CAIR’S Hooper: US Muslims’ ‘Mental Health Issues’ Cause them to Fake Hate Crimes

Posted December 27, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: CAIR, Fake hate crimes, Islamists in America, Islamophobia, Victimology
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CAIR’S Hooper: US Muslims’ ‘Mental Health Issues’ Cause them to Fake Hate Crimes, Front Page Magazine, Robert Spencer, December 27, 2016

hooper

Being a victim is a coveted status in our Leftist-dominated society. Even individuals and groups who are not victims try to gain this great honor for themselves.

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Here’s a new twist: the establishment propaganda media’s narrative that Muslims are always victims is breaking down with the continuing revelations that Muslims have faked “anti-Muslim hate crimes,” and so now ABC News has doubled down: Muslims are victims, you see, because they fake anti-Muslim hate crimes. They’re driven crazy by “Islamophobia,” doncha know.

“These false reports unfortunately give ammunition to the industry of Islamophobes who promote the demonization and dehumanization of Islamic Muslims,” says Hamas-linked CAIR’s Ibrahim “Honest Ibe” Hooper. “Islamic Muslims,” Ibe? Are there non-Islamic Muslims now? Anyway, note how deftly Hooper plays the victim card even in the process of being exposed for falsely playing the victim card: the fake hate crimes are not a challenge to the veracity or trustworthiness of Muslims; rather, they’re tools in the hands of the alleged “Islamophobes” who supposedly “promote the demonization and dehumanization of Islamic Muslims” — as if its demonizing and dehumanizing someone to ask him to be honest.

Hooper added that the Muslim community “is under great psychological stress and tension right now, and that that in itself can cause mental health issues that lead to these types of incidents, that’s why healthy matters cbd gummies or other medicine can help to relieve stress and avoid many of these situations.

Why is the Muslim community, in Hooper’s view, “under great psychological stress and tension”? Because of all the hate crimes against Muslims, you see, which drive Muslims so crazy that they…fake hate crimes against Muslims.

How did Avianne Tan of ABC News keep from laughing right in Hooper’s face? She either kept a straight face because she is a fully indoctrinated true believer in this nonsense, or because she knew her establishment propaganda media bosses would look askance at her thinking critically in the face of Hooper’s ridiculous statements.

But it is understandable why he uttered those statements: he had to do what he could to shore up his failing narrative. Hate crimes, after all, are political capital. When real ones don’t exist, they must be invented. Hamas-linked CAIR and other Muslims have on many occasions not hesitated to stoop even to fabricating “hate crimes,” including attacks on mosques. A New Jersey Muslim was found guilty of murder that he tried to portray as an “Islamophobic” attack, and in 2014 in California, a Muslim was found guilty of killing his wife, after first blaming her murder on “Islamophobia.”

This kind of thing happens quite frequently. The New York Daily News reported that “a woman who told cops she was called a terrorist and slashed on her cheek in lower Manhattan on Thursday later admitted she made up the story, police said early Friday. The woman, who wore a headscarf, told authorities a blade-wielding wacko sliced open her face as she left a Manhattan cosmetology school, police sources said.”

We were told that a Muslim boy was attacked and beat up on his school bus in North Carolina — but a photo showed him without a scratch and no one on the bus corroborated his story. And recently in Britain, the murder of a popular imam was spread far and wide as another “Islamophobic hate crime” – until his killer also was found to be a Muslim. The Mirror reported that the imam “was targeted because he had made efforts to turn youngsters away from radical Islam.”

According to The Detroit News, a Muslim woman, Saida Chatti, was “charged with making a false police report after she allegedly fabricated a plot to blow up Dearborn Fordson High School to retaliate against the November terrorist attacks in Paris….Police say Chatti called Dearborn investigators Nov. 19, six days after Islamic extremists killed 130 people in Paris.”

And similarly in Britain, a Muslim woman was “fined for lying to police about being attacked for wearing a hijab. The 18-year-old student, known only as Miss Choudhury, said she was violently shoved from behind and punched in the face by a man in Birmingham city centre 10 days after the atrocities in the French capital on November 13.”

