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Hillary Clinton is not a friend of Israel

September 27, 2016

Hillary Clinton is not a friend of Israel, Israel National News, Aviel Shewin-Stevens, September 27, 2016

Hillary Clinton is campaigning on the basis that she is a friend of Israel, just as she did in the Senate, and Obama did twice for the presidency. As Secretary of State, she was the architect of the policy of the most anti-Israel president since the rebirth of Israel in 1948. It was a policy which reflected views she has held her entire life, with the exception of the nine-year period when she ran for and held the office of U.S. Senator from New York State. American voters should not let her get away with hiding her true self. Israel-focused Americans should vote for Republicans in Senate and congressional races, as well as for Donald Trump as president. Hillary Clinton has collapsed her election.

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Hillary Clinton has a lifetime of anti-Israel positions. She said she was a big supporter of Israel when she was in the U.S. Senate, when she needed campaign contributions from American Jews and New York’s Jewish voting bloc. She has not been pro-Israel since her resignation from the Senate to become Secretary of State in January 2009.

When Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State, she helped Barack Obama craft his anti-Israel positions. Like other presidents, Obama made his own policy; he fundamentally transformed America’s foreign policy. He reoriented America’s Middle East policy in favor of the ayatollahs, to make Iran the regional superpower, disadvantaging America’s traditional allies: Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni Arab monarchies. Like other secretaries of state, Hillary had the option of resigning if she did not agree with the foreign policy, but she shared the same flawed vision of the world as Obama.

Hillary Clinton made an official visit to the Middle East in November 1999, when her husband was the president. During the visit, Suha Arafat, the wife of Palestine leader Yasser Arafat, made slanderous allegations in her presence: “Our [Palestinian] people have been submitted to the daily and intensive use of poisonous gas by the Israeli forces, which has led to an increase in cancer cases among women and children.” Suha Arafat also accused Israel of contaminating the water sources used by Palestinians with “chemical materials” and “poisoning Palestinian women and children with toxic gases.”

Hillary listened to a real-time translation of the accusations without objections. She also hugged and kissed Suha Arafat when she finished speaking. Twelve hours passed without a word from Hillary. Only when she saw the public outcry did she call Suha Arafat’s words “inflammatory.” She also called on all sides to refrain from “inflammatory rhetoric and baseless accusations,” including Israel, whose leaders made no such accusations.

Then Hillary did what she and her husband often do when they mess up: She blamed others. First she blamed the translator, though the Palestinians would have assigned one of their most capable translators to handle a major speech by the wife of the Palestinian leader. She then tried to blame the Americans traveling with her, who, she said, told her that Suha Arafat’s remarks were “not worthy of any particular comment.” She also blamed her husband: If she were not the First Lady, she could have spoken up sooner.

Hillary should not have been there. Her advisers told her that traveling to the Territories in the middle of a difficult peace process and her own Senate race was to court disaster. Perhaps the sumptuous trappings of overseas travel as First Lady won out. When Republicans questioned her actions, she responded with arrogance: “It is unfortunate that there are any questions about what was a very straightforward occasion.” Most Americans would not agree that public accusations that an American ally was engaging in chemical genocide make for a “straightforward occasion.” Till now, Hillary Clinton has not specifically contradicted nor denounced the lies uttered by Suha Arafat in her presence.

Hillary Clinton became a supporter of Israel in her Senate years because she needed the Jewish vote and campaign contributions. After becoming the Secretary of State, one of her first actions was to call for the end of construction of new homes for Jews in existing neighborhoods in Jerusalem and the Territories, contravening an existing U.S./Israel agreement made during the Bush administration. This was a major error by the Hillary Clinton State Department, compounded by the inclusion of Jerusalem. Elliot Abrams, who negotiated the agreement for the U.S., stated that the agreement was valid.

In early 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded the “settlement” freeze and was quickly supported by Obama. The Palestinians seized upon the Hillary-created settlement issue as an opportunity to avoid negotiations. They used the demands for a “settlement” freeze a precondition to further talks, even though there were negotiations and construction going on simultaneously before she became Secretary of State.

In August 2009 Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced a ten-month “settlement” freeze. It was approved by the Israeli cabinet and implemented on November 25, 2009 and was to run till September 25, 2010. Despite pressure from America, the Palestinians refused to join any talks the first nine months of the freeze; they did not come to the negotiation table till September 2010, three weeks before the freeze ended.

As the end of the “settlement” freeze approached, the U.S. asked Israel to extend the freeze. Israel demanded that any proposal be presented in writing, based on their experience with Hillary denying the deal negotiated by Elliot Abrams during the Bush Administration. The written offer never came; Hillary was not negotiating in good faith.

In 2011, speaking at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the left-wing Brookings Institution, Hillary Clinton attempted to delegitimize Israel as a free nation by expressing concern for Israel’s social climate in the wake of limitations regarding female singing in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and gender segregation on public transportation. Both were accommodations made to the Orthodox communities in Israel. She said the decision of some IDF soldiers to leave an event where female soldiers were singing reminded her of the situation in Iran. Whereas, in Iran the women would have been lashed or executed. In Israel the women sang, but some people, exercising their personal freedom, felt it was against their religious beliefs and were allowed to walk out. In the IDF, most senior officers supported the women’s right to sing.

Hillary Clinton also spoke of her shock that some Jerusalem buses had assigned separate seating areas for women, at the request of both men and women who are stringently Orthodox, and compared it to the segregation era in America. She said “it’s reminiscent of Rosa Parks.” Her statement was part of the continued attempt to de-legitimize Israeli democracy by the Obama administration.

In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s email scandals, the media coverage of her emails from her close friend Sidney Blumenthal has mostly been about his recommendations about Libya; however, he also sent many emails about Israel. Some of them consisted of forwarding articles from his anti-Semitic son, writer Max Blumenthal, but others were recommendations of policies describing Israel as the oppressor.

As reported by the National Review Online: Blumenthal sent dozens of e-mails advising Clinton on Israel in 2010. Before her March speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Blumenthal sent Clinton an article from left-wing Israeli writer Uri Avnery accusing the Netanyahu government of “starting a rebellion” against America and defending interests that diverge from America’s. Clinton responded: “I have to speak to AIPAC tomorrow…How — and should I — use this [sic]?” Blumenthal said he will send another memo the next day.

In that memo, he told Hillary to “hold Bibi [Binyamin Netanyahu]’s feet to the fire” on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process: “Perhaps most controversial would be to remind [AIPAC] in as subtle but also direct a way as you can that it does not have a monopoly over American Jewish opinion. Bibi is stage managing US Jewish organizations (and neocons, and the religious right, and whomever else he can muster) against the administration. AIPAC itself has become an organ of the Israeli right, specifically Likud.” Whereas, AIPAC favors Israel’s left-wing parties, and is becoming more so in reaction to J-Street, the group formed to give political cover to Obama among liberal Jews. J-Street professes to be pro-Israel, and pro-peace, but its public pronouncements regularly attack the policies of the Israeli government, and back all pressure Obama directs at Israel.

On May 17, Blumenthal forwarded Hillary an article on the Israeli government’s decision to deny pro-Palestine activist Noam Chomsky access to the Territories. Blumenthal wrote that: “Barring him for his political opinions has created a needless PR disaster. The US should not be a passive onlooker…The US effort on his behalf to gain entry should be part of the story.” Hillary forwarded the memo to her staff with instructions to “pls print 3 copies.” Chomsky is anti-Israel and has been fierce in his opposition to Israel’s right to defend itself from terrorism, and had been banned from the country since 2010.

