Free speech on campus, Pat Condell via You Tube, March 2, 2015
(Many “highly educated” leftists believe that they should vent their views freely but that others not only should not but should be prevented from doing so. Might the objections of Obama and his cohorts to PM Netanyahu’s address to the Congress have been motivated by substantially the same sort of nonsense Mr. Condell ascribes to academia: If you don’t agree with Obama, know your place, sit down and shut up?– DM)
What Benjamin Netanyahu just did, The Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin, March 3, 2015
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress was a devastating indictment of the P5+1′s entire approach, and it reminded and reunited Democrats and Republicans, as did Sen. Robert Menendez’s speech to AIPAC Monday, on what is at stake and why the deal under contemplation can never come to pass.
As a preliminary matter, it is evident that had the president not thrown a fit, Netanyahu’s speech might not have garnered quite so much attention. But to be honest, the fuss mostly remained in the media. When the chips were down, it appeared that all but far-left lawmakers and Congressional Black Caucus members attended. That, incidentally, is a problem on the left, which has become virulently anti-Israel, as has the left in Europe and elsewhere (hence the BDS movement’s prominence on left-wing campuses and European capitals).
The speech was not aimed at the president, who is immune to reason, nor to the negotiators who suffer from a variation of Stockholm Syndrome, whereby they come to identify with their bargaining opponents more than the country they represent. It was aimed at American public opinion and uncertain Democrats on whose good judgment Netanyahu must rely to derail a disastrous deal. By flattering the president and Democrats, Netanyahu gave them an out to agree with him without crossing the president or appearing to give in to Republicans. He said so bluntly it was starting: This is a bad deal. No deal is better. And he explained exactly why.
From identical talking points spouted by Obama administration apologists, we know the Obama defense is that there is no alternative. But Netanyahu gave them one, and in doing so pointed Congress in the right direction.”We can insist that restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program not be lifted for as long as Iran continues its aggression in the region and in the world. Before lifting those restrictions, the world should demand that Iran do three things. First, stop its aggression against its neighbors in the Middle East. Second, stop supporting terrorism around the world. And third, stop threatening to annihilate my country, Israel, the one and only Jewish state.” He was greeted with thunderous applause.
And how to get there? “Well, nuclear know-how without nuclear infrastructure doesn’t get you very much. A race car driver without a car can’t drive. A pilot without a plane can’t fly. Without thousands of centrifuges, tons of enriched uranium or heavy water facilities, Iran can’t make nuclear weapons. Iran’s nuclear program can be rolled back well-beyond the current proposal by insisting on a better deal and keeping up the pressure on a very vulnerable regime, especially given the recent collapse in the price of oil. Now, if Iran threatens to walk away from the table — and this often happens in a Persian bazaar — call their bluff. They’ll be back, because they need the deal a lot more than you do. And by maintaining the pressure on Iran and on those who do business with Iran, you have the power to make them need it even more.” In other words, stop chasing a deal, tighten the screws and give the regime a choice between economic collapse and nukes.
He made three other salient points that the administration would rather obscure.
First, even if the deal on the table was inked, it would set off a series of events far worse than having no deal: “So this deal won’t change Iran for the better; it will only change the Middle East for the worse. A deal that’s supposed to prevent nuclear proliferation would instead spark a nuclear arms race in the most dangerous part of the planet. This deal won’t be a farewell to arms. It would be a farewell to arms control.”
Second, he explained that the hope of Iran changing its stripes down the road is entirely illogical. “Why should Iran’s radical regime change for the better when it can enjoy the best of both world’s: aggression abroad, prosperity at home? This is a question that everyone asks in our region. Israel’s neighbors — Iran’s neighbors know that Iran will become even more aggressive and sponsor even more terrorism when its economy is unshackled and it’s been given a clear path to the bomb. . . . If anyone thinks — if anyone thinks this deal kicks the can down the road, think again. When we get down that road, we’ll face a much more dangerous Iran, a Middle East littered with nuclear bombs and a countdown to a potential nuclear nightmare. Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve come here today to tell you we don’t have to bet the security of the world on the hope that Iran will change for the better. We don’t have to gamble with our future and with our children’s future.”