It is virtually certain that we have not seen the last anti-Muslim hate crime that turns out to have been faked by a Muslim. Being a victim is a coveted status in our Leftist-dominated society. Even individuals and groups who are not victims try to gain this great honor for themselves. It’s easy to understand why in light of Hooper’s statements here: once one is recognized as being part of an established victim group, the mainstream media will treat even one’s most absurd claims with respect bordering on reverence. It’s a heady status to have. It’s no wonder that Ibrahim Hooper would be fighting with everything he has to maintain that status, even as the cynicism and dishonesty of the whole enterprise has been so abundantly exposed.

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The ‘occupied’ Western Wall

Posted December 27, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Israel, Israeli "occupied" territories, Israeli settlements, UN and Israel, UN Security Council
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The ‘occupied’ Western Wall, Israel Hayom, Nadav Shragai, December 27, 2016

At the beginning of the last century, Jews had to collect the dung from the donkeys and horses that the Arabs intentionally left at the “occupied territory” of the Western Wall, among the Jews huddled against its stones. The Mughrabi Arabs who immigrated here from North Africa placed their homes and their toilets next to “the occupied territory of the Western Wall,” and sullied it with human feces and sewage more than once. In return for their willingness to correct their bad manners, the Jews had to bribe the heads of the Mughrabi quarter with large sums of money, and even then, it did not always help.

For the sake of the struggle for the Western Wall, the Palestinians enlisted Buraq, the Prophet Muhammad’s miraculous beast, over 100 years ago, as well as the tradition of the place where Muhammad tied him at the end of his nocturnal journey from Mecca to Jerusalem — which was transferred from the eastern and southern walls to the Western Wall. Even the grand mufti, the hateful Haj Amin al-Husseini, one-time Hitler ally, “adopted” the Western Wall. Inspired and orchestrated by Husseini, the Palestinians waged a war over the Western Wall, which led to the murder of Jews in the 1929 Palestine riots and the establishment of a British commission of inquiry, which, just as now, distorted the facts and determined that the Muslim Waqf had ownership of the Western Wall.

The holiness of the Western Wall to Muslims did not prevent them from building homes, staircases and sewage pipes adjacent to the wall for generations. For the duration of the 19 years of their rule as conquerors of Jerusalem, the Jordanians prevented Jews from visiting the Western Wall — in contrast to their signed commitment. They also shattered and desecrated 38,000 of the graves in the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives — now “Israeli-occupied” territory; they leveled the “occupied territory” of the Jewish Quarter and destroyed dozens of “occupied” synagogues. They expelled the thousands of refugees who settled in the quarter’s ruins and kept it as the Shuafat refugee camp, another “occupied territory,” with the rights to its establishment in their name.

In our generation, the official Palestinian television station promises its viewers that “Arab homes” will soon be built on “the occupied territory” of the Western Wall Plaza (formerly the Mughrabi neighborhood) and makes it clear that the sinful Jews are “defiling the Western Wall.” The Muslim Waqf and the Palestinians have for years — listen closely — prevented Israel from clearing garbage and debris from the “Little Western Wall,” which is a continuation of the Western Wall. Oh, the absolute shame of it — this garbage has become part of the status quo of the place.

Here, then, is a golden opportunity to take the necessary step — the first of many — that will put us on a sane path of action. Later on, the time will come to throw the U.N. Security Council’s shameful resolution into the garbage and to go back to building in Jerusalem and its suburbs. This is what we did for years. We owe it first and foremost to ourselves.

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Bolton: Obama Didn’t Stab Netanyahu in the Back; He Did in the Front

Posted December 27, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Israel, Israel settlements, Obama and Israel, Obama and Palestinians, Trump and Israel, UN and Israel, UN Security Council
Tags: , , , , , ,

Bolton: Obama Didn’t Stab Netanyahu in the Back; He Did in the Front, National Review via Fox News via YouTube, December 27, 2016

 

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Martin Karo: A Modest (Statutory) Proposal

Posted December 27, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Israel, Israel and UN, Israeli settlements, U.S. Congress, UN and Israel, UN Security Council
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Martin Karo: A Modest (Statutory) Proposal, Power Line,  Scott Johnson, December 27, 2016

(The US Congress and the UN Security Council resolution damning Israel. — DM)

Reader Martin Karo is a Philadelphia attorney. Mr. Karo has submitted a modest if lawyerly proposal for the consideration of President-elect Donald Trump and the 115th Congress. He writes:

