share his belief that there is no Palestinian peace partner and that turning the West Bank into a sovereign state that could be controlled by Hamas and other terrorists just like Gaza would be madness. They also oppose efforts to divide their capital or to prohibit Jews from the right to live in some parts of the city.

Netanyahu won’t back down. In the wake of the summer war with Hamas that further undermined an Israeli left that was already in ruins after 20 years of failed peace processing, Netanyahu was clearly heading to early elections that would further strengthen the Likud. Obama’s attacks will only make that strategy more attractive to the prime minister. But whether he is reelected in 2015, 2016, or 2017, few believe Netanyahu won’t be returned to office by the voters for his third consecutive and fourth overall term as Israel’s leader. Though a lot of damage can be done to Israel in the next two years, that means Netanyahu is almost certain to be able to outlast Obama in office and to enjoy what will almost certainly be better relations with his successor whether it is a Democrat or a Republican. Waiting out Obama isn’t a good strategy for Israel but it may be the only one it has available to it and will likely be rewarded with a honeymoon with the next president.

But Netanyahu isn’t the only person who will profit politically from this astonishingly crude assault on the Jewish state’s democratically elected leader.

Foreign policy is rarely a decisive factor in U.S. elections but at a time when Democrats are suffering the ill effects of Obama’s inept response to the threat from ISIS, it won’t do the president’s party any good for the administration to pick a fight with it’s sole democratic ally in the Middle East. Americans have a right to ask why an administration that was slow to react to ISIS and is intent on appeasing a murderous Islamist regime in Iran is so intent on fighting with Israel. That won’t help embattled Democrats seeking reelection in red states where evangelicals regard backing for Israel as a key issue.

Nor will it help Democrats as they head toward 2016. Though Hillary Clinton will likely run away from Obama on his attacks on Netanyahu as she has done on other foreign-policy issues, running for what will in effect be Obama’s third term will still burden her with the need to either actively oppose the president’s anti-Israel actions in the UN or détente with Iran or accept the negative political fallout of silence. Any Republican, with the exception of an isolationist like Rand Paul, will be able to exploit this issue to their advantage.

Those who worry about the damage to Israel from a lame-duck Obama administration that is seething with hatred for Netanyahu and thinks it has nothing to lose are not wrong. But Democrats will be hurt politically by a crisis that was created by Obama, not Netanyahu. They won’t be grateful to the president for having put them in this fix while Netanyahu will probably emerge from this trial strengthened at home and in a good position to repair relations with Obama’s successor.

Categories: Hamas, Iranian nukes, Israel, Palestinians, Jerusalem, Netanyahu, Obama
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The Islamization of Jerusalem

October 29, 2014

The Islamization of Jerusalem, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, October 29, 2014

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The murder of little girls like Chaya Zissel Braun does not take place in a vacuum. The Islamizers of Jerusalem gain confidence when they see that the international community stands behind their demands. In 1920, racist Muslim settler mobs in Jerusalem had chanted “Mohammed’s religion was born with the sword”, “Death to the Jews” and “the government is with us” as Muslim policemen under British colonial rule had joined with them in the rape and murder of the indigenous Jewish population.

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Chaya Zissel Braun was murdered on her first trip back from the Western Wall where the indigenous Jewish population of Israel continues to pray in the shadow of the shrine established there by the Muslim conquerors from which the racist Muslim settlers rain down rocks on the Jewish worshipers.

The three-month old baby girl died when a Muslim terrorist rammed a car into a crowd hurtling her into the air and headfirst onto the pavement. Her death did not take place in isolation. It was not caused by a tiny minority of extremists. Her blood was spilled on the street for the Islamization of Jerusalem.

The Islamization of Jerusalem is an international cause. It does not just come out of Gaza City or even Ramallah. Nor Doha or Istanbul. The politicians and diplomats of every major country demand the Islamization of Jerusalem. When they talk about a Palestinian State with its capital in Jerusalem what they are really demanding is the restoration of the Muslim ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem in 1948.

They demand it with words and boycotts, but the Muslim settlers on whose behalf they cry for the Apartheidization of Jerusalem are writing their murderous demands with the blood of little girls.

The baby girl was murdered to Islamize a city. She died as the Israeli soldiers had died reunifying Jerusalem after the Arab Legion had ethnically cleansed the Jewish population and as ordinary Jerusalemites had died at the hands of Jordanian snipers searching the city for Jewish and Christian targets. The victims of those years of Muslim occupation included Yaffa Binyamin, a 14-year-old girl sitting on the balcony of her own house, and a Christian carpenter working on the Notre Dame Convent.

Like Chaya, I was born in Jerusalem. Like Yaffa, I lived in a building targeted by Muslim snipers. But the Six Day War had ended the reign of Muslim snipers over the city. The building where my parents made their home had been cheap once because living there could mean instant death for anyone looking out of a window at the wrong time. The liberation and reunification of Jerusalem had made it a place where Jewish children could play on balconies and Christians could repair churches without being murdered.

Under Muslim occupation, while Jordanian snipers were cold-bloodedly murdering their children, the Jewish residents living under fire couldn’t so much as put up an outhouse without being reported to the UN for illegal construction. In one case a UN observer organization held four meetings to discuss an outhouse for local Jewish residents before condemning Israel for illegal construction.

It did not however condemn Jordan when one of its soldiers opened fire on a train wounding a Jewish teenage girl.

Muslim outrage over Jewish outhouses mattered more than the Muslim murder of Jewish children. It still does. Today the State Department calls the murder of that little girl a traffic incident while warning that Jews living in Jerusalem will end any possibility of peace.

Hillary Clinton spent 45 minutes shrieking at Netanyahu over the phone after a planning committee allowed new housing in Jerusalem to advance to the public comment stage, and told the media that the proposal that Jews live in a part of Jerusalem that she believes should belong to Muslims is “insulting” to the United States.

The latest firestorm exploded over seven Jewish families moving into homes that they had bought legally in an area from which Jews had been ethnically cleansed by racist Muslim violence in the twenties and thirties. Earlier the State Department and White House had warned that Israel was alienating “even its closest allies” by proposing to build houses on Airplane Hill, a place mainly known for having an Israeli plane crash there during the Six Day War that had formerly hosted temporary housing for Russian and Ethiopian immigrants.

Meanwhile when Chaya was murdered, the State Department urged “all sides to maintain calm and avoid escalating tensions in the wake of this incident.” It wasn’t as if anything important had happened. Just an Israeli-American baby murdered in pursuit of their shared goal of Islamizing Jerusalem.

Secretary of State John Kerry did not call President Abbas, the unelected president of the PLO’s Palestinian Authority, to berate him when one of his advisers called the murderer of that child a “heroic martyr”. Hillary Clinton did not come out of retirement to shriek at him over the phone when his party suggested that the killer would be receiving his 72 virgins in paradise.

