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Allen West Warns: Look to Israel For What’ll Happen If We Let Liberals ‘WUSSIFY’ America

March 17, 2016

Allen West Warns: Look to Israel For What’ll Happen If We Let Liberals ‘WUSSIFY’ America

By Breitbart Jerusalem

16 Mar 2016

Source: Allen West Warns: Look to Israel For What’ll Happen If We Let Liberals ‘WUSSIFY’ America

David Silverman/Getty

TEL AVIV – Colonel Allen West compared President Barack Obama to Israeli left-wing NGO head Yariv Oppenheimer, saying, “Oppenheimer and Obama are the reason why we have ISIS beheading, crucifying, slaughtering, enslaving, raping, and committing acts of genocide.”

In an article published Tuesday on West’s website, the former congressman slammed Oppenheimer’s claim that Israelis are “executing” terrorists, and warned that U.S. society was also in danger of breeding “miserable creatures” like Oppenheimer.

On Thursday, Breitbart Jerusalem reported that Peace Now head Oppenheimer had blasted a stabbing victim’s act of self-defense in a terror attack on Tuesday, calling it an “extrajudicial killing.”

Despite having been stabbed multiple times, the victim, Yonatan Azarihab, managed to pull the terrorist’s knife from his own neck and use it to stab his attacker to death.

Oppenheimer also condemned police for shooting and killing the Palestinian terrorist who went on a stabbing spree in Jaffa later the same day, wounding 10 and murdering tourist and U.S. Army veteran Taylor Force.

The Palestinian Authority subsequently made use of Oppenheimer’s words, saying that Israel’s so-called “executions display the depth of the radicalism and the fascism that still rules in the circle of decision makers in Israel in their different political, judicial, military, and media institutions, and they express a wide infrastructure of violent radicalism in Israel in the shadow of the ongoing development of the radical right.”

West laid into Oppenheimer, accusing him of having a “depraved mentality and abject cowardice” for blaming the victims of terrorist attacks.

“What form of stupid would refer to an act of self-defense in killing the person who just stabbed you as a damn ‘execution?’” he wrote.

Where I come from that’s called self-defense. Does Mr. Oppenheimer prefer the Israeli citizen just stay down, bleed out, and die? I laud that man as a hero who stood up and said, you will not flee, I will pursue and kill you with the weapon you just used to try and take my life. That’s the message we need to send to Islamic jihadists.

I’m sorry, but this is exactly what the world does not need: Another doggone Islamapologist who would rather live in subjugation and mask his weakness under some banner of “peace.”

According to the ex-Lieutenant Colonel, the Oppenheimer case is indicative of a huge problem brewing in the U.S., in which liberals expect to make peace with killers.

Referring to Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, West stated, “This is the same idiocy that says we have to have a nuclear agreement with Iran and give them billions of dollars in order to avoid a confrontation.”

West expressed his concern that by giving “wussy boys” and “punks” a platform to express their opinions, Western society is cultivating an environment that shuns “real men of leadership, conviction, and courage.”

He also blasted Obama for throwing a Rose Garden celebration for the family of a deserter who served with “honor and distinction,” while sentencing another soldier – paratrooper, and first lieutenant Clint Lorance – to prison for premeditated murder for killing the enemy.

“It is this society that has demeaned strong men and created a Yariv Oppenheimer — and a Barack Obama,” he wrote.

These types of males are the reason why Parisians were gunned down. These types of males are the reason why women in Cologne, Germany were sexually assaulted and across Europe they’re being raped. These males are the reason why 14 were killed and another 21 wounded in San Bernardino and the response was “gun control.”

 

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Trump and the Left’s Accusations of Fascism

March 16, 2016

Trump and the Left’s Accusations of Fascism, Front Page Magazine, Bruce Thornton, March 16, 2016

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Donald Trump’s success in the primaries and his rhetoric have sparked troubled meditations about an awakening of fascist impulses among his supporters. Bret Stephens has drawn an analogy with the Thirties, “the last dark age of Western politics,” and compared Trump to Benito Mussolini. On the left, Dana Milbank, in a column titled “Trump Flirts with Fascism,” wrote about a campaign rally at which Trump was “leading supporters in what looked very much like a fascist salute,” a scene New York Times house-conservative David Brooks linked to the Nuremberg party rallies.

Much of the rhetoric that links Trump to fascism or Nazism is merely the stale ad Hitlerum fallacy used by progressives to demonize the candidate. They did the same thing when they called George W. Bush “Bushitler.” This slur reflects the hoary leftist dogma that conservatives at heart are repressed xenophobes and knuckle-dragging racists lusting for a messianic leader to restore their lost “white privilege” and punish their minority, immigrant, and feminist enemies. As such, the attack on Trump is nothing new or unexpected from a progressive ideology whose totalitarian inclinations have always had much more in common with fascism than conservatism does.

What Auden called the “low dishonest decade” of the Thirties, however, is indeed instructive for our predicament today, but not because of any danger of a fascist party taking root in modern America. Communism was (and in some ways still is) vastly more successful at infiltrating and shaping American political, cultural, and educational institutions than fascism ever was. But the same cultural pathologies that enabled both fascist and Nazi aggression still afflict us today. These pathologies and their malign effects are more important than the reasons for Trump’s popularity–– anger at elites, economic stagnation, and anti-immigrant passions–– that supposedly echo the “waves of fear and anger” of Auden’s Thirties.

The most important delusion of the Thirties still active today is the idealistic internationalism that had developed over the previous century. A world shrunk by new communication and transportation technologies and linked by global trade, internationalists argued, meant nations and peoples were becoming more alike. Thus they desired the same prosperity, political freedom, human rights, and peace that the West enjoyed. Interstate relations now should be based on this “harmony of interests,” and managed by non-lethal transnational organizations rather than by force. Covenants and treaties like the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and institutions like the League of Nations and the International Court of Arbitration, could peacefully resolve conflicts among nations through diplomatic engagement, negotiation, and appeasement.

The Preamble to the First Hague Convention (1899) captures the idealism that would compromise foreign policy in the Thirties. The Convention’s aims were “the maintenance of the general peace” and “the friendly settlement of international disputes.” This goal was based on the “solidarity which unites the member of the society of civilized nations” and their shared desire for “extending the empire of law and of strengthening the appreciation of international justice.” Two decades later, the monstrous death and destruction of World War I should have shattered the delusion of such “solidarity” existing even among the “civilized nations.” Despite that gruesome lesson, Europe doubled down and created the League of Nations, which failed to stop the serial aggression that culminated in World War II.

