Amb. Bolton on US abstention from UN Israel vote, Fox News via YouTube, December 23, 2016
Archive for December 2016
Amb. Bolton on US abstention from UN Israel vote
December 24, 2016FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA – A CALL FOR GENOCIDE
December 24, 2016
Published on Oct 15, 2015
By Pierre Rehov. www.middleeaststudio.com
According to most Palestinians, “Israeli Occupation” means Tel Aviv, Ber Sheva and Haifa, and for their leaders, Palestine should be built “From the River to the Sea”. Meaning, should replace Israel, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
In this disturbing film, “From the River to the Sea”, a revised version of “Hostages of Hatred” acclaimed director Pierre Rehov sets out to tell us the real story of those men, women and children, who have been shamefully used as mere pawns for over 50 years, by Arab leaders at first, by Palestinian leaders later on and until this very day but also by the United Nations’ body that was specially created to supposedly take care of them: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNWRA.
The Great Palestinian Lie
December 24, 2016
Congress Threatens to Defund UN over Anti-Israel Vote
December 24, 2016Congress Threatens to Defund UN over Anti-Israel Vote, Breitbart, Joel B. Pokkak, December 23, 2016
(Obama allowed the UN Security Council to do its nasty deed. Isn’t there some way we can “defund” Obama? — DM)
Anthony Behar-Pool/Getty Images
Ambassador Samantha Power, who represents the United States at the UN Security Council, sat mum on Friday when the chair called for votes against an anti-Israel resolution declaring Israeli settlements illegal. But she raised her hand high when the chair called for abstentions.
She, and her boss, President Barack Obama, could have voted no, in keeping with precedent, and in deference to the incoming administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump. Instead, they let the resolution pass.
In anticipation of Obama’s suspected — now confirmed — abstention, members of Congress threatened to de-fund the UN. The U.S. accounts for some 22% of the UN’s budget, supporting a large, comfortable bureaucracy and its various programs.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) issued a statement, warning:
This provocative action by the United Nations is an outrage and must be dealt with sternly and forcefully.
As the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations of the Senate Appropriations Committee, I oversee the United States assistance to the United Nations. The United States is currently responsible for approximately 22 percent of the United Nations total budget.
If the United Nations moves forward with the ill-conceived resolution, I will work to form a bipartisan coalition to suspend or significantly reduce United States assistance to the United Nations.
In addition, any nation which backs this resolution and receives assistance from the United States will put that assistance in jeopardy.
Others joined Graham’s call to defund the UN, including Sen. James Lankford (R-OH). The Republican Jewish Coalition issued a statement also calling for defunding the UN:
By allowing the United Nations’ anti-Israel resolution to be adopted by the Security Council, in the face of fierce bi-partisan opposition, the actions of the Obama Administration will forever be remembered as a dark, shameful moment for our country. The resolution passed today will only serve as a greater barrier to peace, which can only truly be achieved through negotiations. Instead of pressuring the Palestinians to be a partner for peace, President Obama chose to break with long standing diplomatic practices and allowed the one-sided, anti-Israel United Nations to be used as a tool to bludgeon Israel, our greatest ally in the Middle East.
We applaud the efforts of Republican Senators, led by Senator Graham, to strip funding to the United Nations, which has time and again showed their anti-Israel bias. What happened today will forever be on the heads of the President, his Party, and groups like J Street that remained silent.
The passage of the resolution marks the Obama administration’s final stab in the back against Israel, on its way out the door and in defiance of the results of the November election, when voters chose Trump’s more assertive U.S. foreign policy.
In the hours before the vote, American Jewish organizations otherwise friendly to the Obama administration, such as the Union for Reform Judaism, belatedly mobilized to urge the Obama administration to veto the resolution. It was all to no avail.
In her statement attempting to justify the Obama administration’s failure to exercise its veto, Power cited a statement by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 opposing further Israeli settlements. She argued — incorrectly — that opposition to Israeli settlements had been the policy of every U.S. administration since 1967, ignoring the fact that President George W. Bush had assured Israel it would accept some settlements, as a reward for Israel’s recognition of the Palestinian aspiration to statehood.
Power attempted to cover the Obama administration’s backstabbing by noting that Israel is unfairly singled out for criticism by the UN: “Israel continues to be treated differently than other UN member states,” she said.
Yet even as Power said those words, she and the Obama administration participated in precisely that kind of singling out — subjecting Israel to criticism that no other states in similar situations had ever faced, in a week when the city of Aleppo fell to the genocidal Syrian regime.
