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Only Islam Can Save Us From Islam

May 18, 2016

Only Islam Can Save Us From Islam, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, May 18, 2016

Quran and Islam

In the Washington Post, Petraeus complained about the “inflammatory political discourse that has become far too common both at home and abroad against Muslims and Islam.” The former general warned that restricting Muslim immigration would “undermine our ability to defeat Islamist extremists by alienating and undermining the allies whose help we most need to win this fight: namely, Muslims.”

At Rutgers, Obama claimed that restricting Muslim immigration “would alienate the very communities at home and abroad who are our most important partners in the fight against violent extremism.”

If we alienate Muslims, who is going to help us fight Muslim terrorism?

You can see why Obama doesn’t mention Islamic terrorism in any way, shape or form. Once you drop the “I” word, then the argument is that you need Islam to fight Islam. And Muslims to fight Muslims.

This is bad enough in the Muslim world where we are told that we have to ally with the “moderate” Muslim governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to fight the Muslim terrorists whom they sponsor.

Petraeus has troublingly close ties to the Saudis. He defended their oil dumping program, praised the role of Islamic law in fighting Islamic terrorism and endorsed their Syria plans. While defending the Saudis as allies, he blamed Israel for America’s problems with the Muslim world. The narrative he was using there was the traditional Saudi one in which Israel, not Islam, is the source of the friction.

He defended Pakistan as an ally and claimed to believe the Pakistani excuses that they did not know Osama bin Laden was living right in their military center and that they really wanted to fight the Taliban.

Obama’s “partners” against “violent extremism” have included Muslim Brotherhood terror supporters at home and abroad. He backed Al Qaeda’s LIFG in Libya, Iran’s Shiite terror militias in Iraq, Al Qaeda allies in Syria and those are just a few of the worst examples of his partners against extremism.

Petraeus and Obama view terrorists and state sponsors of terror as important allies. Their policies have led to multiple terrorist attacks against Americans. And they still insist that we need Islamic terrorists as allies to protect us from Islamic terrorists. We need moderate theocrats to protect us from extremist theocrats. We need the Saudis and Pakistanis to save us from the terrorists whom they arm and fund.

But it’s Muslim immigration where their argument really shines.

The United States faces a terror threat because a certain percentage of the Muslim population will kill Americans. Every increase in the Muslim population also increases the number of potential terrorists. Muslim immigration increases the terrorism risk to Americans every single year.

These are undeniable facts.

When you’re in a hole, stop digging. Muslim populations are a hole. Immigration is the shovel. Dig deep enough and you’re six feet under.

Even if the mainstream narrative about a moderate majority and extremist minority were true, how could the cost of Islamic terrorism justify the expansion of even moderate Muslim communities?

9/11 cost us $3.3 trillion, over 10,000 dead, a national loss of privacy and traumas inflicted on millions. What could any number of moderate Muslims possibly contribute to outweigh all that? If it were a debt, it would take a thousand years to even begin balancing out those scales. And instead of trying to make amends, Muslim groups like CAIR and ISNA have waged a relentless campaign to undermine national security and defame Americans. They have refused to cooperate with law enforcement, defended terrorists and denounced America. These are our “moderate” partners.

But the Obama/Petraeus narrative about needing partners in Muslim communities in America implicitly concedes that Muslim communities at home, like the Saudis and Pakistanis abroad, create environments in which Islamic terrorists can safely operate. They admit the existence of Islamic no-go zones where the FBI and local law enforcement are ineffective so that we have to treat parts of Michigan or New Jersey like Pakistan or Iraq, trying to work with untrustworthy allies to gain intelligence on enemy territory.

We have to work with CAIR or ISNA, the way we do with the Saudis or Pakistanis, even though they’re untrustworthy, because they’re all we have in parts of America that have become enemy territory.

This argument is terrible enough in the Middle East. But it’s horrifying in the Midwest.

It’s bad enough that we sign off on “partners” who finance terrorists and then pretend to fight them in Syria or Afghanistan, do we really want to be doing this in Illinois or California?

The real problem, as Obama and Petraeus indirectly concede, is that Muslim communities create an ideal environment for Muslim terrorists. The last thing that we should be doing is building them up.

Even if Muslim communities were an asset, the Obama/Petraeus narrative is that they benefit us by helping us deal with the problems that they cause. The obvious question would be to wonder why we need them in the first place to help us cope with a problem that wouldn’t exist without them.

Obama insists that we need Muslim immigration so that Muslims will help us fight Muslim terror. But if we didn’t have Muslim immigration, we wouldn’t need Muslims to help us fight Muslim terrorism.

Muslim immigration isn’t a solution. It’s a problem posing as a solution. And we are told that we need to make the problem bigger in order to solve it. Muslim immigration has yet to reduce terrorism in any country. The increase in Muslim populations has not made Europe any safer. On the contrary, it has increased the risk of terrorism. The same is also true in Africa, Asia and across the Middle East.

The plan to reduce the risk of terrorism by increasing the Muslim population has failed around the world. Nor has it ever worked in the United States. What are the odds that it suddenly will now?

Building a counterterrorism strategy around creating more terrorism is not a strategy, it’s a suicide mission. Using Muslim immigration to fix a terrorism problem caused by Muslim immigration is like drilling a hole in a boat and then trying to plug it with water. Europe is sinking and if we don’t stop importing hundreds of thousands of Muslims, we’ll be facing the same problems that Europe does.

“It is precisely because the danger of Islamist extremism is so great that politicians here and abroad who toy with anti-Muslim bigotry must consider the effects of their rhetoric,” Petraeus insists. It’s a compelling argument, but not in the way that he thinks it is.

If Muslims can’t handle the full spectrum of argument, debate and namecalling that is a part of life in a free country without turning homicidal, then something has to go. According to Petraeus, it’s freedom of speech. According to others, it’s Muslim migration. Americans will have to decide whether they would rather have freedom of speech or Muslim immigration. Because even the advocates for Muslim migration are increasingly willing to admit that we can’t have both. The choice is ours.

Either we can hope that Islam will save us from Islam. And that Muslims will protect us from other Muslims. Or we can try to protect ourselves and save our lives and our freedoms from Islam.

Categories: CAIR, Foreign policy, Islamic immigration, Islamic integration, Islamic terrorism, Islamisation, Islamists in America, ISNA, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama and Islam, Pakistan, Petraeus, Saudi Arabia
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Petraeus: Self-Censor To Avoid Offending Muslims

May 17, 2016

Petraeus: Self-Censor To Avoid Offending Muslims, PJ Media, Robert Spencer, May 17, 2016

Petrayus

David Petraeus, the former director of the CIA and former commander of CENTCOM, published a piece in the Washington Post last Friday entitled “Anti-Muslim Bigotry Aids Islamist Terrorists.”

Wrote Petraeus:

[I am] increasingly concerned about inflammatory political discourse that has become far too common both at home and abroad against Muslims and Islam, including proposals from various quarters for blanket discrimination against people on the basis of their religion.

Petraeus’s target isn’t just Donald Trump’s proposed temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration. He is referring to all speech that some Muslims might find offensive, and this has sweeping and ominous implications.

Petraeus doesn’t just oppose what Trump now characterizes as “just a suggestion“ solely as a policy measure. Petraeus is saying that such proposals shouldn’t even be made; that just to speak them is damaging:

[T]he ramifications of such rhetoric could be very harmful — and lasting.

He feels simply speaking such thoughts may:

 … compound the already grave terrorist danger to our citizens.