But the League wasn’t the only manifestation of naïve internationalism. The Locarno Treaty of 1925 welcomed Germany back into the community of nations with a seat on the League of Nations council. Nobel Peace prizes, and wish-fulfilling headlines like the New York Times’ “France and Germany Bar War Forever,” were all that resulted. The Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928 “condemn[ed] recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce[d] it as an instrument of national policy” in interstate relations. The signing powers asserted that “the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts . . . shall never be sought except by pacific means.”

All the future Axis Powers signed the treaty, and they all soon shredded these “parchment barriers.” In the next few years, Japan invaded Manchuria, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in gross violation of the Versailles Treaty, and Italy invaded Ethiopia. By the time Germany annexed Austria, and Neville Chamberlain’s faith in negotiation and appeasement handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler, all these treaties and conventions and conferences were dead letters, and the League of Nations was exposed as a “cockpit in the tower of Babel,” as Churchill suggested after the First World War.

However, such graphic and costly evidence showing the folly of “covenants without the sword,” as Hobbes put it, did not discredit this dangerous idealism over the following decades. Indeed, it lies behind the disasters of Obama’s foreign policy. Just consider his “outreach” to our enemies, his acknowledgement of our own “imperfections,” his reliance on toothless U.N. Security Council Resolutions, his preference for non-lethal economic sanctions to pressure adversaries, and his belief that negotiated settlements and agreements can achieve peace and good relations even with our fiercest enemies. All reflect the same failure to recognize that our adversaries in fact do not sincerely want to reach an agreement, for the simple reason they are not in fact “just like us,” and so they do not want peace and prosperity and good relations with their neighbors and the “world community.”

The catalogue of Obama’s failures is long and depressing. The “reset” with Russia and promise of “flexibility,” the empty “red line” threats against Bashar al Assad, the arrogant dismissal of a metastasizing ISIS as a “jayvee” outfit, the alienation of allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, the cultivation of the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood, the ill-conceived overthrow of Muammar Ghaddafi, and the rhetoric of guilt and self-abasement are just the most noteworthy failures. The nuclear deal with Iran, of course, is the premier monument to this folly. Yet despite the increasing evidence of its futility­­––Iran’s saber-rattling in the Gulf, capture of U.S. military personnel, genocidal rhetoric, and testing of missiles in blatant violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution–– Obama still clings to this internationalist delusion.

A recent article in The Atlantic on Obama’s foreign policy shows, despite his protestations of hardheaded “realism,” that he has not learned from his failures. Thus he still thinks that the vigorous use of force is usually an unnecessary and dangerous mistake, and that verbal persuasion and diplomatic engagement are more effective. He also still believes that “multilateralism regulates [U.S.] hubris” of the sort that George W. Bush showed when he recklessly invaded Iraq, and that American foreign policy has frequently displayed.

Obama’s delusional faith in rhetoric, especially his own, comes through in his rationale for the infamous 2009 Cairo speech: “I was hoping that my speech could trigger a discussion, could create space for Muslims to address the real problems they are confronting—problems of governance, and the fact that some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity.” The idea that Obama’s mere words could start a “discussion” that would transform 14-century-old religious doctrines fundamentally inimical to liberal democracy, human rights, and all the other Western goods we live by, is a fantasy. Obama’s self-regard recalls Neville Chamberlain’s boast after his meeting with Hitler at Bad Godesberg that he “had established some degree of personal influence with Herr Hitler.”

Or consider Obama’s take on Vladimir Putin:

He understands that Russia’s overall position in the world is significantly diminished. And the fact that he invades Crimea or is trying to prop up Assad doesn’t suddenly make him a player. You don’t see him in any of these meetings out here helping to shape the agenda. For that matter, there’s not a G20 meeting where the Russians set the agenda around any of the issues that are important.

A “player,” in Obama’s foreign policy universe, is a leader who uses “smart power” like diplomacy and negotiated deals, and recognizes that the use of force will backfire and lead to costly “quagmires.” As Secretary of State John Kerry suggested, Putin is using outdated “19th century” instruments of foreign policy like military force in a world that presumably has evolved beyond it.

In contrast, a genuine “player,” as Obama fancies himself, attends summits and conferences, such as the useless climate change conference in Paris, and “sets the agenda.” And like his rationale for the Cairo speech, as the leader of the world’s greatest power, his rhetoric alone can be a force for change. Thus just saying that Syria’s “Assad must go,” while doing nothing to achieve that end, is still useful, and refusing to honestly identify the traditional Islamic foundations of modern jihadism will build good will among Muslims and turn them against the “extremists.”

Meanwhile, Putin and Iran fight and bomb and kill in Syria and Iraq, and now they are the big “players” in a region that the U.S. once dominated, but that now serves the interests of Russia and Iran. I’m reminded of Demosthenes’ scolding of the Athenians for refusing to confront Phillip II of Macedon: “Where either side devotes its time and energy, there it succeeds the better––Phillip in action, but you in argument.”

In other words, for Obama as for Chamberlain, appeasing words rather than forceful deeds are the key to foreign policy––precisely the belief that led England to disastrously underestimate Hitler until it was too late. And that same belief has turned the Middle East into a Darwinian jungle of clashing tribes, sects, and nations.

Obama wraps his foreign policy of retreat in claims to “realist” calculations of America’s security and genuine interests, and buttresses his claim by citing his strategically inconsequential drone killings. But such rhetoric hides an unwillingness to risk consequential action and pay its political costs. And it reflects a commitment to the internationalist idealism that gives diplomatic verbal processes an almost magical power to transform inveterate enemies into helpful partners. Europe tried that in the Thirties, and it led to disaster. That’s a much more important lesson from that sorry decade’s history than the lurid fantasies about fascism coming to America on the wings of Trump’s rhetoric.

Categories: Donald Trump, Europe, Fascism, Foreign policy, Germany, Human rights, Iran scam, Leftists, Middle East, Moral equivalence, national security, Nazis, Obama, Obama's America, Take America back, Western media
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Arrest the Thugs

March 15, 2016

Arrest the Thugs, Front Page Magazine, The Editors, March 15, 2016

(Please see also, How Not to Fight Our Enemies. — DM)

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First the Left unleashed anti-war rallies against President Bush in support of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Then it brought out Occupy Wall Street to push the radical Marxist agenda that Bernie Sanders is now riding like a red wave through the Democratic Party. Finally, it unleashed the racist hate mobs that looted and burned neighborhoods and cities, singled out white people for harassment over the color of their skin, terrorized campuses and incited the murder of police officers.

The common agenda of all these hateful campaigns was to radicalize, intimidate and terrorize Americans into submitting to the totalitarians of the Left. From the inner city neighborhood to the Ivy League campus, from a couple having brunch in the morning to a police officer on patrol being shot in the head, from a political rally to the Thanksgiving Day parade, these thugs of the Left are out to enforce their tyrannical Party Line through political terror.