After the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2334, declaring that all Israeli building and activity in any territory captured in the 1967 war (the third war imposed on the Israelis) is illegal under international law, Donald Trump immediately vowed that things will be different come January 20. Virtually all Democrats in Congress immediately went on record opposing the Obama Administration’s feckless betrayal of Israel as well. Chuck Schumer purported to be particularly outraged. In order to convert outrage to action, herewith a modest proposal for the first law to be presented to and passed by the Congress under the Trump Administration:

Whereas, it is a bedrock principle of the United States, and a sound principle generally, that no peace deal may be imposed by outside parties on any party not directly involved in any conflict; and

Whereas, said principle is especially relevant in the context of Israel and the Palestinians, and the conflict that has embroiled that region since the passage of the UN plan partitioning the British Mandate;

The following provisions of law are hereby enacted:

Section 1. The United States does not recognize, and repudiates, UN Security Council Resolution 2334. Said act shall have no force whatsoever within the United States, shall in no way influence any action of the Government of the United States, and shall not be observed in any way by any company that does business in the United States, except as necessary to carry out the following provisions of law.

Section 2. The United States shall, at the next meeting of the United Nations Security Council, introduce a resolution formally revoking UNSC 2334 and reaffirming that any peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians must and shall be negotiated and concluded between those parties only. This resolution shall be reintroduced by the United States at every UNSC session until it is passed.

Section 3. The United States Treasury is directed to reduce all United States payments or transfers to the United Nations, and all constituent elements thereof, to match those of New Zealand, Malaysia, Senegal, or Venezuela, whichever is least, until UNSC 2334 is revoked. The United Nations seeks to force the United States to follow the political contributions of those nations; consequently it shall be limited to the economic contributions provided by those nations.

Section 4. The United States shall revoke and withhold any direct or indirect aid to the Palestinians, or any organization that in any way assists the Palestinians, until UNSC 2334 is revoked pursuant to Section 2.

Section 5. No bank registered in the United States shall do any business whatsoever with any country that proposed, voted for or recognizes UNSC 2334, or with any bank registered in such countries, for any purpose, without an explicit waiver from the United States Congress. No bank registered in any country which recognizes UNSC 2334 shall do any business whatsoever in the United States or with any bank registered in the United States, without an explicit waiver from the United States Congress.

Section 6. The provisions of Sections 1 – 4 of this Act shall be effective immediately. The provisions of Section 5 shall be effective six months from the passage of this Act.

I’m informally considering titling this the “Mr. T’s Prediction Was Right” Act, though other titles are solicited.

EDITOR’S NOTE: For readers who may be wondering, I think this is “Mr. T’s prediction”:

(The short video is at the link. — DM)

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Attorney Alan Dershowitz: Obama stabbed Israel in the back

Posted December 27, 2016 by Joseph Wouk
Categories: Uncategorized

Source: Israel Hayom | Attorney Alan Dershowitz: Obama stabbed Israel in the back

In scathing interview, attorney Alan Dershowitz slams “undemocratic” U.S. president for “tying” President-elect Donald Trump’s hands on settlement issue • “He will go down in history as one of the worst foreign policy presidents ever,” Dershowitz says.

Yoni Hersch and Israel Hayom Staff
Alan Dershowitz: Obama pulled a nasty bait-and-switch on Israel

 Photo credit: Dudi Vaaknin

Israel is not alone in struggling to grasp the American administration’s failure to veto U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334 against the settlements — many Democrats also cannot fathom why U.S. President Barack Obama chose to take such a dramatic step in his final days in office.

Renowned attorney and Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, an outspoken Democrat himself, slammed Obama in unprecedented fashion on Monday for “stabbing Israel in the back.”

Speaking to Fox News, Dershowitz recounted how Obama once invited him to the White House and asked personally for his support, promising that he would “always have Israel’s back.”

“I didn’t realize what [Obama] meant is that he would have their back to stab them,” Dershowitz said. “This will make peace much more difficult to achieve because the Palestinians will now say ‘we can get a state through the U.N.'”

Dershowitz also criticized Obama for tying U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s hands on the issue during his lame duck period, calling the move “nasty” and a “bait and switch.”