And finally, he went to the heart of the problem with the administration’s premise, namely that reconciliation with Iran can help us defeat the Islamic State. He argued, “Iran and ISIS are competing for the crown of militant Islam. One calls itself the Islamic Republic. The other calls itself the Islamic State. Both want to impose a militant Islamic empire first on the region and then on the entire world. They just disagree among themselves who will be the ruler of that empire. In this deadly game of thrones, there’s no place for America or for Israel, no peace for Christians, Jews or Muslims who don’t share the Islamist medieval creed, no rights for women, no freedom for anyone. So when it comes to Iran and ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.”
It was masterful in many ways. But ultimately, Israel won’t be hobbled or restrained if Netanyahu’s message falls on deaf ears. He wrapped up with a reminder, as he pointed to Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in the gallery: “And I wish I could promise you, Elie, that the lessons of history have been learned. I can only urge the leaders of the world not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Not to sacrifice the future for the present; not to ignore aggression in the hopes of gaining an illusory peace. But I can guarantee you this, the days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies, those days are over. We are no longer scattered among the nations, powerless to defend ourselves. We restored our sovereignty in our ancient home. And the soldiers who defend our home have boundless courage. For the first time in 100 generations, we, the Jewish people, can defend ourselves.”
He hastened to add to tumultuous applause that “But I know that Israel does not stand alone. I know that America stands with Israel. I know that you stand with Israel. You stand with Israel, because you know that the story of Israel is not only the story of the Jewish people but of the human spirit that refuses again and again to succumb to history’s horrors.”
That’s the hope, and he made it that much more likely by debunking nearly every false note, phony argument and wrong assumption guiding the administration. He is betting congressional Democrats and the American people are smarter and wiser than Obama. How could they not be?
A scenario Netanyahu hasn’t spelled out: One Iranian nuke could obliterate Israel’s heartland, DEBKAfile, March 3, 2015
One dread Iranian nuclear threat postulated
When Prime Minster Binyamin Netanyahu speaks out against Iran becoming a pre-nuclear state he is warning that Iran could at any time cross the line agreed in diplomacy with the US and build a bomb whenever it chooses. He has never spelled out the mechanics of this threat to Israel’s survival.
The last DEBKA Weekly revealed in detail one potential scenario that, given Israel’s small size, would call for no more than one nuke to destroy its heartland and inflict at least an estimated million casualties. This nuclear bomb or device would be dropped from an IranAir civilian airliner on a regular run from Larnaca over the Mediterranean about 100 km from the Israeli coast.
After the plane disappeared, the delayed action mechanism would detonate the bomb and set off a tsunami. Giant waves would swamp the densely populated Tel Aviv conurbation and its satellites. This 1,500 square kilometer area is home to some 3.7 million people, nearly half of the country’s entire population, its military and banking centers, hi-tech industry and the stock exchange.
The cost in lives would be cataclysmic – at least a million dead.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary rulers make no secret of their plans for Israel. On Feb. 26, the second day of Iran’s 2015 war games, a senior Revolutionary Guards officer declared that Iran had the ability to wipe the cities of Haifa and Tel Aviv off the face of the earth.
In projecting this scenario, Israel’s defense chiefs have no doubt set up defenses and a second-strike capacity in a mountainous area outside the range of a tsunami and far from Israel’s shores.
Israel is also on guard on both of its northern borders against the hostile Iranian military presence encroaching from Syria and Lebanon.
The big speech – about which Netanyahu joked: Never has so much been written about a speech before it was given – will be delivered to a joint session of the US Congress Tuesday, March 3, at 6 p.m. IST.
It is hard to see what he hopes to achieve, aside from dramatizing his fight against the emerging US-Iranian deal which, he warns, will enable Iran to consummate its drive for nuclear weapons early in the future.
He takes the august podium under a barrage of criticism from President Barack Obama, his aides and his political opponents at home. About one-fifth of Democratic members will be absent. The White House has warned him against “betraying trust” by revealing details conveyed in confidence. But he won cheers from a large AIPAC audience earlier when he said, “Israel now has a voice and I will use it!”
In a Reuters interview Monday night, Obama said the US and Israel agreed Iran must not acquire nuclear weapons, but differed on how to achieve this goal. Any deal he would agree to, Obama said, would require Iran to freeze its nuclear program at least a decade. The US goal is to make sure “there’s at least a year between us seeing them try to get a nuclear weapon and them actually being able to obtain one,” he said.
A key doubt was whether Iran would agree to rigorous inspection demands and the low levels of uranium enrichment capability they would have to maintain.
Monday, March 2, the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, complained once again that Iran was still not answering key questions about its nuclear projects or opening up suspect sites to inspection.