While the media call these so-called protesters “non-violent,” they completely ignore the fact that suppressing someone else’s free speech is an act of intimidation. To prevent someone else from speaking is not a debate. It’s the refusal to have a debate. Protesters have the right to be heard, but silencing views you disagree with is not a protest. It is the exercise of totalitarian power. And the Left’s organized efforts to prevent opposing points of view from being heard have now migrated from the campus to the city. The media call these crybullies the victims. But they are not victims. They are thugs who are using brute force to suppress the free speech and political freedoms of others.

Donald Trump has as much right to hold a rally as Bernie Sanders. His supporters have as much right to come out to hear him speak. The Left’s refusal to accept this is a definitive rejection of freedom of speech and democracy.

For all his faults, Donald Trump is to be commended for standing up against all this, and for his cool under fire. When a leftist fascist attempted to attack him recently at a rally in Dayton, Ohio, and succeeded in grabbing his foot before he was subdued by Secret Service agents, Trump quipped: “I was ready for him but it’s much easier if the cops do it, don’t we agree?”

Trump’s opponents, both Republican and Democrat, and the Obama administration should realize what’s at stake – if, that is, they have any interest in preserving the American tradition of non-violent political disagreement. The unseemly haste of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich to blame Trump’s rhetoric for the violent shutdown of his Chicago rally is extraordinarily disappointing: they should realize that the same violence can and will be turned against them if they stray too far from the thugs’ idea of what constitutes acceptable political discourse.

There is only one answer to a movement that is determined to thuggishly shut down the speech of others. And that is prison. We can either have speech democracy or speech tyranny in which the biggest thugs and the nastiest bullies decide who gets to speak and who has to shut up. The leftist fascists who shut down Trump’s Chicago rally should be arrested and energetically prosecuted. Barack Obama, so quick to issue statements about black and Muslim victimhood, should (if he cared at all about the principles that allow for a republic) immediately issue a statement stressing the importance of civility and respect for political dissent, and decry the shutdown of the Trump rally.

Obama won’t issue any such statement, of course, and that’s a large part of the problem. Much, much more is at stake in the shutdown of Trump’s rally than most Americans realize. As it becomes increasingly perilous to dissent from the leftist line in America, we can only hope that a sufficient number of Americans will awaken to what is happening in time to hold today’s political and media elites to account for the damage they have done and are doing to the American public square.

The political thugs of the Left cannot be allowed to hijack freedom of speech for an entire nation. Either we arrest the thugs or we will all exist confined in a prison where a handful of thugs can tell us what to we may say and what we may think.

 

Categories: Democrats, Donald Trump, Freedom of speech, Marco Rubio, Obama, Republicans, Ted Cruz, Trump rallies
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Palestinians: Laughing Their Heads Off

March 14, 2016

Palestinians: Laughing Their Heads Off

by Khaled Abu Toameh

March 14, 2016 at 5:00 am

Source: Palestinians: Laughing Their Heads Off

  • As in any comedy, there is a clown, and Biden was played for a fool by a Palestinian Authority leadership that finds that it pays to point its finger at Israel.
  • Here is a dirty little secret: the Palestinian attackers were not driven to murder Jews because of “settlements” and “checkpoints.”
  • Check their Facebook accounts: what fueled their hatred were the lies they had been fed for the past few years by President Abbas and other Palestinian leaders. Palestinian media outlets and spokesmen vomit poison against Israel.
  • And so the curtain rises on another act of the ceremonial, make-believe theater of the Middle East. In Abbas’s sneaky script, it is about settlements. In reality, it is about the refusal of the Americans to read, speak or even translate Arabic.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited Ramallah last week, and Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and his top officials are laughing their heads off.

Why not laugh? Biden arrived in the region hoping to persuade the Palestinian leaders to issue a “condemnation” of the reign of terror, which they continue to describe as a “popular and peaceful uprising.” This in itself reeks of gallows humor.

But what Biden got was even funnier, from the point of view of Abbas and his friends.

The Palestinian president offered “condolences” over the killing of a U.S. citizen in Jaffa the previous day: “The President [Abbas] offered his condolences over the killing of the US citizen, while stressing at the same time that the occupation authorities have killed 200 Palestinians over the past five months,” according to a statement released by the PA leadership in Ramallah.

Abbas’s crocodile tears were shed for Taylor Force, a West Point graduate from Texas who was stabbed to death by a Palestinian during a rampage on the Jaffa beachfront promenade. Abbas is doubtless also upset because Israel has killed Palestinian stabbers and shooters.

Just before Biden arrived in Ramallah, Abbas’s Fatah faction praised the murderer of Force, calling him a “martyr.” But Fatah was quick to delete the posts to avoid embarrassing the Palestinian leadership during Biden’s visit.

It seems that the murder of an American visitor is condemnable, but the murder of some 34 Israelis since last October, including a pregnant woman and civilians, is somewhat less so.

Where was the condemnation of the wounding of nine Israelis in the attack that killed Taylor Force? Where was the condemnation of the attacks the took place on that very day in Jerusalem and Petah Tikva?

But Abbas explained everything to Biden: Israel was in fact fully responsible for the “violence and bloodshed” because of the “occupation” and “settlements.”

Here is a dirty little secret: the Palestinian attackers were not driven to murder Jews because of “settlements” and “checkpoints.”

Check their Facebook accounts: what fueled their hatred were the lies they had been fed for the past few years by President Abbas and other Palestinian leaders, concerning Jews “desecrating” Islamic holy sites and plotting to destroy them. No checkpoint snags, no settlement issues, no protests against construction of new apartments in Jerusalem for Jewish families.

Many of these Palestinians went for Israeli blood because they have been taught — by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and other Palestinian groups — to hate Israel. And they do not give a damn whether that Jew lives in Jaffa or in the West Bank. They also do not give a damn if some of their victims are Arabs.

Yet the comedy continues. Biden is reported to have urged Abbas and the Palestinian leadership to stop the anti-Israel incitement in their official media and on social media. Abbas vehemently denied that this incitement was taking place, and indeed, explained that the US leader had gotten things mixed up entirely: it was Israel that was guilty of incitement against the Palestinians.

While Abbas was busy offering his condolences for the killing of the U.S. citizen, his ruling Fatah faction was busy glorifying Palestinian assailants who killed Israelis.

In one instance, Fatah published an announcement inviting Palestinians to mark the 38th anniversary of the “martyrdom” of Dalal Al-Mughrabi.