How will these words do that? Well, you see:

[T]hose who flirt with hate speech against Muslims should realize they are playing directly into the hands of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. The terrorists’ explicit hope has been to try to provoke a clash of civilizations — telling Muslims that the United States is at war with them and their religion. When Western politicians propose blanket discrimination against Islam, they bolster the terrorists’ propaganda.

Petraeus doesn’t offer any alternative suggestion as to how jihad terrorists can be prevented from entering the United States. He just doesn’t like Trump’s former proposal, and what he terms “hate speech against Muslims” in general, because he says it will enrage Muslims and make more of them join the jihad against America. So the upshot of Petraeus’ argument is that we must not say things to which Muslims might object, because this will just make more of them become jihadis.

His prescription for minimizing the jihad against the West is for the West to practice self-censorship in order to avoid offending Muslims.

Petraeus has done this before. When he headed up the international coalition in Afghanistan, he said this of Florida pastor Terry Jones’ plan to burn the Qur’an:

[It] was hateful, it was intolerant and it was extremely disrespectful and again, we condemn it in the strongest manner possible.

He warned that the Qur’an-burning would endanger American troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere. He issued a statement saying that he hoped:

 … the Afghan people understand that the actions of a small number of individuals, who have been extremely disrespectful to the holy Quran, are not representative of any of the countries of the international community who are in Afghanistan to help the Afghan people.

I opposed the Qur’an-burning, but not for the reasons Petraeus did.

I don’t like the burning of books. And I’d rather that the contents of the Qur’an, and the ways that jihadists use those contents to justify violence, be known.

However, Jones was free to do what he wanted to do. Petraeus would have done better to have told the Afghans that in America we have freedom of speech and expression, and that we put up with speech and expression that we dislike without trying to kill the speaker.

He would have done better to tell them that their murderous rage over any burning of the Qur’an was an outrageous overreaction, and that bloodshed over such burnings was a heinous crime, far dwarfing any crime they thought Jones was committing.

The idea that in wartime one should be careful not to do anything that the enemy is likely to respond to with irrational and even murderous anger may seem tactically wise at first glance, but ultimately it is a recipe for surrender. One is already accepting the enemy’s worldview and perspective and working to accommodate it, instead of working on various fronts — not just the military one — to show why it is wrong and should be opposed.

Of course, to that Petraeus and his ilk would likely respond: “Well, we are not at war with Islam or the Qur’an, and so to burn the book is a needless provocation.”

This ignores, however, the war that the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and other Muslim groups are waging today against the freedom of expression. This also ignores the ways in which Islamic jihadists use the Qur’an to justify violence and win recruits.

Without approving of the burning, Petraeus should have defended Jones’ freedom of expression, and used the burning as a teaching moment in Afghanistan. Petraeus should have said:

We are going to defend our vision of society no matter what you bring against us. The U.S. will always defend American citizens who are exercising their Constitutional freedoms.

The OIC’s effort to compel the West into censoring itself regarding criticism of Islam is going very well.

In the wake of the jihad attack on our free speech event in Garland, Texas last year, there were widespread condemnations of our event for daring to “provoke” Muslims. After the Danish Muhammad cartoon riots and the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo Muhammad cartoonists, mainstream media outlets all over the West refused to publish the cartoons in solidarity with the victims and in defense of the freedom of speech. Instead, they opted to publish transparently hypocritical explanations of how they were declining to publish the cartoons out of “respect” for Muslims and Islam.

The lesson of all this is one that no less a figure than General Petraeus has imbibed and is now propagating himself: Muslims don’t like when we say we should stop Muslim immigration for awhile, and they join the jihad. So we must stop saying it so that they won’t join the jihad.

In reality, this argument will only encourage them to tell us they’re joining the jihad because of other things we do, because they now have proof this tactic works. They are in fact already doing this. In the wake of violent intimidation by Muslims, Petraeus is saying that the West’s proper response is to give those violent Muslims what they want. Conform our speech to suit them.

If we take Petraeus’ advice, it will not result in less jihad, as he claims, but more. More aggressive Muslim demands on the U.S., more rage, and more “revenge.” Petraeus is giving the West a recipe for setting the world on fire even more than it is now.

Categories: Apologists for Islamism, Donald Trump, Foreign policy, Freedom of speech, Islamic immigration, Islamic jihad, Islamic refugees, Islamisation, Islamophobia, Obama and Islam, Obama and uncontrolled immigration, Obama's America, Petraeus
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Obama’s Animus toward Israel May Lead to War

May 15, 2016

Obama’s Animus toward Israel May Lead to War, American Thinker, Victor Sharpe and Robert Vincent, May 15, 2016

Will the looming conclusion of the Obama presidency lead him to engineer an all-out war by Iran’s terror surrogates, Hamas and Hezbollah, against the embattled Jewish state?  Will that war conveniently occur in December 2016, as Obama serves out the final days of his presidency?

Is it conceivable that the pro-Muslim president of the United States will use such a conflict to predictably and mendaciously blame Israel as a means to permanently fracture the U.S.-Israeli alliance in a manner that would be difficult for any successor to repair?  As extreme as this may sound, it is entirely possible in view of Obama’s past acts of blatant hatred toward America’s one and only true democracy and ally in the Middle East.

As should be obvious by now, Obama believes that Islam has suffered from British and European Christian colonization and oppression.  After being thoroughly prepared to be receptive to this message by his stridently anti-Western mother and maternal grandparents, such was the indoctrination Obama received from Khaled al-Mansour – a Muslim high-level adviser to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and anti-Jewish hate-monger – during his formative years.

It was al-Mansour who helped Obama gain admittance to the Harvard Law School.  Edward Said, an outspoken anti-Israel professor of Obama’s at Columbia University, and Rashid Khalidi, a former press agent for Yasser Arafat’s PLO, served as Obama’s mentor in the former case and friend in the latter.

These figures, whose entire professional adult lives had been essentially dedicated to eliminating Israel, focused on influencing Obama to support the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians – along with their thugocracy known as the Palestinian Authority.  These overwhelmingly Muslim terrorists amount to little more than cannon fodder in the ongoing Islamist quest to effectively perpetrate yet another Holocaust.

Thus, while Obama weakens America and disparages Western values and the tenets of Judeo-Christian civilization, he always chooses to suppress the reality of Islamic triumphalism and its appalling and inhumane history of slavery, hatred of non-Muslims, brutal Muslim conquests, and slaughter dating back to its 7th-century origins in Arabia.

This is why no one should be surprised that he would bow to a Saudi king and venerate the Islamic call of the muezzin.

Given his background, it is no wonder that Obama fell for the monumental lie that the Jewish state is also a modern colonizer, just as the European powers were.  After all, Obama’s other confidants included, as the principled and worthy Victor David Hanson recently pointed out, “the obscene Reverend Wright and reprobates like Bill Ayers and Father Michael Pfleger.”

But unlike the European colonizers who had no ancestral roots in the Middle Eastern territories they occupied, Israel is the biblical and post-biblical homeland of the Jewish people, and as the native people of its ancestral homeland, the Jews predate the Muslim invasion of Israel by millennia, as is clearly evident in the Bible, which could not have been written when and where it was otherwise.

Even though sovereignty was lost to them after the Roman destruction of the Jewish state, Jews have always lived in their native land in whatever numbers they could sustain under a succession of alien occupiers.

Despite these clearly established historical facts, modern reborn Israel and her democratically elected leader, Prime Minister Netanyahu, have been treated with unprecedented contempt by Obama and his sycophants.

This was evident early on with Obama’s support of and friendship to the Islamist Erdoğan in Turkey, who has reduced once secular Turkey to a growing totalitarian Islamic state that has openly supported terrorism against Israel, as demonstrated by the Gaza flotilla incident of 2010.