If only something more important had happened than a presidential advisor to an Obama-backed terror state calling the murderer of an American child a hero; like planning for new housing “advancing”.

No one objects when Muslim settlers build houses in Jerusalem or anywhere else. But the objections pour in when the indigenous Jewish population builds so much as a house or an outhouse.

What we are talking about here is not peace, but ethnic cleansing. In 1948, the Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem to Islamize the city. Their synagogues were blown up by the Muslim occupiers. Their tombstones were used to line the roads traveled by the racist Muslim settlers.

“For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter,” Abdullah el-Talal, a commander of the Muslim invaders, had boasted. “Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible.”

In his memoirs he wrote, “I knew that the Jewish Quarter was densely populated with Jews who caused their fighters a good deal of interference and difficulty…. Only four days after our entry into Jerusalem the Jewish Quarter had become their graveyard. Death and destruction reigned over it.”

Life magazine published photos of the atrocity writing that, “Muslim censors, not only in Palestine but in   neighboring Arab countries which have major communication outlets, tried for a fortnight to keep the news from leaking out.”

The Life photographer who took the photos was sentenced to death by the Arab High Committee.

This ethnic cleansing is what Hillary Clinton and John Kerry have been defending. The Islamization of Jerusalem is the thrust of all the peace plans put forward.

The entire phony “Palestinian” narrative in which the regional Sunni Arab Muslim majority that is busy slaughtering Christians, Kurds, Shiites acts as if it’s the victim because its racist ethnic cleansing plans were frustrated when its Jewish victims fought back and won.

The Muslim occupiers have added insult to injury by pretending to be the indigenous population to aid in their attempts at displacing the indigenous Jewish population through terror and lies.

Abdullah el-Talal said, “I have seen in this defeat of the Jews the heaviest blow rendered upon them, especially in terms of morale, since they were evicted   from the Western Wall and from the Jewish Quarter, for the first time in fifteen generations.”

Every politician denouncing Jews for building houses in Jerusalem, but not Muslims doing the same thing is endorsing Abdullah’s genocidal vision and all the terrorism that goes with it.

The murder of little girls like Chaya Zissel Braun does not take place in a vacuum. The Islamizers of Jerusalem gain confidence when they see that the international community stands behind their demands. In 1920, racist Muslim settler mobs in Jerusalem had chanted “Mohammed’s religion was born with the sword”, “Death to the Jews” and “the government is with us” as Muslim policemen under British colonial rule had joined with them in the rape and murder of the indigenous Jewish population.

Too many governments still stand with those who wave the sword of Mohammed and cry death to the Jews. They encourage them, defend their agenda and issue weak rebukes when blood is spilled in the name of Islamizing Jerusalem.

Those politicians who endorse the Islamization of Jerusalem cannot escape responsibility for the crimes of the Islamizers.

Categories: Antisemitism, Apartments, Hamas, Islam, Islamic jihad, Israel, Israel, Palestinians, Jerusalem, Jewish occupation of Israel, Jews, juden ist verboten, Kerry, Netanyahu, Obama, Palestinians, Two state solution
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Huge rise in campus anti-semitism and anti-Israel activity

October 29, 2014

Huge Rise in campus anti-semitism and anti-Israel activity | Anne’s Opinions, 29th October 2014

I have documented academic anti-Israel and antisemitic activity on occasion, but my focus was more on the anti-Israel activity against Jewish and Israeli academics and institutions, including boycotts. I have not really focussed on campus antisemitism against Jewish and pro-Israel students.

It was therefore shocking, if not unexpected, to see this horrifying video produced by Jewish Voices on Campus (via Arlene Kushner):

 

Staged “checkpoint” at a campus Israel Apartheid Week event

 

Prof. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has been documenting campus antisemitism for a long time now (see here and here for example) and today links to an item similar to the video above reporting on a huge rise in campus anti-Israel activity in the US:

The Anti-Defamation League issued an important report on Monday, Oct. 27, finding a dramatic increase in anti-Israel activity, compared to last year. The ADL attributes the increase to the aftermath of the 50-day Gaza war this past summer.

According to the ADL, this fall semester there have already been 75 anti-Israel events reported on U.S. college campuses. In the same period last year, there were only 35 such events.

The problem is even more alarming than the ADL’s report suggests.

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William Jacobson, clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School and founder and publisher of the excellent blog covering legal matters, especially anti-Israel activity on campuses, Legal Insurrection, made the point:

“It is no real surprise that anti-Israel groups are trying to leverage the summer’s fighting in Gaza to their advantage on campus.

“But that is just the latest excuse for what has been a long-running campus propaganda war against Israel. If it was not Gaza it would have been something else. There are groups always looking for an excuse to attack Israel on campus,” Jacobson explained.

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METHODS OF CAMPUS ANTI-ISRAEL ACTIVITIES

Those campus anti-Israel activities include mock “Apartheid Walls” intended to represent Israel’s passive security barrier as a weapon of racism; mock checkpoints in which anti-Israel thugs act out the role of Israeli security forces intimidating, harassing and aggressively demanding identification from hapless and often helpless students who are forced into playing the role of meek and innocent Palestinian Arabs, and fake “die-ins.”

There are also the mock eviction notices slipped under the dorm room doors of students. These notices demand the students leave their rooms, pretending that the evil Israeli empire is confiscating their dwelling space. Although there is (at least now) a line usually at the bottom of the notice, informing the student that the eviction notice is not real, the level of anxiety it creates is real, as is the feeling of students having their private space violated.

These tactics, along with the Israel divestment resolutions (all of purely symbolic value as students cannot vote on how a university’s money is invested, but the platform provided to bash Israel can be deeply upsetting nonetheless) and activities promoting the boycott of, divestment from and sanctions against (BDS) movement have metastasized. In the past few years several large academic organizations have focused a great deal of time and energy on whether to boycott Israeli academic institutions.

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Jacobson, another observer in the front row, agreed with the ADL that most campuses in the U.S. do not experience problems with openly hostile anti-Israel activity. But, Jacobson explains, “that is not for lack of trying. Groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, often with the assistance and encouragement of anti-Israel faculty, have become more aggressive in the past two years.”

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By whatever standard is used, there is little doubt that the problem of orchestrated anti-Israel activity on U.S. campuses is growing and needs to be taken seriously.

And it is not a new phenomenon. As long ago as 2009, after spending two weeks on a speaking tour of North American colleges, Arab Israeli journalist Khaled abu Toameh had this to say about the anti-Israel climate on those campuses: “there is more sympathy for Hamas there than in Ramallah.”