Al-Mughrabi was a Fatah member who participated in the 1978 Coastal Road massacre in Israel, in which 38 civilians were killed, including 13 children.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on March 10, hoping to persuade Abbas to issue a “condemnation” of the wave of terror attacks against Israelis. The next day, Abbas’s Fatah party invited Palestinians to commemorate the 38th anniversary of the “martyrdom” of Dalal Al-Mughrabi. Al-Mughrabi was a Fatah member who participated in the 1978 Coastal Road massacre in Israel, in which 38 civilians were killed, including 13 children.

The condolence message was also long enough for Fatah to praise Palestinian assailants, including Abdel Malek Abu Kharoub, who carried out a recent shooting attack in Jerusalem. In a post on its official Facebook account, Fatah hailed Abu Kharoub as a “hero and martyr.”

Of course neither Biden nor any of his advisors and aides saw these posts. They prefer to continue burying their heads in the sand and pretending that once the “peace process” is revived, everything will be fine.

So it is business as usual for Abbas and crew. As in any comedy, there is a clown, and Biden was played for a fool by a PA leadership that finds that it pays to point its finger at Israel.

In Arabic, a language in which Western leaders are perhaps not fluent, Palestinian media outlets and spokesmen vomit poison against Israel. Condemnation of attacks on Israelis would be rather unlikely in such a drama.

And so the curtain rises on another act of the ceremonial, make-believe theater of the Middle East. In Abbas’s sneaky script, it is about settlements. In reality, it is about the refusal of the Americans to read, speak or even translate Arabic.

Khaled Abu Toameh, an award-winning journalist, is based in Jerusalem.

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Tanks for nothing! US-backed Syrian rebel division attacked & looted by Al-Qaeda affiliate

March 14, 2016

Tanks for nothing! US-backed Syrian rebel division attacked & looted by Al-Qaeda affiliate

Published time: 14 Mar, 2016 05:52

Source: Tanks for nothing! US-backed Syrian rebel division attacked & looted by Al-Qaeda affiliate — RT News

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An Islamist Syrian rebel group Jabhat al-Nusra fighter © Hamid Khatib
An Islamist Syrian rebel group Jabhat al-Nusra fighter © Hamid Khatib / Reuters

 

In what could be one of the worst failures of the Pentagon’s program to arm Syrian rebels, several bases with American weapons, armored vehicles and US-trained fighters were captured by Al-Nusra Front. The jihadists and “moderate rebels” are blaming each other for the attack.

READ MORE: ‘Truce hasn’t changed anything, terrorists intensified attacks’ – Aleppo residents to RT

Division 13 of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which had received both US weapons and training, on Sunday said it was attacked by Al-Nusra Front militants – radical Islamist fighters affiliated with Al-Qaeda. The jihadists looted the FSA group’s depots in the town of Maarrat Al-Nuuman in Syria’s Idlib province.

Read more

EXCLUSIVE: Turkey ‘protects & supplies’ Al-Nusra camps at its border – Syria’s YPG to RT

Though it has widely been reported that weapons and dozens of Division 13 fighters have been captured, there are conflicting accounts of how much the jihadists could actually carry. Some media reports claimed that the haul included US-supplied TOW anti-tank missiles, firearms and ammunition, and unspecified armored vehicles, including a tank. The rebel group’s chief has denied they have lost anti-tank missiles, telling AFP that only “light weapons” have been taken.

Moreover, up to 40 Division 13 fighters have been taken hostage and four killed, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has said, though the remote “sources on the ground” routinely cited by the UK-based organization are often hard to verify.

Adding to the rebel group’s dismay, Al-Nusra was also the first to release an online statement – blaming Division 13 for provoking the attack. In turn, the rebels denied attacking Al-Nusra and accused them of an unexpected armed assault on a checkpoint, set up at the request of the local population.

The reason reportedly given by the US-backed group as to why they couldn’t have attacked the Islamists? Too weak for the job.

The feud between the militant factions, once close allies in fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces, has been brewing for some time, according to AP. Al-Nusra has recently suppressed demonstrations and arrested protesters in the city of Idlib, and reportedly replaced the tricolor of the Syrian rebels with the black Al-Qaeda flag there.

On Friday, in Maaret al-Numan, motorcyclists waving the black flag of Al-Nusra threatened to fire on a protest, shouting “Allahu akbar” or “God is greatest.”

Read more

Members of Al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front. © Ammar Abdullah

Capture or betrayal? US-trained Syrian rebels with weapons end up in hands of Nusra jihadists

Interestingly, Al-Nusra has a history of looting US-backed opposition forces: last summer, jihadists kidnapped members of the US-trained Division 30, while in September a whole stock of US-supplied weapons and hardware was captured.

The Pentagon’s failed rebel-training program was canceled in October, after dozens of US-trained rebels abandoned Division 30 and handed the weapons they had been supplied to Al-Nusra upon crossing from Turkey into Syria.

However, the head of US Central Command, General Lloyd Austin, proposed to restart training for Syria’s so-called “moderate” rebels.

A month later, the US State Department admitted that some of the “moderates” had been successfully recruited by Al-Nusra in Syria.

READ MORE: ‘US created monster of al-Qaeda, yet believes Iran supported 9/11 terrorists’ (OP-ED)

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How Not to Fight Our Enemies

March 13, 2016

How Not to Fight Our Enemies, Front Page Magazine, David Horowitz, March 13, 2016

(An excellent article by David Horowitz. — DM)

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The mob that came to disrupt the Trump rally in Chicago was neither spontaneous nor innocent, nor new. It was a mob that has been forming ever since the Seattle riots against the World Trade Organization in 1999, whose target was global capitalism. The Seattle rioters repeated their outrages for the next two years and then transformed itself into the so-called “anti-war” movement to save the Saddam dictatorship in Iraq. Same leaders, funders and troops. The enemy was always America and its Republican defenders. When Obama invaded countries and blew up families in Muslim countries, there was no anti-war movement because Obama was one of them, and they didn’t want to divide their support. In 2012 the so-called “anti-war” movement reformed as “Occupy Wall Street.” They went on a rampage creating cross-country riots to protesting the One Percent and provided a whipping boy for Obama’s re-election campaign. Same leaders, same funders and troops. In 2015 the same leftwing forces created and funded Black Lives Matter and lynch mobs in Ferguson and Baltimore who targeted “white supremacists” and police.

Behind all the mobs was the organized left – MoveOn.org, the public sector unions runby Sixties leftovers,  and the cabal of anti-American billionaires led by George Soros. The mobs themselves were composed of the hate-filled foot soldiers of the political left. Now these forces have gathered in the campaign to elect the Vermont communist and are focusing their venom on Donald Trump. The obvious plan is to make Republicans toxic while driving a wedge through the Republican Party. The plan is defeat Republicans in November so that the destructive forces they have set in motion in the Democratic Party can finish the wrecking job that Obama started.