But US national security adviser Susan Rice, who addressed AIPAC after Netanyahu, insisted that the prime minister’ demand to strip Iran of the ability to enrich uranium would be “neither realistic nor achievable,” adding that President Obama had left all options on the table for preventing a nuclear-armed Iran.
After the speech to Congress, the prime minister will meet Senators Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid with a group of bipartisan lawmakers.
Although no member of the administration will be present for the speech – not just Vice President Joe Biden – the office of House Speaker John Boehner, who invited the Israeli leader to give the address, says the demand for tickets is unprecedented – from both Republicans and Democrats alike. The House and Senate have set up alternative viewing locations.
Netanyahu, Churchill and Congress, The Gatestone Institute, Richard Kemp, March 1, 2015
There are striking similarities between the objectives of Churchill’s speech nearly 75 years ago and Netanyahu’s today; both with no less purpose than to avert global conflagration. And, like Churchill’s in the 1930s, Netanyahu’s is the lone voice among world leaders today.
There is no doubt abut Iran’s intent. It has been described as a nuclear Auschwitz. Israel is not the only target of Iranian violence. Iran has long been making good on its promises to mobilize Islamic forces against the US, as well as the UK and other American allies. Attacks directed and supported by Iran have killed an estimated 1,100 American troops in Iraq in recent years. Iran provided direct support to Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks.
Between 2010 and 2013, Iran either ordered or allowed at least three major terrorist plots against the US and Europe to be planned from its soil. Fortunately, all were foiled.
Iran’s ballistic missile program, inexplicably outside the scope of current P5+1 negotiations, brings Europe into Iran’s range, and future development will extend Tehran’s reach to the US.
It is not yet too late to prevent Iran from arming itself with nuclear weapons. In his 1941 speech to Congress, Churchill reminded the American people that five or six years previously it would have been easy to prevent Germany from rearming without bloodshed. But by then it was too late.
This vengeful and volatile regime must not in any circumstances be allowed to gain a nuclear weapons capability, whatever the P5+1 states might consider the short-term economic, political or strategic benefits to themselves of a deal with Tehran.
In a few days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address the US Congress for the third time. The only other foreign leader to have had that privilege was Winston Churchill. Like Churchill when he first spoke to Congress in December 1941, Netanyahu is taking a risk.
For Churchill the risk was to his life — he had to make a hazardous transatlantic voyage aboard the battleship HMS Duke of York through stormy, U-boat infested waters. For Netanyahu the risk is to his own political life and to his country’s relationship with the United States, given the intense presidential opposition to his speech.
But like Churchill was, Netanyahu is a fighting soldier and, like Churchill, a tough political leader, unafraid to shoulder such risks when so much is at stake. And in both cases, the stakes could not be higher, greater than their own lives, political fortunes or rivalries and affecting not just their own countries and the United States, but the whole of the world.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint session of U.S. Congress on May 24, 2011. (Image source: PBS video screenshot)
There are striking similarities between the objectives of Churchill’s speech nearly 75 years ago and Netanyahu’s today: both with no less a purpose than to avert global conflagration.
Speaking days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Churchill summarized the course of the war thus far but then concluded with a dramatic appeal to the American people for Anglo-American unity to prevent conflict in the future, reminding them that “twice in a single generation, the catastrophe of world war has fallen upon us.”
“Do we not owe it to ourselves, to our children, and to mankind,” he asked, “to make sure that these catastrophes do not engulf us for the third time?”
No less profound, and no less far-reaching, will be Netanyahu’s appeal for American-Israeli unity in the face of a new danger. A danger perhaps even greater than Churchill was able to comprehend in pre-nuclear 1941. Whereas Churchill spoke of a future, as yet unknown peril, Netanyahu will focus on the clear and present threat to world peace if Iran is allowed to produce nuclear weapons.
And like Churchill in the 1930s, Netanyahu’s is a lone voice among world leaders today.
In pursuit of both uranium and plutonium tracks to a bomb, as well as the development of long-range ballistic missiles, there is no doubt about Iran’s intent. It has been described as a nuclear Auschwitz.
It is Netanyahu’s duty to sound the alarm against such a prospect. It is Israel’s survival that is at stake. It is Israel that will have to conduct military intervention if the US will not. And it is Israelis who will die in any subsequent regional conflagration.
But this is not only an existential threat to Israel — it is a danger to other states in the Middle East and to us all. Doubtful of Western resolve, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey are already investigating the development of their own nuclear capabilities.