Read the whole article for a depressing and alarming insight into what is happening in US academia.

In the UK matters are at least as bad. The Stand With Us organization does sterling work in countering academic boycotts, BDS in general, and defending Israel in various forums. Of course many individuals (e.g. Ronnie Fraser) have confronted anti-Israel boycott proposals by teachers’ unions like the UCU, often to the detriment of their own career.

A scene from Manchester’s Say No to Anti-Semitism rally on Sunday, October 19,2014. (Mike Poloway)

 

Now there is more trouble afoot Britain, this time for Jewish students in Manchester, as they have to contend with a vote to continue twinning Manchester University with the “Hamas greenhouse”, An-Najah University in Shechem (Nablus):

Even by the standards of British student politics, the campus-wide vote due to take place from October 24-31 at the University of Manchester is most questionable and controversial.

The proposal being put to vote is to renew the university student union’s twinning partnership with An-Najah National University in Nablus, a place called by Hamas “a greenhouse for martyrs.”

According to Jewish watchdog organization the Anti-Defamation League, “the student council of An-Najah is known for its advocacy of anti-Israel violence and its recruitment of Palestinian college students into terrorist groups. The council, almost completely controlled by factions loyal to Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah, glorifies suicide bombings and propagandizes for jihad against Israel.”

Unsurprisingly, students connected with Manchester’s Jewish society oppose the motion.

In London’s Jewish News, James Graham wrote that he and other Jewish students supported the proposal’s motion to bring a student from a Palestinian university to study in Manchester.

“What we as a J-Soc [Jewish student union] were opposed to is the twinning with An-Najah, an institution with links to Hamas and that has publicly called for the annihilation of the Jewish people. Instead we were in favor of a three-way relationship between Manchester, an Israeli university and an alternative Palestinian one,” Graham wrote.

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What is witnessed in wider society is not reflected proportionally on campus, but rather boiled down and concentrated. Organized student politics, as a result, can appear radical or extreme on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The current campus clashes began, in fact, before students returned to classes in late September and early October. In early August, during Operation Protective Edge, the National Executive Committee of the National Union of Students (NUS) voted in favor of a motion to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.

The NUS – a national confederation of 600 student unions in Britain representing the interests of more than seven million students – backed 23 votes to 18 to commit itself to “ensuring that, as far as is practical, NUS does not employ or work with companies identified as facilitating Israel’s military capacity, human rights abuses or illegal settlement activity, and to actively work to cut ties with those that do,” a spokesperson said at the time.

But the motion went further than that. Support for BDS was tagged to a motion which condemned “Israel’s attacks on Gaza” and “the collective punishment and killing in Gaza,” and backed calls to lift the blockade on the Strip. It also beseeched the British government to cease aid and funding to Israel and impose an arms embargo against Israel,according to Cherwell, a student newspaper of Oxford University.

Anti-Israel demonstration in London during the Gaza war summer 2014

 

This would not be in the NUS’ only intervention in the Middle East. Earlier this month, the National Executive Committee blocked a motion to “condemn the IS and support the Kurdish forces fighting against it, while expressing no confidence or trust in the US military intervention” and “campaign in solidarity with the Iraqi people and in particular support the hard-pressed student, workers’ and women’s organizations against all the competing nationalist and religious-right forces.”

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Decisions such as these — condemning Israel, but not Islamic extremists — have set a tone for political activity in other students’ unions across the country. At Goldsmiths, University of London, the students’ union voted down a motion to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, among other anniversaries of genocides and atrocities in Europe, including the Armenian genocide. The motion read in part:

The Student Union recognizes the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, of the other genocides, of totalitarianism and racial hatred. It further recognizes that commemorating the victims of genocide, racial hatred and totalitarianism, and promoting public awareness of these crimes against humanity, is essential to sustaining and defending democratic culture and civil society, especially in the face of a resurgence of neo-fascism, racial hatred and neo-Stalinism across Europe.

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Meanwhile at Cambridge…

At the University of Cambridge, a collective of doctors and professors put their names to a September 28 statement which demanded an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip and “a more far-reaching justice for the Palestinian people, including the displaced refugees.” This change, they argued, “without an end to the violence perpetrated by the State of Israel against Palestinians, an end to the siege of Gaza and to the occupation, and an end to the discriminatory and dehumanizing treatment of Palestinian citizens within Israel.”

Students at the university connected to the Israel Society issued a counter-letter, condemning the academics for “demonstrating a severe lack of nuance surrounding the complexity of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and for issuing an un-academic statement that achieves little save establishing the desire to discriminate against a sole nationality.”

The original letter, however, asserted that Israel “singles itself out” for criticism “through its claims to moral impeccability, its celebrated status as a democracy, through its receipt of massive support from the US and other nations, and through its abuse of the memory of the Holocaust in order to deflect criticism and to discredit the Palestinian struggle.”

Joshua Gertner, co-president of Cambridge’s Israel Society and one of the authors of the counter-letter, told The Times of Israel, “This eye-opening letter from the student body rightly highlights the lack of nuance from these Cambridge academics in their strikingly un-academic torrent of criticism leveled at Israel. It was very important to send a strong message that their unhelpful and misguided sentiment is not blindly accepted by their students.”

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In explaining this raft of extremely politicized decisions by the NUS and other students’ unions, Daniel Cooper – one of the co-sponsors of the motion to condemn ISIS – argued that “there is a stranglehold of ‘identity politics’ on the student movement.” He added that “the idea is widespread that if a Liberation Officer opposes something, it must be bad.”

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Some “appear not to research issues, work out what they think, engage and take ideas forward. Instead, some are not very interested and vote on basis of who they want to ally with.

In other words many British students are dimwits who vote with their emotions without studying the facts first. Exactly how a university student should NOT behave in fact.

However it is not all bad news, though the good news are few and far between.

The President of Liege University in Belgium condemned an antisemitic invitation to an anti-Israel student event and demanded that it be cancelled:

The president of the University of Liege in Belgium said he was “appalled” at philosophy students for staging a mock Gaza-themed initiation ritual of newcomers.

The invitation to the event, scheduled for Tuesday, was couched in an anti-Semitic language, reading ‘’your goal is to avoid the big bad Jew,” according to the European Jewish Press..

…

University’s president Albert Corhay demanded the cancellation of the event and added that students involved will be summoned in the coming days.

In a statement, the Union of Jewish Students in Belgium declared: “The student body has a tradition of humorous initiations. Here, however, we are dealing with something else: a Manichaean and anti-Semitic vision of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Kol hakavod to Mr. Corhay for having the courage to stand up to these bigots and for imposing a modicum of decency in his university. If only British deans adn professors woudl act likewise.

