Many Israelis seem to think that if Iran does acquire nuclear weapons, if Israel could just offer up a more friendly face, the current U.S. Administration would, in a crisis, come to their help. They could not be more wrong.
Many Israelis seem to be counting on some deeply wished-for love from the current U.S. Administration. What they may not want to see is that their unrequited love for the U.S. runs far deeper than any disagreement with Israel’s current prime minister. Just ask Syria, ask Iraq, ask Yemen, ask Libya, ask Saudi Arabia, ask Kuwait, ask Egypt. The current U.S. Administration does not even send weapons; it sends meals-ready-to-eat. Israel and the rest of us in the region — as Iran has already encircled all the oil fields and is now taking over Iraq — have no more to look forward to than that.
Hard as it may be for Israelis to believe it, Israel’s survival most likely does not figure into the current U.S. Administration’s calculations at all. No matter who wins the election this week, the U.S. will grant Iran its nuclear weapons. If they end up turned on Israel, no matter who is prime minister, so be it.
No matter who wins the election this week in Israel, if and when Iran has a nuclear bomb, there is not a thing the current U.S. Administration will do to help Israel. To the current U.S. leadership, Israel is just the next Sudetenland. The Israelis will have only themselves to rely on.
There is about to be a mistake. The only country in the region of which all the other countries are envious — for opportunity, equal justice under law, freedom to speak without the 2 a.m. knock on the door — has an election this week. Its citizens are tired of war — right on schedule for its enemies’ plans to destroy it. The Israelis are meant to be tired of war; that is why it is called “a war of attrition.”
Many Israelis seem to be counting on some deeply wished-for love from the current U.S. Administration. What they may not want to see is that their unrequited love for the U.S. runs far deeper than any disagreement with Israel’s current prime minister. Just ask Syria, ask Iraq, ask Yemen, ask Libya, ask Saudi Arabia, ask the Emirates, ask Kuwait, ask Egypt. The current U.S. Administration does not even send weapons to help; it sends meals-ready-to-eat, perhaps with the occasional unserious bombing, and tells others to do any serious work themselves. Israel and the rest of us in the region — as Iran has already encircled all the oil fields and is now taking over Iraq — have no more to look forward to than that.
Bassam Tawil writes that if and when Iran has a nuclear bomb, there is not a thing the current U.S. Administration will do to help Israel. (Image sources: Israel PM office, PressTV video screenshot)
The Israelis may be conning themselves into thinking that if they could just stay friendly with America, America will not “let Israel down” — whatever that is supposed to mean. Perhaps they think that the U.S. will not let Iran acquire a nuclear weapons capability — as the U.S. has been promising for twenty years. But the U.S. has already made clear that it will fast-track, or slow-track, Iran to nuclear weapons capability.
Or maybe it means that many Israelis think that if Iran does acquire nuclear weapons, if Israel could just offer up a more friendly face, the U.S. would, in a crisis, come to Israel’s help.
They could not be more wrong.
Sadly, the current administration in Washington has reportedly already sabotaged several efforts by Israel to address its Iran problem. The current U.S. Administration seems to care about only one thing: making just about any deal with Iran. It does not even care about America, or it would never have enabled Iran to get as far along as it is now.
From some apparent self-infatuated fantasy of “landing a big one” — luring the world’s most medieval, genocidal, terror-promoting state to be a responsible member of the “family of nations” — the current U.S. Administration will help exactly no one.
Hard as it may be for Israelis to believe, Israel’s survival most likely does not figure into the current U.S. Administration’s calculations at all. Israel was excluded from the P5+1 negotiations — they might actually have insisted on not handing Iran a nuclear weapons capability, and ruined the current U.S. Administration’s dream of turning the deadliest enemy of the “Big Satan” into its new-found friend — like the wish of turning a prostitute into a doting wife.
The Israelis, of course, will vote for whomever they wish, but if they are voting with the thought that a new Prime Minister will save their country from being turned onto roadkill by the current U.S. Administration — the world’s next Sudetenland — and that their current prime minister has been the problem, they have a nasty surprise coming. Everyone else has been lied to, misled, double-crossed, and tossed over the cliff – especially the American people themselves. The problem is not in whoever is Israel’s Prime Minister. The problem is three thousand miles away, in a leadership that cares only about following in the footsteps of Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich: waving around a dangerous, illusory, non-existent “peace in our time.” To the current U.S. leadership, Israel is just the next Sudetenland.
For its own fantasy of turning a voracious, extremist Islamic regime into the “stripper who becomes the girl next door,” the current U.S. Administration will grant Iran its nuclear weapons. If they end up turned on Israel, so be it. No matter who wins the election this week in Israel, if and when Iran has a nuclear bomb, there is not a thing the current U.S. Administration will do to help Israel. The Israelis will have only themselves to rely on.
(The article is about more than the elections. The disconnect between Israel and the Obama administration seems likely to continue to worsen regardless of who wins, unless Israel falls completely into line with Obama’s views. — DM)
Given the stakes, the choice of Israeli voters next Tuesday is an easy one.
An Israeli flag is seen in the background as a man casts his ballot for the parliamentary election at a polling in the West Bank settlement of Ofra. (photo credit:REUTERS)
The next 22 months until President Barack Obama leaves office promise to be the most challenging period in the history of US-Israel relations.
Now unfettered by electoral concerns, over the past week Obama exposed his ill-intentions toward Israel in two different ways.
First, the Justice Department leaked its intention to indict Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez on corruption charges. Menendez is the ranking Democratic member, and the former chairman, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is also the most outspoken Democratic critic of Obama’s policy of appeasing the Iranian regime.
As former US federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote this week at PJMedia, “It is perfectly reasonable to believe that Menendez may be guilty of corruption offenses and that his political opposition on Iran is factoring into the administration’s decision to charge him. Put it another way, if Menendez were running interference for Obama on the Iran deal, rather than trying to scupper it, I believe he would not be charged.”
The Menendez prosecution tells us that Obama wishes to leave office after having vastly diminished support for Israel among Democrats. And he will not hesitate to use strong-arm tactics against his fellow Democrats to achieve his goal.
We already experienced Obama’s efforts in this sphere in the lead-up to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before the joint houses of Congress on March 3 with his campaign to pressure Democratic lawmakers to boycott Netanyahu’s address.
Now, with his move against Menendez, Obama made clear that support for Israel – even in the form of opposition to the nuclear armament of Iran – will be personally and politically costly for Democrats.
The long-term implications of Obama’s moves to transform US support for Israel into a partisan issue cannot by wished away. It is possible that his successor as the head of the Democratic Party will hold a more sympathetic view of Israel. But it is also possible that the architecture of Democratic fund-raising and grassroots support that Obama has been building for the past six years will survive his presidency and that as a consequence, Democrats will have incentives to oppose Israel.
The reason Obama is so keen to transform Israel into a partisan issue was made clear by the second move he made last week.
Last Thursday, US National Security Adviser Susan Rice announced that the NSC’s Middle East Coordinator Phil Gordon was stepping down and being replaced by serial Israel-basher Robert Malley.
Malley, who served as an NSC junior staffer during the Clinton administration, rose to prominence in late 2000 when, following the failed Camp David peace summit in July 2000 and the outbreak of the Palestinian terror war, Malley co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times blaming Israel and then-prime minister Ehud Barak for the failure of the negotiations.
What was most remarkable at the time about Malley’s positions was that they completely contradicted Bill Clinton’s expressed views. Clinton placed the blame for the failure of the talks squarely on then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s shoulders.
Not only did Arafat reject Barak’s unprecedented offer of Palestinian statehood and sovereignty over all of Gaza, most of Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem including the Temple Mount, he refused to make a counter-offer. And then two months later, he opened the Palestinian terror war.
As Jonathan Tobin explained in Commentary this week, through his writings and public statements, Malley has legitimized Palestinian rejection of Israel’s right to exist. Malley thinks it is perfectly reasonable that the Palestinians refuse to concede their demand for free immigration of millions of foreign Arabs to the Jewish state in the framework of their concocted “right of return,” even though the clear goal of that demand is to destroy Israel. As Tobin noted, Malley believes that Palestinian terrorism against Israel is “understandable if not necessarily commendable.”
During Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, then-senator Obama listed Malley as a member of his foreign policy team. When pro-Israel groups criticized his appointment, Obama fired Malley.