She further argued that the U.S. would have blocked any resolution that threatened Israeli security. The implication was that a resolution that is factually and legally false, and which rewards Palestinians for decades of terror, does not harm Israel.
Power stated that “we cannot stand in the way of this resolution as we seek to preserve a chance to attain” the goal of a two-state solution. The claim flies in the face of Israeli efforts to renew negotiations — even to freeze settlement construction — in vain.
President-elect Trump had managed to keep the resolution at bay the day before by opposing it publicly, and by convincing Egypt to withdraw it from the agenda. But the Obama administration, aided by temporary Security Council members New Zealand, Malaysia, Venezuela, and Senegal, persisted.
The vote is a watershed: Israel faces a new and more hostile diplomatic reality, and the myth of bipartisan support for Israel has been shattered forever. Democrats will now bear an anti-Israel legacy.
Trump Said the U.S. Should Expand Nuclear Weapons. He’s Right.
December 24, 2016On Thursday, Donald Trump created controversy when he tweeted, “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” In case anyone was confused, he followed up Friday morning with an off-air remark to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that clarified his intentions: “Let it be an arms race,” he said. “We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”
The backlash was swift and unanimous. Critics charged that there is no plausible reason to expand U.S. nuclear weapons, that Trump’s comments contradicted a decades-old bipartisan consensus on the need to reduce nuclear stockpiles, and that such reckless statements risk provoking a new nuclear arms race with Russia and China.
On this matter, however, Trump is right.
U.S. nuclear strategy cannot be static, but must take into account the nuclear strategy and capabilities of its adversaries. For decades, the United States was able to reduce its nuclear arsenal from Cold War highs because it did not face any plausible nuclear challengers. But great power political competition has returned and it has brought nuclear weapons, the ultimate instrument of military force, along for the ride.
In recent years, North Korea has continued to grow its nuclear arsenal and means of delivery and has issued chilling nuclear threats against the United States and its Asian allies. As recently as Thursday — before Trump’s offending tweet — Rodong Sinmum, the Pyongyang regime’s official newspaper, published an opinion article calling for bolstering North Korea’s “nuclear deterrence.”
The potential threats are everywhere. Washington faces an increasing risk of conflict with a newly assertive, nuclear-armed China in the South China Sea. Beijing is expanding its nuclear forces and it is estimated that the number of Chinese warheads capable of reaching the U.S. homeland has more than trebled in the past decade and continues to grow. And Russia has become more aggressive in Europe and the Middle East and has engaged in explicit nuclear saber rattling the likes of which we have not seen since the 1980s. At the height of the crisis over Crimea in 2014, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin ominously declared, “It’s best not to mess with us … I want to remind you that Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers.” And on Tuesday, he vowed to “enhance the combat capability of strategic nuclear forces, primarily by strengthening missile complexes that will be guaranteed to penetrate existing and future missile defense systems.” As former Defense Secretary William Perry correctly notes, “Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War.”
The United States needs a robust nuclear force, therefore, not because anyone wants to fight a nuclear war, but rather, the opposite: to deter potential adversaries from attacking or coercing the United States and its allies with nuclear weapons of their own.
Under President Barack Obama, the United States mindlessly reduced its nuclear arsenal even as other nuclear powers went in the opposite direction, expanding and modernizing their nuclear forces. Such a path was unsustainable and Trump is correct to recognize that America’s aging nuclear arsenal is in need of some long overdue upgrades.
So, what would expanding and strengthening the nuclear arsenal look like?
First, the United States must modernize all three legs of the nuclear triad (submarines; long-range bombers, including a new cruise missile; and intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs). The Obama administration announced plans to modernize the triad under Republican pressure, but critics are already trying to kill off the ICBM and the cruise missile, and production timelines for these weapon systems keep slipping into the future. The Trump administration must make the timely modernization of all three legs of the triad a top priority.
Second, the United States should increase its deployment of nuclear warheads, consistent with its international obligations. According to New START, the treaty signed with Russia in 2011, each state will deploy no more than 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads, but those restrictions don’t kick in until February 2018. At present, according to the State Department, the United States is roughly 200 warheads below the limit while Russia is almost 250 warheads above it. Accordingly, Russia currently possesses a nuclear superiority of more than 400 warheads, which is worrisome in and of itself and also raises serious questions about whether Moscow intends to comply with this treaty at all. The United States, therefore, should expand its deployed arsenal up to the treaty limits and be fully prepared for further expansion should Russia break out — as Moscow has done with several other legacy arms control agreements.