In an e-mail from May 31 entitled “Several observations on the Israeli raid,” Blumenthal blamed Netanyahu’s family “inferiority complex” for his decision to launch a raid on the “Gaza Flotilla,” a group of ships seeking to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza: “Bibi desperately seeks his father’s approbation and can never equal his dead brother.” Blumenthal then hinted that the raid was deliberately orchestrated to kill the peace process and humiliate Obama before his scheduled visit with the prime minister. Hillary forwarded the message to Jake Sullivan, her deputy chief of staff at the State Department, and she wrote: “FYI and I told you so.”

On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks published a collection of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails leaked to WikiLeaks. The DNC is the governing body of the United States’ Democratic Party. The leak caused the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, CEO Amy Dacey, CFO Brad Marshall, and Communications Director Luis Miranda. The leak revealed attempts to smear Bernie Sanders, a candidate in the Democratic Party presidential primaries, with information that might damage him. Wasserman Schultz called Jeff Weaver, manager of Bernie Sanders’ campaign, a “damn liar.” The Washington Post reported: “Many of the most damaging emails suggest the committee was actively trying to undermine Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.”

The DNC wanted to use Sanders’s Jewish heritage and lack of religious belief against him. In one of the email chains, Marshall told Dacey that someone should ask Sanders if he is an atheist: “Get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God [sic]. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.” The DNC announced Wasserman Schultz would not gavel open the Democratic Party’s convention. Hillary subsequently appointed Wasserman Schultz chair of Hillary’s presidential campaign’s “50 state program.”

There is nothing in Hillary Clinton’s history that would qualify her for the presidency, and much that should disqualify her. The most important job she ever held was as the Secretary of State, heading the U.S. Department of State, principally concerned with foreign affairs. Under her watch as Secretary of State, American foreign policy had one setback after another, separated by disasters. She orchestrated the U.S. intervention in Libya and Egypt, undermining governments that were no threat to American interests, which led to terrorist chaos in Libya and Islamic extremists taking over in Egypt.

Under Hillary’s watch as Secretary of State was the radical transformation of American foreign policy and the historic catastrophe — permitting Iranians to develop nuclear weapons while making it difficult for Israel to stop them. Obama’s years-long negotiations with Iran allowed time to multiply, disperse, and fortify Iran’s nuclear facilities. The Obama administration’s leakage of Israel’s secret agreement with Azerbaijan, allowing Israeli warplanes to refuel if attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, sabotaged any Israeli attempt to destroy Iranian facilities.

In the 2009 Iranian Green Movement, in which protesters demanded the removal of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from office, Hillary Clinton was intent on “engagement” with the world’s most dangerous regime and vilest state-sponsor of terrorism. She cut funding to organizations supporting Iranian human rights, then sat by as thousands of Iranians were imprisoned, tortured and executed. She repeatedly watered down sanctions against Iran, and it was during her tenure that negotiations began with the Ahmadinejad regime, culminating in the Iranian deal, which she supported, and still supports: Iran could develop nuclear weapons and the ayatollahs get $150 billion.

Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Iraq, Islamic State, Libya, Syria and Yemen are the dark forces in Israel’s neighborhood. They could have looked different today had Hillary not betrayed America’s democratic values with her “smart power.” Hillary, as well as Obama, sought to put distance diplomatically between America and Israel.

She berated Netanyahu publicly for announcing Jerusalem home building, compared Israel to an apartheid regime, correlated the status of women in Israel to that in Iran, demanded reckless concessions from Israel to promote “peace talks” while never making serious demands of the Palestinian Authority or ever holding it accountable, granted legitimacy to George Soros-sponsored J Street, made a false equivalency between terrorist attacks on Israel and Israel’s attempts to defend itself, questioned Israel’s commitment to its American alliance, rejected the legitimacy of all Jewish construction across the Green Line including Jerusalem neighborhoods, etc.

Netanyahu infuriated the Obama administration when he talked about the truth of the internationally supported Palestinian Arab demand that Israel must transfer control over Jerusalem and the Territories to the Palestinians Jew-free. From its first days in office, the Obama administration rejected the civil rights of Jews as Jews in these areas and seeks the complete negation of their rights through destruction, mass expulsion, and property seizure: ethnic cleansing. So if Hillary were elected president, her administration could be an Obama third term: the American people could be left unprotected from Islamic terrorists, and Israel could face unprecedented pressure to submit to Palestinian Arab terrorists.

The Republicans have become the pro-Israel party. Democrats talk about their commitment to Israel, but when Hillary and Obama were abusing Israel diplomatically, there was no pushback from congressional Democrats. Even the Jewish Democrats in Congress always stood with the administration. Whereas, Republicans have stood up for Israel unapologetically, and just passed the most pro-Israel platform in American history.

The blatant anti-Semitism displayed at the 2016 Democratic National Convention merits a mention: Booing any mention of Israel, chanting “Intifada”, burning the Israeli flag, etc. The Democrats do not even try to disguise their disdain for Jews any more. Nevertheless, a vast majority of American Jews could still vote for Hillary and other Democrats.
Hillary Clinton is campaigning on the basis that she is a friend of Israel, just as she did in the Senate, and Obama did twice for the presidency. As Secretary of State, she was the architect of the policy of the most anti-Israel president since the rebirth of Israel in 1948. It was a policy which reflected views she has held her entire life, with the exception of the nine-year period when she ran for and held the office of U.S. Senator from New York State. American voters should not let her get away with hiding her true self. Israel-focused Americans should vote for Republicans in Senate and congressional races, as well as for Donald Trump as president. Hillary Clinton has collapsed her election.

Categories: 2016 elections, Donald Trump and Israel, Hillary Clinton and Israel, Obama and Israel
Tags: Donald Trump and Israel, Hillary Clinton and Israel, Obama and Israel

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Trump Really Would Recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s Capital

September 26, 2016

Trump Really Would Recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s Capital, PJ Media, Roger L Simon, September 26, 2016

jerusalem-pic

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton met with Benjamin Netanyahu Sunday. Interestingly, Trump was with the Israeli prime for nearly ninety minutes, Clinton for less than an hour.

The Republican candidate obviously had more of substance to discuss with Netanyahu – the efficacy of security walls and their mutual distrust of the Iran nuclear deal being two obvious examples. For Hillary, the encounter was more of a quick check on her bucket list, and probably an uncomfortable one.

After his meeting, Trump’s people made clear that Donald had pledged that, if elected president, he would formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state.

This has been a bone of contention (to put it mildly) from, we could almost say, time immemorial, because the Jewish claim on the city dates from at least the construction of Solomon’s temple, estimated to be 832 BCE. (Actually, there’s lots of earlier evidence of Jewish presence in Jerusalem, including the extensive excavations of David’s City, but I’m keeping it simple here.) Islam, currently occupying Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, has its origins in the beginning of the 7th Century CE, over 1400 years after Solomon, and in Mecca and Medina (not Jerusalem). No one sane disputes this.

Several American presidential candidates – when running for office – have made pledges similar to Trump’s, then, upon election, basically reneged, usually by ignoring the situation or telling the Israelis to wait until the Palestinian question is resolved. That gave those presidents a fair amount of cover because it would take Solomon himself to tell us when that would be – and even in his case I’m not sure.

So it’s natural that Trump’s pledge would be met with some skepticism. On Twitter Sunday night, several Republican stalwarts attacked a tweet I had written in support of Trump on this matter, implying (or even stating) that I was promoting a lie. The candidate would never go forward with the recognition.

While I think these attacks were basically masked, last-ditch NeverTrumpism, this would be a significant decision on Trump’s part with great international ramifications and I owe my critics a bit longer response than I could give in 140-character tweets.

To begin with, Trump attended the meeting Sunday in the company of his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Kushner – a real estate investor himself and publisher of The Observer who has emerged as one of Trump’s key advisers – is an Orthodox Jew and therefore takes the Jerusalem issue quite seriously, far more than almost any politician or political professional would. This could only signal to Netanyahu – and should to all of us – that Trump was not taking the meeting, or anything he said in it, lightly.