One of the professionally produced signs at the Chicago mob scene proclaimed, “This is what democracy looks like.” Actually it is exactly what fascism looks like. As every student of the Thirties knows, the break up of democratic forums by Nazi and Communist thugs paved the way for Hitler’s election. Just like the mobs of the Thirties, today’s left is driven by racial and class hate, and is utterly contemptuous of the democratic process – hence the effort to hang the Ferguson cop before the trial and to prevent Trump from expounding his views in Chicago.

And what has been the reaction of the presidential candidates, particularly those who propose to save the country? It is to blame Trump as though he and not the left had instigated the riot. If you play with matches like Trump did, opined Hillary Clinton, you’re likely to start a fire. This is the same Hillary Clinton who has compared Republicans to terrorists and called them racists, and who once accused a “vast right-wing conspiracy” of inventing her husband’s paramour. The Democratic Party has officially endorsed the Black Lives Matter racists and rioters. But it is not only the left who is attempting to blame Trump for the Chicago debacle.

According to the proudly positive John Kasich, it was Trump who created the “toxic environment” that led to the riot – not the fascist movement that has been metastasizing in our universities and streets for more than a decade. In other words, when you finally go on the attack, attack a Republican rather than a Democrat. That way you get a pass.

Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and their spokespeople piled on Trump as well. “Ted Cruz Claims Trump Is To Blame For Violence At His Rallies,” ran a headline in the leftwing New York Times. His Republican attackers attempted to shame Trump for speaking to the anger of his conservative supporters instead of bringing everyone together – those who claim we live in a white supremacist society and the whites they are attacking, those who claim that Republicans are terrorists and racists and the victims of this abuse. As though you can create unity with people who hate you because you are white or rich, or believe that America is a nation worth saving. The fact is that Trump’s anger is pretty controlled, considering the hate-filled environment of Islamic terrorists, illegal immigrants, event disrupters and rival candidates openly smearing him.

He is often guilty of over-reach – “punch him in the nose” directed at one disrupter, but this is hardly the sin his detractors suggest in comparing him to Mussolini. That is a much great violence to the man who is its target. Aside from Trump’s compulsive over-reach what is wrong with anger in the current political context? Is it wrong to be angry at what Obama and the Democrats and the progressive mobs are doing to our country? How is this dissociation from Trump mob attack not the same surrender to political correctness that conservatives like Rubio and Cruz claim to reject? Aren’t Cruz and Rubio angry at what is being done to our country? Why are they willing to validate the hypocritical slanders of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, two architects of our disasters?

This is the reality we must never forget: There is an anti-American radical in the White House who – with the support of his party – has delivered nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and a hundred billion dollars to our mortal enemies in Teheran who have declared their intentions to kill us. This suicidal deal was not an oversight, as Rubio has correctly observed, but the result of decades of thinking that America and Israel are adversaries, and our enemies are their victims. The extremists of #Never Trump exemplify the malaise Republicans have been prisoners of for years, which is what the primary revolt is about. Why was there no #Never Obama movement in 2012? For Republicans such a movement would be unthinkable. It would be too angry. It would be called racist. On the other hand, no one will call us racist for attacking a fellow Republican. So let’s join the left in smearing one of our own and hope that we can scrub off the stigmas that Democrats have tarred us with in the process. We’re not racists. Let’s not fight Obama, which will prove that we are. Let’s have respectful words for the lynch mob left.  If we capitulate the disaster unfolding before us, maybe it will go away. That is what the Trump crowd is angry about and mainstream Republicans should be too.

At the outset of the presidential debates all the Republican candidates pledged to support the party’s choice in November. Extra pressure was put on Trump to do so and he did. But now that millions of Republicans have cast their ballots for Trump, Rubio and Kasich are threatening to renege on their pledge, and destroy both the party and the country in the process. And Cruz, while sniping at Trump’s alleged role in inciting the leftists is notably non-committal about whether he will support a Trump primary victory. None of them explain how you can fight fascist leftists without actually fighting them and opening yourself to the charge of anger.

Perhaps it is money from the #Never Trump crowd – the extremists who want to thwart the popular vote and fatally split the party – that is behind this perfidy. But as someone who until very recently held high opinions of Rubio and Cruz, I am hoping that it is not too late for somebody to wake them up. I am hoping that somebody says: Cut it out. Come to your senses. Your scorched earth warfare is threatening the very existence of the right. Trump isn’t the enemy. Like you he is opposed to the Iran deal, supports a secure border, recognizes the Islamist threat, wants to reduce taxes and make the country solvent, and is greatly expanding the Republican base. Attempt to beat him at the polls if you think he shouldn’t be president but let the voters decide the result, and respect their decision. The alternative is a fratricidal war that could drive large numbers of conservatives away from the polls, and whose beneficiaries will only be America’s enemies at home and abroad.

Categories: Democrats, Donald Trump, Islamic jihad, Leftists, Marco Rubio, Obama, Racism, Ted Cruz
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Judge Jeanine Pirro Opening Statement – Attack On 1st Amendment and Trump Rally

March 13, 2016

Judge Jeanine Pirro Opening Statement – Attack On 1st Amendment & Trump Rally, Fox News via You Tube, March 12, 2016

 

Categories: Democrats, Donald Trump, Freedom of speech, Marco Rubio, Obama, Sanders, Ted Cruz
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Trump Storm Troopers Mob Sanders Rally: Force Cancellation

March 13, 2016

Trump Storm Troopers Mob Sanders Rally: Force Cancellation, American Thinker, Clarice Feldman, March 13, 2016

Of course, this didn’t happen. The opposite is true, but you can be sure that would be the headline had conservative opponents of Sanders prevented his rally in suburban Chicago from taking place because of mob threats of violence. This makes Ted Cruz ‘s spineless rejoinder to the violent demonstrations in Chicago so galling to me.

Some years ago I wrote here of my contempt for conservatives who flee the forum for fear of getting their spotlessly white togas spattered with mud and blood when their colleagues are being savaged by liars and thugs. This week my White Toga award goes to Ted Cruz. As thousands of rent a mobs from Soros funded Move On, the White House approved Black Lives Matters fabulist race baiters, and Bernie Sanders fans mobbed and threatened the thousands of people who’d waited in lines for hours to attend a rally in Chicago for Donald Trump. Even Obama pal and admitted terrorist Bill Ayers, doubtless reliving his “glory days” as a Weatherman was there cheering the mayhem on:

We shut Trump down! Beautiful gathering of anti racist youth. pic.twitter.com/uYOFXMvKhX

Bill Ayers (@WilliamAyers) March 12, 2016

The People’s Cube, which has perfected its satire of left speak described the event from the thugs’ point of view:

CHICAGO, IL – Tonight one thousand peaceful communists, socialists, anarchists, Black Lives Matter activists, devout Muslims, immigration advocates with Mexican flags, and local students of Marxism, disrupted a meeting of some twenty five thousand angry and violent Trump supporters.