“It’s the most undemocratic thing a president can do, to tie the hands of his successor during the lame duck period. And what he did was so nasty; he pulled a bait-and-switch. He said to the American public: ‘Oh, this is all about the settlements deep in the West Bank.’ And yet he allowed his representative to the U.N. to abstain — which is really ‘for’ — a resolution that is basically ‘Jews can’t pray at the Western Wall; Jewish and Arab students can’t go to Hebrew University; Jewish and Arab patients can’t go to Hadassah Hospital; Jews can’t live in the Jewish Quarter, where they’ve lived for thousands of years.’ And he’s [going to] say, ‘Whoops! I didn’t mean that.’ Well, read the resolution! You’re a lawyer. You went to Harvard Law School,” Dershowitz said.

He said Obama will be remembered as “one of the worst” presidents in the foreign policy arena, which he said created a “terrible conflict” for liberal-leaning Americans who adhere to the tenets of his domestic policies.

“He will go down in history — President Obama — as one of the worst foreign policy presidents ever. What he did to Syria, and what he did, and was partially responsible for, in Aleppo, creating a vacuum for Russia. I have to tell you, you know, I supported his domestic policy, I liked him on Supreme Court appointments, but he created a terrible conflict for people, many like me, liberal Democrats who support his domestic policy but think he was an appalling, appalling president when it came to foreign policy,” Dershowitz said.

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Our World: Obama’s war against America

Posted December 27, 2016 by Joseph Wouk
Categories: Uncategorized

Source: Our World: Obama’s war against America – Opinion – Jerusalem Post

Caroline Glick

Obama’s strategic campaign against his country can only be defeated by a counter campaign by his successor.

Barack Obama

 President Barack Obama during a news conference in the White House this week. ‘What was the role played by countries like the US in the Arab Spring?’. (photo credit:REUTERS)
 In 1989, following her tenure as President Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick described how the Palestinians have used the UN to destroy Israel.

Following outgoing US President Barack Obama’s assault on Israel at the UN Security Council last Friday, longtime UN observer Claudia Rossett wrote an important article at PJMedia where she recalled Kirkpatrick’s words.

In “How the PLO was legitimized,” published in Commentary, Kirkpatrick said that Yasser Arafat and the PLO worked “to come to power through international diplomacy – reinforced by murder.”

Kirkpatrick explained, “The long march through the UN has produced many benefits for the PLO. It has created a people where there was none; a claim where there was none. Now the PLO is seeking to create a state where there already is one. That will take more than resolutions and more than an ‘international peace conference.’ But having succeeded so well over the years in its campaign to delegitimize Israel, the PLO might yet also succeed in bringing the campaign to a triumphant conclusion, with consequences for the Jewish state that would be nothing short of catastrophic.”

As Rossett noted, in falsely arguing that Obama’s support for Friday’s UN Security Council Resolution 2334 is in line with Reagan’s policies, Obama’s UN Ambassador Samantha Power deliberately distorted the historical record of US policy toward Israel and the PLO-led UN onslaught against the Jewish state.

As Rosett noted, in stark contrast to Power’s self-serving lie, neither Reagan nor George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush would have ever countenanced a resolution like 2334.

Obama’s predecessors’ opposition to the war against Israel at the UN was not merely an expression of their support for Israel. They acted also out of a fealty to US power, which is directly targeted by that war.

It is critical that we understand how this is the case, and why the implications of Resolution 2334 are disastrous to the US itself.

Resolution 2334 is being presented as an “anti-settlement” resolution. But it is not an anti-settlement resolution.

Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and neighborhoods in Jerusalem are being used – as they always have been used – as a means of delegitimizing the Jewish state as a whole, and legitimizing Palestinian terrorists and Islamic terrorists more generally. Resolution 2334 serves to criminalize Israel and its people and to undermine Israel’s right to exist, while embracing Palestinian terrorists and empowering them in their war to annihilate Israel.

America’s historic refusal to countenance such actions at the UN Security was never a purely altruistic position. It was also a stand for American power and the inherent justice of American superpower status and global leadership.

Throughout most of its history, the UN has served as a proxy battlefield first of the Cold War, and since the destruction of the Soviet Union, for the war against the US-led free world. Beginning in the early 1960s, the Soviets viewed the political war against Israel at the UN as a means to undermine the moral basis for the US-led West. If Israel, the only human rights defending state in the Middle East, and the US’s only stable ally in the region could be delegitimized, then the very coherence of the US-led Western claim to moral superiority against the totalitarian Soviet empire would be undone.