But after his 2012 reelection, no longer fearing the ramifications of embracing an openly anti-Israel adviser, one who had documented contacts with Hamas terrorists and has expressed support for recognizing the terror group, Obama appointed Malley to serve as his senior adviser for Iraq-Iran-Syria and the Gulf states. Still facing the 2014 congressional elections, Obama pledged that Malley would have no involvement in issues related to Israel and the Palestinians. But then last week, he appointed him to direct the NSC’s policy in relation to the entire Middle East, including Israel.
The deeper significance of Malley’s appointment is that it demonstrates that Obama’s goal in his remaining time in office is to realign US Middle East policy away from Israel. With his Middle East policy led by a man who thinks the Palestinian goal of destroying Israel is legitimate, Obama can be expected to expand his practice of placing all the blame for the absence of peace between Israel and the Palestinians solely on Israel’s shoulders.
Malley’s appointment indicates that there is nothing Israel can do to stem the tsunami of American pressure it is about to suffer. Electing a left-wing government to replace Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will make no difference.
Just as Malley was willing to blame Barak – a leader who went to Camp David as the head of a minority coalition, whose positions on territorial withdrawals were rejected by a wide majority of Israelis – for the absence of peace, so we can assume that he, and his boss, will blame Israel for the absence of peace over the next 22 months, regardless of who stands at the head of the next government.
In this vein we can expect the administration to expand the anti-Israel positions it has already taken.
The US position paper regarding Israeli-Palestinian negotiation that was leaked this past week to Yediot Aharonot made clear the direction Obama wishes to go. That document called for Israel to withdraw to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, with minor revisions.
In the coming 22 months we can expect the US to use more and more coercive measures to force Israel to capitulate to its position.
The day the administration-sponsored talks began in July 2013, the EU announced it was barring its member nations from having ties with Israeli entities that operate beyond the 1949 armistice lines unless those operations involve assisting the Palestinians in their anti-Israel activities. The notion that the EU initiated an economic war against Israel the day the talks began without coordinating the move with the Obama administration is, of course, absurd.
We can expect the US to make expanded use of European economic warfare against Israel in the coming years, and to continue to give a backwind to the anti-Semitic BDS movement by escalating its libelous rhetoric conflating Israel with the apartheid regime in South Africa.
US-Israel intelligence and defense ties will also be on the chopping block.
While Obama and his advisers consistently boast that defense and intelligence ties between Israel and the US have grown during his presidency, over the past several years, those ties have suffered blow after blow. During the war with Hamas last summer, acting on direct orders from the White House, the Pentagon instituted a partial – unofficial – embargo on weapons to Israel.
As for intelligence ties, over the past month, the administration announced repeatedly that it is ending its intelligence sharing with Israel on Iran.
We also learned that the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is being fingered as the source of the leak regarding the Stuxnet computer virus that Israel and the US reportedly developed jointly to cripple Iran’s nuclear centrifuges.
In other words, since taking office, Obama has used the US’s intelligence ties with Israel to harm Israel’s national security.*
He has also used diplomacy to harm Israel. Last summer, Obama sought a diplomatic settlement of Hamas’s war with Israel that would have granted Hamas all of its war goals, including its demand for open borders and access to the international financial system.
Now of course, he is running roughshod over his bipartisan opposition, and the opposition of Israel and the Sunni Arab states, in the hopes of concluding a nuclear deal with Iran that will pave the way for the ayatollahs to develop nuclear weapons and expand their hegemonic control over the Middle East.
Amid of this, and facing 22 months of ever more hostility as Obama pursues his goal of ending the US-Israel alliance, Israelis are called on to elect a new government.
This week the consortium of former security brass that has banded together to elect a leftist government led by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni accused Netanyahu of destroying Israel’s relations with the US. The implication was that a government led by Herzog and Livni will restore Israel’s ties to America.
Yet as Obama has made clear both throughout his tenure in office, and, over the past week through Malley’s appointment and Menendez’s indictment, Obama holds sole responsibility for the deterioration of our ties with our primary ally. And as his actions have also made clear, Herzog and Livni at the helm will receive no respite in US pressure. Their willingness to make concessions to the Palestinians that Netanyahu refuses to make will merely cause Obama to move the goalposts further down the field. Given his goal of abandoning the US alliance with Israel, no concession that Israel will deliver will suffice.
And so we need to ask ourselves, which leader will do a better job of limiting the danger and waiting Obama out while maintaining sufficient overall US support for Israel to rebuild the alliance after Obama has left the White House.
The answer, it seems, is self-evident.
The Left’s campaign to blame Netanyahu for Obama’s hostility will make it all but impossible for a Herzog-Livni government to withstand US pressure that they say will disappear the moment Netanyahu leaves office.
In contrast, as the US position paper leaked to Yediot indicated, Netanyahu has demonstrated great skill in parrying US pressure. He agreed to hold negotiations based on a US position that he rejected and went along with the talks for nine months until the Palestinians ended them. In so doing, he achieved a nine-month respite in open US pressure while exposing Palestinian radicalism and opposition to peaceful coexistence.
On the Iranian front, Netanyahu’s courageous speech before Congress last week energized Obama’s opponents to take action and forced Obama onto the defensive for the first time while expanding popular support for Israel.
It is clear that things will only get more difficult in the months ahead. But given the stakes, the choice of Israeli voters next Tuesday is an easy one.
_______________
* Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that Hillary Clinton was reportedly involved in leaking sensitive information related to joint Israel-US operations to the media.
Bibi’s a bad deal
Mar 14th 2015 | From the print edition Via The Economist
(In an effort to be more ‘fair and balanced, I’m going to play the devil’s advocate and post this opinion piece I just found. With the elections coming up, it will be interesting to see if and who gets a mandate to take a more aggressive stand against the threats facing Israel today. Like the old saying goes, “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.” – LS)
The prime minister’s failures outweigh his achievements. Israelis should back Yitzhak Herzog
BINYAMIN NETANYAHU is articulate, dashing—and distrusted, by friends and foes alike. Nicolas Sarkozy, a former French president, was once heard telling Barack Obama: “I can’t stand him. He’s a liar.” Mr Obama did not demur.
This month the Israeli prime minister offered fresh glimpses of his deviousness. Following reports that he had offered the Palestinians more generous terms than his rhetoric admits, Mr Netanyahu (pictured, right) tried to regain right-wing support by repudiating his acceptance, in a speech in 2009, of (strictly limited) Palestinian statehood. This leaves a big question: is the real Bibi a man of negotiation, or of occupation? Recklessly, he gambled with bipartisan American support for Israel when he defied Mr Obama by brazenly appearing before a Republican-dominated Congress to denounce the administration’s nuclear negotiations with Iran: “This is a bad deal. It’s a very bad deal. We’re better off without it.”
On March 17th Israeli voters will have their say on Bibi (see article). In this newspaper’s view he has been a bad deal for Israel. It is better off without him. His challenger, Yitzhak “Bougie” Herzog (pictured, left), is not charismatic. But he is level-headed and has a credible security and economic team. He wants talks with the Palestinians and to heal ties with Mr Obama. He deserves a chance to prove himself.
Prime minister, you’re no David Ben-Gurion. In office for the past six years, having served a three-year stint in the 1990s, Mr Netanyahu is now Israel’s longest-serving leader since David Ben-Gurion. That is a remarkable feat for a man whose father once doubted his suitability for the job. Mr Netanyahu’s longevity is due to many factors, not least luck, cunning, a silver tongue and the loyalty of the Likud party. But his achievements are outweighed by his many flaws.
On the positive side, he has liberalised the Israeli economy and promoted a thriving high-tech sector. He navigated skilfully through the financial crisis and the long slump in Europe, Israel’s largest trading partner. He kept Iran’s nuclear programme at the forefront of world attention. He also kept Israel safe after the Arab-spring revolts of 2011, which toppled leaders and cracked fossilised states across the region. The jihadists and Shia militias that filled the void might have turned their guns on Israel, and may yet do so. For the time being they are killing each other. In the turmoil Israel has forged closer ties with Egypt and, more secretly, with Arab monarchies.
Against this, Bibi’s preservation of the military occupation in the West Bank and the stranglehold over Gaza Strip must count heavily against him. He has refused to make any genuine concessions to the Palestinians, on the ground that “there is no partner for peace”—even though Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has abjured violence and maintained security co-operation with Israel in the West Bank (Gaza is controlled by the Islamist Hamas movement). Mr Abbas himself has plenty of shortcomings, but he has also been deliberately weakened by Mr Netanyahu. Israel has cut off Palestinian tax revenues in retaliation for Mr Abbas’s decision to join the International Criminal Court. The pragmatism that Mr Netanyahu sometimes expresses is belied by his actions: he has expanded settlements, thus breaking up Palestinian areas and making a mockery of the very notion of Palestinian statehood.