In New York too, a boycott motion was defeated at CUNY by the Doctoral Students Council:

On Friday afternoon, the Doctoral Students Council of the City University of New York (CUNY) once again considered a hateful resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

After the same measure was defeated by 41 votes last month, this destructive and divisive resolution once again reared its ugly head. For a second time, the resolution failed to win passage, receiving 31 out of a required 39 votes.

The hypocrites who promoted the resolution are part of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. This well-funded and increasingly organized campaign seeks to isolate, demonize, and ultimately destroy the Jewish state of Israel.

The resolution’s backers claimed they were promoting justice and human rights, that they were seeking sovereignty and freedom for the Palestinian people, that they are trying to end the “occupation.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

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Sensible students and faculty at CUNY organized to stand up for academic freedom and moral integrity by helping defeat this resolution. They were supported by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, StandWithUs, The Third Narrative, The Israel Project, and an on-site rapid response team from Israel on Campus Coalition.

Kol hakavod to all the students and the pro-Israel advocacy groups who supported them in their tireless efforts to defeat this bigoted motion.

Unfortunately, as we have seen in the above article, being defeated once, or even twice, is not enough to deter the bigots and Jew-haters. I’m sure they will raise their ugly heads again in further boycott attempts and anti-Jewish events. We all have to stand guard and give support to the Jewish students and faculty.

Categories: Antisemitism
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IDF Northern Cdr.: ‘Hezbollah Likely Has Tunnels’

October 29, 2014

IDF Northern Commander: ‘Hezbollah Likely Has Terror Tunnels’After playing down threat, IDF acknowledges likelihood of attack tunnels from Lebanon, warning ‘can’t use Iron Dome there.’

By Ari Yashar

First Publish: 10/29/2014, 2:08 PM

via IDF Northern Cdr.: ‘Hezbollah Likely Has Tunnels’ – Defense/Security – News – Arutz Sheva.

 

Hezbollah terrorists (file)

Hezbollah terrorists (file)
Reuters

A senior IDF commander on Wednesday acknowledged to Galei Tzahal (IDF Radio) that the Iran-proxy terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon has likely dug terror tunnels into Israel.

IDF Northern Commander Maj. Gen. Yair Golan equivocated by noting on Hamas’s use of terror tunnels, saying “we have no positive information meaning that there are tunnels. The situation is not similar to what there was around the Gaza Strip,” reports Reuters.

“That said, this idea of going below ground is not foreign to Lebanon and is not foreign to Hezbollah and so we have to suppose as a working assumption that there are tunnels. These have to be looked for and prepared for,” revealed Golan.

Golan in August responded to northern citizens, who reported hearing digging sounds under their homes and seeing cement mixers and construction trucks carting out earth on the Lebanese side under the cover of greenhouse structures, by saying the IDF hadn’t found Hezbollah terror tunnels – yet.

While the IDF has been playing down the northern tunnel threat, IDF sources have reported to Arutz Sheva that the army is covertly conducting an investigation of the threat.

The usage of similar attack tunnels by Syrian rebels in their fight against President Bashar Assad in rocky terrain similar to that found along the Israeli-Lebanese border has proven the feasibility of a Hezbollah tunnel attack.

“We won’t be able to use Iron Dome”

Golan warned that with Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal – thought to be ten times more powerful than that of Hamas – and the high elevations and inclinations, “we will not be able to provide the umbrella that was provided in the south by Iron Dome.”

“We and Hezbollah are conducting a kind of mutual-deterrence balance. There is no absolute deterrence. Each side has its pain threshold, its restraint threshold, which when passed prompt it to take action,” assessed Golan.

The statements comes after Hezbollah terrorists wounded two IDF soldiers earlier in the month with explosives set along the border. Security sources warned Israel may be in danger of “losing control” of the Lebanese border, after one IDF source caused a panic last month by warning Hezbollah could hypothetically invade parts of the Galilee for “several hours.”

While Israel this month asked the UN to demand the disarmament of Hezbollah following the explosive attack, instead, a UN envoy met with Hezbollah’s deputy leader.

American and Arab officials likewise revealed this week that US President Barack Obama’s administration has been cozying up to Hezbollah, along with Iran and Hamas, by providing intelligence information and using backdoor communication channels.

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Israeli cells could save US from nuclear health disaster

October 29, 2014

Israeli cells could save US from nuclear health disaster

Pluristem’s off-the-shelf placenta-based cell therapies are being tested by a top US agency – just in case

By David Shamah October 27, 2014, 6:57 pm

via Israeli cells could save US from nuclear health disaster | The Times of Israel.

 

Pluristem workers process placenta for the company's cell-based therapy products (Photo credit: Courtesy)

Pluristem workers process placenta for the company’s cell-based therapy products (Photo credit: Courtesy)

 

In the event of a nuclear catastrophe in the US, Israeli technology will stand ready to save millions of lives. Haifa-based Pluristem Therapeutics has been working for the past eight months with the US National Institutes of Health on developing a treatment for acute radiation syndrome (ARS) – the mass destruction of tissues and cells caused by exposure to high levels of radiation, like from a bomb or a nuclear accident.

In tests conducted in Israel and the US, animals, most of them mice, were subjected to total-body irradiation, then injected with human cytokines. They showed significantly increased survival rates when treated with Pluristem’s PLX-RAD cells. The treatment actually reversed the effects of radiation disease to a great extent, a development once thought impossible.

The reversal just one of the near-miraculous things that Pluristem’s technology is capable of, said Zami Aberman, chairman and CEO. It’s based on harvesting cells from human placenta.  On a special tour of “the cleanest room in Israel” — a highly secure area where bioreactors “cook up” therapeutic cell products using human placental cells harvested from donated placentas – Aberman described the benefits of using what until just a few years ago had been considered “dead waste” by scientists.

“I come from an engineering background, not a medical background, so maybe that’s why I was less hesitant to go ahead with placenta-based cell development,” said Aberman. “Everyone said it couldn’t be done, but they were wrong, obviously.”

While there are many companies today harvesting human cells, like stem cells, to develop therapeutic products, Pluristem was the first and still one of the only companies doing that by harvesting from placenta. “Usually, you need a genetic match, or at least tissue compatibility, in order to use cells for therapeutic purposes,” Aberman said. “As we know from organ transplants, the body often rejects outside material. But placenta is the only place in nature where an outside organism – a fetus – is able to co-exist with the body without triggering a reaction,” like the release of antibodies. Placenta is the point of connection between mother and fetus, and thus, logically, would be the material that was most “tolerant.”