An agreement that leaves Iran with the potential to achieve nuclear breakout will trigger a Middle East arms race that will exponentially increase the risks of global nuclear war, a risk multiplied by the vulnerability of regional governments to overthrow by extremists.
Iran’s ballistic missile program, inexplicably outside the scope of current P5+1 negotiations, brings Europe into Iran’s range, and future development will extend Tehran’s nuclear reach to the US. The world’s number one sponsor of terrorism, the regime of the ayatollahs would have no qualms about supplying their terrorist proxies with nuclear weapons.
This is the greatest threat the world faces today. Yet all the signals suggest that the P5+1, driven by President Obama’s apparent desperation for détente with Tehran, is already set on a path towards 1930s-style appeasement that will end with Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
The view that Cold War style containment and mutual deterrence could prevent this apocalyptic, fanatical regime from using its nuclear weapons is dangerously naïve. Yet the Western leaders who seem to be on the verge of reaching an agreement are not naïve. Lacking the moral strength to face down Iran, they see deception and appeasement as the only way out of their dilemma.
To gauge their intentions, we do not need to rely just on frequent Iranian threats, such as those of General Hossein Salami, who said recently, with negotiations still under way: “As long as the US continue to use the Islamic world as the scene for their regional policies, all the forces of the Islamic world will undoubtedly be mobilized against them.” In the same interview, he threatened Israel too: “The very existence of the Zionist entity and its collapse are of crucial importance.”
Iran’s determination to bring about the violent collapse of the “Zionist entity” is continuously manifested in its directing and funding of armed attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians at home and overseas, by proxies including Hizballah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Gaza conflict last summer, for example, owed much to Iranian funding and weaponry.
Just a few weeks ago, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Mohammad Allahadi was operating with senior Hizballah commanders to set up a new front on Syrian territory in the Golan, from which to launch attacks against Israel. He was killed by an Israeli air strike while visiting his planned area of operations.
Israel is not the only target of Iranian violence. Iran has long been making good on its promises to mobilize Islamic forces against the US, as well as the UK and other American allies. Attacks directed and supplied from Tehran killed an estimated 1,100 American troops in Iraq in recent years. Strikes have been facilitated in Afghanistan, killing US, British and other Coalition soldiers.
Iran provided direct support to Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks and continues to harbor Al Qaeda terrorists. Between 2010 and 2013, Tehran either ordered or allowed at least three major terrorist plots against the US and Europe to be planned from its soil. Fortunately, all were foiled. Direction, support and facilitation to both Sunni and Shia terrorist groups in planning attacks against the US and its allies continues today.
This vengeful and volatile regime must not in any circumstances be allowed to gain a nuclear weapons capability, whatever the P5+1 states might consider the short-term economic, political or strategic benefits to themselves of a deal with Tehran.
Even before the world’s first experience of nuclear bombing in August 1945, Churchill and Roosevelt both understood the dangers of allowing their enemies and potential enemies to acquire such capability. When Allied intelligence identified a Nazi uranium production plant in Oranienburg in eastern Germany, 612 bombers destroyed it in a single raid in March 1945 with 1,506 tons of high explosives and 178 tons of incendiary bombs, to prevent it falling into the hands of advancing Russian troops.
Only a strong stand by the West, and rejection of an agreement that allows development of nuclear weapons, will ensure that such action does not in the future become necessary against Iran. In his 1941 speech to Congress, Churchill reminded the American people that five or six years previously it would have been easy to prevent Germany from rearming without bloodshed. But by then it was too late, and the world was engulfed in unprecedented violence.
It is not yet too late to prevent Iran from arming itself with nuclear weapons. The American people, the American government and the West as a whole must heed Netanyahu’s clear warning not to reach a deal that will allow the mendacious and malevolent Iranian regime to acquire nuclear weapons. Instead, sanctions that stand a chance of compelling Tehran to abandon its world-threatening ambitions must be maintained, and if necessary, increased.
Netanyahu tries to head off Iran’s machinations after Obama empowers Tehran as favored Mid East ally, DEBKAfile, March 1, 2015
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.
****************
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.
(Tip of the hat to Vermont Loon Watch. – DM)
Obama to preempt all programming to address Climate change: March 3, Dan Miller’s Blog, The Most Reverend Mohamed Allah-scimitar, February 28, 2015
(The views expressed in this article are mine and those of my (imaginary) guest author, the Most Reverend Mohamed Allah-Scimitar. They do not necessarily reflect the views of Warsclerotic or any of its other editors.– DM)
This is a guest post by my (imaginary) guest author, the Most Reverend Mohamed Allah-scimitar, President Obama’s chief adviser on Islamic relations with Christians and Jews.