To Israelis traumatised by missiles and rockets, Mr Netanyahu sounds plausible when he claims that giving the Palestinians control over their own land will bring more violence. The turmoil of the Arab world deepens these fears. Had Israel handed the Golan Heights back to Syria, it might now find itself facing fighters from Hizbullah, al-Qaeda or Islamic State on the Sea of Galilee.
However, without a Palestinian state, Israel will either endanger its Jewish majority or lose its moral standing by subjugating and disenfranchising the Palestinian population. Israel will lose support abroad even when it legitimately defends itself. In the final days of the campaign, Mr Netanyahu may well play up the dangers from Iran, jihadists and Hamas. But the truth is that immobilism, too, is endangering Israel.
[O]ur sources also reveal that the PA chairman has asked Netanyahu through back-channels for a secret rendezvous somewhere in Europe. He proposed avoiding prominent capitals like London, Paris or Berlin, but meeting at a smaller venue for the sake of confidentiality.
Abbas also insisted that this meeting must be concealed from Washington, especially from Secretary of State John Kerry.
The Israeli prime minister has turned him down – and not just because the Palestinian request finds him in the middle of a tough race for re-election.
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Acting on direct orders from Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian special forces raided the nine PA-ruled towns of the West Bank in the past 48 hours and detained 500 Hamas suspects, DEBKAfile’s military sources report. Abbas ordered the operation after discovering that Hamas had been hatching a plot for some weeks to stage an armed insurrection against the Palestinian Authority, starting in one of the Palestinian towns – possibly even the PA capital of Ramallah. They would assassinate him in the process of the coup.
Of late, Abbas has kept his distance from Ramallah and his seat of government and spends most of his time traveling in foreign countries, especially Arab capitals, where he feels safer under the protection of foreign security services than he does at home.
The wave of detentions from Sunday to Tuesday (March 9-10) is the most extensive the Palestinian Authority has ever conducted against Hamas’ West Bank cells. Not only prominent figures and known terror activists were taken into custody but also new figures.
Abbas ordered the operation amid a serious dilemma over his personal security.
Before him were reports presented by Palestinian Intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Majed Faraj revealing the preparations in train for his assassination, an event that would signal mass riots orchestrated by Hamas and Jihad Islami, leading up to the seizure of government from the Palestinian Authority – much as they did in the Gaza Strip.
At the same time, Abbas does not entirely trust Palestinian security services or their ability to safeguard him and his regime in Ramallah.
He therefore turned to Israel, touching off an IDF response that had nothing to do with Israel’s forthcoming general election on March 17 – as government opponents have claimed.
The 3,000 IDF soldiers plus 10,000 reservists called up this week were not posted on the West Bank to practice anti-riot tactics for putting down Palestinians disturbances against Jewish settlements – as reported. They were placed on the ready in case it was necessary to go into Palestinian towns and save them from being overrun by the radical Hamas and Jihad Islami.
The Israeli troops also rehearsed a possible scenario that might ensue from the murder of Mahmoud Abbas.
In view of the highly sensitive security situation on the West Bank, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu accompanied by Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, paid a rare visit to the IDF’s Judea-Samaria command headquarters Tuesday, March 10, to inspect these preparations.
It was the Hamas conspiracy to seize power in Ramallah that prompted Ya’alon’s enigmatic remark that were it not for preemptive military operations, central Israel might now be under missile and mortar attack.
DEBKAfile’s military sources add that way the Palestinian issue has become a football for kicking around Israel’s election campaign, making it hard to penetrate the fog of anti-government propaganda and establish what is really going on.
For example, Netanyahu is being presented by his rivals as having agreed at a former stage in US-brokered peace negotiations with the Palestinians to withdraw to behind the 1967 lines. They have picked out one of the many papers drawn up by the Americans and discarded in the course of the negotiations – this one was written by a Shiite Iraqi academic in Oxford University and was never approved either by Israel or the Palestinians.
Turning to the real events afoot today, our sources also reveal that the PA chairman has asked Netanyahu through back-channels for a secret rendezvous somewhere in Europe. He proposed avoiding prominent capitals like London, Paris or Berlin, but meeting at a smaller venue for the sake of confidentiality.
Abbas also insisted that this meeting must be concealed from Washington, especially from Secretary of State John Kerry.
The Israeli prime minister has turned him down – and not just because the Palestinian request finds him in the middle of a tough race for re-election.
Netanyahu’s political rivals, while slamming him day by day, turn their gaze away from the encroaching Iranian forces taking up forward positions in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, where they are busy fashioning a Shiite Crescent that encircles Sunni Arab states as well as Israel.
It must be obvious that to bolster its rising status as the leading regional power, Iran must be reach the nuclear threshold – at the very least – if not nuclear armaments proper, or else how will Tehran be able to expand its territorial holdings and defend its lebensraum.
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Almost the last words Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu heard Sunday, March 1, as he took off for Washington to address Congress on Iran, was in effect “Don’t do it!” They came from a group of 180 senior ex-IDF military officers. After the personal abuse is weeded out of their message, what remains is that Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of the US Congress Tuesday, March 3, was not worth making because it would damage relations with the US.
Maj. Gen. Amiram Levin, former Northern Command chief and ex-Deputy Director of the Mossad, put it this way: “Bibi, you are making an error in navigation; the target is Tehran not Washington.” He went on to say: “[Instead] of working hand in hand with the president,,, you go there and poke a finger in his eye.”
DEBKAfile’s analysts maintain that the navigation error is the general’s. Before shooting his slings and arrows at the Israeli prime minister’s office, he should long ago have taken note of President Barack Obama’s Middle East record in relation to Israel’s during his six years in the White House.
It took time to catch on to Obama’s two-faced policy towards Israel because it was handled with subtlety.
On the one hand, he made sure Israel was well supplied with all its material security needs. This enabled him to boast that no US president or administration before him had done as much to safeguard Israel’s security.
But behind this façade, Obama made sure that Israel’s security stayed firmly in the technical-material-financial realm and never crossed the line into a strategic relationship.
That was because he needed to keep his hands free for the objective of transferring the role of foremost US ally in the Middle East from Israel to Iran, a process that took into account the ayatollahs’ nuclear aspirations.
This process unfolding over recent years has left Israel face to face with a nakedly hostile Iran empowered by the United States.
Tehran is not letting its oft-repeated threat to wipe Israel off the map hang fire until its nuclear aspirations are assured of consummation under the negotiations continuing later this week in the Swiss town of Montreux between US Secretary John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minsiter Mohammed Javad Zarif. In the meantime, without President Obama lifting a finger in defense of “Israel’s security,” Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps officers are drawing Israel into a military stranglehold on the ground.
Netanyahu’s political rivals, while slamming him day by day, turn their gaze away from the encroaching Iranian forces taking up forward positions in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, where they are busy fashioning a Shiite Crescent that encircles Sunni Arab states as well as Israel.
It must be obvious that to bolster its rising status as the leading regional power, Iran must be reach the nuclear threshold – at the very least – if not nuclear armaments proper, or else how will Tehran be able to expand its territorial holdings and defend its lebensraum.
This is not something that Barack Obama or his National Security Adviser Susan Rice are prepared to admit. They are not about to confirm intelligence reports, which expose the military collaboration between the Obama administration and Iran’s supreme leader Aytatollah Ali Khamenei as being piped through the office of Iraq’s Shiite Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
Washington denies that there is any such collaboration – or any suggestion that the White House had reviewed recommendations and assessments of an option for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Al Qods Brigades to take over the ground war on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as American contractors.
Al Qods chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani is frequently spotted these days flitting between Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut, while his intelligence and liaison officers file reports to the Obama administration, through the Iraqi prime minister’s office, on their forthcoming military steps and wait for Washington’s approval.
America understandably lacks the will to have its ground forces embroiled in another Middle East war. Washington is therefore not about to turn away a regional power offering to undertake this task – even though it may be unleasing a bloody conflagration between Shiite and Sunni Muslims that would be hard to extinguish
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the rest of the Gulf are as dismayed as Israel by Obama’s regional strategy, which, stripped of its diplomatic veneer, boils down to a straight trade: The US will allow Iran to reach the status of a pre-nuclear power and regional hegemon, while Tehran, in return, will send its officers and ground troops to fight in Iraq, Syria and even Afghanistan.
The 180 ex-IDF officers and Israel’s opposition leaders, Yitzhak Herzog and Tzipi Livni, were right when they argued that Israel’s bond with the US presidency is too valuable to jeopardize. But it is the Obama White House which is trifling with that bond – not Netanyahu, whose mission in Washington is no more than a tardy attempt to check Iran’s malignant machinations which go forward without restraint.