 

Zami Aberman (Photo credit: Courtesy)

 

That was the theory in 2006, when the company was first established, and the theory had been confirmed many times over. Over the past several years, animal placenta, especially from horses, has been used by alternative physicians to treat sports injuries. Placenta, according to researchers, enhances cell repair and speeds up the healing process significantly. Using human placenta because it is more compatible with the human genome, Pluristem processes and enhances the cells, using proprietary methods inside a bioreactor created by the company. The result, said Aberman, is “a drug delivery platform that releases a cocktail of therapeutic proteins in response to a host of local and systemic inflammatory and ischemic diseases.”

Perhaps the most important aspect of Pluristem’s technology is what could be called its “business side.” Instead of manufacturing cells for specific purposes, the company creates “generic” cells, an “off-the-shelf” product that can later be processed for whatever is needed. The cells, stored in deep freeze (minus 200 degrees Celsius), have a shelf life of at least two years. Aberman believes they could last even longer. Pluristem creates what Aberman calls a 3D micro-environment that matches the “challenging and cultures conditions” of a specific health issue – such as conditions for an injury, arteriosclerosis, or massive cell injury due to radiation sickness – and the placenta-based cells adjust themselves to the conditions, and significantly enhance the repair process, he said.

How does it work? According to Pluristem researchers, the placenta contains mesenchymal-like adherent stromal cells, which have been found by researchers to have significant therapeutic potential. The cells promote tissue repair, possibly by secreting biologically active substances, including cytokines, that modulate immune response, along with factors that enhance the growth of blood vessels. These cells stimulate the body’s own mechanisms to heal damaged tissues. Because placental cells themselves are immunoprivileged, meaning that they do not elicit an immunological response from the body, as other cells do, they can be used freely for any purpose without requiring tissue matching.

Pluristem “harvests” the placenta from a hospital in northern Israel, where it is donated by women undergoing caesarean section births. The births are planned in advance, allowing the company to set up the equipment needed to ensure that the placenta is still living and not contaminated by the environment. It is then rushed to Pluristem’s facility, where it is processed into PLX (PLacental eXpanded) cells, for use in a variety of applications.

The company has conducted dozens of tests showing the efficacy of its solution – including several on animals that showed a significant improvement in cases of radiation sickness. According to one of the studies, mice showed a four-fold increase in their survival rate, accompanied by a corresponding weight regain, and a large increase in blood cell count when treated with Pluristem PLX cells. Other tests have shown how injuries to limbs repair themselves much faster, even among individuals with severe injuries, arteriosclerosis, and other serious conditions.

The US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), has been conducting its own study on how Pluristem’s technology could be useful to humans in the event of mass nuclear destruction. According to Aberman, the agency has been very positive about the results, to the extent that along with Pluristem, it has already developed a plan for the creation, delivery, and deployment of millions of doses of PLX-based radiation treatments.

Radiation sickness induces a wide variety of health effects which occur within several days to months after exposure to high doses of ionizing radiation from a nuclear event, such as a nuclear power plant accident. Especially affected is bone marrow. Its deterioration leads to severe anemia, hemorrhages and failure of the immune system. PLX cells can handle bone marrow issues as well, said Prof. Raphael Gorodetsky, lead investigator of the study and head of the Biotechnology and Radiobiology Laboratory at the Sharett Institute of Oncology at Hadassah, Hebrew University Medical Center, where several of the Pluristem tests have taken place.

“Following preclinical studies using Pluristem’s placental derived cells, we found that these placenta cells have the ability to potentially increase the survival rate of animals following exposure to lethal doses of total body irradiation,” he said. “The higher survival rate of the PLX treated animals, compared to the control group, is accompanied with better hematological profile, as reflected by the increase of all the cell lines of the hematopoietic system and in the blood hemoglobin levels. These findings substantially strengthen the hypothesis that Pluristem’s placenta-derived cells could potentially be used to reduce complications associated with life threatening ARS.”

Why stop at radiation disease? Aberman said the company does not intend to. Pluristem’s development plan for the PLX-RAD cells considers numerous potential clinical indications such as enhancement of engraftment of transplanted hematopoietic stem cells for the treatment of bone marrow deficiency, which can result from immune system disorders, genetic diseases, and treatment of leukemia and other blood cancers, as well as treatment of bone marrow deficiency in patients who have undergone chemotherapy.

“We’ve just completed a two-year development cycle for our PLX-RAD cells and have also developed new manufacturing equipment, methods and know-how. We believe that our state-of-the-art technology platform can be used to create additional cell products from the placenta, tailored to potentially deliver targeted treatments for a variety of new indications,” said Aberman. “Our technology platform, robust manufacturing capabilities and broad IP portfolio open the door for potential institutional and commercial partners, and we’re pleased with the level of interest we have received in our technology platform. Pluristem is in a unique position to be a leader in the cell therapy industry.”

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Obama, Not Bibi, Created U.S.-Israel Crisis « Commentary Magazine

October 29, 2014

Obama, Not Bibi, Created U.S.-Israel Crisis « Commentary Magazine.

| @tobincommentary 10.28.2014 – 7:10 PM

Since Barack Obama became president, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has been a reliable indicator of administration opinion about foreign-policy issues. Like some other journalists who can be counted on to support the president, he has been the recipient of some juicy leaks, especially when the White House wants to trash Israel’s government.

But Goldberg and his “senior administration sources” reached a new low today when he published a piece in which those anonymous figures labeled Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu a “chickenshit” and a “coward.” The remarks are clearly not so much a warning to the Israelis to stop complaining about the U.S. push for appeasement of a nuclear Iran and the administration’s clueless approach to the conflict with the Palestinians. Rather the story is, as Goldberg rightly characterizes it, a genuine crisis in the relationship.

That much is plain but where Goldberg and the talkative administration members are wrong is their belief that this is all Netanyahu’s fault. Their attacks on him are not only plainly false but are motivated by a desire to find an excuse that will be used to justify a drastic turn in U.S. foreign policy against Israel.

The administration critique of Netanyahu as a coward stems from its disgust with his failure to make peace with the Palestinians as well as their impatience with his criticisms of their zeal for a deal with Iran even if it means allowing the Islamist regime to become a threshold nuclear power. But this is about more than policy. The prickly Netanyahu is well known to be a tough guy to like personally even if you are one of his allies. But President Obama and his foreign-policy team aren’t just annoyed by the prime minister. They’ve come to view him as public enemy No. 1, using language about him and giving assessments of his policies that are far harsher than they have ever used against even avowed enemies of the United States, let alone one of its closest allies.

So rather than merely chide him for caution they call him a coward and taunt him for being reluctant to make war on Hamas and even to launch a strike on Iran. They don’t merely castigate him as a small-time politician without vision; they accuse him of putting his political survival above the interests of his nation.