Yes, he could have been using Kushner as an emblem of some sort, but I suspect Kushner himself would have been unhappy about that. So I further suspect the reverse was true here. This was a gesture meant to say to the Israelis – I’m with you in the deepest sense. (Clinton was accompanied in her meeting by Jake Sullivan, who has been frequently besmirched by the email scandal.)

More importantly, Trump, not being a lifetime politician, would be the first president, basically ever, well-positioned to follow through on the pledge. He has never participated in the seemingly endless rounds of Middle East negotiations. The ins-and-out of the increasingly dubious Oslo Accords were not his doing. He can come to all of this fresh, with, let’s hope, common sense.

Recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is just the kind of action I think Trump would enjoy taking because, after the initial brouhaha, everybody would realize that nothing really had changed. The facts on the ground would be the same, Israel would still be allowing Muslim worship at Al Aqsa, and the absurdity of Jerusalem not being recognized as the capital of Israel when it really is would be unmasked.

Most of all, it would be a sign that Western Civilization is not prepared to give up its dominant role in the future of humanity – something, at this moment, that is sorely needed.

Categories: 2016 elections, Donald Trump and Israel, Hillary Clinton and Israel, Jerusalem, Netanyahu, Obama and Israel
Tags: Donald Trump and Israel, Hillary Clinton and Israel, Jerusalem, Netanyahu, Obama and Israel

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The Real Middle East Story

September 25, 2016

The Real Middle East Story, The Amerian Interest, Walter Russell Mead, September 23, 2016

The reason that Bibi has been more successful than Obama is that Bibi understands how the world works better than Obama does. Bibi believes that in the harsh world of international politics, power wisely used matters more than good intentions eloquently phrased.

Bibi’s successes will not and cannot make Israel’s problems and challenges go away. And finding a workable solution to the Palestinian question remains something that Israel cannot ignore on both practical and moral grounds. But Israel is in a stronger global position today than it was when Bibi took office; nobody can say that with a straight face about the nation that President Obama leads. When and if American liberals understand the causes both of Bibi’s successes and of Obama’s setbacks, then perhaps a new and smarter era of American foreign policy debate can begin.

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Peter Baker notices something important in his dispatch this morning: at this year’s UNGA, the Israel/Palestine issue is no longer the center of attention. From The New York Times:

They took the stage, one after the other, two aging actors in a long-running drama that has begun to lose its audience. As the Israeli and Palestinian leaders recited their lines in the grand hall of the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, many in the orchestra seats recognized the script.

“Heinous crimes,” charged Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. “Historic catastrophe.”

“Fanaticism,” countered Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. “Inhumanity.”

Mr. Abbas and Mr. Netanyahu have been at this for so long that between them they have addressed the world body 19 times, every year cajoling, lecturing, warning and guilt-tripping the international community into seeing their side of the bloody struggle between their two peoples. Their speeches are filled with grievance and bristling with resentment, as they summon the ghosts of history from hundreds and even thousands of years ago to make their case.

While each year finds some new twist, often nuanced, sometimes incendiary, the argument has been running long enough that the world has begun to move on. Where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once dominated the annual meeting of the United Nations, this year it has become a side show as Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas compete for attention against seemingly more urgent crises like the civil war in Syria and the threat from the Islamic State.

Baker (and presumably many of his readers) don’t go on to the next, obvious question: What does this tell us about the relative success or failure of the leaders involved? The piece presents both Netanyahu and Abbas as irrelevant. They used to command the world stage, but now nobody is interested in their interminable quarrel.

What the piece doesn’t say is that this situation is exactly what Israel wants, and is a terrible defeat for the Palestinians. Abbas is the one whose strategy depends on keeping the Palestinian issue front and center in world politics; Bibi wants the issue to fade quietly away. What we saw at the UN this week is that however much Abbas and the Palestinians’ many sympathizers might protest, events are moving in Bibi’s direction.

There is perhaps only one thing harder for the American mind to process than the fact that President Obama has been a terrible foreign policy president, and that is that Bibi Netanyahu is an extraordinarily successful Israeli Prime Minister. In Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, Israel’s diplomacy is moving from strength to strength. Virtually every Arab and Middle Eastern leader thinks that Bibi is smarter and stronger than President Obama, and as American prestige across the Middle East has waned under Obama, Israel’s prestige — even among people who hate it — has grown. Bibi’s reset with Russia, unlike Obama’s, actually worked. His pivot to Asia has been more successful than Obama’s. He has had far more success building bridges to Sunni Muslims than President Obama, and both Russia and Iran take Bibi and his red lines much more seriously than they take Obama’s expostulations and pious hopes.

The reason that Bibi has been more successful than Obama is that Bibi understands how the world works better than Obama does. Bibi believes that in the harsh world of international politics, power wisely used matters more than good intentions eloquently phrased. Obama sought to build bridges to Sunni Muslims by making eloquent speeches in Cairo and Istanbul while ignoring the power political realities that Sunni states cared most about — like the rise of Iran and the Sunni cause in Syria. Bibi read the Sunnis more clearly than Obama did; the value of Israeli power to a Sunni world worried about Iran has led to something close to a revolution in Israel’s regional position. Again, Obama thought that reaching out to the Muslim Brotherhood (including its Palestinian affiliate, Hamas) would help American diplomacy and Middle Eastern democracy. Bibi understood that Sunni states like Egypt and its Saudi allies wanted Hamas crushed. Thus, as Obama tried to end the Gaza war on terms acceptable to Hamas and its allies, Bibi enjoyed the backing of both Egypt and Saudi Arabia in a successful effort to block Obama’s efforts. Israel’s neighbors may not like Bibi, but they believe they can count on him. They may think Obama has some beautiful ideas that he cares deeply about, but they think he’s erratic, unreliable, and doesn’t understand either them or their concerns.

Obama is an aspiring realist who wanted to work with undemocratic leaders on practical agreements. But Obama, despite the immense power of the country he leads, has been unable to gain the necessary respect from leaders like Putin and Xi that would permit the pragmatic relationships he wanted to build. Bibi is a practicing realist who has succeeded where Obama failed. Bibi has a practical relationship with Putin; they work together where their interests permit and where their interests clash, Putin respects Bibi’s red lines. Obama’s pivot to Asia brought the US closer to India and Japan, but has opened a deep and dangerous divide with China. Under Bibi’s leadership, Israel has stronger, deeper relationships with India, China and Japan than at any time in the past, and Asia may well replace Europe as Israel’s primary trade and investment partners as these relationships develop.

The marginalization of Abbas at the UN doesn’t just reflect the world’s preoccupation with bigger crises in the neighborhood. It reflects a global perception that a) the Sunni Arab states overall are less powerful than they used to be and that b) partly as a result of their deteriorating situation, the Sunni Arab states care less about the Palestinian issue than they used to. This is why African countries that used to shun Israel as a result of Arab pressure are now happy to engage with Israel on a variety of economic and defense issues. India used to avoid Israel in part out of fear that its own Kashmir problem would be ‘Palestinianized’ into a major problem with its Arab neighbors and the third world. Even Japan and China were cautious about embracing Israel too publicly given the power of the Arab world and its importance both in the world of energy markets and in the nonaligned movement. No longer.

Inevitably, all these developments undercut the salience of the Palestinian issue for world politics and even for Arab politics and they strengthen Israel’s position in the region and beyond. Obama has never really grasped this; Netanyahu has based his strategy on it. Ironically, much of the decline in Arab power is due to developments in the United States. Fracking has changed OPEC’s dynamics, and Obama’s tilt toward Iran has accelerated the crisis of Sunni Arab power. Netanyahu understands the impact of Obama’s country and Obama’s policy on the Middle East better than Obama does. Bibi, like a number of other leaders around the world, has been able to make significant international gains by exploiting the gaps in President Obama’s understanding of the world and in analyzing ways to profit from the unintended consequences and side effects of Obama policies that didn’t work out as Obama hoped.