1. Scholars who study our civilization a hundred years in the future will be able to point out the key geopolitical shifts in the Middle East, the collapse of the geographical nations and the return to the ancient social borders, and the rise of radical Islam. They will describe how the Islamic Republic of Iran took over countries like Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, its tentacles of terrorism reaching every corner, including Gaza, Judea and Samaria.
They will study the Iranian nuclear issue and be able to quote hundreds of instances in which Iranian leaders vowed to destroy the Jewish state. But when they begin studying the Israeli society of our time, they will encounter a failure of logic. Amid a virtual consensus on preventing an Iranian nuclear bomb, they will not be able to understand the Israeli focus on bottles recycled by the prime minister’s wife, the electrician the prime minister hired and the frivolous reports that grabbed massive headlines while world powers were busy leaving Iran with the ability to manufacture a bomb. They will have trouble understanding what the Jews were arguing about while facing such an obvious threat.
In an effort to solve this mystery, the scholars will turn to historians who studied the 1930s in Europe: Western leaders’ willful blindness to Hitler’s explicit threats; Europe’s desperate longing for reconciliation with the fuhrer. They will review the history of France, which was warned in those years but failed to prepare an army. They will review Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of “peace for our time” while waving a worthless piece of paper. They will examine the history of European Jewry, which failed to accurately read the political map. Among other things, they will look at U.S. Jewry in the 1940s. They may read the memoirs of Rebecca Kook, the daughter of Hillel Kook, a prominent member of the Irgun.
2. In 1940, the members of the Irgun arrived in the U.S. at the behest of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, to recruit a Hebrew army to fight the Nazis alongside the allied forces. In 1942, when the extermination of Europe’s Jewry began to emerge, the delegation changed course and devoted themselves to saving Jewish lives. They had the nerve to challenge the official stance adopted by the Roosevelt administration — accepted with little opposition by the Jewish leaders of the United States — that the only way to save the Jews was to win the war.
The Irgun members pressured the leaders of the free world to make saving Jewish lives a goal of equal importance to winning the war, and to dedicate special resources to making it happen. They focused their efforts on campaigning in the media, among intellectuals, in the U.S. Congress and to the administration. They convinced then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt to establish the War Refugee Board — an executive agency created to save Jews. It is estimated that the board was responsible for saving 200,000 Jewish lives.
The future scholars will delve deep into the battle waged by the Jewish leadership in America against the Irgun’s delegation. The mudslinging campaign against them was not led by the administration. It was spearheaded by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Sol Bloom — a New York Jew, Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise and Nahum Goldmann of the American Jewish Congress and other Jewish leaders.
Every effort made by the Irgun delegation was met with criticism and active sabotage efforts. They claimed that their activity was too political, too vocal, too aggressive, and that in fact they did not represent anyone. Hundreds of letters were sent to senators and representatives and Jewish leaders. The letters said that the Irgun members were part of a fascist terrorist outfit from Palestine. Jewish activists handed out pamphlets warning that the delegation would bring catastrophe and destruction on the Jewish people.
Several explanations were provided for this hostile behavior. The main explanation was that Jewish leadership’s fear of tarnishing the image of the Jewish community. In a secret British Foreign Office document, Nahum Goldmann was quoted as saying that just as Hitler brought anti-Semitism to Europe, Hillel Kook would bring anti-Semitism to the U.S.
At the end of the 19th century, Germany’s Jews were also fearful of Zionism. It made them susceptible to accusations of dual loyalty, and labeled them as belonging in Palestine. That is why they resisted the Zionist movement and made extra efforts to be even more German than the rest of the Germans.
3. For the last 20 years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been warning anyone who would listen of Iran’s perilous ambitions. Much like Nazi Germany, Iran and radical Islam do not threaten only Israel but the entire free world. But the left-wing liberal mindset, inspired by U.S. President Barack Obama, complacently dismisses these warnings, often with a side of disrespect.
Over the last month, the White House and a long line of cultural figures and politicians have been confronting a far greater threat: Netanyahu’s upcoming speech at the U.S. Congress. The future historians will note the American Jews who disrespected the Israeli prime minister for fighting for the safety of his people. They will add to that list a number of Israelis who took pains to undermine Netanyahu’s legitimacy and sabotage his address.
One of these critics, Peter Beinart, recently slammed Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel for urging Obama to join him at Netanyahu’s address.
“Wiesel is acutely, and understandably, sensitive to the harm Jews suffer. Yet he is largely blind to the harm Jews cause,” Beinart wrote. Cause to whom? To the Palestinians, of course. The American Left is stuck in its 1980s elitist morality that refused to see that the reality has changed.
There is no occupation anymore, Mr. Beinart. Certainly not in the way that you and your friends make it out. The Arabs of Judea and Samaria enjoy expanded autonomy — a de facto state with a national anthem, a flag, a government and enormous budgets. It is true that the IDF is present on the outskirts, because we do not trust our neighbors. But incidentally, they, too, do not trust themselves to ward off Hamas and the radical Islamists. Israel in fact protects the lives of the Palestinian leadership and population from the perils of the Islamic caliphate, which has the ability to turn the lives of these Arabs into a hell devoid of human rights, and heads.
4. This blindness is not just geopolitical, but it is also moral. We are students of the great teacher Rabbi Akiva, who in the second century classified the commandment to “love your neighbor as you love yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) as a great principle of the Torah (Genesis Rabbah 24:7). In this he built on the work of Hillel the Elder who in the first century B.C.E. placed the entire Torah upon the foundation of this dictum (Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Shabbat 31a).
But the same Rabbi Akiva taught us that in the event of a conflict between your life and your neighbor’s life, “your brother shall live with you.” Namely, your own life comes first (Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Baba Mezi’a, 62a). That is the proper way to approach altruistic love. If you do not love your own life, or the lives of your own people, more than the lives of others, especially those who are hostile toward you, then you do not truly possess a moral understanding, but rather a nihilistic intellectualism that plays pretend in living rooms across the east and west coasts of the U.S.
Next Tuesday, truth seekers will be called upon to support Netanyahu when he addresses a joint session of Congress. The State of Israel needs your courageous support.
(For European nations, America and others, abortive efforts to bring “peace” among Israel and warring Islamic factions provide welcome distractions from difficulties elsewhere which are even less tractable and more damaging to them. — DM)
[N]ot even a utopian-style peace treaty will end the fight against Israel that is being waged by Europe and the global left wing (and here as well, to some degree). The dozens of organizations that have been established to take away the Jews’ right to their own land (for some reason, these groups are known as “human-rights organizations”; after all, you know, we Jews have no human rights) will no longer show any interest in the cruel dictatorship that they helped set up next door. Instead, they will aim their heavy artillery against Israeli society, which they will accuse of racism for being an exclusive state for the Jewish ethnic group instead of a “state of all its citizens,” which is actually code for “a state of all its nationalities.”
*****************
1. The upcoming elections have plunged Israel into a wartime atmosphere, and a good deal of blame is being thrown about. Each side, instead of looking to its own misdeeds, is making accusations against the other. They are not saying, “We have sinned,” but rather, “You have sinned.”
Here, too, the accusations are meant to generate shallow headlines rather than addressing deep issues. This is a big mistake. Despite the piles of mud and refuse that are customarily dumped onto the average Israeli, the average Israeli is generally well aware of what is going on. They understand ideology and vision.
On the political plane, one gets the impression that the discourse, at least on the Left, is still stuck in the 1980s, before the great experiments that the Oslo Accords brought upon us — before Hamas, before Islamic State, before the Middle East fell to pieces. What can Tzipi Livni accomplish with the Palestinians that she hasn’t done over the past two years, when she was in charge of the talks with them? Did she bring any sort of agreement to the government that it turned down? If so, let her tell us.
But she knows that there is nobody to talk to on the other side. They never had the slightest desire to end the conflict with the Jews. I would be glad to hear any Arab leader name his final demands — the ones for which, if they were fulfilled, he would sign on the dotted line that the conflict was over and state that he had no further claims. Are there any volunteers?
We have not even mentioned Jerusalem or the refugees or recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. The demand that our neighbors recognize Israel as the national home of the Jewish people was not for us, but for them. That is the litmus test of the integrity of their intentions. Do they recognize the right of Jews to any part of the historical Land of Israel? We know that any Arab leader who grants such recognition can expect an uncomfortable death.