Erdoğan’s perfidy – which has included all but open support for ISIS – has in no way dampened Obama’s preferential treatment of this dictator, in contrast to his appalling treatment of Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Routinely, the State Department promotes the hypocrisy of the Obama administration by ignoring the aggression and terror of the Palestinian Authority, led by the Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Abbas and the Hamas and Islamic Jihad thugs who rule over the Gaza Strip.

In deplorable contrast, the State Department routinely attacks Israel for building homes in Jerusalem for young couples, or chiding Israel to exercise “restraint” when Israel is forced to defend itself from relentless Palestinian brutality and murder of Israeli civilians.  Was France or Belgium similarly asked to exercise “restraint” in the face of recent Muslim terrorist attacks in those countries?

This spitefulness was exhibited when the U.S., at the behest of a high-level individual in the Obama administration (wonder who!), denied visas to Israelis during Israel’s defensive Gaza war in 2014 against Hamas aggression.

Even as the barrage of thousands of rockets aimed at Israeli villages and towns from Gaza continued, this outrage was compounded when President Obama banned the much needed resupply of armaments to Israel at the height of the Hamas terror blitz and temporarily banned U.S. airlines from flying to Israel on the flimsiest of pretexts (23 international carriers – including British Airways – continued flights to Israel in spite of this ban).

Obama has also treated America’s other traditional allies with insolent disdain and cozied up to the worst enemy of freedom and liberty – namely, the Islamo-Nazi regime of Iran.

Iran’s ongoing implicit threats of nuclear warfare – against the U.S. as well as Israel – including its aggressive development of potentially nuclear-armed ICBMs, which can eventually reach the U.S., does not faze this incumbent in the White House.

The fact that this supposed nuclear “agreement” with Iran was reached, even as his very own State Department admits that Iran has yet to actually sign the agreement and even as Iranian mobs continue to chant “Death to America” to the approving nods of the Iranian mullahs, also fits into Barack Hussein Obama’s distorted world view – a deliberate policy of lies, deception, and dissimilitude.

This was admitted to by one of his closest advisers, Ben Rhodes, who recently disclosed that the Obama administration had deliberately deceived Congress and the American public about the Iran deal – as if this was something to be proud of.

Perhaps one of the most blatant examples of Obama’s anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Israeli ideology was his support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and his reluctance to sell arms to President El-Sisi, who overthrew the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi and his vicious anti-Christian regime after it had been in power for only two years and had wrought havoc on that country.

Obama’s support for Morsi should have come as no surprise, given the endless flow of Muslim Brotherhood activists visiting Obama’s White House and the filling of senior positions within the administration, as documented by former CIA analyst Clare Lopez.

Even today, El-Sisi fights al-Qaeda terrorism in the Sinai and the Hamas terrorists in Gaza without any apparent support or approval from Obama.

These examples of the president’s bias, his pro-Islamic sympathies, and his agenda point to a seminal hatred of not only America itself, but most pointedly of the Jewish state – this hatred may override all other practical considerations in the remaining few months of his term in office.

His parting shot at Israel may well be to force her expulsion from the United Nations and turn the Jewish state into another Taiwan.

As suggested at the beginning of this article, he might well encourage both Iranian terror proxies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezb’allah in Lebanon, to attack Israel with a massive missile bombardment sometime this coming December.

Hamas, for its own part, has thousands of lethal rockets and mortars and is feverishly building tunnels into Israeli territory in the hope of sending its terrorist hordes into Israeli villages and towns and slaughtering as many civilians as possible.  Hezb’allah, on the other hand, is estimated to have more than 150 thousand missiles and rockets aimed at all of Israel, hidden in Lebanese schools, hospitals, and apartments.

Even as the deliberate use of civilians as human shields is explicitly spelled out by the Geneva Conventions as a crime against humanity, and though Israel would have no choice but to inflict substantial civilian casualties in her own defense, this circumstance would naturally be used as a pretext by the U.N. to punish Israel in an unprecedented manner.

They would do so knowing that for the first time, an American president would likely stand by and approve whatever the U.N. anti-Israel “lynch mob” might concoct in order to further isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state.  This might include severe economic sanctions or embargoes or might even involve expulsion of Israel from the U.N. entirely.

It should be emphasized here that once the American national election is over, there will be nothing to stop Obama from doing this.  Obama’s entire foreign policy has revolved around undermining Israel.  Such an action on his part in the closing weeks of his administration can be seen as not only possible, but likely, given the pattern of his behavior toward Israel for the whole of his presidency.

This latter punishment would suit Israel’s enemies very well, even though it would change nothing on the ground.  An Israel reduced to a Taiwan-like status – i.e., a de facto sovereign state not officially recognized as such by the U.N. – would obviate the need for Gulf Arabs (who are covertly making common cause with Israel against Iran) to establish any formal diplomatic relations with her.

The “Zionist entity,” as their official propaganda impudently puts it, would remain just that.  This might even, in rhetorical terms, satisfy the requirement of Iran’s mullahs to “wipe Israel from the map.”  What is more, once Israel is expelled from the U.N., it would be very difficult for any future U.S. president, no matter how pro-Israel, to successfully support Israel’s re-admittance into the U.N.

As is the case with Taiwan, the U.S. may maintain a commitment to supplying Israel with arms and supporting her efforts at self-defense, but in practical terms, that may be the extent of the relationship, even in the best-case scenario surrounding Israel’s expulsion from the U.N. under Obama during his final days in office.

While such a turn of events may sound far-fetched to even some of those most critical of Obama, it is entirely possible in view of Obama’s past acts of blatant hatred toward America’s one and only true ally and democracy in the Middle East.

 

Categories: Erdogan, Foreign policy, Hamas, Iran and Israel, Iran scam, Iranian proxies, Israel, Israeli security, Obama and Iran, Obama and Islam, Obama and Israel, Obama and Muslim Brotherhood, Obama and Turkey, Palestinian Authority, Palestinians, Saudi Arabia
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Anti-Americanism is the Foreign Policy of Fools

May 13, 2016

Anti-Americanism is the Foreign Policy of Fools, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, May 13, 2016

Go to hell America

The New York Times profile of Ben Rhodes, Obama’s foreign policy guru, had plenty of shocking moments from his attempt to cover up Iran’s abduction of US sailors to his blatant gloating over the stupidity of the journalists whom he manipulated into spreading his lies in support of the Iran deal.

But the larger revelation is also simpler. Ben Rhodes knows next to nothing about foreign policy. He has no idea whether Iran will get nukes and couldn’t care less whether it’s moderate or not. He’s a failed fiction writer whose goal is “radically reorienting American policy in the Middle East in order to make the prospect of American involvement in the region’s future wars a lot less likely”.

That’s another way of describing a foreign policy built on isolationism.

Obama’s interviews are liberally spiced with contempt for the Europeans, whose foreign policy he adopted, and even former Islamist allies like Turkey are being treated with disdain. He despises both traditional US allies such as the UK and Israel, but he also has little use for the enemies, such as Russia and the Sunni Islamists, whom he tried to court. About the only enemy nation he still likes is Iran.

The first wave of Democratic backlash to the Iraq War was to champion diplomacy over military intervention. But diplomacy without intervention proved toothless. All that’s left now is a warped isolationism in which the US still pays the bills, signs all sorts of meaningless international accords that compromise our interests, but completely abandons its leadership role as a world power.