Bibi’s successes will not and cannot make Israel’s problems and challenges go away. And finding a workable solution to the Palestinian question remains something that Israel cannot ignore on both practical and moral grounds. But Israel is in a stronger global position today than it was when Bibi took office; nobody can say that with a straight face about the nation that President Obama leads. When and if American liberals understand the causes both of Bibi’s successes and of Obama’s setbacks, then perhaps a new and smarter era of American foreign policy debate can begin.

Categories: Abbas, Diplomacy, Foreign leaders, Foreign policy, Israel, Israel and Middle East, Netanyahu - realist, Netanyahu and Middle East, Obama - Middle East, Obama and Israel, Obama and Palestinians, Obama and The World, Palestinian Authority
Tags: Abbas, Diplomacy, Foreign leaders, Foreign Policy, Israel, Israel and Middle East, Netanyahu - realist, Netanyahu and Middle East, Obama and Israel, Obama and Palestinians, Obama and The World, Palestinian Authority

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Between obvious and oblivious

September 25, 2016

Between obvious and oblivious, Israel Hayom, Smadar Bat Adam, September 25, 2016

Imagine if U.S. President Barack Obama, in his last speech before the U.N. General Assembly last week, would have opened by saying: “Eight years ago, when I was sworn in to office, I didn’t know much about the conflict in the Middle East or its origins. With the naivete of a novice, but with a great deal of desire to do good things for the world, I saw conflicts across the globe in black and white. I was sure that anywhere occupation existed, the job of the most powerful Western democracy was to draw the push the occupier back and liberate the occupied.”

Imagine that he would have finished by declaring: “Ladies and gentlemen, I was wrong. I didn’t believe in the existence of an occupied people who don’t yearn for peace. I couldn’t accept that there were people for whom destroying the occupier was more important than independence. After all, it goes against logic that the occupier isn’t the aggressor, but is the one defending himself.”

Now imagine that he would have added, “Today, when the entire world is under the threat of Islamist jihad, I understand. Israel is not the problem. Israel is the symptom. And the settlements are not the obstacle to peace; rather the obstacle is the refusal of the Palestinians, particularly of their leadership, to recognize the fact that Israel is the land and national home of the Jewish people. And the terror which Israel suffers is the same terror determined to kill anyone who doesn’t share its beliefs, which is why we should all stand by the State of Israel.”

Picture Obama expressing, even in milder terms, what many Europeans are already saying openly: “Obviously most Muslims are not involved in terrorism, but all terrorists are Muslim.” And think what a commotion that would have caused at the United Nations; and how those words could have disarmed U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who always has an accusatory finger ready to point at Israel.

In reality, however, what we heard were the familiar refrains: “Surely, Israelis and Palestinians would be better off if Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel, but Israel recognizes that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land.”

There is something of a start here. How joyous, indeed. Regardless, let’s just say it would be nice if the Palestinians would “reject incitement” — just as long as no one, heaven forbid, accuses them of doing the inciting. As for the Israelis, their guilt is clear. They are the occupier. Those who didn’t get it from the speech got it from Obama’s comments to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, albeit in a softened tone, during their much publicized meeting: “The U.S. is concerned about the settlements.”

It’s possible that Obama did not have the time (or the inclination) to learn what most people in the American intelligence community already know, that there is a clear link between Palestinian terrorism and global Islamic terrorism. And it’s quite possible, for various reasons, that this is the legacy he wishes to leave behind. It is also important, of course, to remember that his administration did give Israel a military aid package unprecedented in scope. He has emphasized the unbreakable bond between the countries and the deep concern for the wellbeing of Israel.

Meanwhile, perhaps we should stop focusing on the outgoing president’s swan song and instead help his successor understand this administration’s fundamental error: rejecting the premise that terrorism against Israel is part of fundamentalist Islam’s war of civilizations against the West. Let us hope that in a year’s time this will all be obvious, and we won’t have to imagine anymore. As Herzl would say: If you will it …

Categories: Israel - Jewish state, Israeli security, Israeli settlements, Obama and Israel, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian incitement, Palestinian terrorists, Palestinians and Jews
Tags: Israel - Jewish state, Israeli security. Israeli settlements, Obama and Israel, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian incitement, Palestinian terrorists, Palestinians and Jews

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Obama’s Parting Shot at Israel

September 22, 2016

Obama’s Parting Shot at Israel, Front Page Magazine, Ari Lieberman, September 22, 2016

unobama

Obama’s last address before the UN General Assembly was typically and predictably condescending, hypocritical, disingenuous and vainglorious. He used the opportunity to perform some electioneering and take a swipe at Donald Trump. “Today, a nation ringed by walls would only imprison itself,” he said in a not too subtle reference to Trump’s promised plans to secure the southern border with the construction of a wall and restrict immigration from high-risk countries.

France, a NATO ally that has partnered with the U.S. to combat the Taliban in Afghanistan and Islamic extremism in Mali, was also derided. Though he did not mention France by name, he criticized “liberal societies” for their “opposition to women who choose to cover themselves.” This of course was a veiled reference French laws banning Burkas and Burkinis, items of Islamic clothing that are oppressive to and denigrate women.

Of course, Obama made no mention of the Paris and Nice massacres. Nor did he note that as a result of Muslim violence, 70 percent of Europe’s Jews won’t be attending synagogue during the Jewish High-Holy Days. Obama did of course heap praise on Indonesia, a Muslim nation that discriminates against minorities and the LGBT community, still maintains so-called “blasphemy” laws, and imposes draconian Sharia law in some districts. This year, a 60-year old Christian-Indonesian woman was given 28 lashes for selling alcohol. This is the model nation that the president touts before the world community.

The vainglorious president also took the opportunity to tout his disastrous Iran deal, noting that the United States “resolved the Iranian nuclear issue through diplomacy.” Obama, however, failed to note that he inked the worst deal in U.S. diplomatic history and likely the worst deal since the 1938 Munich Accord. He also omitted the fact that the infusion of $150 billion into Iran’s anemic economy will enable the mullahs to continue to sow misery throughout the region.

Of course, no Obama speech would be complete without the perfunctory assault on Israel. What better place to attack the Jewish state than before a body that is today’s greatest purveyor of anti-Semitism, where anti-Israel invective flows like water and where the Jewish state is incessantly vilified?

Recognizing of course that referring to Jews as “apes and pigs” is a national Palestinian pastime, Obama reminded the Palestinians to play nicely before directing his invective against Israel.

“Surely, Israelis and Palestinians will be better off if Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel, but Israel recognizes that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land,” he said.

There are two egregious problems with Obama’s statement. First, it is insufficient for the Palestinian Authority to merely “recognize the legitimacy of Israel.”

Israel has made clear that the PA must recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The PA has rejected this demand outright because they envision a future Palestinian state, exclusively for Palestinians, in Judea/Samaria and an entity that calls itself “Israel” composed of Jews as well as Palestinian Muslims, thereby negating the Jewish character of the state.

That represents the crux of the problem. Palestinian Muslims will never recognize the indigenousness of Jews in their ancestral land. Any peace agreement without such recognition is inherently flawed and sets the stage for more bloody conflict. In terms of strategy, there is absolutely no difference between the PA and Hamas. Both aspire to the ultimate goal of establishing a Muslim Arab state from the River to the Sea. The only difference is tactics. The PA has adopted a more practical and deceitful approach toward achieving their ultimate objective (though every once in a while they slip and reveal their true colors) while Hamas is frighteningly and brutishly honest.