The Trump crowd had it coming because they had conspired to shut down everyone else’s right to free speech by buying tickets to the event, which was closed to those who didn’t have tickets. That was a grotesque violation of the protesters’ right to get inside, jump on the podium, rip Trump signs, and scream “F** Trump” into a TV camera.

As the news of the event’s cancellation was announced, the protesters peacefully celebrated their victory by throwing punches at Trump supporters and police officers, shouting over their objections, flipping the middle finger and kicking their cars, and walking into the road to block traffic composed of gas-guzzling, global-warming-causing vehicles.

Did Ted Cruz criticize this effort to deny thousands of people their right to free speech and assembly or the violent nature of the demonstration? No, he feebly offered up this on Fox New’s The Kelly File: “A campaign bears responsibility for creating an environment when the candidate urges supporters to engage in physical violence.”

Did he seriously believe that the effort to shut down the rally was occasioned by anything but Trump’s political positions? Where was he in 1968 when the far left pulled the same kind of thug action in the same city? Did he not notice Soros’ funding of Move On and Black Lives Matter or his funding of opposition to Trump and mobilization of Latinos opposed to Trump’s immigration stance in this election?

The organizers’ own words belie that claim that Trump bears responsibility for this mayhem: They were well organized and were there to shut down Trump  whose political views they oppose.

Here’s People for Bernie:

People For Bernie

‏‪@People4Bernie

Remember the ‪#TrumpRally wasn’t just luck. It took organizers from dozens of organizations and thousands of people to pull off. Great work.

Newsbusters picked up from an AP story the role of a Black Lives Matters

When’s the last time if even, that a group of right-wing protesters in the U.S. specifically set out to completely shut down a left-wing speaker’s address? There’s no doubt that the attempt to protest Trump was organized, and that its primary intent was to prevent him from speaking:

[snip]

“Trump represents everything America is not and everything Chicago is not,” said Kamran Siddiqui, 20, a student at the school who was among those celebrating. “We came in here and we wanted to shut this down. Because this is a great city and we don’t want to let that person in here.”

[snip]

“Our country is not going to make it being divided by the views of Donald Trump,” said Jermaine Hodge, a 37-year-old lifelong Chicago resident who owns a trucking company. “Our country is divided enough. Donald Trump, he’s preaching hate. He’s preaching division.”

[snip]

Chicago community activist Quo Vadis said hundreds of protesters had positioned themselves in groups around the arena, and they intended to demonstrate right after Trump took the stage.

Their goal, he said, was “for Donald to take the stage and to completely interrupt him. The plan is to shut Donald Trump all the way down.”

A directory assistance lookup indicates that there is no listed “Quo Vadis” (which means “Where are you going?” in Latin) in Illinois.

It seems quite likely that the person who was quoted is really Quovadis Green, a Chicago activist who was involved in Black Lives Matter protests in Chicago’s Michigan Avenue shopping district during last year’s Black Friday Christmas shopping weekend.

Bernie Sanders, whose people, as I have noted, took pride in shutting down the Trump rally, held a rally of his own in suburban Chicago. There he bragged that he was bringing people together, not dividing them like Trump. One can only imagine what he’d have said in the unlikely chance that rabid Trump supporters had shut down his rally. I say unlikely chance because these tactics are those of the left side of the spectrum. For sure, the press wouldn’t have called such action a “protest”. We’d have been treated to Nazi comparisons and the rally wreckers called Trump’s storm troopers.

The president, who has stirred up so much racial division by, among other things, supporting the Black Lives Matter supporters and megaphoning their lies about Trayvon Martin and Ferguson, Missouri, was equally mendacious.

“What’s happening in this primary is just a distillation of what’s been happening in their party for more than a decade,” Obama said, according to a report filed by the Texas Tribune.

Given the forces of the left arrayed against his party, Cruz’ take was more than spineless, it was self-defeating. If they succeed in shutting down Trump’s rallies, he’ll be next in their crosshairs. It’s the way they work. In any event, this show of rent-a-mob force may well encourage more voters, sick of this behavior, into the Trump camp.

Cruz’ offering up a justification for this behavior also played into the press game of targeting Republicans while spackling the records of their opponents. Of particular amusement is this piece in the Washington Post (whose editors must be on permanent leave):

Trump is known for his massive, raucous rallies — part campaign events, part media spectacles, part populist exaltations for his most loyal supporters. But the events have also become suffused with the kind of hostility and even violence that are unknown to modern presidential campaigns. The candidate himself often seems to wink at, or even encourage, rough treatment of protesters.

What is conveniently ignored is that these demonstrations are set up by Trump’s opponents specifically to provoke tensions and fights which the press then propagandizes. By this means they hope to set him up as what he is not — a racist — to scare off supporters and drive Blacks and Hispanics to the polls to vote for his Democratic opponent.

It’s of a piece with the rapidly disintegrating claim of a Breitbart reporter, Michelle Fields, days before that she was roughed up by Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s brilliant campaign manager.

The Daily Beast picked up her claim and further suggested (on the basis of a dubious third-hand account) that Lewandowski had admitted manhandling Fields, but as pictures and videos emerged which made her claim virtually impossible to sustain. It shows Trump and Lewandowski emerging from the presser with a Secret Service agent between Lewandowski and Fields. The Daily Beast walked that back step by step:

Update 2:15 p.m. ET: The Trump campaign has evidently leaked an email from Breitbart News Washington political editor Matthew Boyle. In the email Boyle rejects as “false” Daily Beast editor-at-large Lloyd Grove’s claim that Lewandowski “acknowledged to Breitbart’s Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle, that he did manhandle Fields.”

Breitbart, itself over the day, seemed to be backpeddling its reporter’s claim and noted

A Vine video has emerged, purporting to show a new angle of the incident. The footage appears inconclusive, but visible in the background is Ken Kurson, editor-in-chief of the New York Observer, who appears to have had a close-up view of the action.

Breitbart News reached out to Kurson, who responded via e-mail:

I was five feet away from the alleged incident and didn’t see anything. I was literally looking right at Corey when it supposedly happened. Someone sent me a Vine of it (I look bald as hell, goddammit — and what’s with that backpack?!?!!?) and if this happened, I think I would have seen it. I have a lot of experience as both a journalist and operative in these kind of press scrums and I didn’t see anything at all out of the norm.

Still, you can be sure this week’s lefty trope that Trump and his people are violent and encourage more violence will be played out, And if Cruz were the front runner drawing tens of thousands to his rallies he, too, would be tarred just the same.