Rhodes sneers at the reporters whom he manipulated as knowing nothing. And he’s right. But he also doesn’t know anything. The condition is typical of an American left which has no foreign policy. It only has an anti-American domestic policy which it projects internationally without regard to its relevance.

The Iran deal had to happen to defeat “neo-conservatives”, the “war lobby” and whatever other leftist boogeyman was lurking around the premises. The men and women doing the defeating, like Rhodes, had zero interest in what was actually happening in Iran or what its leaders might do with nuclear weapons. They would tell any lie to help sell the deal because they were fighting a domestic battle of narratives. Iran wasn’t a real place. It was a fictional counter in a domestic ideological battle.

This problem did not begin yesterday.

Senator Ted Kennedy’s infamous letter to the Soviet leadership was seen as treasonous. But as a practical matter it revealed that an aspiring president had no interest in the USSR except to use it in a domestic battle against Reagan. Democrats had similarly supported and then turned against the Iraq War over domestic politics. Not only had they backed the removal of Saddam Hussein in the past, but Obama’s regime change in Libya showed that they did not believe any of their own critiques of regime change or unilateral intervention. Their foreign policy was based entirely on a domestic agenda.

Earlier generations of Democrats did have a comprehensive foreign policy based on ideas. It might be wrong, but it did exist. The Clinton-Kerry generation was very interested in talking about foreign policy, but viewed it purely in terms of opposing the Vietnam War as a critique of American power.

They had no other ideas to offer and it showed.

Without the Cold War, the Clinton era reduced foreign policy to multilateral diplomacy that existed to resolve conflicts and prevent genocide. But diplomacy proved useless in Rwanda and Bosnia. So Clinton ignored the former and used ruthless force casually for the latter. Meanwhile his foreign policy couldn’t process the rise of Al Qaeda and the growing threat of Islamic terrorism which led inevitably to 9/11.

Hillary Clinton is offering up a freezer fresh version of the same thing. The policies that failed her badly in Syria, Libya and across the Middle East are the only foreign policy offerings that she has for sale.

Bill Clinton had no foreign policy. Like Obama, he viewed foreign policy in terms of his domestic conflicts with Republicans. He tried to engage diplomatically while retreating militarily. His botched intervention in Yugoslavia had strong similarities to Obama’s disastrous intervention in Libya.

And a Clinton was behind both.

Hillary Clinton took the Secretary of State position to build up credibility for a presidential run. The invasion of Libya was a platform to take her to the White House. Libya did not matter to her. While the State Department blew through fortunes to finance her self-promotion, the Benghazi mission lacked basic security. Even the Jihadists who were hired on to provide security weren’t getting paid.

And that led to the murder of four Americans.

It’s a short distance from Ted Kennedy trying to figure out how he could use Soviet officials to undermine Reagan and become president to Hillary Clinton seeing regime change in Libya as a campaign commercial right down to the punchy media-friendly slogan, “We came, We saw, He died.”

Democratic foreign policy is animated by political careerism and the conviction that American power is the problem. Beyond that lies a deep and abiding ignorance of the actual conflicts and issues abroad.

The left’s reflexive anti-Americanism makes it easy to be ignorant while appearing knowledgeable. It allows the conflation of domestic policy critiques with foreign policy by blaming America for everything. Anything that doesn’t fit into the neat anti-American box can be waved away with some clichés about the importance of global communication, global poverty, trade policies, global warming and reform.

Democrats didn’t have to understand Iraq. They just had to know it was Bush’s fault. First it was Bush I’s fault for not removing Saddam Hussein, as Democrats and the media instead he should have. Then it was Bush II’s fault for removing Saddam, which Democrats and the media had now decided he shouldn’t have. But blaming Bush I and II didn’t actually teach them anything about Iraq. And so they had no idea what to do about it.

Bill Clinton ricocheted from bombing Iraq to trying to trying to ignore it. Obama followed the same course, first trying to ignore it and then bombing it. Neither of them understood anything about Iraq. While Obama still boasts of having gotten Iraq right, that’s because no one reminds him that back in the Senate he was insisting that Iraqis would achieve a political solution once American soldiers had left.

The political solution they achieved was a bloody civil war culminating in ISIS.

But Obama’s understanding of Iraq was limited to blaming America for its problems. He didn’t know anything else and he didn’t feel that he had to.

The rise of ISIS happened because Democrats didn’t feel they had to know anything about Iraq except that it was Bush’s fault. When Bush tried to get Assad to cut off the flow of Al Qaeda terrorists into Iraq, leading Democrats, including Pelosi and Kerry, rushed to support Assad against President Bush.

That flow of terrorists from Syria into Iraq eventually became the basis for ISIS.

It’s no wonder that Obama has never been able to come up with a working plan for Syria. Blaming Bush is not a plan. And it’s a particularly bad plan in this case.

Anti-Americanism, like most prejudices, is a license for ignorance. By embracing a prejudice against their own country, Democrats have lost any skill at foreign policy that they once had. Instead of learning anything about the world, they resort to the easy answer of turning away from the confusing problems of other countries to blame them all on us. Anti-Americanism is the only foreign policy that they need.

Anti-Americanism is the foreign policy of fools. It’s not smart power. It’s ignorance and prejudice with a dictionary.

Categories: Allies, Clintons, Democrats, Foreign policy, Isolationism, Obama, Obama and Iran
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US foreign policy,

May 11, 2016

US foreign policy

by Thierry Meyssan

Voltaire Network | Damascus (Syria) | 9 May 2016

Source: US foreign policy, by Thierry Meyssan

These days, US foreign policy is often contradictory, as we can see in Syria, where troops trained by the Pentagon are fighting troops trained by the CIA. And yet it remains perfectly coherent on two points – to divide Europe between the European Union on one side and Russia on the other – and to divide the Far East between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on one side and China on the other. Why? And can this be predicted?

For more than a century, in an attempt to explain and therefore anticipate US foreign policy, we have been visualising a struggle between the isolationists and the interventionists. The former adopted the line of the «Pilgrim Fathers», who fled old Europe to build a new world based on their religious beliefs, and therefore distant from European cynicism. The latter, in the tradition of certain of the «Founding Fathers», intended not only to seize their independence, but also to pursue the project of the British Empire for their own benefit.

Today, this distinction has lost almost all validity, since it has become impossible to live in autarchy, even for a country as vast as the United States. Although it has become commonplace to accuse one’s political adversaries of isolationism, no US politician – with the exception of Ron Paul – now defends such an idea.

The debate has shifted to a confrontation between the partisans of perpetual war and the adepts of a more measured use of force. If we are to believe the work of professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, the present policy of the United States is decided by a collection of interest groups, independent of the desires of its citizens [1]. In this debate, therefore, it is legitimate to note the influence, on the one hand, of the military-industrial complex, which dominates the US economy and whose interest is to pursue a state of «endless war» – and, on the other, the toll companies (software, high-tech, entertainment) who, although their production is more virtual than real, make their money wherever the world is at peace.

This analysis of the debate leaves aside the question of the access to raw materials and energy sources, which was dominant in the 19th and 20th centuries, but has lost its urgency, without having completely disappeared.

Since the «Carter Doctrine», which treats the access to hydrocarbons from the «Greater Middle East» as a question of «national security» [2], we have seen Washington create CentCom, move more than 500,000 men to the Gulf, and seek to impose control over the whole region. We remember that Dick Cheney, persuaded of the imminence of «peak oil», decided to prepare the «Arab Springs», and war against all the states in the region which it did not yet control. But this policy lost its meaning even while it was in appplication, because the United States, apart from their production of gas and shale oil, took control of the hydrocarbons in the Gulf of Mexico. Consequently, in the years to come, the United States will not only have abandoned the «Greater Middle East», but may engage in a major war against Venezuela, the only middle-range power which could compete with and threaten their exploitation in the Gulf of Mexico.