The second problem is that Judea and Samaria is neither “occupied” nor is it “Palestinian land.” It is a territory that is the subject of a bonafide dispute between two parties with competing claims.

From a legal perspective, Israel’s claim has more merit. In 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Israel/Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. General Assembly resolutions have no binding legal authority. The Jews accepted partition, but the Arabs rejected it. Had they accepted it, the matter would have been settled and an agreement would have validated the GA resolution and made it legally binding under international law.

During the War of 1948 that followed, Jordan seized Judea and Samaria as well as the eastern portion of Jerusalem and annexed these territories. Only Pakistan fully recognized Jordan’s illegal annexation, while England’s recognition was limited to Judea and Samaria. The territory was occupied by Jordan for 19 years and during those 19 years, Jewish institutions were reduced to rubble while Jewish headstones in the Mount of Olives cemetery were used to build latrines for the Jordanian army.

In June 1967, Jordan’s monarch, fed on a steady diet of fantasy-like falsehoods of Israel’s impending demise, attacked Israel with Hawker Hunter jets and artillery. Israel responded to the provocation and liberated Jerusalem as well as Judea and Samaria in a matter of days.

The UN considers war and conquests therefrom to be illegal, but Article 52 of the UN Charter provides an exception to the illegality of war in cases involving self-defense. The Six-Day War was as clear as they come in terms of self-defense. Israel acquired these lands through defensive conquest. Never in the history of mankind has a nation been compelled to return territories — acquired in the course of a defensive war — to an aggressor entity.

Following the war and after many months of haggling, the UN Security Council, which has the power to establish international law, passed Resolution 242. The resolution called upon Israel to withdraw from “territories occupied in the recent conflict.” Notably, the word “all” was deliberately omitted thus giving implicit recognition to Israeli territorial conquests. One can reasonably argue that Israel has fully complied with Resolution 242 by virtue of its withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza, some 40 percent of Judea and Samaria and Quneitra on the Golan Heights, and that no further territorial withdrawals are required.

I would be remiss if I didn’t note that two Jewish commonwealths existed on territories now claimed as “occupied” hundreds of years before Mohammedan colonizers set foot on the land. It would be more precise to refer to the territories as “re-occupied,” in deference to the indigenous inhabitants of the land.

Obama likely knows all this but couldn’t resist taking a parting shot at Israel. That he would choose to do it in a forum that is infamous for its anti-Semitic vitriol speaks volumes of the man.

Categories: Abbas, Islamist terror attacks, Israel - Jewish state, Israeli settlements, Obama and Israel, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian terrorists, Two state solution, United Nations
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Netanyahu: Palestinians’ ‘No Jews’ Demand is ‘Ethnic Cleansing for Peace’

September 9, 2016

Netanyahu: Palestinians’ ‘No Jews’ Demand is ‘Ethnic Cleansing for Peace’, PJ Media, Bridget Johnson, September 9, 2016

netanyahuandarabs

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu poses for a photograph with pupils on the first day of school in the Israeli Arab town of Tamra on Sept. 1, 2016. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at calls for Israelis to accept an “ethnic cleansing for peace” deal with the Palestinians, who have long demanded any settlement expel Jews from Palestinian territories.

“I’m sure many of you have heard the claim that Jewish communities in Judea Samaria, the West Bank, are an obstacle to peace,” Netanyahu said in a video. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Thursday that the United States is “concerned that things might be moving in the opposite direction given, on the one hand, and we’ve expressed our concern about this, ongoing Israeli settlement activity, but equally, we’ve been troubled by the fact that — or by the incitement to violence.”

“I’ve always been perplexed by this notion” of settlements being the problem, Netanyahu said. “Because no one would seriously claim that the nearly two million Arabs living inside Israel – that they’re an obstacle to peace. That’s because they aren’t. On the contrary.”

“Israel’s diversity shows its openness and readiness for peace. Yet the Palestinian leadership actually demands a Palestinian state with one pre-condition: No Jews. There’s a phrase for that: It’s called ethnic cleansing. And this demand is outrageous.”

The prime minister added that “it’s even more outrageous that the world doesn’t find this outrageous.”

“Some otherwise enlightened countries even promote this outrage. Ask yourself this: Would you accept ethnic cleansing in your state? A territory without Jews, without Hispanics, without blacks Since when is bigotry a foundation for peace?” he said. “At this moment, Jewish schoolchildren in Judea Samaria are playing in sandboxes with their friends. Does their presence make peace impossible? I don’t think so.”

“I think what makes peace impossible is intolerance of others. Societies that respect all people are the ones that pursue peace. Societies that demand ethnic cleansing don’t pursue peace.”

Netanyahu said he envisions “a Middle East where young Arabs and young Jews learn together, work together, live together side by side in peace.”

Categories: Ethnic cleansing, Israel, Israel settlements, Netanyahu, Obama and Israel, Obama and Palestinians, Palestinian Authority, Palestinians and Jews, Two state solution
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Column One: Mahmoud Abbas and other Soviet ghosts

September 9, 2016

Column One: Mahmoud Abbas and other Soviet ghosts, Jerusalem Post, Caroline B. Glick, September 8, 2016

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In 1982 Abbas received a doctorate from the Patrice Lumumba University – or KGB U – in Moscow. According to KGB defectors, 90 percent of the university’s faculty and staff received their paychecks from the KGB. Its purpose was to train KGB agents from the developing world, including terrorists. Abbas’s fellow alumni included master terrorist Carlos the Jackal and future Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Rather than devote his energies to murdering Israelis, along the lines of the subversive program Ceausescu presented to Arafat, Abbas’s main focus was the subversion of the European and the Israeli Left.

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Channel 1’s report Wednesday that in 1983, current Palestinian Authority Chairman and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas served as a KGB agent is hardly the story of the year, but it does remind us of certain half-forgotten facts about the Cold War that are becoming ever more relevant today.

The PLO’s close and servile relationship with the KGB was first exposed in a systematic way in 1987, with the publication of Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, the exposé of Soviet and Romanian Cold War operations written by former Romanian intelligence chief Lt.-Gen. Ion Pacepa. Pacepa, who defected to the US in 1978 after serving as the head of the DIE – Romania’s KGB – was the highest ranking intelligence officer from the Soviet bloc to ever defect.

In his book, Pacepa revealed that “the PLO was dreamt up by the KGB.”

Pacepa explained how Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, at the direction of Moscow, convinced Yasser Arafat to employ political warfare, centered on phony protestations that he had abandoned terrorism, to weaken the West’s resolve to defend itself and to cause Israel to doubt its own legitimacy.

Wednesday’s Channel 1 report on Abbas was based on new revelations from the Mitrokhin Archive. Vasili Mitrokhin was a senior archivist in the KGB who surreptitiously copied KGB documents for many years and hid his copies in his home. In 1991 Mitrokhin defected to Britain and took his archive of 25,000 copies of documents with him.

In 2004, the second volume of his edited archive was published. The volume, titled, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, focused on the KGB’s efforts to use the Third World as a strategic weapon in its battle against the West. The volume devotes two chapters to the KGB’s campaign against Israel.

Mitrokhin revealed that for the KGB, Israel was a target of subversion second only in importance to the US. The KGB fielded multiple political agents on the Israeli Left and multiple Palestinian agents in the PLO’s terrorist nexus.

According to the Channel 1 report, Abbas began his official service for the KGB in 1983.

In truth his KGB ties were already longstanding by 1983.

In 1982 Abbas received a doctorate from the Patrice Lumumba University – or KGB U – in Moscow. According to KGB defectors, 90 percent of the university’s faculty and staff received their paychecks from the KGB. Its purpose was to train KGB agents from the developing world, including terrorists. Abbas’s fellow alumni included master terrorist Carlos the Jackal and future Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Abbas received a doctorate for a thesis denying the Holocaust. That is, he used the cover of academia to vilify the Jewish state and deny Jewish history and suffering – a practice that has been his stock in trade in trade ever since.