That is the reason for the effort to anchor the Jewish nature of the State of Israel in a Basic Law. It is because not even a utopian-style peace treaty will end the fight against Israel that is being waged by Europe and the global left wing (and here as well, to some degree). The dozens of organizations that have been established to take away the Jews’ right to their own land (for some reason, these groups are known as “human-rights organizations”; after all, you know, we Jews have no human rights) will no longer show any interest in the cruel dictatorship that they helped set up next door. Instead, they will aim their heavy artillery against Israeli society, which they will accuse of racism for being an exclusive state for the Jewish ethnic group instead of a “state of all its citizens,” which is actually code for “a state of all its nationalities.”
2. As we look on, Europe is falling like a ripe fruit at the feet of the radical Islam sweeping over it. The more terrorism conquers the streets of Europe, the greater the Europeans’ desire will be to pay the terrorists a ransom in exchange for being left in peace, unmolested. As history has taught us, the ransom will be the Jews. The ludicrous statements by the European parliaments about recognizing the Palestinian state show the blindness of a society in decline that lost its basic instincts long ago. The Europeans care nothing about the Palestinians, whom they have doomed to a life of misery and suffering under oppressive regimes that are among the worst in the world, where there is no such thing as basic human rights.
The Palestinians are the last thing that the Europeans care about, just as they care nothing about the atrocities being perpetrated in Syria, Iraq or Africa. The Europeans are recognizing the Palestinian state not because they have any desire to improve our neighbors’ situation, but because they have a problem with the Jews. They always did.
Ironically, the return to Zion made the Jewish problem worse because it gave the Jews an independent political living space — which the Europeans find completely unacceptable. That is also the reason why there are dozens of European organizations in this region, and why they funnel hundreds of millions of euros supposedly to help the Palestinians, but actually in efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish state. The “peace process” is just one more tool in that mechanism.
3. The talk of a “diplomatic agreement” is also a media ransom, lip-service paid by politicians who seek the sponsorship of the media party. Avigdor Lieberman is quite familiar with this work.
“We must reach a diplomatic agreement,” he said in a “closed-door conference,” and received flattering headlines right away. “What is going on today is that they are doing nothing; there is a status quo. The initiative must be a comprehensive regional agreement.”
Have we not heard those empty phrases a thousand times already? Have we not tried to reach a political agreement in all kinds of ways? Has Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not gotten into trouble with his own camp over it? Did he not freeze construction in Judea and Samaria for ten months? And, before him, did Ehud Olmert not offer our neighbors what even Lieberman (I hope) would never dare offer?
And what about the two Yisrael Beytenu princes, Uzi Landau and Yair Shamir? Where are they? Why are they not responding to their party chairman’s heretical statements? After all, were they not the ones who gave Lieberman the stamp of approval to be a right-wing party? More evidence of Lieberman’s desertion to the Left is his use of the well-known leftist scare tactic terminology: “a political tsunami.” But what burst out this week was more of a police tsunami against the members of Yisrael Beytenu. Now that the leader has adopted the Orwellian language of peace and speaks the language of the media party, maybe they will cut him some slack.
4. In the end, the dispute between most of the Right and most of the Left boils down to one question: Do we believe the Palestinians or not? Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has declared many times that he will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and he specifically named 6 million, with all its symbolism, as the number of Palestinians who expect their demand for the right of return to be fulfilled. Abbas is currently being kept alive by the Israeli army, which is protecting him as they would a delicate flower from attacks by the street, which supports Hamas. This does not stop the Palestinians from going all over the world, accusing us of every possible atrocity.
The purpose of their action is to gain the maximum amount of territory at the minimum price — actually, for no price at all — but not to establish a tiny statelet. The past hundred years have taught us that what unites Arab-Palestinians is not the desire to improve their own living conditions, but to destroy the Jews’ lives. What more has to happen for us to believe what they say? In the meantime, they are sticking close to us so that we will protect them against Islamic State.
5. So what is the solution? First, whoever said that there was a solution? Second, if we tried and did not succeed, maybe we ought to leave something for future generations to accomplish. You do not really believe the well-known chorus of lamentation that things are bad here and that the country is “stuck.”
We have succeeded quite well, thank God, considering the fact that only one of our hands is engaged in construction, development and cultural work, since the other is busy with self-defense. Where were we just 70 years ago, in 1944 — and where are we now? Let us put things in perspective.
(Mainstream media reports in the United States, and reports elsewhere reliant upon them, seem to affect perceptions in Israel and elsewhere of Israel, Islam, Iran and the Iran Scam. Here’s a question. To what extent do Israeli media mimic the U.S. mainstream media? — DM)
All the news that fits the desired narrative, and none other, shall be reported by the legitimate “news” media.
On February 11, 2013 Vice President Biden said that he and Obama are “counting on…legitimate news media” to help in their gun control efforts.
He said he knew people would continue to “misrepresent” the positions taken by himself and Obama, but that “legitimate news media” would cover them in a way that’s helpful to the administration.
In this post, I use the term “legitimate ‘news’ media” in the same sense that Biden apparently did.
I have been reading Sharyl Attkisson’s November 2014 book Stonewalled. Its thesis is that favored businesses, Government agencies and politicians set the agenda of the legitimate “news” media, which defer to them in what they report and how they report it.
Since Obama’s 2008 nomination and subsequent election, the legitimate “news” media have embraced Him by reporting (or creating) good news for Him and His administration while ignoring or disparaging any reports that they consider inconsistent with their pro- Obama ideological talking points. In doing so, they have relied excessively on administration spokespersons without verifying, independently, what they have been told.
On December 11th, The Washington Times published an article by Monica Crowley titled How do we protect Barack Obama today? It relates to the ideological perspective of the media as related by a broadcast journalist shortly before the 2012 presidential elections.
When I asked her for an example, she replied, “Every morning, we hold a meeting about how to build that evening’s broadcast. We’ve been doing this for decades. Everybody talks about which stories we’re going to air, what the line-up looks like, and which reporters we’ll have live in the field and which ones will be filing taped pieces. In the past, the left-wing bias was always left unspoken. People just ‘got it,’ because they all thought the same. [Emphasis added.]
“Once Obama pulled ahead of Hillary and certainly once he became president,” she said, “the bias came out of the closet. Now, every morning when we meet to discuss that night’s show, they literally say — out loud — ‘How do we protect Barack Obama today?’” [Emphasis added.]
Shocking? No more shocking than any other common but unpleasant reality. And it is congruent with Ms. Attkisson’s multiple accounts in Stonewalled. Less than half way through her book, I have learned more than I had previously understood about what, how and why the media reported — and did not report — on the green scam, the Benghazi scam, the Fast and Furious scam, the IRS scam and others. It’s disgusting but neither shocking nor surprising.
We have a “free press” in the legitimate “news” media. They are free to lie, to accept officially authorized “news” and to reject as not newsworthy or wrong anything which disputes, or is even merely inconsistent with, the prevailing narrative based on the official line.
Here are two interviews with Ms. Attkisson:
Many viewers and readers of the legitimate “news” media seem to be catching on. Perhaps that explains the decline in their numbers of viewers and readers. Do the legitimate “news” media care? They must, because it impacts their bottom lines. Will they continue their march into oblivion by running ever more bland pap while hoping for change they can believe in? Or will they, eventually, begin to report hard news, regardless of whom it might distress?
Please read Stonewalled. Depending on where you live, it may (or may not) be available at your local public library.
Obama does not want Americans to be free — to think for ourselves, to have our First and Second Amendment and other constitutional rights or to reject any aspect of His radical transformation of our country and others into nations of which He, in His twisted way, can be proud. Part II of this multipart series deals with Obama’s foreign policy.
When el Presidente Chávez took office in 1999, he began only slowly to implement his “reforms.” To a casual observer, few changes were apparent in Venezuela between 1997 when my wife and I first arrived and late 2001 when we left, probably never to return. We had a few concerns about the future of the country under Chávez but they were low on our list of reasons not to buy land and build our home in the state of Merida, up in the Andes. Mainly, we wanted to continue sailing and Merida is inconveniently far from an ocean.
Chávez’ initiatives increased dramatically in number and in magnitude only when he was well into his seemingly endless terms in office. Maybe he had heard the story of the frog put into a pleasantly warm but slowly heating pot of water. The frog failed to realize until too late that he was being boiled for dinner. By then the frog had become unable to jump out of the pot.
President Obama, flush with victory and perhaps not having heard the frog story, turned up the heat quickly at first. As a result, starting in January of last year, President Obama’s dinner was delayed by an uncooperative House of Representatives. The frog survived for a while longer. If reelected and given a compliant Congress, he seems likely to turn up the heat. We are the frog.