In a series of interviews with The Atlantic, President Obama tried to explain his doctrine [3]. In order to do so, he replied lengthily and repetitively to those who accuse him of contradictions or weakness, particularly after the affair of the «red line» in Syria. He had indeed declared that the use of chemical weapons was a red line which should not be crossed, but when his administration alleged that the Syrian Arab Republic had used them against its own population, he refused to wage a new war. Leaving aside the question of whether the accusation was true or not, the President stressed that the United States had no interest in risking the lives of its soldiers in this conflict, and that he had chosen to economise their forces in order to face genuine threats against US national interests. This declaration of reserve is known as the «Obama Doctrine».

So what are these «genuine threats» ? The President didn’t say. At best we can look at the work of the US National Intelligence Council and the preceding remarks on the power of the interest groups. It appears that the United States has abandoned the post-9/11 «G.W. Bush Doctrine» of global domination to return to that of his father – commercial excellence. Once the Cold War ended for want of combatants, the era was dedicated only to economic competition within the deregulated capitalist system.

As a matter of fact, it was specifically to reassure himself that the era of ideological conflicts was really over that President Obama reached out to Cuba and Iran. It was indispensable to calm the opposition of these two revolutionary states, the only ones to contest not only US supremacy, but also international rules. The bad faith displayed by the United States in their application of the 5+1 agreement only goes to show that they do not care about Iranian nuclear technology, but are seeking only to restrain the Khomeinist revolution.

It’s in this context that we witness the return of the «Wolfowitz Doctrine», according to which everything must be done to prevent the emergence of a new competitor, and this begins with the bridling of the European Union [4]. However, this strategy seems to have been modified, insofar as Washington considers the awakening of China with even greater apprehension. So there is talk of the «Far East Pivot» strategy, consisting of withdrawing troops present in Greater Middle East, and repositioning them in order to control this new region and contain China. While the Pentagon has abandoned the neo-conservative lunacy concerning the destruction of China, it nonetheless intends to restrict Beijing to an entirely economic role, and prevent it from applying any political influence outside its frontiers.

And yet what we are now seeing is the contrary of the «Far East Pivot». The United States have certainly increased their presence in the Pacific slightly, but have above all set up a strong military presence in Central Europe. While war is still raging in Palestine and Yemen, in Syria and Iraq, and threatens to inflame Libya, a new conflict has begun in Ukraine. There are, however, two ways of interpreting this evolution.

On one hand, we may consider that the military deployment at the Russian border, and Moscow’s intended military reponse, are absolutely no threat to peace. Indeed, it seems both very dangerous and absolutely unnecessary to engage in such a conflict. The war in Ukraine will not be directed against Russia, but will constitute the artificial fabrication of a Russian pseudo-threat to Europe, with its sanctions and counter-sanctions, which will allow the United States to «protect» their credulous allies.

On the other hand, we may consider that the economic future of the United States is founded on their control of international exchange, and thus on the maintenance of maritime transport [5]. On the contrary, the development of Russia and China supposes their freedom from US trusteeship, and therefore the construction of continental commercial routes. This is President Xi’s project, with the construction of two «Silk Roads», one building on the antique traces of the route through Central Asia, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean, the other through Russia to Germany. Two routes which today are interdicted by Daesh in the Levant, and by Ukraine in Europe.

The question of maritime transport was the central point of US strategy at the beginning of the 21st century, with the support of pirates from the Horn of Africa [6] – a strategy that ended when Moscow and Beijing sent their warships into the area. However, even though China had the Suez Canal doubled in size by Egypt, the access via the Bal el-Mandeb Straits remains officially under the control of Djibouti, and unofficially under the control of Al-Qaïda via the Islamic Emirate of Mukalla.

To the control of the commercial routes must be added the control of financial exchanges. This is the reason why the US Justice Department has promulgated rules which it is attempting to impose progressively on all the banks in the world. But here too, Russia has set up its own SWIFT system, while China has refused the convertibility of its money into dollars in order to avoid being shackled by US rules.

If this analysis is correct, the wars in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine will not end until Russia and China have secured another commercial route to Western Europe. On this subject, we can observe the current efforts by the United States to topple Belarus into their camp after having opposed it for so long – a way of consolidating the Ukrainian firewall and ensuring hermetic compartmentalisation between Western and Eastern Europe.

From this perspective, the commercial negotiations that the United States have undertaken with the European Union (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP), and with the ASEAN (Trans Pacific Partnership, or TPP) are not aimed at reinforcing their exchanges, but on the contrary, at excluding Russia and China from the market. Stupidly, the Europeans and Asians are concentrating on the choice of production standards instead of demanding the entry of Russia and China into the negotiations.

A final fact to be learned from Obama’s interviews with The Atlantic is that the United States intend to update their alliances and adapt them to their new strategic doctrine. So the support for the Saudi régime, which guaranteed a supply of Middle East oil, is no longer of any interest, and even becomes a burden. Or, the «special relation» with the United Kingdom which once had its importance in terms of control of the oceans (the Atlantic Charter), and the attempt to fashion a unipolar world (the Iraq war), no longer offers any particular interest and must be re-thought – without mentioning the costly support for Israël, which no longer serves a purpose in the Middle East, and which will not continue unless Tel-Aviv proves itself useful in other parts of the world.

The preceding remarks do not reflect the current Presidential campaign in the United States, which opposes the military-industrial complex and WASP ideology, represented by Hillary Clinton, and the toll industry and social pact of the «American dream», represented by Donald Trump [7]. The violence of this campaign attests to the necessity of re-balancing these forces after a period of the exclusive supremacy of war-mongering since 1995.

When the camp represented today by Trump finally wins, we should see the settlement of wars, but the outbreak of an oppressive coercion for the payment of patents and authors’ royalties. In the case that a win by this group should tarry, the United States will have to deal with the uprising of an angry population and riots. It will then become especially difficult to predict US foreign policy.

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Iran’s Plans to Control a Palestinian State

May 9, 2016

Iran’s Plans to Control a Palestinian State, Gatestone Institute, Khaled Abu Toameh, May 9, 2016

(Please see also, Op-Ed: Trump’s “peace through strength”  for  USA also applies to Israel. — DM)

♦ The Iran nuclear deal, marking its first anniversary, does not appear to have had a calming effect on the Middle East.

♦ Iran funnels money to Hamas and Islamic Jihad because they share its desire to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamic empire. The Iranian leaders want to see Hamas killing Jews every day, with no break. Ironically, Hamas has become too “moderate” for the Iranian leadership because it is not doing enough to drive Jews out of the region.

♦ More Palestinian terror group leaders may soon perform the “pilgrimage” to their masters in Tehran. If this keeps up, the Iranians themselves will puppeteer any Palestinian state that is created in the region.

The Iran nuclear deal, marking its first anniversary, does not appear to have had a calming effect on the Middle East. The Iranians seem to be deepening their intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general and in internal Palestinian affairs in particular.

This intervention is an extension of Iran’s ongoing efforts to expand its influence in Arab and Islamic countries, including Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon and some Gulf states. The nuclear deal between Tehran and the world powers has not stopped the Iranians from proceeding with their global plan to export their “Islamic Revolution.” On the contrary, the general sense among Arabs and Muslims is that in the wake of the nuclear deal, Iran has accelerated its efforts to spread its influence.

Iran’s direct and indirect presence in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon has garnered some international attention, yet its actions in the Palestinian arena are still ignored by the world.