It’s quite an indictment but once you get beyond the personal dislike of the individual on the part of the president, Secretary of State Kerry, and any other “senior officials” that speak without attribution on the subject of Israel’s prime minister, all you have is a thin veil of invective covering up six years of Obama administration failures in the Middle East that have the region more dangerous for both Israel and the United States. For all of his personal failings, it is not Netanyahu—a man who actually served as a combat soldier under fire in his country’s most elite commando unit—who is a coward or a small-minded failure. It is Obama and Kerry who have fecklessly sabotaged a special relationship, an act whose consequences have already led to disaster and bloodshed and may yet bring worse in their final two years of power.

It was, after all, Obama (and in the last two years, Kerry) who has spent his time in office picking pointless fights with Israel over issues like settlements and Jerusalem. They were pointless not because there aren’t genuine disagreements between the two countries on the ideal terms for peace. But rather because the Palestinians have never, despite the administration’s best efforts to tilt the diplomatic playing field in their favor, seized the chance for peace. No matter how much Obama praises Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and slights Netanyahu, the former has never been willing to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders would be drawn. They also chose to launch a peace process in spite of the fact that the Palestinians remain divided between Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas-ruled Gaza, a situation that makes it impossible for the PA to make peace even if it wanted to do so. The result of their heedless push for negotiations that were bound to fail was another round of violence this summer and the possibility of another terrorist intifada in the West Bank.

On Iran, it has not been Netanyahu’s bluffing about a strike that is the problem but Obama’s policies. Despite good rhetoric about stopping Tehran’s push for a nuke, the president has pursued a policy of appeasement that caused it to discard its significant military and economic leverage and accept a weak interim deal that began the process of unraveling the international sanctions that represented the best chance for a solution without the use of force.

Even faithful Obama supporter Goldberg understands that it would be madness for Israel to withdraw from more territory and replicate the Gaza terror experiment in the West Bank. He also worries that the administration is making a “weak” Iran deal even though he may be the only person on the planet who actually thinks Obama would use force to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon.

So why is the administration so angry with Netanyahu? It can’t be because Netanyahu is preventing peace with the Palestinians. After the failure of Kerry’s fool’s errand negotiations and the Hamas missile war on Israel, not even Obama can think peace is at hand. Nor does he really think Netanyahu can stop him from appeasing Iran if Tehran is willing to sign even a weak deal.

The real reason to target Netanyahu is that it is easier to scapegoat the Israelis than to own up to the administration’s mistakes. Rather than usher in a new era of good feelings with the Arab world in keeping with his 2009 Cairo speech, Obama has been the author of policies that have left an already messy Middle East far more dangerous. Rather than ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his decision to withdraw U.S. troops and to dither over the crisis in Syria led to more conflict and the rise of ISIS. Instead of ending the Iranian nuclear threat, Obama is on the road to enabling it. And rather than manage an Israeli-Palestinian standoff that no serious person thought was on the verge of resolution, Obama made things worse with his and Kerry’s hubristic initiatives and constant bickering with Israel.

Despite the administration’s insults, it is not Netanyahu who is weak. He has shown great courage and good judgment in defending his country’s interests even as Obama has encouraged the Palestinians to believe they can hold out for even more unrealistic terms while denying Israel the ammunition it needed to fight Hamas terrorists. While we don’t know whether, as Goldberg believes, it is too late for Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, it is Obama that Iran considers weak as it plays U.S. negotiators for suckers in the firm belief that the U.S. is a paper tiger that is not to be feared any longer.

If there is a crisis, it is one that was created by Obama’s failures and inability to grasp that his ideological prejudices were out of touch with Middle East realities.

The next two years may well see, as Goldberg ominously predicts, even more actions by the administration to downgrade the alliance with Israel. But the blame for this will belong to a president who has never been comfortable with Israel and who has, at every conceivable opportunity, sought conflict with it even though doing so did not advance U.S. interests or the cause of peace. No insult directed at Netanyahu, no matter how crude or pointless, can cover up the president’s record of failure.

 

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U.S.  Judge Shields Palestinian Terrorists from Scrutiny

October 29, 2014

U.S. Judge Shields Palestinian Terrorists from Scrutiny

New York judge keeps key docs on terrorist salaries under seal

BY:
October 29, 2014 5:00 am

via U.S.  Judge Shields Palestinian Terrorists from Scrutiny | Washington Free Beacon.

 

Reporters are taking legal action to force a U.S. District Court to publicly disclose secret documents that are believed to provide new details about payments made to terrorists by the Palestinian government, according to court documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Lawyers have been fighting for months to force a U.S. District Court in New York to unseal scores of documents and testimony that allegedly detail how the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) has been paying salaries to convicted terrorists.

The sealed documents were submitted to the court as part of a 2004 lawsuit brought by terrorism victims seeking damages from the PLO as a result of their attacks on Israel.

The victims’ lawyers have argued for months that the documents in question play a critical role in establishing the PLO’s culpability and should be released to the public.

However, Judge George B. Daniels has rejected this request on the basis that the documents may reveal personal information about purported terrorists and potentially “undermine” the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) interests, according to court documents.

As the case drags on, several reporters filed a motion on Monday to intervene in the case and force the court to unseal the sealed documents.

Investigative reporters Sharyl Attkisson, Steve Emerson, and Edwin Black jointly filed the motion announcing their intent to pursue intervention in the case with a motion meant to compel the “unsealing [of] certain judicial documents,” according to court documents obtained by the Free Beacon.

Atkinson is a former CBS reporter who has said she faced a backlash from the Obama administration for her stories, Emerson is an author and executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), and Black is an author and columnist known for his exposés on Palestinian terrorism against Israel.

The reporters assert in multiple briefs that the public has a right to see the court documents detailing the Palestinian government’s alleged financial support of terrorists.

“We’re confident that the court will take this motion very seriously because it’s based on well-established constitutional law,” Ronald Coleman, a lawyer representing the reporters told the Free Beacon on Tuesday. “The legal standards mandating public access to public judicial proceedings are applied strictly in matters of public concern. And this litigation is certainly such a case.”

In March, lawyers from the firm Miller and Chevalier, which is representing the PLO and PA against the terrorism charges, moved to put 57 documents and 51 pages of testimony under court seal.

They argued that public revelation of the evidence could compromise “law enforcement” interests and disclose “private third-party information,” according to court documents.

The lawyers representing the terror victims countered that the documents in question are critical and that “limited redactions” could effectively ensure that personal information is protected.

“The Court should not permit defendants to hide the overwhelming evidence of their deep involvement in a relentless terrorism campaign,” the plaintiff’s lawyer Kent Yalowitz wrote in a partially redacted March 27 letter to Judge Daniels.