The situation has worsened since I wrote that article in January of 2012, not the least in Obama’s foreign policies. His then already rapid pace has accelerated and the consequences of His actions have become more “transformational.” In no particular order, He has done His utmost to enhance racial divisions, to conduct His own “war on women,” to engorge the welfare state, to import many illegal aliens, to punish His enemies and reward His friends and to conceal His intentions and actions and otherwise to deceive the public. He has also continued to militarize Federal, State and local law enforcement entities and others well beyond their legitimate needs to the detriment of those who obey the law. His transformational depredations have also infested His foreign policies and actions. In particular, He has tried to punish His, rather than America’s, enemies and to reward His, rather than America’s, friends. Despite all of this He remains — although decreasingly — popular with His admirers.
The United States has slashed its defense budget to historic lows. It sends the message abroad that friendship with America brings few rewards while hostility toward the U.S. has even fewer consequences. The bedrock American relationships with staunch allies such as Australia, Britain, Canada, Japan and Israel are fading. Instead, we court new belligerents that don’t like the United States, such as Turkey and Iran. ]Emphasis added.]
Radical Islam is spreading in the same sort of way that postwar communism once swamped postcolonial Asia, Africa and Latin America. But this time there are only weak responses from the democratic, free-market West. Westerners despair over which is worse — theocratic Iran, the Islamic State or Bashar Assad’s Syria — and seem paralyzed over where exactly the violence will spread next and when it will reach them. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
In the late 1930s, it was pathetic that countries with strong militaries such as France and Britain appeased fascist leader Benito Mussolini and allowed his far weaker Italian forces to do as they pleased by invading Ethiopia. Similarly, Iranian negotiators are attempting to dictate terms of a weak Iran to a strong United States in talks about Iran’s supposedly inherent right to produce weapons-grade uranium — a process that Iran had earlier bragged would lead to the production of a bomb. [Emphasis added.]
The ancient ingredients of war are all on the horizon. An old postwar order crumbles amid American indifference. Hopes for true democracy in post-Soviet Russia, newly capitalist China or ascendant Turkey long ago were dashed. Tribalism, fundamentalism and terrorism are the norms in the Middle East as the nation-state disappears. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
What is scary in these unstable times is that a powerful United States either thinks that it is weak or believes that its past oversight of the postwar order was either wrong or too costly — or that after Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, America is no longer a force for positive change. [Emphasis added.]
A large war is looming, one that will be far more costly than the preventative vigilance that might have stopped it.
Islam
Islam is on the march for greater power and against other religions, including Christianity and Judaism. In the Islamic view, Allah is the only true God and Mohamed is His messenger. According to Wikipedia,
Islam teaches that everyone is Muslim at birth[30][31] because every child that is born has a natural inclination to goodness and to worship the one true God alone. . . . [Emphasis added.]
Muhammad commanded: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him” (Bukhari 9.84.57). This is still the position of all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, both Sunni and Shi’ite. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most renowned and prominent Muslim cleric in the world, has stated: “The Muslim jurists are unanimous that apostates must be punished, yet they differ as to determining the kind of punishment to be inflicted upon them. The majority of them, including the four main schools of jurisprudence (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi`i, and Hanbali) as well as the other four schools of jurisprudence (the four Shiite schools of Az-Zaidiyyah, Al-Ithna-`ashriyyah, Al-Ja`fariyyah, and Az-Zaheriyyah) agree that apostates must be executed.” There is only disagreement over whether the law applies only to men, or to women also – some authorities hold that apostate women should not be killed, but only imprisoned in their houses until death.
In some but not all cases, it may be possible to escape death by paying, in perpetuity, substantial fines which many simply cannot afford.
Here is a video of Ayan Hirsi Ali‘s September 15, 2014 remarks at a Yale Buckley Foundation symposium. They deal with the clash of civilizations. If you want to skip the introductory formalities, go directly to 03:45. Her remarks begin at 10:33.
Obama, like Ayan Hirsi Ali, was raised as a Muslim child. As she matured and began to think for herself, she found the realities of Islam increasingly hateful. Obama continues to find Islam good and to consider it the “religion of peace. Why?
At a dinner in Washington, Biden attempted to correct her perspective on relationship between the Islamic State and Islam, saying, “ISIS had nothing to do with Islam.” When she pushed back, Biden said, “Let me tell you one or two things about Islam…” [Emphasis added.]
“I politely left the conversation at that,” Hirsi Ali said. “I wasn’t used to arguing with vice presidents.”
Consistently, Obama’s “solution” and that of many other multiculturalists: declare the Islamic State, et al, (but not Islam itself, of course) non-Islamic.
Why Uruguay? It’s one of several South American countries run by Marxist terrorists.
Uruguayan President Jose Mujica, a former Marxist terrorist, already offered to take in Syrian refugees and a number of the freed Gitmo Jihadists are Syrians who trained under the future leader of what would become ISIS. If they stay on in Uruguay, they can try to finish the job of killing the Syrian refugees resettled there. If they don’t, they can just join ISIS and kill Christian and Yazidi refugees back in Syria.
It’s a win-win situation for ISIS and Marxist terrorists; less so for their victims.
Most of the Guantanamo detainees freed by Obama were rated as presenting a high risk to America and our allies. They include a bomb maker, a trained suicide bomber, a document forger and a terrorist who had received training in everything up to RPGs and mortars.
Outgoing Uruguayan President José Mujica has made clear that Uruguay would not hold or restrict the six Guantanamo detainees who were recently resettled in his country.
“The first day that they want to leave, they can leave,” said Mujica in a Spanish-language interview with state television TNU. [Emphasis added.]
Please see also this article at The Long War Journal for additional information on the released terrorists. It also observes that
In its final recommendations, issued in January 2010, President Obama’s Guantanamo Review Task Force recommended that all six be transferred “to a country outside the United States that will implement appropriate security measures.” [Emphasis added.]
Right. Was it an humanitarian gesture from Obama? An early Christmas present for the Islamic state and related peace loving Islamic terrorists?
Iran and Nukes
The Israel versus Iran context provides glaring examples of Obama’s predilection for punishing His, rather than America’s, enemies while rewarding His, rather than America’s, friends. As I observed here, Iran is well known as a major sponsor of Islamic terrorism. It is also remarkable for its failure to provide even the most basic human rights.
It has been reported that Iran executed more than four hundred people during the first half of 2014. That’s more than two per day.
Despite Iran’s state anti-Semitism, the recent arrest of U.S. journalists, and the continued oppression of women, the Obama administration has been attempting a rapprochement with the Iranian regime. Fending off Iran hawks in Congress and the D.C. punditocracy, the administration has argued for a policy of constructive engagement, pursuing diplomacy over military action to halt Iran’s nuclear program. The execution of two gay men, while it may not be surprising, certainly doesn’t make that “engagement” any easier.
Iran’s abysmal human rights record and support for Islamic terrorism appear to be of little if any relevance to Obama and the P5+1 negotiators as they pursue a deal with Iran. As noted here, Iran is already at least a nascent nuclear power and, due to Obama’s twisted world view and His desire for a legacy consistent with it, the P5+1 nuclear negotiations gave, and will likely continue to give, Iran substantial advantages. Iran continues to use those advantages, as P5+1 continues to give Iran all that it demands while receiving little if anything in return. The recent seven month extension highlights this strategy.
[W]hat is clear is that the Islamic Republic, particularly the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior cadre of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have gained considerable amount of geopolitical, geostrategic and economic advantages from this offer by the Obama administration. The Supreme Leader’s strategies to buy time, regain full recovery in the economy, pursue his regional hegemonic and ideological ambitions, and reinitiate his government’s nuclear program have been fulfilled. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
[T]he extension of nuclear talks offered to the Islamic Republic is not going to alter Iran’s stand on its nuclear program. Iran will continue holding the position that their demands for the following issues to be met: maintaining a specific number (tens of thousands of) fast-spinning centrifuge machines, Tehran should have the capacity to produce nuclear fuel in the future, and maintain specific level of enriching uranium. In the next few months, the Islamic Republic is not going to give up its capacity to produce plutonium which can be utilized for weapons at its heavy water reactor in the city of Arak. Iran is less likely to provide more evidence proving that it did not carry out secret tests on the development of atomic weapons in Parchin or other military complexes. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency recently pointed out that the Islamic Republic continues to deny the IAEA access to sensitive military site which are suspected to be used for nuclear activities. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
After the extension of the nuclear talks, President Rouhani pointed out on state television that “I promise the Iranian nation that those centrifuges will never stop working.” The extension not only will not alter the Islamic Republic’s position on its nuclear program, but will give the ruling clerics the opportunity to be further empowered, making them more determined to pursue their regional hegemonic ambitions. [Emphasis added.]