That Iran provides financial and military aid to Palestinian groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad has never been a secret. In fact, both the Iranians and the Palestinian radical groups have been boasting about their relations.

Iran funnels money to these groups because they share its desire to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamic empire. Like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas and Islamic Jihad agreed to play the role of Tehran’s proxies and enablers in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

1162 (1)Iran used to funnel money to Hamas and Islamic Jihad because they share its desire to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamic empire. Relations between Iran and Hamas foundered a few years back, when Hamas leaders refused to support the Iranian-backed Syrian dictator, Bashar Assad. Pictured above: Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal (left) confers with Iranian “Supreme Leader” Ali Khamenei, in 2010. (Image source: Office of the Supreme Leader)

But puppets must remain puppets. Iran gets nasty when its dummies do not play according to its rules. This is precisely what happened with Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Relations between Iran and Hamas foundered a few years back over the crisis in Syria. Defying their masters in Tehran, Hamas leaders refused to declare support for the Iranian-backed Syrian dictator, Bashar Assad. Things between Iran and Hamas have been pretty bad ever since.

First, the Assad government closed down Hamas offices in Damascus. Second, Assad expelled the Hamas leadership from Syria. Third, Iran suspended financial and military aid to Hamas, further aggravating the financial crisis that the Gaza-based Islamist movement had already been facing.

Islamic Jihad got it next. Iranian mullahs woke up one morning to realize that Islamic Jihad leaders have been a bit unfaithful. Some of the Islamic Jihad leaders were caught flirting with Iran’s Sunni rivals in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. Even worse, the Iranians discovered that Islamic Jihad was still working closely with their erstwhile allies in the Gaza Strip, Hamas.

Iran had had high hopes for Islamic Jihad replacing Hamas as Tehran’s darling, and major proxy in the Palestinian arena. But here were Islamic Jihad leaders and activists working with their cohorts in Hamas, in apparent disregard of Papa Iran.

The mullahs did not lose much time. Outraged by Islamic Jihad’s apparent disloyalty, Iran launched its own terror group inside the Gaza Strip: Al-Sabireen (The Patient Ones). This group, which currently consists of several hundred disgruntled ex-Hamas and ex-Islamic Jihad members, was meant to replace Islamic Jihad the same way Islamic Jihad was supposed to replace Hamas in the Gaza Strip — in accordance with Iran’s scheme.

Lo and behold: it is hard to get things right with Iran. Al-Sabireen has also failed to please its masters in Tehran and is not “delivering.” Palestinian sources in the Gaza Strip say that Iran has realized that the investment in Al-Sabireen has not been worthwhile because the group has not been able to do anything “dramatic” in the past two years. By “dramatic,” the sources mean that Al-Sabireen has neither emerged as a serious challenger to Islamic Jihad or Hamas, and has not succeeded in killing enough Israelis.

So Iran has gone running back to its former bedfellow, Islamic Jihad.

For now, Iran is not prepared fully to bring Hamas back under its wings. Hamas, for the Iranians, is a “treacherous” movement, thanks to its periodic temporary ceasefires with Israel. The Iranian leaders want to see Hamas killing Jews every day, with no break. Ironically, Hamas has become too “moderate” for the Iranian leadership because it is not doing enough to drive Jews out of the region.

That leaves Iran with the Islamic Jihad.

In a surprise move, the Iranians this week hosted Islamic Jihad leader Ramadan Shalah and senior officials from his organization, in a renewed bid to revive Islamic Jihad’s role as the major puppet of Tehran in the Gaza Strip. Islamic Jihad officials said that the visit has resulted in the resumption of Iranian financial aid to their cash-strapped organization. As a result of the rift between Islamic Jihad and Iran, the Iranians are said to have cut off nearly 90% of their financial aid to the Palestinian terror organization.

Some Palestinians, such as political analyst Hamadeh Fara’neh, see the rapprochement between Iran and Islamic Jihad as a response to the warming of relations between Hamas and Turkey. The Iranians, he argues, are unhappy with recent reports that suggested that Turkey was acting as a mediator between Hamas and Israel.

Other Palestinians believe that Iran’s real goal is to unite Islamic Jihad and Al-Sabireen so that they would become a real and realistic alternative to Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Whatever Iran’s intentions may be, one thing is clear: The Iranians are taking advantage of the nuclear deal to move forward with their efforts to increase their influence over some Arab and Islamic countries. Iran is also showing that it remains very keen on playing a role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — one that emboldens radical groups that are bent on the destruction of Israel and that share the same values as the Islamic State terror group.

Iran’s latest courtship of Islamic Jihad is yet another attempt by the mullahs to deepen their infiltration of the Palestinian arena by supporting and arming any terror group that strives to smash Israel. For now, it seems that Hamas’s scheme is working, largely thanks to the apathy of the international community, where many believe that Iran has been declawed by the nuclear deal.

But more Palestinian terror group leaders may soon perform the “pilgrimage” to their masters in Tehran. If this keeps up, the Iranians themselves will puppeteer any Palestinian state that is created in the region. Their ultimate task, after all, is to use this state as a launching pad to destroy Israel. And the Iranians are prepared to fund and arm any Palestinian group that is willing to help achieve this goal.

Categories: Al-Sabireen, Death to Israel, Foreign policy, Gaza, Hamas, Iran and Israel, Iran scam, Iranian nukes, Iranian proxies, Islamic jihad, Islamic terrorism, Israel, Israeli security
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Donald Trump: Hillary Clinton Is ‘Trigger Happy’ on Foreign Policy

May 8, 2016

Donald Trump: Hillary Clinton Is ‘Trigger Happy’ on Foreign Policy

by Michelle Moons

7 May 2016

Source: Donald Trump: Hillary Clinton Is ‘Trigger Happy’ on Foreign Policy – Breitbart

Speaking to an overflow crowd in Lynden, Washington, Donald Trump called Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton “trigger happy” on foreign policy:

On foreign policy Hillary is trigger happy. She is, she’s trigger happy. She’s got a bad temperament. By the way, and her husband learned that a few times didn’t he? Bad timing. No it’s bad timing. But she’s trigger happy.

You look what she did, and look at this, I just wrote this down. Iraq, Libya she voted, Iraq, let’s go into Iraq. I voted against it except I was a civilian so nobody cared. From the beginning I said it’s gonna destabilize the Middle East and Iran will take over Iraq. Ya know for years they’ve been trying to get Iraq and Iraq has been trying to get Iran. We decimated that country’s military and now the country’s a mess. And what we did is we got ISIS, they got oil.

Trump moved on to slam former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s successor, John Kerry:

Now Iran, not only did they make a great deal with this total idiot Secretary of State that we have — he’s a clown. I’m telling ya he’s a clown. He never left the table once. He never left the table once. He’s making a deal with the Persians who are grea,t great negotiators over history.

“They’re killing him,” said Trump of Kerry’s negotiations with Iran. “Instead he goes on a bicycle and he breaks his leg so badly that for six months he’s out…”

Trump vowed, “I promise you I will never be in a bicycle race. I give you my word, okay? I promise.”

Trump returned to speaking of Clinton:

Her decisions in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya have cost trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, and have totally unleashed ISIS. Now thousands of lives yes, for us, but probably millions of lives in all fairness, folks.

He referred to another side to the story. “You know, they bomb a city, I watch it, they bomb a city and you go and you see this city that’s obliterated, obliterated. We started this. Obama couldn’t get us out properly, but we started this; now it’s a total mess. If nothing would have happened we would have been far better off than we are now. We spent four trillion dollars.”