Stay alert. This is going to be the dirtiest election in a long time.

Categories: 2016 elections, Democrats, Donald Trump, Fox News, Obama, Political correctness, Republicans, Sanders, Ted Cruz, U.S. politics
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Obama sees Netanyahu as most disappointing of all Mideast leaders

March 11, 2016

Obama sees Netanyahu as most disappointing of all Mideast leaders — report

The Atlantic: Israeli PM is ‘in his own category’ when it comes to those who frustrate US president; article cites ‘condescending’ lecture by PM, asserts that Obama sees Netanyahu as ‘too fearful and politically paralyzed’ to secure two-state solution

By Times of Israel staff March 10, 2016, 4:39 pm

Source: Obama sees Netanyahu as most disappointing of all Mideast leaders — report | The Times of Israel

US President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a welcoming ceremony for the president at Ben Gurion Airport, March 20, 2013. (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem/Pool/Flash90)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is in his own category” when it comes to the Middle East leaders who have most deeply disappointed President Barack Obama, according to a major overview of the Obama presidency, featuring numerous interviews with the president, published online Thursday by The Atlantic.

In the piece, headlined “The Obama Doctrine,” writer Jeffrey Goldberg goes to great lengths to trace the president’s growing disillusionment, over the course of his presidency, with the possibility of changing the region for the better. “Some of his deepest disappointments concern Middle Eastern leaders themselves,” Goldberg writes. Of these, “Benjamin Netanyahu is in his own category.”

 According to Goldberg, “Obama has long believed that Netanyahu could bring about a two-state solution that would protect Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority democracy, but is too fearful and politically paralyzed to do so.”

To illustrate Obama’s impatience with Netanyahu, one of several Middle Eastern leaders said to have questioned the president’s understanding of the region, Goldberg relates an incident during an undated Obama-Netanyahu meeting, at which the Israeli prime minister “launched into something of a lecture about the dangers of the brutal region in which he lives.”

Obama, relates Goldberg, “felt that Netanyahu was behaving in a condescending fashion, and was also avoiding the subject at hand: peace negotiations. Finally, the president interrupted the prime minister: ‘Bibi, you have to understand something,’ he said. ‘I’m the African American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.’”

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (left) with US President Barack Obama during a bilateral meeting (photo credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, left, with US President Barack Obama during a bilateral meeting in 2011. (photo credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

The piece does not single out Netanyahu as the only regional leader to “frustrate him immensely.” Obama now thinks of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who he had hoped could bridge the East-West divide, as “a failure and an authoritarian, one who refuses to use his enormous army to bring stability to Syria,” Goldberg writes.

He also says Obama two years ago took Jordan’s King Abdullah II aside at an international summit because he was unhappy that the monarch was badmouthing him. “Obama said he had heard that Abdullah had complained to friends in the U.S. Congress about his leadership, and told the king that if he had complaints, he should raise them directly. The king denied that he had spoken ill of him.”

“In recent days,” Goldberg continues, “the president has taken to joking privately, ‘All I need in the Middle East is a few smart autocrats.’ Obama has always had a fondness for pragmatic, emotionally contained technocrats, telling aides, ‘If only everyone could be like the Scandinavians, this would all be easy.’”

US President Obama delivering his famed Cairo Speech in 2009. The president highlighted the need for social progress in his first major address to the Muslim world. (photo credit: screen capture, YouTube)

US President Barack Obama speaks in Cairo on June 4, 2009. (photo credit: screen capture, YouTube)

According to Goldberg, Obama now acknowledges that a goal of his Cairo speech in 2009, early in his presidency, in which he sought to persuade Muslims to look honestly at the sources of their unhappiness and stop blaming Israel for all their problems, has proved unsuccessful.

He quotes Obama as follows: “My argument was this: Let’s all stop pretending that the cause of the Middle East’s problems is Israel… We want to work to help achieve statehood and dignity for the Palestinians, but I was hoping that my speech could trigger a discussion, could create space for Muslims to address the real problems they are confronting — problems of governance, and the fact that some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity. My thought was, I would communicate that the U.S. is not standing in the way of this progress, that we would help, in whatever way possible, to advance the goals of a practical, successful Arab agenda that provided a better life for ordinary people.”

What unfolded over the following three years, Goldberg goes on, “as the Arab Spring gave up its early promise, and brutality and dysfunction overwhelmed the Middle East,” left Obama bleak. “The unraveling of the Arab Spring darkened the president’s view of what the U.S. could achieve in the Middle East, and made him realize how much the chaos there was distracting from other priorities,” Goldberg writes.

Undated file image posted on a militant website on January 14, 2014, shows Islamic State fighters marching in Raqqa, Syria. (AP/Militant Website)

Undated file image posted on a militant website on January 14, 2014, shows Islamic State fighters marching in Raqqa, Syria. (AP/Militant Website)

More recently, says Goldberg, the rise of the Islamic State terror group has “deepened Obama’s conviction that the Middle East could not be fixed — not on his watch, and not for a generation to come.”

In the piece, Goldberg quotes Obama castigating Islamic State in the most bitter tones, as “the distillation of every worst impulse.” Says Obama: “The notion that we are a small group that defines ourselves primarily by the degree to which we can kill others who are not like us, and attempting to impose a rigid orthodoxy that produces nothing, that celebrates nothing, that really is contrary to every bit of human progress— it indicates the degree to which that kind of mentality can still take root and gain adherents in the 21st century.”

Obama is also quoted praising Israelis’ ability to withstand a relentless climate of terrorism. Writes Goldberg of the US president: “Several years ago, he expressed to me his admiration for Israelis’ ‘resilience’ in the face of constant terrorism, and it is clear that he would like to see resilience replace panic in American society.”

A worker outside the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran (photo credit: Vahid Salemi/AP)

A worker outside the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran (photo credit: AP/Vahid Salemi)

Relating to last July’s nuclear agreement with Iran, on which he and Netanyahu disagreed so profoundly and so publicly, Obama told Goldberg as recently as January that he wasn’t bluffing when he said in 2012 that he would have attacked Iran to prevent it from getting a nuclear weapon. “I actually would have,” Goldberg quotes Obama saying, in reference to a strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities, “If I saw them break out… This was in the category of an American interest.”

Where he and Netanyahu differed, Goldberg elaborates, is that “Netanyahu wanted Obama to prevent Iran from being capable of building a bomb, not merely from possessing a bomb.”