Rather than devote his energies to murdering Israelis, along the lines of the subversive program Ceausescu presented to Arafat, Abbas’s main focus was the subversion of the European and the Israeli Left.

Until the mid-1970s, Arab terrorists were unable to make inroads in Israel because there were no significant political forces in Israeli society that questioned the justice and morality of the state or saw the PLO as anything other than a terrorist organization bent on the annihilation of Israel and the massacre of its citizens.

The situation changed with the rise of the Likud and the Right to power in 1977. As the Likud supplanted Labor as the largest party in Israel, the far Left became more susceptible to subversion.

Abbas focused his efforts on developing ties to the Israeli far Left. His efforts culminated in the 1993 Oslo peace deal which Abbas negotiated with Israeli leftist activists affiliated with then-foreign minister Shimon Peres through his deputy Yossi Beilin.

The PLO’s success in convincing the Rabin- Peres government that it had abandoned its goal of annihilating Israel came two years after the demise of the Soviet Union. In other words, the KGB’s campaign of anti-Western subversion outlived the Soviet Union.

Indeed it carries on with ever greater force and consequence. Today, the subversive campaigns that first bore fruits in the Vietnam War have brought about a situation where increasingly, Western elites cannot accept the basic morality of their societies.

Consider the case of NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Last month Kaepernick caused a public outcry when he refused to stand up for the US national anthem at the beginning of a football game. Kaepernick defended himself by arguing that the US is immoral. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” he said.

Rather than defend the US against his assault and insist that its symbols required respect, President Barack Obama said only that Kaepernick had a right to his opinion.

Then there is Germany. This week Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU party came in third place in regional elections on Merkel’s home turf behind the far-right, anti-immigration AfD party.

Merkel’s political collapse owes entirely to her refusal to budge on her open border policies.

That policy enabled more than a million, predominantly Muslim, immigrants to stream into Germany last year. An additional 300,000 are expected this year.

Merkel’s associates claim that she operates under the conviction that Germany’s Nazi past precludes any attempt to protect German society from Muslim immigrants. For Merkel, Germany is inherently immoral and therefore has no right to defend its identity or culture.

The sense among Western elites that Western culture and history as a whole are morally impaired has dampened their concern about their future. This diminished commitment to securing their societies into the future is most apparent in the West’s fertility rates, which have been below replacement rate for more than a decade. Last year for the first time, deaths in Europe outnumbered births.

The situation is similarly fraught on the other side of the former Iron Curtain. Russian society was economically and culturally broken by the Soviet defeat in the Cold War and by its post- Cold War leadership’s inability to present a life-affirming vision for a new Russia.

In some ways, post-Cold War Russia is the mirror image of the subverted West. While Western leftists insist on adopting the socialist economics of swelled welfare states, which given demographic realities are unsustainable in the long-term, to expiate their guilt for capitalism and colonialism, Russia’s leaders have largely abandoned their people to their fate.

Russia spends a bit more than a third of what OECD countries spend on public health. And the low investment shows.

According to the World Health Organization, a third of all deaths in Russia in 2012 were caused by alcohol. Russian male life expectancy is 64 – lower than it was a hundred years ago.

Drug addiction rates are soaring, as are HIV infection rates.

Like the Europeans, Russians have lost interest in the future, which increasingly will not include a Russia. With fertility rates below replacement levels, the UN estimates that by 2060, Russia’s working age population will have shrunk by 15 percent.

Due to the scarcity of workers, like Europe, Russia is experiencing massive, predominantly Muslim immigration. Russian immigration levels are second only to the US. In response, xenophobia is a large and growing social force in Russia.

According to David Satter, author of the recently released, The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin, Russia’s gloomy prospects, reinforced by the long-term outlook for reduced oil and gas prices, have brought about a situation where President Vladimir Putin and his associates do not think about the long-term future of their country. Their international considerations, specifically, are based on their assessments of immediate potential payoffs.

Since the Russian leadership doesn’t suffer from the civilizational neurosis the Soviets inflicted on the West, like the Soviet leaders before him, Putin’s short-term game empowers him to adopt policies with potentially high short-term payoffs regardless of the long-term dangers they create. Russia’s policies in Syria and toward Iran are case in point.

On the other side of the divide in Europe, the elites devote their remaining days in power to absolving themselves of imperialist and capitalist guilt. To this end, they have adopted the causes of those they falsely believe were most victimized by their predecessors.

The same is true, albeit to a lesser degree, in the US.

This then brings us back to KGB agent Abbas and his target, Israel.

Against great odds, and at a steep price, over the past 10 years Israeli society stopped listening to the voices on the Left parroting Abbas’s lies that Israel was born in sin, as a Western colonialist implant. Given the stakes, most Israelis today also have come to realize that our national self-confidence is a vital component of our long-term survival.

This understanding, along with a clear-eyed assessment of what drives our interlocutors in Moscow, Paris, New York and Brussels, must inform our foreign policy in the coming years.

When faced with foreign governments whose societies lack long-term prospects, Israel needs to put aside its yearning for long-term peace and stability and focus on short-term cooperative ties. It must also recognize that our partners’ interests are subject to change at a moment’s notice.

The revelation of Abbas’s KGB service requires us to recognize that the Soviets’ long game of subversion continues on today. Whether or not Western societies persevere and reject the Soviets’ central contention that they are unworthy of survival is not for Israel to decide. So, too, Israel will not convince the Russians to embrace a future based on freedom and the sanctity of life.

All we can do is wish them the best and play the short-term game with them – while keeping our long-term interests front and center in our minds.

Categories: Abbas, Israel, Israel and Russia, KGB, Leftists, Obama and Israel, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian incitement, Palestinian terrorists
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Muslim Terrorists and Jewish Anti-Semites Against Trump

September 2, 2016

Muslim Terrorists and Jewish Anti-Semites Against Trump, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, September 2, 2016

donald-trump-wikimedia-commons_xmo4y6

“I was often the ‘designated yeller.’”

That’s how Hillary Clinton described her relationship with the Israeli prime minister. Yelling and cursing was her particular specialty.

One marathon Hillary yelling session allegedly lasted 45 minutes. Afterward the Israeli ambassador said that relations between the United States and Israel had reached their lowest point.

Her favorite name for Netanyahu was, “F____ Bibi.”

But it wasn’t just about her hatred of any particular Israeli leader. The same year that Hillary was yelling herself hoarse at a man who had fought terrorists on the battlefield, she addressed the American Task Force on Palestine, a leading terror lobby, and blasted Israel and praised Islamic terrorists.

Hillary told the terror lobby, “I may have been the first person ever associated with an American administration to call for a Palestinian state.” She praised Mahmoud Abbas, the PA terror dictator who had boasted, “There is no difference between our policies and those of Hamas.”

She celebrated Naomi Shihab Nye who had written of the Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli cities, “Oppression makes people do desperate things.” Echoing her, Hillary denounced the “indignity of occupation”. A few years later she accused Israelis of a lack of “empathy” in understanding “the pain of an oppressed people.”

Perhaps they were too busy mourning their dead to emphasize with the terrorists who were killing them.

But fighting for her political life, Hillary and Huma dug through her closet and threw on a blue and white pantsuit. Her campaign placed an editorial in the Forward headlined, “How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Probably by yelling “F___ Bibi” at him for another 45 minutes.

When Hillary Clinton promised to reaffirm her “Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu” it was in the pages of The Forward. And, striving to sell a rotten radical to skeptical Jews, the left-wing paper has decided to run a piece claiming that “Trump Would Be Israel’s Worst Nightmare”. As if anyone in Israel goes to bed dreaming of eight years of Hillary.

