Posted tagged ‘President Obama’

My Response to Mike Huckabee

July 30, 2015

My Response to Mike Huckabee

“It’s a completely ridiculous comparison. For one thing, these are totally different Jews we’re talking about killing here.”

by Andrew Klavan

July 28, 2015 – 8:15 am

via My Response to Mike Huckabee | Klavan On The Culture.

Corrupt News Media Rule #42: “Whenever a Republican says something we consider untoward, every other Republican is required to respond to it. Whenever a Democrat says or does something patently corrupt, destructive or idiotic…  Look over there!  Transexuals!”

So it is with Governor Mike Huckabee, who recently discussed President Obama’s Iran deal with Breitbart editor-in-chief Alexander Marlow. Huckabee said: ”This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.”

Since everyone who has ever voted Republican will be asked to give a response to this remark, here’s mine:

“I am absolutely shocked that Governor Huckabee would make reference to the Holocaust when discussing a deal that endangers the lives of six million Jews. Why, it’s so absurd — Jon Stewart ought to make one of his funny faces about it. God, I love those. Are they hilarious or what? Just because the president wants to virtually guarantee nuclear weapons to a regime dedicated to Israel’s destruction, that’s no reason to go around getting all Holocausty about it. It’s a completely ridiculous comparison. For one thing, these are totally different Jews we’re talking about killing here. And for another thing, Adolf Hitler was evil. President Obama is just narcissistic and morally obtuse. So when these Jews die, it’ll be different. Okay, not for them, but I mean for us, later, when we make excuses about it. Governor Huckabee should apologize at once. Especially for those music segments on his old Fox show.”

That’s my opinion. And I mean it to sting, by golly.

The No Deal Deal | Faster, Please!

July 7, 2015

The No Deal Deal

Here’s why…

by Michael Ledeen

July 6, 2015 – 3:58 pm

via The No Deal Deal | Faster, Please!.

I don’t want to be the sole bearer of bad news for Ben Rhodes and his fellow gurus, but here it is:  the Iranians at Vienna won’t sign anything, per their instructions from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Full credit for this diplomatic accomplishment goes to President Obama, Secretary of State Kerry, Guru Rhodes and the rest of the administration strategists.  Their constant offer of more–more money, more gold, more limits on annoying inspections, more cooperation in the air and on the ground with Iranian forces, etcetera etcetera–solidified Khamenei’s conviction that there is no reason for him to approve a hated deal with the devil.  It’s much better to keep talking until all the sanctions are gone, and Iran’s “right” to pursue its nuclear projects is fully recognized.

Keep reminding yourself that Khamenei has two fixed principles:  no “new relationship” with the Great Satan, and relentless pursuit of the atomic bomb.

Obama/Kerry/Rhodes won’t take “no” for a definitive answer, so we’re probably going to see a new form of creative appeasement.  Short version:  It will be a “no deal deal.”  Iran promises to try really really hard to be nice and we pay for it.  Everyone agrees to commit to a “real” agreement by the end of the year.  Iran gets money–the continuation of the monthly payoff, and under-the-table arrangements like the gold shipment the South Africans delivered to Khamenei–and we get smiles.

There is no deal, per se–nobody signs anything–but we get the worst of it any how.  If John Kerry thinks that’s enough for a Nobel Peace Prize, he’s got an even lower opinion of the judgment of the Oslo crowd than I do.  And he may be right.  Chamberlain was widely praised as a great peacemaker for a while, and Carter was greatly admired when he proclaimed we had given up our “inordinate fear of Communism.”  And we’ll keep talking, won’t we?  And Obama just reiterated–at the Pentagon no less–that guns don’t defeat ideologies, only good ideas do.

If I were a Pentagon official and I heard the president say that, I’d have resigned on the spot.

There are some interesting political consequences to the “no deal deal,” and if I have it right, our Congressional warriors seem to have been mooted.  They voted themselves the right to be heard on any Iran deal, but does that apply to this arrangement?  Are they entitled to insist that current sanctions be vigorously enforced?  The White House doesn’t want any such thing, since that would throw a real spanner into the works of the various payoffs to Tehran.  The “international community” doesn’t much want that either;  we’ve read a lot about “Western” businessmen/government officials lining up at the entrances to Persian bazaars.  Some of them will press on.  That includes our own wheelers.  I am told that Iran’s fleet of Boeing jets–you know, the “civilian” aircraft that had been grounded for decades–have been refurbished.

What will Corker/Menendez et al do?  Kredo has reported that the White House is whipping the Dems into a pliable herd to ensure Congress can’t/won’t stop the appeasement of the evil murderers around Ali Khamenei.  If they succed, as any serious gambler would wage, then the Islamic Republic will continue to slaughter Syrians, Kurds, Yeminis, Saudis…you know the list…until they finally get on with the mission assigned them by the 12th Imam:  destroy us.

If the next president is paying attention, he/she will take names, and campaign against the appeasers.  Then fire all those pathetic “military leaders” who stood at attention as Obama proclaimed them irrelevant to the great global war of our time.

Blog: Obama’s Gulf Summit collapsing (along with Arab support for his Iran negotiations)

May 11, 2015

Obama’s Gulf Summit collapsing (along with Arab support for his Iran negotiations)

By Thomas Lifson

May 11, 2015

via Blog: Obama’s Gulf Summit collapsing (along with Arab support for his Iran negotiations).