Much of the information being kept secret is said to reveal employment records for Palestinian security officials who are on the government’s official payroll as a result of terror acts they carried out, according to court testimony.

Others reveal how much money the PLO and PA are paying “convicted terrorists on a month-by-month basis,” Yalowitz explained during an April court hearing about the order to seal the documents.

Some of the other sealed documents that the defense maintains is privileged include information relating to “suicide terrorists,” details of promotions given to suspected terrorists, and certain arrest records, court documents show.

The information, Yalowitz maintained, goes “to the merits of defendants’ liability in this case” and proves that the PLO and PA’s “support of terrorism.”

While the Palestinian government’s lawyers maintain that “the specific amount of each payment” to alleged terrorists “reflects private information” that should not be publicly disclosed, Yalowitz maintains that the law does not allow for this.

“The fact that defendants pay generous salaries to convicted terrorists is not confidential,” Yalowitz wrote in his letter.

The court ultimately rejected these arguments and sided with the Palestinian government’s request to seal the documents and keep them from public view.

The decision to keep the information private is what prompted Monday’s action by Attkinsson, Emerson, and Black calling for intervention in the case.

The reporters maintain that “there is no legal basis for maintaining a cloak of secrecy over the contents of public filings in this litigation to which the press and public are presumptively entitled access,” according to court filings made this week on their behalf.

They claim that given the case’s global implications, the public has a right to view the information under seal.

“Given the nature of the litigation and the documents involved, there is substantial reason to believe that the information thus freed from improper occlusion would reveal an unlawful, pernicious, and murderous system established and organized by the defendant to reward or ‘compensate’ the families of suicide bombers and other self-styled Palestinian ‘martyrs,’” they write in their memorandum to the court.

Past reports issued by the Israeli government and others have revealed that Palestinian terrorists can receive monthly stipends of up to $3,500 and grants of up to $25,000.

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US anger at Netanyahu said ‘red-hot’ as ties hit new low

October 29, 2014

US anger at Netanyahu said ‘red-hot’ as ties hit new low

As Israel’s relationship with its critical ally enters ‘full-blown crisis,’ The Atlantic reports, senior American officials refer to Israeli PM as a ‘chickenshit,’ hell-bent on career preservation

By Times of Israel staff October 29, 2014, 1:30 am

via US anger at Netanyahu said ‘red-hot’ as ties hit new low | The Times of Israel.

 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, and President Barack Obama embrace at a ceremony welcoming the US leader at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, on March 20, 2013 (photo credit: Miriam Alster/Flash90)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, and President Barack Obama embrace at a ceremony welcoming the US leader at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, on March 20, 2013 (photo credit: Miriam Alster/Flash90)

American anger at the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “red hot” and the relationship between Israel and the US is now in a “full-blown crisis,” The Atlantic reported Tuesday.

The piece, by Jeffrey Goldberg, observed the extraordinarily harsh tone now used in increasingly regular and open fashion by Obama administration officials in reference to Jerusalem leaders, chiefly among them Netanyahu. One senior administration official was quoted by the publication as calling the Israeli prime minister “a chickenshit,” referring to what he saw as the premier’s pandering to his political base for fear of electoral defeat, his refusal to make any diplomatic headway with the Palestinians and moderate Arab states, and his fear of initiating wars.

US officials increasingly see the Israeli leader as acting out of a “near-pathological desire for career-preservation” and not much more, the article claimed.

“The good thing about Netanyahu is that he’s scared to launch wars,” the senior official said, referring to the prime minister’s ongoing — but so far unrealized — threats to strike Iran to stop its nuclear program. “The bad thing about him is that he won’t do anything to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arab states. The only thing he’s interested in is protecting himself from political defeat.

“He’s not [Yitzhak] Rabin, he’s not [Ariel] Sharon, he’s certainly no [Menachem] Begin. He’s got no guts.”

Diplomatic rhetoric has heated up in recent days as the US used strong terms to condemn Netanyahu’s Monday approval for a thousand new homes in Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. State Department Spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Israel’s continued building across the Green Line was “incompatible with their stated desire to live in a peaceful society.”

But Netanyahu rebuffed the criticism from American, European and Palestinian leaders.

“We have built in Jerusalem, we are building in Jerusalem and we will continue to build in Jerusalem,” Netanyahu said. “I have heard a claim that our construction in Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem makes peace more distant. It is the criticism which is making peace more distant.”

But while Netanyahu’s “recalcitrance” has long frustrated Washington, Goldberg wrote, it is his apparent contempt and open derision for American leaders that has sparked fury there. According to the piece, Netanyahu has told several sources that he has “written off” the Obama administration and, should the US finalize a deal with Iran that is not to Israel’s liking, will bypass the White House and speak directly to Congress and the American public against such a deal.

Goldberg observed that the relationship between Obama, Netanyahu and their respective cabinets was “the worst it’s ever been, and it stands to get significantly worse after the November midterm elections,” at which point, the piece claimed, the Obama administration may remove its gloves and stop protecting Israel at the UN. While Washington is likely to continue opposing any unilateral Palestinian statehood bid, it may help draft an anti-settlement resolution, the article suggested, which would be catastrophic for Israel’s international standing.

Riffing on Netanyahu’s statements that US strong criticism of East Jerusalem construction was “disconnected from reality,” Goldberg asserted that, on the verge of a third Palestinian uprising and facing increasing international isolation in its defiance of world opinion, it is “the Netanyahu government that appears to be disconnected from reality.” He also called the Israeli right’s message of “the whole world is against us. Only we can protect Israel” disastrous for Israel’s standing as a US ally.

On the issue of Iran and the possibility of a preventative Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities, another US official quoted in the article said it was now too late for Israel to take action and Washington no longer believed it would attempt to do so.

““It’s too late for [Netanyahu] to do anything,” the official said. “Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.”

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Obama Admin Finally Identifies Its Real Middle East Enemy: Israel

October 29, 2014

Obama Admin Finally Identifies Its Real Middle East Enemy: Israel.

Obama Administration Finally Identifies The Middle East’s Biggest Problem:Israel

October 29, 2014 By

The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg has written a piece detailing the deteriorating relationship between Israel and the Obama administration. The chief purpose of Goldberg’s piece is to humiliate Benjamin Netanyahu. None of this is especially shocking, considering the antagonism the administration has shown towards the Jewish State from the start. It’s the sort of antipathy Goldberg identified as Jewish paranoia back in 2008.

Goldberg begins his piece with the following:

The other day I was talking to a senior Obama administration official about the foreign leader who seems to frustrate the White House and the State Department the most. ‘The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,’ this official said, referring to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, by his nickname.