The Most Revereddd Mohamed Allah-scimitar
**********************
The worst crisis ever to face The Obama Nation — man-caused global warming climate change — continues to immobilize the country. It does so contemptuously despite the decades-long warming trend recognized by all reputable scientists. Therefore, President Obama will use the emergency broadcast system to preempt all other programming, including the internet, to address the nation on March 3.
Hell Niagara Falls freezes over
Violent right-wing Christian and Jewish extremist Islamophobes have contended that, by virtue of its timing, President Obama’s address is intended to preempt media coverage of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s remarks to the Congress on the alleged “existential threat” of a nuclear deal with Iran.
However, White House press secretary Josh Earnest vigorously denied their racist and therefore specious claims. He pointed out that Obama is extraordinarily busy fulfilling His duties as the President of all of His people. He has, therefore, made — and continues to make — historic efforts to help potential non-Islamic Islamic State recruits find jobs and hence to feel good about themselves. Do we want more of this non-Islamic violence? No? Then you should not watch Netanyahu’s address, even if you could.
President Obama also owes it to His people to continue His Herculean efforts to prevent the Republican Congress from destroying His country by passing legislation which He has to waste time vetoing, thereby attempting to impede His noble efforts to give His people — American citizens and American citizens in waiting — everything they need and want by executive decree action.
Unfortunately, the only time He has available coincides, unexpectedly, with PM Netanyahu’s frivolous speech — which nobody in his right mind would watch anyway because Netanyahu is an untrustworthy nattering nabob of negativism and a war criminal to boot.
Moreover, as explained by Robert Kagan in a February 27th Washington Post article, there is no need for anyone to hear Netanyahu’s meddlesome nonsense:
Do we really need the Israeli prime minister to appear before Congress to explain the dangers and pitfalls of certain prospective deals on Iran’s nuclear weapons programs? Would we not know otherwise? Have the U.S. critics of those prospective deals lost their voice? Are they shy about expressing their concerns? Are they inarticulate or incompetent? Do they lack the wherewithal to get their message out?
Not exactly. Every day a new report or analysis warns of the consequences of various concessions that the Obama administration may or may not be making. Some think tanks in Washington devote themselves almost entirely to the subject of Iran’s nuclear program. Congress has held numerous hearings on the subject. Every week, perhaps every day, high-ranking members of the House and Senate, from both parties, lay out the dangers they see. The Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and others publish countless stories on the talks in which experts weigh in to express their doubts. If all the articles, statements and analyses produced in the United States on this subject could be traded for centrifuges, the Iranian nuclear program would be eliminated in a week.
. . . .
Given all this, can it really be the case that the American people will not know what to think about any prospective Iran deal until one man, and only one man, gets up to speak in one venue, and only one venue, and does so in the first week of March, and only in that week? That is what those who insist it is vital that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speak before a joint meeting of Congress next week would have us believe. [Emphasis added.]
President Obama is greatly, and perfectly understandably, distressed that Netanyahu will offer nothing new in support of His legacy achievement of world peace in His time and that his address will therefore force Him to create insuperable problems for Israel. Indeed, He has already asked Iran, under the auspices of the United Nations, to mediate a binding peace agreement among Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. President Obama did not want to do it, because He loves Israel just as He would His only begotten son if He had one. However, in the circumstances Netanyahu has created, He has has no alternative. Only a vile Islamophobic Jew-hater like Netanyahu would destroy his own country by opposing President Obama’s grand plan for world peace.
As the world’s second greatest authority — second only to Obama — on Islam and its profoundly helpful relations with Jews and Christians everywhere, I call upon everyone in Israel and elsewhere to ignore whatever nonsense the soon-to-be-former Prime Minister of that insignificant beautiful little country may try to spew.
*************
Editor’s comment:
All citizens of the World with half a brain — and even less — should pay heed to The Most Reverend Mohamed Allah-scimitar’s profound words and trust only Dear Leader Obama. He, and only He, can and will do all that needs to be done to keep them warm, safe and content. Should they place unwarranted trust elsewhere, their Dear Leader may well be unable to achieve world peace whirled peas in His time.
On moral blindness, Israel Hayom, Dror Eydar, February 27, 2015
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.
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