Third, and finally, the United States and NATO need more flexible nuclear options in Europe. In the event of a losing war with NATO, Russian strategy calls for limited nuclear “de-escalation” strikes against European civilian and military targets. At present, NATO lacks an adequate response to this threat. As I explain in a new report, the United States must develop enhanced nuclear capabilities, including a tactical, air-to-surface cruise missile, in order to disabuse Putin of the notion that he can use nuclear weapons in Europe and get away with it.
These stubborn facts lay bare the ignorance or naivety of those fretting that Trump’s tweets risk starting a new nuclear arms race. It is U.S. adversaries, not Trump, who are moving first. It is a failure to respond that would be most reckless, signaling continued American weakness and only incentivizing further nuclear aggression.
The past eight years have been demoralizing for many in the defense policy community as Obama has consistently placed ideology over reality in the setting of U.S. nuclear policy. The results, an increasingly disordered world filled with intensifying nuclear dangers, speak for themselves.
Rather than express outrage over Trump’s tweet, therefore, we should take heart that we once again have a president who may be willing to do what it takes to defend the country against real, growing and truly existential threats.
U.S. Abstains In UN Vote On Israeli Settlements
December 23, 2016U.S. Abstains In UN Vote On Israeli Settlements, Fox News via YouTube, December 23, 2016
Trump was Right to Stop Obama from Tying his Hands on Israel
December 23, 2016Trump was Right to Stop Obama from Tying his Hands on Israel, Gatestone Institute, Alan M. Dershowitz, December 23, 2016
(This was published just a couple of hours before the UN Security Council voted unanimously to pass the resolution, Obama’s America abstaining. — DM)
The Egyptian decision to withdraw the one-sided anti-Israel Security Council resolution should not mask the sad reality that it is the Obama administration that has been pushing for the resolution to be enacted. The United States was trying to hide its active ‘behind the scenes’ roll by preparing to abstain rather than voting for the resolution. But in the context of the Security Council where only an American veto can prevent anti-Israel resolutions from automatically passing, an abstention is a vote for the resolution. And because of this automatic majority, an anti-Israel resolution like this one cannot be reversed by a future American president. A veto once cast cannot be cast retroactively.
The effect, therefore of the Obama decision to push for, and abstain from, a vote on this resolution is to deliberately tie the hands of President Obama’s successors, most particularly President elect Trump. That is why Trump did the right thing in reaction to Obama’s provocation. Had the lame duck president not tried to tie the incoming president’s hands, Trump would not have intervened at this time. But if he had not urged the Egyptians to withdraw the resolution, he would have made it far more difficult for himself to try to bring about a negotiated resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The reason for this is that a Security Council resolution declaring the 1967 border to be sacrosanct and any building behind those boarders to be illegal would make it impossible for Palestinian leaders to accept less in a negotiation. Moreover, the passage of such a resolution would disincentivize the Palestinians from accepting Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu’s invitation to sit down and negotiate with no preconditions. Any such negotiations would require painful sacrifices on both sides if a resolution were to be reached. And a Security Council resolution siding with the Palestinians would give the Palestinians the false hope that they could get a state through the United Nations without having to make painful sacrifices.
President Obama’s lame duck attempt to tie the hands of his successor is both counterproductive to peace and undemocratic in nature. The lame duck period of an outgoing president is a time when our system of checks and balances is effectively suspended. The outgoing president does not have to listen to Congress or the people. He can selfishly try to burnish his personal legacy at the expense of our national and international interests. He can try to even personal scores and act on pique. That is what seems to be happening here. Congress does not support this resolution; the American people do not support this resolution; no Israeli leader – from the left, to the center, to the right – supports this resolution. Even some members of Obama’s own administration do not support this resolution. But Obama is determined – after 8 years of frustration and failure in bringing together the Israelis and Palestinians – to leave his mark on the mid-East peace process. But if he manages to push this resolution through, his mark may well be the end of any realistic prospect for a negotiated peace.
One would think that Obama would have learned from his past mistakes in the mid-East. He has alienated the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Emirates and other allies by his actions and inactions with regard to Iran, Syria, Egypt and Iraq. Everything he has touched has turned to sand.
Now, in his waning days, he wants to make trouble for his successor. He should be stopped in the name of peace, democracy and basic decency.
But it now appears that Obama will not be stopped. Four temporary Security Council members have decided to push the resolution to a vote now. It is difficult to believe that they would have done so without the implicit support of the United States. Stay tuned.