Alireza Forghani, a former provincial governor (and pro-nuclear radical) who now serves as strategist at a think tank aligned with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in his blog that Iran is pursuing a tactic of “elongation” in the talks, which “never are supposed to be brought to a successful conclusion.” He backs a policy of nuclear weapons being the Islamic Republic’s “definite right” and looks forward to a time when the United States faces “a nuclear Iran who not only has nuclear power, but also is equipped with nuclear weapons.” [Emphasis added.]
In a previous post headlined “Iran Needs a War,” Forghani cautioned that “American politicians should know that their next war with the Islamic Revolution of Iran, the war which guarantees Iranian Muslims survival, will be an utter destruction.” He also denounced “the childish behavior of Obama” regarding the negotiations and said that “nuclear weapons capabilities are essential in order to prevent U.S. freedom of action” and that Iran needed the capability to mount a “rapid response at the level of the atom bomb.” [ Emphasis added.]
The Obama administration is trying to portray the failure to reach a nuclear agreement with Iran as just part of the ebb and flow of the diplomatic process. But the signals coming from Tehran indicate that arms control negotiations are just another tool in Iran’s drive to achieve nuclear capability. [Emphasis added.]
Iran contends that the Obama Administration continues to lie about Iranian concessions, which Iran denies having made. Due to the overall credibility deficit of the Obama administration, I consider Iran more credible on the matter.
Iran over the weekend pushed back against key claims made by the administration to lawmakers and the press about further concessions agreed to by Iran following the last round of talk in Vienna regarding the country’s contested nuclear program.
In talking points disseminated to congressional offices since the extension in talks was announced, the administration has claimed that the terms of the agreement—which will prolong talks through July 2015—included “significant concessions” by Tehran, according to the Associated Press. [Emphasis added.]
However, Iran says that this is a lie and that no new concessions have been agreed upon.
Islam and Israel
Islam, the Religion of Peace Death and Subjugation, is not the root of all evil, but it engages in and promotes far more than its fair share of the worst types. Obama assists it in its depredations. Here’s a video of a Muslim preacher at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem speaking with great warmth heat about Jews.
The words of that “preacher-teacher,” as Ayan Hirsi Ali would probably characterize him, and those of like-minded Islamists, have gained many devout followers among Palestinians. According to this article,
An overwhelming majority of Palestinian Arabs support the recent spate of terrorist attacks against Israelis, an opinion poll released Tuesday finds, according to The Associated Press (AP).
. . . .
The poll found 86 percent of respondents believe the Al-Aqsa mosque is in “grave danger” from Israel. It said 80 percent supported individual attacks by Arabs who have stabbed Israelis or rammed cars into crowded train stations. [Emphasis added.]
Islamists have been regularly clashing with Israeli police on the Temple Mount and escalated a campaign of harassment against Jewish visitors, who are already under severe restrictions due to Muslim pressure. The violence reached a peak with the recent attempted murder of prominent Jewish Temple Mount activist Yehuda Glick.
Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has blamed Israel for the ongoing tensions in Jerusalem.
The Iranian regime has launched a nationwide social media campaign called, “We Love Fighting Israel,” which encourages Iranian children, teens, and Internet users to photograph themselves alongside messages of hate for the Jewish state.
. . . .
Thousands of Iranians are reported to have already joined the electronic movement following comments by Khamenei’s outlining Iran’s goal of destroying the Jewish state.
“Our people love fighting against the Zionists and the Islamic Republic has proved this as well,” [Supreme Leader] Khamenei was quoted as saying in a recent speech by the country’s state-run media. “By Allah’s Favor and Grace, we have passed through the barrier of denominational discord.” [Emphasis and bracketed insert added.]
. . . .
The anti-Israel campaign now “has gone viral on the web,” according to Iran’s state-controlled Mehr News Agency, “getting more and more boost from individuals who post photos reading similar sentences, [and] sharing the #Fightingthezionists hash tag.”
In 1975, after repeated attempts to kick Israel out of the U.N., the General Assembly succumbed to the pressure exerted by the Arab countries and determined that Zionism is racism. The decision was the cornerstone of the institutionalized factory of discrimination against Israel at the United Nations. The U.N. waited 16 long years before retracting its “Zionism is racism” decision. The protocols have been updated, but even with no official reminder, the stain remains on the walls of the general assembly hall and the stench is still in the U.N.’s corridors today. [Emphasis added.]
Of the 193 states that belong to the U.N., only 87 are democracies — less than half. The countries that are taking advantage of the democratic process at the United Nations are the same ones that suppress any spark of democracy within their borders. Although the U.N. uses a parliamentary mechanism, many of the hands raised to vote are the hands of brutal dictators. [Emphasis added.]
The U.N. has gone from being a stage for courageous statecraft to a theater of the absurd: The General Assembly allows wild Palestinian incitement, the Security Council has Venezuela and Malaysia managing peacekeeping forces, and then there is the Human Rights Council, in which the guardians of humanity are regimes without a shred of humanity, regimes that invent blood libels against Israel while in Syria, a tyrant slaughters hundreds of thousands of his own people. [Emphasis added.]
The UN created a unique organization, UNRWA, to handle refugees from Palestine/Israel while every other global refugee is managed in an under-funded, undermanned separate agency. The UN compounds the abuse by only allowing descendants of UNRWA to receive aid, while denying descendants of the rest of the world’s refugees any support.
. . . .
The UN only condemned the nationalist movement of Israelis as “racism” while ignoring nationalism of other countries
The UN censured Israel when the Israeli Prime Minister visited the holiest spot for Jews during regular visiting hours, but didn’t say a word while some countries were slaughtering thousands of people.
Unlike the UN believer in the cartoon, Obama remains unwilling to learn about the bases of, let alone to consider, other perceptions.
A senior official of the United Nation Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), also known to some as the United Nations Rocket Warehousing Agency), recently called for a boycott of the Jerusalem Post for publishing an editorial
by Palestinian human rights activist Bassam Eid that called for an audit of all allocated funds to UNRWA and the dismissal of its Hamas-affiliated employees. (“Proud Palestinians must lead the fight to reform UNRWA,” Dec. 1, 2014.)
And Obama often relies on the U.N. to tell Him how and where to “lead.”
For Obama and European leaders, Israel is reducible to the peace process. And the Israeli left depends on the support of foreign governments for its network of foreign funded non-profit organizations. The Israeli left can’t let go of its exploding version of ObamaCare [the peace process] because the left is becoming a foreign organization with limited domestic support. Its electorate isn’t in Israel; it’s in Brussels. [Emphasis and bracketed insert added.]
The Israeli left is short on ideas, both foreign and domestic, and its last remaining card is Obama.
Escalating a crisis in relations has been the traditional way for US administrations to force Israeli governments out of office. Bill Clinton did it to Netanyahu and as Israeli elections appear on the horizon Obama would love to do it all over again.
There’s only one problem.
The United States is popular in Israel, but Obama isn’t. Obama’s spats with Netanyahu ended up making the Israeli leader more popular. The plan was for Obama to gaslight Israelis by maintaining a positive image in Israel while lashing out at the Jewish State so that the blame would fall on Netanyahu. [Emphasis added.]
Obama considers Prime Minister Netanyahu the principal impediment to realization of His fantasy of Palestinian peace through creation of a Palestinian state. “Peace” with the Palestinians will not bring peace to Israel — aside from Islamic peace through death. Yet it seems that Obama is meddling in Israeli politics to get Prime Minister Netanyahu removed from office. Obama recently met with Netanyahu’s Israeli opponents:
The White House is still working on a detailed plan of action, but has lost no time in setting up appointments for the president to receive heads of the parties sworn to overthrow Netanyahu – among others, ex-minister Lapid, opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog of Labor and Tzipi Livni (The Movement), who was fired this week as Justice Minister along with Lapid. [Emphasis added.]
They will be accorded attractive photo-ops with Obama and joint communiqués designed to signify to the Israeli voter that the US president would favor their election to the future government and the country as a whole would gain tangibly from a different government to the incumbent one. [Emphasis added.]
This White House campaign would be accompanied by leaks from Washington for putting Netanyahu and his policies in a derogatory light. Messages to this effect were transmitted to a number of serving political figures as an incentive to jump the Likud-led ship to opposition ranks. The US administration has begun hinting that it may emulate the Europeans by turning the screws on Israel as punishment for the prime minister’s signature policy of developing West Bank and Jerusalem development construction. [Emphasis added.]