Hence, the first Soviet attempt at the UN to castigate Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement, as a form of racism was made in 1965, two years before Israel took control of Judea and Samaria and united Jerusalem in the Six Day War.

That attempt failed. But nine years later the wording first raised in 1965 was adopted by the UN General Assembly which passed resolution 3379 slandering libeled Zionism as “a form of racism.”

With their automatic majority in the General Assembly and all other UN organs, the Soviets used the Palestinian war against Israel as a proxy for their war against America. After the demise of the Soviet Union, the Islamic bloc, backed by members of the former Soviet bloc, the non-aligned bloc and the Europeans continued their campaign. The only thing that kept them from winning was the US and its Security Council veto.

When Obama chose to lead the anti-Israel lynch mob at the Security Council last week, he did more than deliver the PLO terrorist organization its greatest victory to date against Israel. He delivered a strategic victory to the anti-American forces that seek to destroy the coherence of American superpower status. That is, he carried out a strategic strike on American power.

By leading the gang rape of Israel on Friday, Obama undermined the rationale for American power. Why should the US assert a sovereign right to stand against the radical forces that control the UN? If US agrees that Israel is committing a crime by respecting the civil and human rights of its citizens to live in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, then how can America claim that it has the right to defend its own rights and interests, when those clash with the views of the vast majority of state members of the UN? Following Obama’s assault on Israel Friday, Senators Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz called for the US to end its financial support for the UN at least until the Security Council abrogates Resolution 2334. They are correct.

But it isn’t anger at how Obama has and is expected to continue to use the Security Council to imperil Israel that should inform the incoming Trump administration’s actions. Rather a determination to maintain US power and secure its national security requires that the UN be permanently defunded and defanged.

For eight years, through his embrace and empowerment of US enemies, betrayal and weakening of US allies, emaciation of the US armed forces and repeated apologies for America’s past assertions of global leadership, Obama has waged a determined war against US superpower status. The last vestige of the strategic and moral rationale for US power was the protection America afforded Israel at the Security Council.

Now with that gone, it has become a strategic imperative for the US to render the UN irrelevant. This can only be undertaken by permanently defunding this corrupt institution and using the US’s Security Council veto to end the UN’s role as the arbiter of international peace and security, by among other things, ending the deployment of UN forces to battle zones.

Only by stripping the UN of its financial wherewithal to assault US allies and American interests and by denying it the institutional and operational capacity to serve as an arbiter of disputes morally and legally superior to the US can America protect its sovereignty and advance its interests.

Only by denying those associated with the UN the prestige that confers to an institution legitimized by democrat and autocrat alike can the incoming Trump administration rebuild America’s reputation and power.

It is not surprising that Obama is carrying out the final act of his presidency at the UN. Obama has made no attempt to hide his desire to eliminate America’s independence of action. By elevating the post of UN ambassador to a cabinet level position at the outset of his presidency, Obama signaled his conviction that this corrupt institution is the equal of the US government.

This early signal was transformed into an open policy when Obama used the Security Council as a means to bypass the US Senate in implementing his nuclear deal with Iran.

Now, by ignoring the near consensus position of both parties that the US should block anti-Israel resolutions from being adopted at the Security Council and plotting further action against Israel at the Security Council in his final weeks in office, Obama has made clear his position and his aim.

Obama is not leading the war against Israel at the Security Council simply to advance the PLO’s war for the annihilation of Israel. He is acting in this manner to undermine the legitimacy of American power.

Obama’s strategic campaign against his country can only be defeated by a counter campaign by his successor.

Luckily, by eschewing multilateral entanglements in favor of bilateral partnerships during his presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump has demonstrated that he understands the threat and will adopt the only possible means of countering it. To reassert and rebuild the rationale for American power, the Trump administration must permanently defund the UN and reject its legitimacy as an institution of global governance.