U.S. declines to veto U.N. Security Council resolution for Israel to stop Jewish settlement activity
December 23, 2016U.S. declines to veto U.N. Security Council resolution for Israel to stop Jewish settlement activity, Washington Post, Carol Morello, December 23, 2016
The U.N. Security Council on Friday passed a resolution demanding Israel cease Jewish settlement activity on Palestinian territory in a unanimous vote that passed with the United States abstaining rather than using its veto as it has reliably done in the past.
The resolution said settlements are threatening the viability of the two-state solution, and urged Israelis and Palestinians to return to negotiations that lead to two independent nations.
This marked the first time in more than 36 years that the Security Council passed a resolution critical of settlements.
The United States’ abstention Friday reflected mounting frustration in the Obama administration over settlement growth that the United States considers an obstacle to peace.
The resolution came one day after a scheduled vote was postponed when the sponsor, Egypt, withdrew it after the Egyptian president spoke by phone with President-elect Donald Trump. Friday’s resolution was sponsored by New Zealand, Malaysia, Venezuela and Senegal.
Shortly before the vote, several U.S. senators said that if it passed they would introduce legislation to cut off U.S. funding to the United Nations and to any states that voted in favor of it.
US pushes back against Israeli claims of collusion with Palestinians over UN vote
December 23, 2016US pushes back against Israeli claims of collusion with Palestinians over UN vote, Jerusalem Post, Michael Wilner, December 23, 2015
(Please see also, Israel Official: Obama Administration Secretly Worked With Palestinians to Craft ‘Shameful’ UN Resolution. — DM)
US President Barack Obama speaks at the Righteous Among the Nations Award Ceremony, organised by Yad Vashem, at Israel’s Embassy in Washington January 27, 2016. (photo credit:REUTERS)
WASHINGTON – The White House has not been behind a push for a resolution at the UN Security Council condemning Israel’s settlement enterprise, a senior Obama administration told The Jerusalem Post on Friday, insisting that claims to the contrary are baseless.
Reports that the administration will allow the resolution to pass are “premature,” the official added.
The administration is pushing back against a furious Israeli government that has determined US President Barack Obama intends to abstain from the vote, allowing a resolution harshly critical of its actions to pass. Furthermore, Israeli officials are claiming that Obama orchestrated the effort with their Palestinian counterparts.
“To be clear: from the start, this was an Egyptian resolution,” a senior official told the Post. “The Egyptians authored it, circulated it, and submitted it for a vote on Wednesday evening before asking for a delay and subsequently removing their sponsorship. A group of other Security Council members, not including the United States, is now moving forward the Egyptian text.”
“Contrary to some claims, the administration was not involved in formulating the resolution nor have we promoted it,” the official added. “We have not communicated to any UN Security Council members how the United States would vote if the resolution comes before the UN Security Council.”
After Egypt pulled its resolution last minute— prompted by pressure from both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President-elect Donald Trump— New Zealand took up the cause this morning, adopting their published text.
The resolution tracks with longstanding US policy that Israel’s settlement activity in the West Bank is illegal, and damages the peace process.
Once Israel came to the conclusion that Obama was likely to abstain, officials from the government at a “high level” contacted the incoming president’s team to intervene. The Israelis gave the White House warning it would do so, they said.
A senior Israeli official said on Friday that President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry pushed a “shameful” draft anti-settlement resolution at the UN Security Council.
“The US administration secretly cooked up with the Palestinians an extreme anti-Israeli resolution behind Israel’s back which would be a tailwind for terror and boycotts,” the official said.
The official added that “President Obama could declare his willingness to veto this resolution in an instant but instead is pushing it. This is an abandonment of Israel which breaks decades of US policy of protecting Israel at the UN and undermines the prospects of working with the next administration of advancing peace.”
Is National Guilt Making Germany More Vulnerable To Terrorism?
December 23, 2016Is National Guilt Making Germany More Vulnerable To Terrorism? Investigative Project on Terrorism, Abigail R. Esman, December 23, 2016
(Due to its entirely appropriate feelings of guilt for Hitler’s Holocaust — the imprisonment, torture and murder of six million Jews — Germany resolved to import Islamists who share Hitler’s views about Jews and desire to finish his work in the name of Allah. Does their desire to murder Christians as well help to assuage their guilt? — DM)
“All Germans know the history of the murderous race mania of the Nazis that led to the break with civilization that was the Holocaust,” Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said last year. “This is taught in German schools for good reason, it must never be forgotten. …. We know that responsibility for this crime against humanity is German and very much our own.”