Conclusions
Should we, who claim to be civilized and therefore to support democracy with freedom — including freedom of religion but not freedom to engage in genocidal religious wars — respect and emphasize with the Islamic views of the “preacher-teacher” in the video embedded above and of Iran’s Supreme Leader that the Jews who infest the Earth must be hated and killed? Does Hillary Clinton’s sympathy and empathy meme apply only to our enemies? Does she consider the preacher-teacher, the Supreme Leader and their ilk to be our friends or enemies?
Rather than be troubled by the nature of Islam, Obama heartily approves of it. As far as the Middle East is concerned, He is troubled principally by Israel’s refusal to commit national suicide by bowing to His every demand which, in His apparent view, should bring peace to the entire region. If Israel fails to do as He demands, it must suffer the fate of a rabid dog so that its infection cannot spread.
Obama has been a disaster as a world leader and, when He has actually tried to lead He has done so, often in conjunction with the U.N., to deprive many of their freedoms while enhancing the abilities of others, particularly devotees of Islam, to trash even more of those freedoms. If, as seems increasingly likely, the P5+1 negotiations as eventually concluded permit Iran to get (or keep) nukes and the means to use them, the world will be a much less safe place for all.
If Obama succeeds, Iran will see to it that Israel is not the only nation to suffer the consequences of His actions.
For Obama and European leaders, Israel is reducible to the peace process. And the Israeli left depends on the support of foreign governments for its network of foreign funded non-profit organizations. The Israeli left can’t let go of its exploding version of ObamaCare [the Palestinian Authority] because the left is becoming a foreign organization with limited domestic support. Its electorate isn’t in Israel; it’s in Brussels.
The Israeli left is short on ideas, both foreign and domestic, and its last remaining card is Obama.
Israel is meant to be a scapegoat in foreign affairs and a safe fundraising line for Democratic politicians. It’s supposed to take the blame for Obama’s foreign policies while posing for photos with him for Jewish audiences.
Obama’s ideal Israeli government would allow itself to be berated and blamed for everything without ever speaking up in its own defense. It would be pathetically grateful for any attention from Obama. That’s all the Israeli left can offer him and it can’t even deliver that because it can’t win.
In trying to weaken Netanyahu, Obama only made him stronger.
*********************
While in most countries immigration moves the electorate to the left, in Israel immigration moved the country to the right. In the United States the left is counting on demographics to make it easier for them to win elections, but in Israel demographic shifts have made it easier for the right to win.
But the biggest problem for the Israeli left is that it’s tethered to its own version of ObamaCare in the form of the Palestinian Authority which won’t make peace, won’t stop funding terrorism and won’t stop playing the victim. As with ObamaCare, the Israeli left teeters between running on the disastrous peace process that everyone hates and pivoting away from it toward economic bread and butter issues.
For Obama and European leaders, Israel is reducible to the peace process. And the Israeli left depends on the support of foreign governments for its network of foreign funded non-profit organizations. The Israeli left can’t let go of its exploding version of ObamaCare because the left is becoming a foreign organization with limited domestic support. Its electorate isn’t in Israel; it’s in Brussels.
The Israeli left is short on ideas, both foreign and domestic, and its last remaining card is Obama.
Escalating a crisis in relations has been the traditional way for US administrations to force Israeli governments out of office. Bill Clinton did it to Netanyahu and as Israeli elections appear on the horizon Obama would love to do it all over again.
There’s only one problem.
The United States is popular in Israel, but Obama isn’t. Obama’s spats with Netanyahu ended up making the Israeli leader more popular. The plan was for Obama to gaslight Israelis by maintaining a positive image in Israel while lashing out at the Jewish State so that the blame would fall on Netanyahu.
That was what Obama’s trip to Israel had been about. While his approval ratings in Israel briefly picked up, they clattered down again over his attitude during the recent Hamas war. Polls show that the majority of Israelis don’t trust him to have their back on Islamic terrorism or Iran. And that’s bad news for him and for an Israeli left that needs to sell the image of a good Obama and a bad Netanyahu.
The foreign policy crowd is divided on whether Obama should intervene in Israel’s elections and how much. Trial balloons being floated show that Obama Inc. is at the very least willing to play coy about suggestions of sanctioning Israel. The sanctions are unlikely to ever get past Congress, but they never have to exist. Obama’s people are letting the Israeli left and their media outlet Haaretz do the heavy lifting by drawing up political doomsday scenarios and then issuing non-denial denials.
The idea is to undermine Netanyahu without getting Obama’s hands dirty. Anonymous leaks provide plausible deniability without anything that can officially be traced back to Obama. While Obama, Biden and Hillary spin the attacks as “normal disagreements between friends” for the consumption of Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, the Israeli left warns that the relationship between America and Israel has been completely wrecked.
While Jewish Democrats have remained oblivious, as intended, these tactics have only hurt Obama’s image among the Israeli target audience. And that has strengthened Netanyahu’s image as a strong leader willing to stand up for his country’s interests.
In trying to weaken Netanyahu, Obama only made him stronger.
The Israeli left however isn’t done yet. Unpopular with the public, its members still control the police, the judiciary, the media, academia and the entertainment industry. They form the Israeli “Deep State” made up of everyone from top security officials to the media who are constantly warning about the threats to democracy from democracy, the dangers of right-wing extremism and the need to crack down on “incitement” which usually means any view that diverges from that of the left.
When it comes to elections, the left compensates for its unpopularity with fake third parties that claim to be centrist or reformist. Yesh Atid, the current incarnation of the fake third party built around an anchorman who went from high school dropout to the Minister of Finance, is sinking, but it had already fulfilled its purpose. The next incarnation of the fake third party will be headed by Moshe Kahlon.
Moshe Kahlon is a familiar figure, a defector from the conservative Likud party, a fake moderate who claims that the “extreme right” has taken over his old party. Swap out Reagan for Begin and it’s the exact same rhetoric you can hear from a Charlie Crist or a Larry Pressler.
The left may not be able to win a popularity contest, let alone a contest of ideas, but it has been agile at manipulating Israel’s multi-party system to its advantage. It doesn’t need to beat the right. It just needs to build a coalition out of fake third parties fueled by public frustration with the existing dominant parties while finding ways to splinter the right. And that’s where Obama can do the most harm.
Obama has failed at winning over Israelis, but he doesn’t need to if he can force Netanyahu to make enough concessions to destroy his image. And then the right begins to eat itself. It’s the same tactic that Obama used against Congressional Republicans. Uniting the left and dividing the right had worked well in America. Netanyahu’s willingness to compromise has lost the right without winning over anyone else.
Netanyahu may not be beatable this time around, but if his coalition can be watered down with enough leftists then it compromises his ability to get anything done while creating a ticking time bomb. New elections are the result of the ticking time bomb finally going off. The “inclusive” coalition favored by this administration last time around effectively undermined the Netanyahu government.
If a more solid conservative coalition emerges from the election then Obama will have lost. But the overall relationship would remain unchanged even if the left won.
No Israeli government can deliver the things that Obama wants because they are physically impossible. The PLO does not want peace. It will not agree to any final deal that ends all future demands on Israel and all justifications for violence against the Jewish State. And even if such a deal were reached, it would have no impact on Hamas which controls Gaza and will control the West Bank. Nor would it make the regional Muslim violence that the conflict is frequently blamed for vanish into thin air.
Even a government of the left would still be berated because there are Jews living in Jerusalem and across Israel in places that Obama disapproves of. No Israeli government could ethnically cleanse a quarter of a million Jews. And even if it did, new demands and claims of occupied territory would follow.
A government of the left can however give Obama political cover. It would avoid making statements about Iran and freely put Israeli lives at risk to meet administration demands. Its members would help Obama maintain the illusion of a friendly relationship no matter how ugly things become behind the scenes. There would be no more public tension and nothing to raise questions for American Jews.
And that’s what Obama really wants. Israel is meant to be a scapegoat in foreign affairs and a safe fundraising line for Democratic politicians. It’s supposed to take the blame for Obama’s foreign policies while posing for photos with him for Jewish audiences.
That’s where Netanyahu rocked the boat by speaking out. That’s what infuriates Obama.
Obama’s ideal Israeli government would allow itself to be berated and blamed for everything without ever speaking up in its own defense. It would be pathetically grateful for any attention from Obama. That’s all the Israeli left can offer him and it can’t even deliver that because it can’t win.
Bassam Tawil writes that if and when Iran has a nuclear bomb, there is not a thing the current U.S. Administration will do to help Israel. (Image sources: Israel PM office, PressTV video screenshot)
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