Most people have focused on the name-calling, and Goldberg keeps a list of pejoratives used by U.S. officials to describe Netanyahu, including “aspergery.” On that front, it’s worth noting that the person being repeatedly being called “chickenshit” by an anonymous officials volunteered for the Israeli Defense Force, saw combat, and was the leader of an elite special-forces unit deployed on numerous missions, including the freeing of hijacked Sabena Flight in 1972, where he was shot. Granted, this might not be as courageous as hopping the Amtrak from Delaware to DC each day or rallying the troops at a fundraiser in Greenwich, but God knows we can’t all be heroes.

Is Netanyahu a political coward? Perhaps. But not for any of the reasons offered by the administration. Is he arrogant? I’m sure he is. Is being anti-Netanyahu tantamount to being anti-Israel? Well, no. Though it’s certainly fair to point out that the administration’s public demeaning of an ally’s elected leader—almost certainly with the blessing of higher ups—is nearly unheard of.

But you know what is unmistakably anti-Israel? Gloating over how the United States has strong-armed Israel into living with a nuclear Iran, which seems like significant news to me:

This official agreed that Netanyahu is a ‘chickenshit’ on matters related to the comatose peace process, but added that he’s also a ‘coward’ on the issue of Iran’s nuclear threat. The official said the Obama administration no longer believes that Netanyahu would launch a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in order to keep the regime in Tehran from building an atomic arsenal. ‘It’s too late for him to do anything. Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.’

At the United Nations a few years, Obama reportedly offered to do whatever it took to prevent Iran from producing atomic weapons in exchange for Israeli assurances that it would not attack Iran’s nuclear sites before the presidential election in 2012. (And to think, Obama officials have the audacity to whine about Netanyahu’s “near-pathological desire for career-preservation.”) One side kept its promise. Obama has repeatedly vowed, since his first run for president, to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Maybe that promise that never should have been made. Now, though, the administration claims it’s too late. Now it claims American pressure helped dissuade Israel from defending itself. And now, there is nothing Israel can do about it.

Knowing this, why anyone would expect Israel to trust John Kerry or Barack Obama to forge a peace deal with a Fatah-Hamas unity government is a mystery.

Israel isn’t completely innocent in this mess, of course. Cabinet member Moshe Ya’alon, for instance, was quoted referring to Kerry as “obsessive and messianic” earlier this year. But Ya’alon has since apologized a number of times. But earlier this month Ya’alon was in Washington—the defense minister of our closest ally in the Middle East—and his requests to meet with senior members of the Obama administration were declined. The administration waited until the visit ended before leaking the snub to humiliate the Israeli defense minister. It’s the sort of thing that’s been going on since 2008.

So what happens next? Well, considering his access, when Goldberg “imagines” what’s coming, I imagine someone in the know told him what to imagine. So, if Abbas asks for recognition of Palestine in the United Nations, as he’s expected to do again, the United States will likely block the initiative in the Security Council. But, as Goldberg notes, the Obama administration may also participate in a “stridently anti-settlement resolution” that would isolate Israel from the international community and pressure it to create a judenfrei West Bank and an indefensible Jerusalem.

Now, that would be anti-Israel, too.

Netanyahu, and the even more hawkish ministers around him, seem to have decided that their short-term political futures rest on a platform that can be boiled down to this formula: ‘The whole world is against us. Only we can protect Israel from what’s coming.’ For an Israeli public traumatized by Hamas violence and anti-Semitism, and by fear that the chaos and brutality of the Arab world will one day sweep over them, this formula has its charms. But for Israel’s future as an ally of the United States, this formula is a disaster.

Not really. It’s unlikely we’re going to elect another president driven by a similarly hostile inclination towards Israel. Maybe the American public will turn on Israel at some point, but that point isn’t here yet. Even if it were, one imagines that any Israel government, Left or Right, would have to take its chances alone rather than participate in setting up another mini terror state on its border.

It must be very frustrating to believe that a nation acts in its own best interests rather than the interests of an American political party. Despite Bibi’s assurances that he wouldn’t mess with the president’s 2012 campaign, it is he, out of all the leaders in the all the world, who frustrates Obama most. Not Russian autocrats who invade sovereign nations. Not genocidal Arab dictators. Netanyahu. I forget which sycophantic liberal pundit pointed out on Twitter that this makes sense since we’re prone to be frustrated more by our friends than our enemies. For that to be true, one would have to accept the dubious notion that the president ever considered Israel a “friend” in any special sense.

Is there any other friend treated similarly? Trust me, you’re never going to hear a senior State Department official refer to Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan as a chickenshit theocrat. In fact, when the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, both friends of ours in the Middle East, were justifiably called out by Joe Biden for their roles in helping to strengthen the Islamic State, the vice president was quickly dispatched to ask for forgiveness from both the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Turkish President Erdogan. Apologize to the leader of Turkey. Call the leader of Israel a coward. That about encapsulates American foreign policy the past few years.

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Report: US, Iran entered state of ‘detente’, facing common Islamic State enemy

October 29, 2014

Report: US, Iran entered state of ‘detente’, facing common Islamic State ene… – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Wall Street Journal says Washington has reassured Tehran that strikes on IS fighters in Syria will not be used to oust Assad.

Yitzhak Benhorin

The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday quoted senior US and Arab officials as saying that the Obama administration and Iran “have moved into an effective state of détente over the past year”, as they hold direct nuclear talks and face a common threat from the Islamic State.

The report comes a day after The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, long considered close to the Obama administration, claimed that a US official had called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a coward” on tackling Iran’s nuclear program, despite his frequent rhetoric on the issue.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the officials say that “recent months have ushered in a change as the two countries have grown into alignment on a spectrum of causes”, at the forefront of which are “peaceful political transitions” in Iraq and Afghanistan, tackling the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

US officials also told the paper that the US has clarified to Iran that ongoing strikes against Islamic State targets in Syria will not also target forces belonging to Syrian President Bashar Assad, a long-standing Iranian ally who is currently battling opposition fighters – including Islamic State – inside his country.

Furthermore, the report claims, the White House has “markedly softened its confrontational stance” toward Iranian allies Hamas, which fought Israel in a 50-day conflict over the summer, and Hezbollah, the Lebanese group armed by Iran and long-considered a major threat to Israel’s northern border.

The newspaper also quotes senior US officials as saying that top American diplomats, including Secretary of State John Kerry, negotiated with Hamas via Turkish and Qatari intermediaries during ceasefire negotiations in July, in an effort to end Hamas rocket strikes on Israel from Gaza.

In addition, the report cites American and Lebanese officials who claim that US intelligence agencies have “repeatedly tipped off Lebanese law-enforcement bodies close to Hezbollah about threats posed to Beirut’s government by Sunni extremist groups, including al-Qaeda and its Syria-based ally the al-Nusra Front.

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