Trump called out reports from the Middle East that showed cities laid waste with statements that nobody was killed. “I’ll bet you thousands and thousands of people were killed every time you see that television set.”

“We’ve lost thousands of lives,  trillions of dollars, millions of people have been killed,” said Trump, postulating that if the United States had done nothing, “We would have been in much better shape.” Trump called Saddam Hussein a horrible, miserable, bad guy but said that he did something very well: “He killed terrorists.”

“Now Iraq is Harvard for terrorists,” said Trump.

Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana 

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Op-Ed: Read Peter Beinart and you’ll vote Donald Trump

May 6, 2016

Op-Ed: Read Peter Beinart and you’ll vote Donald Trump, Israel National News, David Friedman, May 6, 2016

Several weeks ago, I was “outed” as one of Donald Trump’s two advisors on the relationship between the United States of America and the State of Israel. It is an honor and a privilege to advise Mr. Trump on a critical issue that is near and dear to my heart, and I fervently hope that I have the opportunity to assist him in developing and implementing policies that strengthen both countries and the unbreakable bond between them.

Right now, however, the bloodsport of American presidential politics is in full bloom, and within that scented garden emerges a recent Op-Ed piece by CNN panelist, Peter Beinart, published in Israel’s left-wing paper Haaretz. Beinart, a well-known supporter of J Street, New Israel Fund and the BDS movement, decries Trump’s selection of Israel advisors as a cynical charade by which Trump leverages Jews in his employ to go “all in” on Israel solely to garner political capital. According to Beinart, these token Jews, myself included, are just willing pawns in a modern day Game of Thrones, all willing to fall on their proverbial swords for Trump the King.

I have never met Mr. Beinart nor do I care to, and he knows absolutely nothing about me. Had he made the slightest inquiry (apparently no longer necessary for modern journalists), he would have known that I am not in Mr. Trump’s employ,  have hundreds of other clients, and hold views on Israel that are entirely independent of any political movement or candidate.  Those views have been developed over more than thirty years of study of historical accounts and scholarly works, interaction with Israeli political, military and business leaders, and probably 100 trips or more to the Holy Land. I didn’t just come out of “central casting,” as Beinart implies, to facilitate some political theatre, and my beliefs are not for sale to the highest bidder. The same holds true for Jason Greenblatt, Mr. Trump’s other advisor, whom I have known for years.

But I do want to thank Mr. Beinart for getting this issue out on the table, albeit clumsily and disingenuously. Because his reflexive reaction to my involvement in the Trump candidacy lays bare how dangerous the Jewish left is to the State of Israel.

Let’s look at the criticisms offered by Mr. Beinart of views that I have previously expressed. He thinks I’m no good because  (1) I have accused President Obama of “blatant anti-Semitism,” (2) I have questioned the wisdom of Israel bestowing the benefits of citizenship, including free tuition at some of its best universities, upon those who advocate the overthrow of the State, and (3) I have likened J Street supporters to “kapos during the Nazi era.” Let’s unpack each of those a bit.

First, Obama’s anti-Semitism. Here’s the context – Hamas puts on school plays in which 10 year olds dressed as terrorists plunge fake knives into 10 year olds dressed as Jews to the delight of the audience, and Palestinian Authority leaders (they’re supposed to be the “moderate ones”) bestow praise upon all participating in the “knife intifada.” Asked to comment on the unspeakable tragedy of innocent Jewish civilians being murdered by knife-wielding Islamic radicals, Obama and Kerry do little more than condemn the proverbial “cycle of violence.” I’m sorry, but this is pure and outright murder and any public figure who finds it difficult to condemn it as such without diluting the message with geo-political drivel is engaging in “blatant anti-Semitism.”

Second, the wisdom of free stuff for those engaged in advocating the overthrow of the State of Israel. Every civilized country other than Israel punishes treason. In the United States, advocating to overthrow the government by force or violence can get you life in prison. In Israel, Islamic radical citizens speak this way all the time, often on the way back and forth from world class institutions of higher learning which they attend for free. Is this a good idea? Is there no minimal allegiance required for Israeli citizenship? Sure seems like a fair question to me.

Finally, are J Street supporters really as bad as kapos? The answer, actually, is no. They are far worse than kapos – Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps. The kapos faced extraordinary cruelty and who knows what any of us would have done under those circumstances to save a loved one? But J Street? They are just smug advocates of Israel’s destruction delivered from the comfort of their secure American sofas – it’s hard to imagine anyone worse.

Mr. Beinart, therefore, has done us a service, albeit unintentionally. He has shown us the danger of the Jewish left – the lost souls who blame Israel for not making a suicidal “peace” with hateful radical Islamists hell bent on Israel’s destruction. This is Hillary Clinton’s crowd, and they are no friends of Israel.

Donald Trump’s view of Israel isn’t quite as nuanced as that of Mr. Beinart nor as academic as that of President Obama. He thinks that when radical Islamic terrorists are trying to kill you, the right thing to do is kill them first. Don’t negotiate, reason or cajole. Just defeat them. Or as Mr. Trump would say, “win.”

So please read Peter Beinart’s latest column. It will leave you convinced to vote for Donald Trump.

Categories: 2016 elections, Abbas, Antisemitism, BDS, Clash of civilizations, Defense of Israel, Donald Trump, Foreign policy, Gaza, Haaretz, Hypocrisy, Islam and Jews, Israel, J Street, Leftists, Obama and Israel, Obama and Palestinians, Obama's anti-semitism, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian heroes, Palestinian incitement, Republicans
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Indiana Trump

May 6, 2016

Indiana Trump, Israel Hayom, Boaz Bismuth, May 6, 2016

Trump at Israel HayomRepublican presidential candidate Donald Trump | Photo credit: AP

“I was born for the storm, and a calm doesn’t suit me.” These words were uttered by Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, but could easily have come out of the mouth of presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Indiana set the tone this week: The state, which is better versed in motor races than presidential races, demonstrated that Trump is the man Republican voters want. The Indiana primaries also showed that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton is in real trouble, even if — as expected — she is nominated by her party.

In the Midwestern state’s primaries, it turned out that American citizens are not necessarily dreaming of seeing Clinton in the Oval Office. She is not whetting the Democrats’ electoral appetite, as the unexpected success of Senator Bernie Sanders (Vermont) in Indiana and 18 other states proves.

In Indiana, the gun for the real race went off: Clinton versus Trump. Yes, Trump. The man who put egg on the faces of pundits worldwide, even here in Israel; the man who became his party’s presumptive nominee before reaching the minimum of 1,237 delegates necessary to guarantee his candidacy for president. You can argue with the Republican voters, but they are the ones who decide.

Since the Indiana primaries, experts, pundits, and members of the GOP establishment, which produced former presidents Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln, have changed their tune, falling in line with the winner. On their Twitter accounts, they expressed a unified opinion — in the end, when a serious decision has to be made, Trump is preferable to Clinton.

A little over two months from now, the Republican convention will take place in Ohio. It looks like those who did not want Trump as the party’s candidate could see him win the presidency in November.

Clinton is marking time. Trump, on the other hand, keeps moving up. The man whom many called “Mr. 30%” has risen to 50% within weeks. It happened just when he was expected to hit a bump in the road, just when his opponents, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich joined forces to stop him.

Trump’s leaps and bounds this past month defeated all expectations. Since the primaries in New York, his home state, Trump has won in five northeastern states — Connecticut, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Delaware. On Tuesday, he managed a victory in Indiana and with the statistics of a real winner — between 50-60% support.