The Forward shares Hillary’s view of Netanyahu. And it violently loathes Israel.

Its quick costume change from denouncing anything and everything about the Jewish State to a sudden bout of concern for Israel is as unconvincing as Hillary Clinton’s southern accent.

Jay Michaelson, the author of the editorial warning us how bad Trump would be for Israel, followed that up with another piece accusing Israel of being an apartheid state. During Passover, Michaelson’s seething hatred for the Jewish State had pushed him to declare, “I’m Seeking Freedom From the Organized Jewish Community This Passover.”

Should American Jews take their cues on how dangerous Trump would be for Israel from a guy who hates Israel? Who hates Israel so much that he can’t even stand the Jewish community?

The Forward, like Hillary, hates Israel. Its pages are dedicated to rationalizing, justifying and defending the Muslim hatred of Israel and Jews. There’s Lisa Goldman explaining that the Muslim anti-Semitism displayed at the Rio Olympics was really a “Jewish persecution complex” that lacked “nuance.” It’s not an outlier. The Forward’s view of Israel is as hostile and negative as any white supremacist website.

Or Hillary Clinton’s inbox where the likes of Max Blumenthal regularly made appearances.

Do the Forward or Hillary Clinton actually care about Israel? All they’re trying to do is keep the American Jews who don’t believe that Israel is an apartheid state or that Muslim anti-Semitism is the fault of the Jews on the Democratic reservation by scaring them with bedtime stories about Trump.

Michaelson warns us that Trump would destabilize the Middle East and endanger Israel. It’s hard to imagine how he could do so more than Hillary’s Arab Spring which turned Egypt over to the Muslim Brotherhood, sowed terrorist dragon’s teeth across the region, including an ISIS affiliate in the Sinai.

Trump would destroy American credibility, he tells us. What credibility? Nobody thinks we have any credibility now. Not on Syria, Iran, Libya, China, Russia or anything else. And much of that took place under Hillary Clinton.

Then we are told that Trump is an “extremist” because “moderate Saudi businessmen” don’t like him.

Whom should American Jews better take their guidance from than “moderate Saudi businessmen”? Perhaps Jay Michaelson, Hillary Clinton and the Forward. It’s hard to tell who in that gruesome bunch hates Israel more.

The “moderate” Saudi businessman whom Michaelson quotes is Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Alaweed had his post 9/11 donation thrown back in his face after blaming America for the attack. And Moussaoui, the 20^th hijacker, claimed that he was an Al Qaeda supporter.

He had also donated $27 million to terrorism against Israel at a telethon whose host declared on television, “Do not have any mercy, neither compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. Allah made them yours. Why don’t you enslave their women? Why don’t you wage jihad? Why don’t you pillage them?”

The Forward and Jay Michaelson would like American Jews to heed this warning about Trump’s extremism from a “moderate Saudi” who donated to the mass murder and rape of Jews.

Also, Jay Michaelson and the Forward warn American Jews not to vote for Trump because he “famously promised to “bomb the s___ out of ISIS.” This, according to Jay, ”would entail the murder of thousands of innocent people.” Some of whom might even be “moderate Saudi businessmen.”

Finally, we are warned that under Trump, “Egypt and Syria will soon resemble Hamas and Hezbollah: extremist, Islamist and violent.” This was formerly known as Obama and Hillary’s Arab Spring.

Michaelson contends that Republicans are voting from “that part of the brain that sends out constant ‘fight or flight’ messages based on threats and fear.” That’s an odd lack of self-awareness from a man who just desperately tried to hammer together some “fight or flight” messages on Trump.

But attacking Trump is easier than defending Hillary. And so we get this pathetic showing of Muslim terrorist financiers and Jewish anti-Semites against Trump. It’s as meaningful as Hillary’s pro-Israel pandering.

The real Hillary, the one caught with an inbox full of attacks on Israel, including approval for the bigotry of Max Blumenthal whose work was cited by the Kansas City Jewish Community Center gunman, is quite a different creature from the public Hillary who suddenly loves Israel.

The real Hillary, the one who kissed Arafat’s wife and listened placidly to her rant about Israeli poison gas, has a long anti-Israel history. Her time as Secretary of State has already given us a preview of her policies. She will continue demanding apartheid segregation for Jews living in ’67 Israel and she will go on pushing for more concessions to Islamic terrorists. She will back the Iran deal that she championed.

Hillary will go on financing Iran’s wave of Islamic terrorism while ignoring its nuclear violations.

But there is nothing extraordinary about any of this. Hillary is not a radical in a party of moderates. The Democratic Party has drifted so far into the fever swamps of the radical left that opposition to Israel is mainstream. The only reason that Hillary reserves her fulminations for phone calls and private emails is that even though her inner circle of advisers is vocally anti-Israel, some in her outer circle of donors are pro-Israel. And she still needs their support. At least while the election is still going on.

Israel has ceased to be a bipartisan issue. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton reversed JFK and LBJ’s pro-Israel policies. This rejection has been cloaked in euphemisms about “two states for two people”, but that really means championing the creation of Islamic terror states inside Israel.

This policy, which has until recently been bipartisan, represents the greatest threat to Israel.

Donald Trump is the first Republican presidential nominee to firmly break with it. Unlike Hillary, Trump hasn’t kissed Arafat’s wife or spent an hour on the phone yelling at the Prime Minister of Israel. Instead he has said that Jews should be able to keep on living and building houses in ’67 Israel.

Jews living as a free people in their own land is the essence of Zionism. And it’s a rejection of the hateful ravings of Hillary Clinton, the Forward and the “moderate” Saudi businessmen of Islamic terror.

Categories: 2016 elections, Democrat Party, Donald Trump and Israel, Hillary Clinton and Israel, Hillary Clinton and Palestinians, Leftist perspectives, Middle East, Obama and Israel, Obama and Palestinians
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White House Echo Chamber Architect to Keynote Pro-Iran Lobby Conference

August 25, 2016

White House Echo Chamber Architect to Keynote Pro-Iran Lobby Conference, Washington Free Beacon, Adam Kredo, August 25, 2016

Ben Rhodes (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)

The Sept. 25 event also is being co-sponsored by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic group that has been criticized for funding anti-Israel activities and organizations that support boycotts of the Jewish state. The fund bankrolls some of the leading backers of the global BDS movement against Israel, which has raised concerns among some that the administration is breaking its promises to oppose this movement.

The NIAC event is being viewed as another sign that the White House is seeking to boost these organizations in return for their efforts to push the nuclear deal and support the pro-Iran “echo chamber.”

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The senior White House official who bragged about creating a pro-Iran “echo chamber” to mislead Americans about last summer’s nuclear agreement is scheduled to keynote a conference sponsored by an organization that has long been accused of acting as a pro-Tehran lobbying front.

Ben Rhodes, a top national security adviser to President Obama, is slated to be the keynote speaker at an upcoming gathering hosted by the National Iranian American Council, or NIAC, which played a key role in bolstering the nuclear agreement and has long operated under suspicion that it acts as Tehran’s lobbying shop.

NIAC

Rhodes has been engulfed in a growing scandal following the revelation that he enlisted a roster of journalists and experts to spin the public in favor of the deal.

Outside organizations such as NIAC and the Ploughshares Fund, which is co-sponsoring the upcoming conference, were cited as key parts of the White House’s effort to mislead the public about the deal.

The Sept. 25 event also is being co-sponsored by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic group that has been criticized for funding anti-Israel activities and organizations that support boycotts of the Jewish state. The fund bankrolls some of the leading backers of the global BDS movement against Israel, which has raised concerns among some that the administration is breaking its promises to oppose this movement.