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Dem lawmaker: Israel waging ‘war on the American government’

Posted December 27, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Democrats, Israel, Israeli settlements, Jim McDermott, Obama and Israel, Obama and Palestinians, President Elect Trump, President Reject Obama, Trump and Israel, UN and Israel, UN Security Council
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Dem lawmaker: Israel waging ‘war on the American government’, Washington Examiner, Kelly Cohen, December 26, 2016

(How deplorably ungrateful of wicked Israel after all that Obama has done to for her. — DM)

mcdermotRep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., says Israelis attacking Obama for not giving them ‘everything they want.’ (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

McDermott added that because Israel “never could get 100 percent from Barack Obama, so they decided to attack him and use him as the reason why Trump should come in and give them everything they want.”

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A retiring Democratic congressman warned that the war-of-words over the United Nations’ vote on Israel settlements is the beginning of a rhetorical “war on the American government” by Israel.

Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., made the comments Monday in an interview with MSNBC when asked to react to accusations that the Israeli government has proof that the Obama administration helped influence the U.N. Security Council’s vote to condemn Israeli settlements.

Ron Dermer, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., had said earlier on MSNBC that the Israelis would be sharing the proof to the incoming Trump administration only.

“What we are seeing is the beginning of a war on the American government [by Israel],” McDermott said in response to Dermer.

“We’re seeing the air war right now, we’re seeing all these tweets, all this kind of innuendo and all these half stories, and all this stuff is to create tremendous tension,” McDermott explained.

He added that creating the tension will help President-elect Donald Trump begin the “ground war” when he takes over the White House next month. That, McDermott said, is when “his appointees begin to carry out his actions in the departments across the government.”

“The American people are being subjected to a campaign of anxiety production,” McDermott said. “And it really is very, very disturbing to watch.”

McDermott added that because Israel “never could get 100 percent from Barack Obama, so they decided to attack him and use him as the reason why Trump should come in and give them everything they want.”

Israel is now “running their own war against us and our policies” because they are angry that Obama has pushed back against telling them to stop with settlements, McDermott said.

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Obama insists Trump win no indicator Democrats’ vision for U.S. is ‘a fantasy’

Posted December 26, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Hope and change, Obama's affinity for Obama, Obama's America, Obama's leadership, Obama's legacy
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Obama insists Trump win no indicator Democrats’ vision for U.S. is ‘a fantasy’, Washinton Times, Douglas Ernst, December 26, 2016

hopenchangePresident Barack Obama, joined by first lady Michelle Obama, speaks during an event to thank service members and their families at Marine Corps Base Hawaii, in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, Sunday, Dec. 25, 2016. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

President Obama is “confident” that he would have defeated Republican Donald Trump in a head-to-head match-up in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Mr. Obama recently joined his former chief strategist, David Axelrod, for a wide-ranging interview on CNN’s “The Axe Files.” The president talked about his childhood, Hillary Clinton’s doomed presidential campaign, and his plans for the future after leaving the White House.

“I am confident in this vision because I’m confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could’ve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it,” Mr. Obama said, CNN reported Monday. “I know that in conversations that I’ve had with people around the country, even some people who disagreed with me, they would say the vision, the direction that you point towards is the right one.”

The president then stressed that President-elect Trump’s ability to secure 306 Electoral College votes compared to Mrs. Clinton’s 232 is not an indicator that “hope and change” was a political illusion.

“In the wake of the election and Trump winning, a lot of people have suggested that somehow, it really was a fantasy,” the president said. “What I would argue is, is that the culture actually did shift, that the majority does buy into the notion of a one America that is tolerant and diverse and open and full of energy and dynamism.”

Mr. Obama said that although “it feels like the band is breaking up a little bit,” he would turn an objective eye on his performance once Mr. Trump becomes the 45th U.S. commander in chief.

“I have to be quiet for a while. And I don’t mean politically, I mean internally. I have to still myself,” Mr. Obama said, CNN reported. “You have to get back in tune with your center and process what’s happened before you make a bunch of good decisions.”

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Bye Bye, Obama

Posted December 26, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Islamic terrorism, Islamist terror attacks, Israel, Israeli settlements, Obama and Iran, Obama and Islam, Obama and Israel, Obama and Palestinians, Obama and The World, Palestinian state, Palestinians, President Elect Trump, President Reject Obama, Trump and Iran, Trump and Israel, Trump appointments, Two state solution, UN and Israel, UN Security Council
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Bye Bye, Obama, PJ Media, Michael Ledeen, December 25, 2016

(Please see also, Is real change coming to Iran? Get ready for March 15, 2017. — DM)

maddog

What would President Trump do if Khamenei passed from the scene, and millions of Iranians took to the streets again?  The president-elect has said he’s not a great enthusiast of regime change, but it’s hard to imagine he’d abandon the Iranians as Obama did seven years ago.  He ought to be thinking it through.