Much of the article relates to Obama’s decision not to strike at Syria after President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against his own people in the summer of 2013 — a landmark volte face in his presidency. Goldberg reveals, however, that Secretary of State John Kerry has continued to press Obama “to violate Syria’s sovereignty” and “launch missiles at specific regime targets, under cover of night, to ‘send a message’ to the regime.” The president has insistently refused these requests, Goldberg writes, “and seems to have grown impatient” with Kerry’s lobbying. “Recently, when Kerry handed Obama a written outline of new steps to bring more pressure to bear on Assad, Obama said, ‘Oh, another proposal?’”

President Barack Obama and John Kerry (photo credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)

US President Barack Obama and US Secretary of State John Kerry (photo credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)

Goldberg concludes the piece by arguing that Obama “has placed some huge bets” in foreign policy — notably where the Iran deal is concerned. When Goldberg told him last May that he was “nervous” about the deal, Obama replied: “Look, 20 years from now, I’m still going to be around, God willing. If Iran has a nuclear weapon, it’s my name on this… I think it’s fair to say that in addition to our profound national-security interests, I have a personal interest in locking this down.”

For supporters of the president, Goldberg sums up, “his strategy makes eminent sense: Double down in those parts of the world where success is plausible, and limit America’s exposure to the rest. His critics believe, however, that problems like those presented by the Middle East don’t solve themselves — that, without American intervention, they metastasize.”

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Will Obama Try to Blackmail Israel?

March 11, 2016

Will Obama Try to Blackmail Israel?

by Shoshana Bryen

March 11, 2016 at 5:00 am

Source: Will Obama Try to Blackmail Israel?

  • President Obama is looking at the fires he lit in the Middle East and North Africa, and desperately hoping to salvage something, anything, from the conflagration before he leaves office. Israel will be pushed to provide at least one “victory.”
  • Iran has come closer to nuclear weapons competence in the past eight years. And Obama’s abandonment of dissidents and pro-democracy advocates in Cuba, Venezuela, China, Turkey and Iran paves the way for waves of repression and bloodshed around the world.
  • It is estimated that more than 17,000 civilians were killed in Iraq in 2014, four times as many as 2012, after the U.S. withdrew its combat forces. This is a far cry from 2011, when Obama announced the U.S. was leaving a “sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.”
  • He needs to find a “success.” Cue the Middle East “peace process.”

As Vice President Biden arrived in Israel this week, word leaked about yet another “peace plan” designed by the Obama administration. There isn’t much new in it. According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. might support a UN Security Council resolution calling on “both sides to compromise on key issues,” and it might involve the Middle East Quartet. Israel would be told to stop building in the territories and recognize East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian State. The Palestinians would be told to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and give up the “right of return” for the original 1948/49 refugees and their descendants.

Just do it and voila! Problem solved.

As Vice President Biden arrived in Israel this week, word leaked about yet another “peace plan” designed by the Obama administration. (Image source: Israel Prime Minister’s Office)

Why and why now? Because President Obama is looking at the fires he lit in the Middle East and North Africa, and desperately hoping to salvage something, anything, from the conflagration before he leaves office and needs another job. Israel will be pushed to provide at least one “victory.” Consider the list of Administration failures right now and the terrible destruction they have entailed:

In his first foreign visit, President Obama opened the door in Egypt to an uprising not only of “Google people” in Tahrir Square, but also to the Muslim Brotherhood. Brotherhood representatives were front and center at the President’s speech in Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, to the dismay of longtime ally Hosni Mubarak. After Mubarak’s overthrow, the White House pressed for the inclusion of the Brotherhood in Egyptian elections despite its history of terrorism. Since then, the U.S. and Egypt have been unable to find a way to communicate constructively, despite Egypt’s increasing closeness to Israel and their joint interest in controlling the terrorist Hamas and Iranian-sponsored jihadis in Sinai.

The Muslim Brotherhood was emboldened in Syria by its successes in Egypt.

The Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS — both in some measure precipitated by the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq – have killed upwards of 350,000 people (more than 55,000 in 2015) and displaced nearly 4 million more. Chemical weapons, starvation, beheadings and aerial bombing are weapons of choice by various sides. Russia is calling the shots (literally) in Syria, while Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia continue to fund various jihadi groups, and Iran operates freely in both Iraq and Syria. Hezbollah, despite taking enormous casualties in Syria, continues to add to its missile arsenal in Lebanon.

This is a far cry from 2011, when President Obama announced the U.S. was leaving a “sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.” An Iraqi non-governmental organization estimated that more than 17,000 civilians were killed there in 2014, double the number from the previous year and four times as many as 2012, after the U.S. withdrew its combat forces.

Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey have all been destabilized by an influx of refugees from Syria and Iraq. Lebanon, a fragile country of less than 4.5 million people divided into Shiites, Sunnis, Christians and Druze, now has more than one million Syrian refugees.

Afghanistan was the “good war” in President Obama’s narrative. At West Point at the end of 2009, President Obama announced an additional deployment of 30,000 American soldiers to stabilize Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan. Six years later — 15 years after we got there — American military leaders told him the Afghan government still couldn’t survive without a continuing American military presence. Since the administration decided to leave a contingent of nearly 10,000 soldiers for an indefinite period of time, the Taliban has refused to continue peace talks with the Afghan government, and we’re looking at another bloody summer. Terrorist bombs in Pakistan are a daily occurrence.

Libya was supposed to be a test of our “responsibility to protect.” It also had, from the President’s point of view, the benefit of “leading from behind” and having “no boots on the ground.” After successfully ousting Moammar Gaddafi — who had turned his WMD program over to US and UK intelligence, kept al-Qaeda from moving from Egypt to Western North Africa, and paid reparations for terrorism — the U.S. acknowledged as many as 30,000 Libyan deaths in two months of war.

The war in Mali was a direct result of the demise of the Gaddafi government and the raiding of government weapons depots by al-Qaeda-supported Tuareg forces. Only the direct involvement of French troops saved the government there. The deaths of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone S. Woods, and Glen Doherty are attributable to the rise of al-Qaeda there as well. Today, there are as many as 1700 armed gangs across Libya and ISIS controls Sirte, a city of more than 100,000. The Pentagon is drawing up plans for U.S. military action to force ISIS out, we are again bombing Libya and there are American Special Forces on the ground.

Meanwhile, the U.S. bombed an al-Shabaab training base in Somalia this week, killing more than 150 members of the group.

Iran has come closer to nuclear weapons competence in the past eight years. And President Obama’s abandonment of dissidents and pro-democracy advocates in Cuba, Venezuela, China, Turkey and Iran paves the way for waves of repression and bloodshed around the world.

The widespread wreckage and carnage that accrues to President Obama’s policies and fantasies should disqualify him from further activity on the international stage when his term ends. But since retirement doesn’t appear in the offing, he needs to find a “success.”

Cue the Middle East “peace process.”

Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center.

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