The NIAC event is being viewed as another sign that the White House is seeking to boost these organizations in return for their efforts to push the nuclear deal and support the pro-Iran “echo chamber.”

“Pro-Iran lobbies like NIAC were helpful to Ben Rhodes when he created his echo chamber to sell the Iran nuclear deal and the Iran money-for-hostages deal,” said one senior foreign policy consultant who has worked with Congress on the Iran deal. “It’s only fair that Rhodes would return the favor by keynoting NIAC’s conference. It’s not clear what he’ll talk about more: Iran developing its nuclear program, Iran expanding across the region, or Iran seizing more American hostages including those with close links to NIAC itself.”

The NIAC conference also will be attended by Rep. Jared Huffman (D., Calif.), an Iran deal backer, according to an invitation for the event circulated by NIAC.

NIAC makes note of Rhodes’ efforts to deepen diplomacy with the Islamic Republic in its invitation.

The event’s top billed sponsors include Ploughshares and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Ploughshares, a longtime funder of pro-Iran organizations and media outlets, has found itself on defense in recent months following disclosure of its role in Rhodes’ “echo chamber.”

Ploughshares funded writers and organizations in order to create a network of Iran deal “validators” who could influence public opinion at the White House’s behest.

Most recently, the Washington Free Beacon disclosed that a Washington Post contributor who touted the administration’s $400 million payment to Iran had been funded by Ploughshares. Neither the Post nor the writer disclosed this fact.

Ploughshares also moved money to National Public Radio to influence its coverage of the Iran deal.

Categories: BDS, Ben Rhodes, Iran scam, Israel, National Iranian American Council, Obama and Iran, Obama and Israel
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The hard truth – it don’t take a genius

August 19, 2016

The hard truth – it don’t take a genius, Israel National News, Meir Jolovitz, August 19, 2016

The traditional supporters of the Democratic Party, must confront, nay, stop the Obama/Clinton machine from fully deserting the only democracy in the Middle East or be judged by future generations as those who surrendered to willful negligence at best, and to fascist totalitarianism from the left at worst. The path to peace will not come from the euphemisms that the Clinton camp uses to shroud its platform. And it will not be realized by vilifying Israel and glorifying the assault against it. By every measure, the Democrats have failed, miserably, in an arena that will soon be threatened with an Iranian nuclear capability – while Hillary Clinton boasts of being a significant architect of that endeavor.

It is therefore imperative that Donald Trump use his platform to speak the truth; enough to convince a significant enough segment of the voting population – those few percentage points that so often determine an election – that the Obama/Clinton train is fast approaching an unavoidable precipice.

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That age-old maxim that posits that one can tell much about someone by their choice of friends is invariably true, and yet, when applied to the political arena, it is even less telling than one’s choice of advisors. Witness the case of Hillary Clinton, a political chameleon who, despite every effort to be all things to all people, can be readily and transparently identified by those under whose cloak she hides: her advisors.

Political advisors, chosen carefully by aspiring presidential candidates, are often the window by which one can view the policies yet to follow. The very choice of these advisors allows one to understand that “it don’t take a genius” to know what’s coming next. President Obama, influenced by his Middle East mentor (and notorious PLO spokesman) Rashid Khalidi, subsequently filled his dance card with Valery Jarrett, Samantha Power, John Kerry, Ben Rhodes, and yes, Hillary Clinton. And today, we have a deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran that even its architects now shamelessly admit was passed through Congress, with a supportive blessing of the media, as a result of duplicitous power brokering.

No, it don’t take a genius.

Hard-pressed to list her own accomplishments, has chosen her own advisors as part of her inner circle. It begins and ends with Sidney Blumenthal. And, silently in the shadows, his son Max.

Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton friend and advisor for many years and her confidant formulating her failed Libya policy – even despite a strong admonition by Obama during her stint as Secretary that he be distanced from State Department policy-making – continues to be the Svengali behind the scenes. A Clinton electoral success in November guarantees that Blumenthal emerges from the shadows to the great consternation of all friends of Israel. And, at great expense to American efforts to maintain a stable Middle East.

Until Obama, Israel had been viewed by virtually every chief executive as the moral imperative when counting allies in a world where the United States found fewer friends than foes. A Clinton presidency would be disastrous and do little to right that wrong.

The reluctant release by Clinton of her many secret emails have revealed a disturbing picture that ought to shake up all friends of Israel. The Blumenthal plan is one which calls for isolating and then breaking Israel. But it might be too late. Polls indicate that the American Jewish vote will again be quite heavily Democratic, despite the fact that the Democratic platform will be completely incongruous with their strong desire that American support for Israel never be compromised. And the damage that will be done will be immeasurable. Yes, it’s time to panic. Better now, than the day after the presidential election.

And yes, it’s time for Israel’s supporters to look beyond the Democratic Party.

Abraham Lincoln is credited for having opined that you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Well, sort of. In November 2016, approximately 130,000,000 million voters will determine the US’s future, and the course that it charts. The Democratic Party has found a formula that allows it to fool over 67 million people, all of the time. Enough to have won the last two elections with a candidate found wanting on so many fronts. You see, it seems not to matter. African Americans will vote overwhelmingly Democratic. As will the Hispanics, and yes, American Jews as well. Unless, in the coming months, we succeed in getting them to wake up to the truth. The hard truth.

One cannot recall in recent history a presidential election which pitted two candidates whose ideological base has been so contrastingly different, on policy matters, both domestic and foreign. And few foreign affairs are more important, more challenging, and more portentous than the volatile Middle East. In defense of Western values, proponents of a strong and secure Israel, which includes, of course, the tens of millions of America’s evangelical Christians, need to pay careful attention.

As Clinton’s foreign affairs guru, Sidney Blumenthal’s view of the Middle East, fashioned so closely to the vitriolic anti-Israel writings of his son – who questions Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish State, who refers to Israelis as Judeo-Nazis, and who ironically supports the global boycotts of the Jewish State – is cause for alarm. Decidedly proud of his son Max, an apologist for Hamas, the elder Blumenthal has on several occasions expressed equal pride in getting Hillary Clinton to read his scathing screeds, and remarkably, to comment quite favorably.

The antipathy of Blumenthal to Israel is well known, and very much ignored, remarkably in Jewish circles as well, particularly by those who support the Clinton campaign. This inexcusable attitude, suspended halfway between ignorance and indifference, carries with it consequences unlike ever before.

It don’t take a genius.

Someone needs to speak the truth. The hard truth. The traditional supporters of the Democratic Party, must confront, nay, stop the Obama/Clinton machine from fully deserting the only democracy in the Middle East or be judged by future generations as those who surrendered to willful negligence at best, and to fascist totalitarianism from the left at worst. The path to peace will not come from the euphemisms that the Clinton camp uses to shroud its platform. And it will not be realized by vilifying Israel and glorifying the assault against it. By every measure, the Democrats have failed, miserably, in an arena that will soon be threatened with an Iranian nuclear capability – while Hillary Clinton boasts of being a significant architect of that endeavor.

It is therefore imperative that Donald Trump use his platform to speak the truth; enough to convince a significant enough segment of the voting population – those few percentage points that so often determine an election – that the Obama/Clinton train is fast approaching an unavoidable precipice.

In the movie “Wall Street,” Gordon Gekko barks out: “I’ll make you a deal. You stop telling lies about me, and I’ll stop telling the truth about you.” Well, given the unyielding assault on Israel, fraught with its many euphemisms from the Obama/Clinton camps, and perpetuated by all those that hide under the mantle of progressivism, it behooves proponents of Israel to continue to tell the truth.

Categories: 2016 elections, Democrats, Donald Trump and Israel, Hillary Clinton and Israel, Obama and Israel
Tags: Democrats, Donald Trump and Israel, Hillary Clinton and Israel, Obama and Israel

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