Yes, I know good news is hard to swallow, but we are living in a revolutionary moment, of which the Trump election is a dramatic symptom.  The crisis of the Islamic Republic would be a fitting end to the Obama era. He dreamt of a glorious strategic alliance with Iran, and a definitive lethal blow against Israel. How fitting with the Divine sense of humor to have the Palestinians and Iranians to wreck their own enterprises.

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As I promised, as the days of Obama draw down, the jihadis are stepping up the terror tempo.  They know that there will be no reprisals from the Oahu links, and they fear Trump’s lineup of tough guys in the cabinet, so they’re in a hurry to kill infidels while the killing’s good. Therefore we, along with the other Western nations, are at maximum risk right now, until roundabouts January 20th.

And the killing’s plenty good, isn’t it?  Berlin,  Zurich, Ankara, Moscow, with a very nasty plot uncovered in Melbourne, and yet another involving terrorists in Detroit, Maryland, and Virginia.  Not to mention the ongoing slaughter in Syria, and, on Christmas day, Cameroon.

What does the “western world” do in response?  Declare the Western Wall “occupied territory.” This is no accident, since the jihadis believe that they have unleashed holy war against infidels.  That war will not end, in their view, until we infidels have been crushed and subjected to the will of a caliph.  They’ve got plenty of support from the Russians, without whom thousands of Iranians and Iranian proxies would have been killed in Syria and Iraq, and the Assad regime would have been destroyed.

That would have been a better world, but Obama did not want that world.  Nor did the feckless Europeans, who act as if profits on Iran trade compensate for the open subversion of public order.  Indeed, as Christmas arrived we were treated to the spectacle of the bishop of Rome—aka Pope Francis–blaming material misery for the jihadist assault on the West. Thus the first Jesuit pontiff surrenders the moral high ground to his mortal enemies.

Maybe Obama should convert and run for pope.

Paradoxically, the jihadis and their secular allies are launching their new assault just as they are suffering systematic setbacks on the battlefield, their own internal conflicts are intensifying, and there are signs of a religious and patriotic revival within the boundaries of their archenemy, the United States. Walter Russell Mead neatly catches the irony that, just as Obama handed the Palestinians a resounding political victory, a sober look at the situation suggests that the Palestinians have not been this weak, this divided, or this helpless in many decades.

In like manner, the Iranian regime, flush with its success in Aleppo, is increasingly riven.  Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has had two medical events in the past 10 days, and the scrambling for the succession has resumed.  You may have noticed that General Qasem Soleimani has returned to the front pages, which invariably happens when the leader is ill; the Revolutionary Guards want him as the strongman of the next regime (he can’t be supreme leader for lack of theological standing, but he could still be a dominant figure). And it isn’t all peaches and cream for Soleimani, as recent demonstrations in Tehran against the rape of Aleppo make clear. Iranian apologists love to tell us that Persian nationalism  overwhelms internal tribal and sectarian divisions, but Iran has lost thousands in Syria, and the Persian nationalists don’t like their husbands and sons dying to save Bashar Assad.

What would President Trump do if Khamenei passed from the scene, and millions of Iranians took to the streets again?  The president-elect has said he’s not a great enthusiast of regime change, but it’s hard to imagine he’d abandon the Iranians as Obama did seven years ago.  He ought to be thinking it through.

Yes, I know good news is hard to swallow, but we are living in a revolutionary moment, of which the Trump election is a dramatic symptom.  The crisis of the Islamic Republic would be a fitting end to the Obama era. He dreamt of a glorious strategic alliance with Iran, and a definitive lethal blow against Israel. How fitting with the Divine sense of humor to have the Palestinians and Iranians to wreck their own enterprises.

You never know. Life is full of surprises.