**********************
From the moment it became clear that the mass killings at Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz Christmas market on Monday were the actions of a Muslim terrorist, accusing fingers have pointed at German Chancellor Angela Merkel. And not without good reason. Beyond Merkel’s “open door” to Syrian refugees has been the government’s general sloppiness when it comes to counter-terrorism.
Germany has seen several small-scale attacks in recent years. Other plots have failed, not because the authorities were so effective, but largely because the perpetrators were so incompetent. In one case, an attack was stopped only because one plotter thought better of the idea and turned himself in.
But the issue is bigger than Merkel. It encompasses the entire spirit of Germany after World War II, and the shadows of its guilt. This has never been clearer than it is now – after the Berlin attack – because unlike terrorist attacks in Brussels and in Paris, this one was entirely predictable and even more preventable. It simply should not have happened.
Throughout the European Union, guilt about the Holocaust has colored government approaches to Muslim immigrants since the rush of guest workers arrived in the 1970s. Concern about “tolerance” and religious rights have repeatedly led to oversensitivity among lawmakers and to a tendency for Europe’s leaders and many of its people to simply look away.
Honor violence was ignored for decades until former Dutch Parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali forced it into the limelight in the years just after 9/11. So were anti-Western sermons given by Arab-funded imams in Europe’s mosques. But nowhere, rightfully, has the guilt been quite as heavy on a country’s soul as it has been in Germany.
Which may explain what the Wall Street Journal describes as “a cascade of mishaps before and since the [Christmas market] attack” that “suggest Germany isn’t geared up for countering the terrorist threat.”
Everything that needed to be known about Anis Amri, the Tunisian-born suspect in the attack was known well before he plowed his truck into the outdoor festivities on Dec. 19, killing 12 people and injuring 48. Authorities watched him for months, though the Daily Beast reports he “managed to slip off their radar” sometime around September. He served time in Italy for arson. He had a history of drug trafficking. He had been convicted in absentia of robbery in his home country of Tunisia. He had known connections to an extremist imam. Germany even rejected his asylum claim, though he managed to escape deportation.
And yet he was still free, roaming the streets of Germany.
Then there was the target of his attack. The U.S. State Department issued a travel alert for Europe last month, warning of possible terrorist attacks at “holiday festival, events, and outdoor markets.” And a child is suspected of attempting to bomb another German Christmas market two weeks prior to the Berlin attack. Yet no barriers were erected to protect the market. There appear to have been no checkpoints, and no heightened security at the event.
For the right person, it was the right place. Amri, shot and killed by police in Milan, Italy early Friday, was the right person.
This isn’t just a “cascade of mishaps.” Much of Germany’s failure to quash Muslim youth radicalization and to defend against terrorist attacks comes from its approach to national security and surveillance. Post-Holocaust Germany has placed tight restrictions on intelligence-gathering, particularly when it comes to privacy concerns.
“Skepticism towards surveillance runs deep in Germany because of the excesses of the Nazi Gestapo and East German Stasi secret police,” Reuters reports. In addition, a Law Library of Congress analysis notes that, “intelligence agencies are not authorized to use force or other types of police powers to gather information.”
And yet, says Reuters, “Intelligence agencies say there are signs that Islamic State may have planted fighters among the hundreds of thousands of migrants who arrived in the country in uncontrolled fashion last year.”
In June, however, Germany announced long-overdue plans to loosen some of those limitations, making it easier for officials to track radicalized teens – a move that followed a series of attacks by 15- and 16-year-olds.
Germany’s past also shapes its migrant policy today. Merkel and her supporters point to the fact that many Germans were migrants after the war, and they speak of the lessons learned during the Shoah.
“All Germans know the history of the murderous race mania of the Nazis that led to the break with civilization that was the Holocaust,” Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said last year. “This is taught in German schools for good reason, it must never be forgotten. …. We know that responsibility for this crime against humanity is German and very much our own.”
Opening the doors to religious minorities escaping war and autocracy is a form of repentance. So, too, is a hands-off approach to religious figures who preach violent or misogynistic doctrines that violate our own. Such approaches may ease German consciences, but they too often go awry. What, after all, are jihadist attacks like the one at the Breitscheidplatz market if not “crimes against humanity”? Germany is right not to forget its past. But in trying to set it right, the country has just gone tragically very wrong.
anneinpt
artaxes
danmillerinpanama
davidking1530
Peter Hofman
Joseph Wouk
Peter
Louisiana Steve
WarSclerotic 
Recent Comments