The wind went out of the sails

America is watching the finance stag from New York galloping on and cannot understand how it happen. Why did no one foresee this phenomenon? Why, when Trump declared his candidacy last June, did everyone treat it like a gimmick? The answers can be found in the eight years of U.S. President Barack Obama’s terms in office. Despite the efforts of his supporters to present the 44th U.S. president as a success story, his administration has been a failure, due mainly to the expectations that he himself created. From a president who wanted to change America and the rest of the world along with it, Obama turned into a president who mostly changed America, but not the world. And if so, not for the better.

Many Americans today think that the president, to a large extent, stole their country from them. Rationality has given way to emotions: They do not think in terms of numbers — unemployment percentages, inflation, deficit, GDP; they think about values — country, military, family. They are finding it hard to believe that their America, a superpower that once led the world, has changed its face and suddenly become just another country. A country that “leads from behind,” as Obama himself put it in the Libya campaign, and does so willingly.

That is not the American dream — but it might be the American nightmare. Once, even an immigrant to the U.S. from Asia, Europe, or Africa was asked to conform to American values. In the age of Obama, the immigrants learned that the U.S. may try to conform to them. Good? Bad? What is certain is that this isn’t the American spirit. And it might be the reason we were reminded this week of Andrew Jackson, considered one of the most successful American presidents. Although controversial in his time, he won the presidential election twice and captured the hearts of the masses. Jackson was not the establishment’s choice — the elite despised him — but the people voted for the hero general. And in America, the people are sovereign.

Jackson’s and Trump’s stories are very different, but there are similarities. Jackson was also very crude on one hand and popular on the other; like Trump, the establishment did not want him and in 1824 even managed to negate his presidency and hand it over to John Quincy Adams. The fact that Jackson won more votes and electorates did little to help, but Jackson — a hero of wars against the English and the Indians, won the next two election campaigns. Today, his image graces the U.S. $20 bill.

The seventh U.S. president was not one of the founding fathers, but he is still associated with many of the values America is proud of today: honor, independence, world recognition of America’s status and role, the importance of military service, the right to bear arms (under the Second Amendment of the Constitution), and of course courage, which includes willingness to die for the flag and for the safety of one’s family.

All these, if you like, are values attributed to the time of Jackson’s presidency, but also characterize Trump’s agenda. The former’s tradition has become the latter’s promise.

If America had not drifted so far away from Jackson’s legacy during Obama’s presidency, Trump’s promises might not have hit a soft spot with American voters. But luckily for the billionaire, the things he is saying hit home with the voters even if, like Jackson, they stand out for their crudeness.

A gentleman to the enemy

Let’s get back to Indiana. Time and again, reports said that this would be the decisive primary, and it was. This primary made Trump the party’s de facto nominee, and Cruz decided to pack it in.

Cruz, like General Custer, stood bravely to the last. Indiana was his last stand. After his losses in New York and the other northeast states, he was still trying to steal the show when he named Carly Fiorina his running mate. That nomination will remain on paper only.

Cruz, a fundamentalist Christian, was expected to win in Indiana, a state with a high percentage of religious voters. Two weeks ago, he even signed an agreement with Ohio Governor John Kasich, in which the latter agreed to support him in the fateful vote. In practice, the polls predicted a painful loss for Cruz, and turned out to be completely correct.

The last day of Cruz’s campaign was marked by mutual mudslinging with Trump. First, the finance baron from New York said in an interview to Fox News that Cruz’s father, Rafael, had ties to Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963. He was repeating a very problematic report from the National Inquirer tabloid, which had run a picture that showed Cruz Sr. and Oswald allegedly handing out flyers praising Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

Cruz Jr., who was deeply hurt by the remarks, called Trump a “pathological liar” and other choice names. That did not prevent Trump from commending Cruz after the latter’s loss in Indiana. There, another facet of the billionaire’s personality came out — that of a true gentleman.

Meanwhile, Cruz has yet to endorse Trump, and could still cause him some headaches at the convention given the number of delegates he won before suspending his candidacy. In theory, he could try to enlist superdelegates, who are not committed to voting for a certain candidate, but it looks like Trump’s path to the Republican nomination is paved. Nine states have yet to hold primaries, and he does not need more than 50% of the remaining delegates to win the party nomination. California (with 172 delegates), New Jersey, and West Virginia are already in his pocket. In effect, the nomination is his.

Even Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus tweeted that Donald Trump would be the party’s presidential candidate, and that “we all need to unite and focus on defeating @Hillary Clinton.”

Indiana also proved what a CNN poll revealed on the eve of the election: 84% of voters already see Trump as the Republican presidential candidate, and 85% see Clinton as the Democratic candidate. No one is ruling out the possibility that the Republican convention in Cleveland could go over quietly, while the Democratic convention in Cleveland winds up being stormy. Who would have believed in February that such a scenario was even possible?

But even if a Rasmussen Institute poll showed Trump beating Clinton in the general election (41% to 39%), all other national polls are predicting a victory for the former secretary of state. Still, Clinton is in trouble. The victories of her rival Sanders are keeping him in the race, which shows that she has to take the left flank of the Democratic Party into consideration.

Centrist Democrats are threatening to go over to Trump or not vote. Clinton is not Sanders fans’ cup of tea. It will be hard for her to run after and sweep up his army of supporters. In Indiana, 70% of young Democrats voted for Sanders, and Independent voters preferred him as well.

One thing is clear — there are no rules and no logic in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. All preexisting concepts have collapsed. The Indiana primary, for example, buried the notion that religious and conservative voters follow a one-dimensional agenda. We also learned that American voters from both parties are looking for a candidate with unconventional ideas. Thorough, boring plans are greeted with suspicion, whereas someone who floats a simple, catchy idea will get the voters’ support.

National honor above all

Something happened in Indiana. It was the first time Trump had won more than 50 percent of the votes in a state not considered his home court. Another barrier fell.

“It won’t be easy to beat Trump in November,” said Senator Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania), a man with a keen political sense. He believes that Clinton will win the nomination at the convention, but will have a hard time in the western states “among Reagan Democrats, who live in cities that still haven’t recovered from the [2008] economic crisis and are hostile toward Washington and the [political] establishment.”

In 2012, when Trump was first discussed as a possible presidential candidate, his chance of winning was one in 80. In 2015 his chances improved to one in 50, and now he is the de facto Republican candidate. Have we already said “moving ahead by leaps and bounds”? Clinton has another problem: It is very difficult for a candidate from one party to win after a president from that same party has been in office for two terms. Take the victory of George Bush Sr. in 1988, after Reagan’s second term in office. But we are not there yet. Most Americans start to take an interest in the elections only around September, after the primaries are over, and much could change by then. Trump and Clinton are expected to duke it out; it will not be a clean fight, and their televised debates should air after the kids are in bed. Trump has lots of skeletons in his closet, but Hillary has graveyards, and everything is about to come out. It is time to tune in.

Meanwhile, before the election, Trump should read the excellent biography of Andrew Jackson. Obviously, he will have to start thinking about a running mate, and former presidential hopeful Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s name came up more than once this week.

Aside from Jackson’s legacy, the billionaire must have thought about the words of fifth U.S. President James Monroe, who said, “National honor is a national property of the highest value.” Trump understands that well. America used to be something, and he wants it to be that way again.

Categories: 2016 elections, Democrats, Donald Trump, Foreign policy, Hillary Clinton, Multiculturalism, National honor, Obama's America 2016, Republicans
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President Failure’s Smart Diplomacy

May 5, 2016

President Failure’s Smart Diplomacy, Bill Whittle via Truth Revolt via YouTube, May 5, 2016

Categories: Foreign policy, Obama's foreign failures
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