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At the AP, Opinion Masquerades as Reporting

Posted December 26, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Associated Press, Israel, Israeli settlements, Media and Israel, Netanyahu, Obama and Israel, Trump and Israel, UN Security Council
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At the AP, Opinion Masquerades as Reporting, Power Line, John Hinderaker, December 26, 2016

Yesterday the Associated Press published an article by its Jerusalem bureau chief, Josef Federman, on Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction to President Obama’s betrayal of Israel in the U.N. The article is an opinion piece–a virulent one, in fact. It is suitable for publication in, say, the New York Times, as an anti-Israel op-ed. The piece is headlined Israel: humbled Netanyahu places hopes in Trump. It begins:

The Israeli government’s furious reaction to the U.N. Security Council’s adoption of a resolution opposing Jewish settlements in occupied territory underscores its fundamental and bitter dispute with the international community about the future of the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists that there is nothing wrong with his controversial policy of building Jewish towns in occupied areas that the Palestinians, with overwhelming world support, claim for their state. But Friday’s U.N. rebuke was a stark reminder that the rest of the world considers it a crime. The embattled leader is now placing his hopes in the incoming administration of Donald Trump, which is shaping up as the first major player to embrace Israel’s nationalist right and its West Bank settlements.

Those are perhaps defensible statements of opinion, although I would argue that they are mostly incorrect. The overall thrust of the opening paragraphs–that the entire world other than Netanyahu’s administration and “Israel’s nationalist right” considers it a “crime” for Jews to live in their Biblical home of Judea Samaria, and that Donald Trump is the first “major player” to disagree, is blatantly false.

There is much more, for example:

In a series of statements, Netanyahu has criticized the Obama Administration for letting Resolution 2334 pass Friday by abstaining, using unprecedented language that has turned a policy disagreement into a personal vendetta.

Netanyahu’s language was unprecedented? What, did he call Obama a “chickens*t”? And was not Obama’s betrayal, coordinated with the Arabs and timed to avoid accountability to Congress or the voters, the culmination of a vendetta that included interference in Israel’s election to try to defeat the Prime Minister? That wasn’t a vendetta because, I suppose, Federman welcomed it.

Federman has opinions about Trump, too:

The recent diplomatic defeat would be much more damaging if not for a potential remaining and rather major ace in Netanyahu’s hand: the incoming Trump Administration.

In a striking departure from past policy of incumbent [Ed.: sic] presidents waiting on the sidelines, Trump tried to scuttle the resolution and called for a U.S. veto. After the vote, Trump vowed that “things will be different after Jan. 20th.”

So it’s Netanyahu and Trump who have disrupted the natural order of things by smashing precedents. How about this, Mr. Federman: what’s the precedent for a lame-duck president executing a major change in American foreign policy, against the wishes of Congress and the American people, less than 30 days before leaving office, in the face of no crisis or emergency, or even a change in circumstances?

Critically, he has appointed an outspoken supporter and donor to the settlements, his longtime attorney David Friedman, as ambassador to Israel. And aides say Trump is serious about a promise to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which even many Israelis fear could spark violence. The Palestinians claim east Jerusalem, home to sensitive religious sites, as the capital of the future state to which they aspire.

Sensitive religious sites like Temple Mount, the Mount of Olives and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Moving the U.S. embassy to Israel’s capital has been part of the Republican Party’s platform for a long time. The suggestion that having the U.S. embassy on Jerusalem, along with the Knesset, Israel’s Supreme Court and other organs of Israel’s government “could spark violence” is sheer editorializing.

Mr. Federman’s article is a typical expression of the international Left’s pro-Palestinian view of the situation in Judea and Samaria. It is, as I said, an op-ed that could easily appear in a liberal organ like the New York Times. But there is not a shred of news anywhere in it. It is merely a recitation of Federman’s opinions, with the opinions of Netanyahu, Trump and their allies erected as straw men to be struck down by others.

This conclusion was so obvious that I thought the AP must have designated the Federman article an opinion piece. But no: it went out on the wire as a straight news story. In fact, as I understand the AP’s position, it doesn’t publish opinion pieces. In fact, it cautions its reporters against expressing opinions at all:

EXPRESSIONS OF OPINION:

Anyone who works for the AP must be mindful that opinions they express may damage the AP’s reputation as an unbiased source of news. They must refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in any public forum, whether in Web logs, chat rooms, letters to the editor, petitions, bumper stickers or lapel buttons, and must not take part in demonstrations in support of causes or movements.

How about expressions of opinion in AP news stories? That, apparently, is fine, as long as the opinions are on the left.

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