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman delivered a slap in the face of President Obama when the state-run Saudi press agency announced late yesterday that the King had better things to do than coming to Camp David for a retreat with President Obama and other Gulf monarchs. The meeting, which is planned to start Thursday, was to have included face-to-face talks between President Obama and the King.  As Helene Cooper of the New York Times reports, just last Friday the White House had confidently announced that the two leaders would “resume consultations on a wide range of regional and bilateral issues.”

This is an unmistakable and very public rebuke of President Obama. In place of the monarch, Saudi interior minister Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef and defense minister Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman will attend. This makes the move one step short of a boycott, but rather a symbolic and potent protest over the direction of US Iran policy.  The Saudis, who regard a nuclear Iran as a mortal threat to their regime (and all of Sunni Islam), are in effect voting bno confidence in the extended surrender of sanctions in return for vague non-commitments to measures that will not prevent the mullahs from getting their nuclear weapons.

And Saudi Arabia does not stand alone. The AP reports that most other Gulf Monarchs will not be attending:

The tiny island kingdom of Bahrain said separately that its delegation would be headed by the country’s crown prince, Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa. (snip)

The sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said, is among those staying away. The sultanate will be represented instead by the deputy prime minister, Sayyid Fahd bin Mahmoud Al Said, and other officials, the country’s official news agency announced. (snip)

Health issues are also expected to keep the president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, from attending. He suffered a stroke in January last year and has not been seen publicly since.

However, two Gulf monarchs are still planning to attend:

Among those who will be at the summit is the Kuwaiti emir, Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah. He arrived at Andrews Air Force Base on Monday, the official Kuwait News Agency reported.

Also, Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, is scheduled to depart Monday to take part in the meeting.

The Saudi monarch has just announced to the world that his nation, which has a direct stake in the outcome of the Iran talks, does not have any faith in the policies of President Obama.

Verifying Iran Nuclear Deal Not Possible, Experts Say

April 6, 2015

Verifying Iran Nuclear Deal Not Possible, Experts Say

Past Iranian cheating to be codified by future accord

BY:
April 6, 2015 5:00 am

via Verifying Iran Nuclear Deal Not Possible, Experts Say | Washington Free Beacon.

 

Despite promises by President Obama that Iranian cheating on a new treaty will be detected, verifying Tehran’s compliance with a future nuclear accord will be very difficult if not impossible, arms experts say.

“The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action will not be effectively verifiable,” said Paula DeSutter, assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance, and implementation from 2002 to 2009.

Obama said Saturday that the framework nuclear deal reached in Switzerland would provide “unprecedented verification.”

International inspectors “will have unprecedented access to Iran’s nuclear program because Iran will face more inspections than any other country in the world,” he said in a Saturday radio address.

“If Iran cheats, the world will know it,” Obama said. “If we see something suspicious, we will inspect it. So this deal is not based on trust, it’s based on unprecedented verification.”

But arms control experts challenged the administration’s assertions that a final deal to be hammered out in detail between now and June can be verified, based on Iran’s past cheating and the failure of similar arms verification procedures.

A White House fact sheet on the outline of the future agreement states that the new accord will not require Iran to dismantle centrifuges, or to remove stockpiled nuclear material from the country or convert such material into less dangerous fuel rods.

The agreement also would permit continued nuclear research at facilities built in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Iran signed in 1970 but has violated repeatedly since at least the early 2000s.

The centerpiece for verifying Iranian compliance will be a document called the Additional Protocol of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), according to the White House.

However, the State Department’s most recent report on arms compliance, made public in July, states that Iran signed an IAEA Additional Protocol in 2003 but “implemented it provisionally and selectively from 2003 to 2006,” when Tehran stopped complying altogether.

“The framework claims that Iran will once again execute an Additional Protocol with IAEA,” said William R. Harris, an international lawyer who formerly took part in drafting and verifying U.S. arms control agreements. “This might yield unprecedented verification opportunities, but can the international community count on faithful implementation?”

Harris also said Iran could cheat by shipping secretly built nuclear arms to North Korea, based on published reports indicating Iran co-financed North Korea’s nuclear tests, and that Iranian ballistic missile test signals reportedly showed “earmarks” of North Korean guidance systems.

“So what would prevent storage of Iranian nuclear weapons at underground North Korean sites?” he asked. “If there is to be full-scope inspection in Iran, the incentives for extraterritorial R&D and storage increase.”

U.S. intelligence agencies, which will be called on to verify the agreement, also have a spotty record for estimating foreign arms programs. After erroneously claiming Iraq had large stocks of weapons of mass destruction, the intelligence community produced a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that falsely concluded that Iran halted work on nuclear weapons in 2003.

The IAEA, in a restricted 2011 report, contradicted the estimate by stating that Iran continued nuclear arms work past 2003, including work on computer modeling used in building nuclear warheads.

White House officials who briefed reporters last week on the new framework agreement said the key to verification of the future pact will be the new IAEA protocol. The protocol will provide greater access and information on the Iranian nuclear program, including its hidden and secret sites, they said.

The nuclear facilities at Fordow, an underground facility where centrifuges will be removed, and Natanz, another major centrifuge facility, were both built in violation of the NPT and will not be dismantled.

Additionally, the nuclear facility at Parchin, where Iran is believed to have carried out most of its nuclear weapons work, is not mentioned in any of the fact sheets by name.

The sole reference to Iran’s work on nuclear arms is the reference in the fact sheet to a requirement that Iran address “the possible military dimensions” of its nuclear program.

Officials who briefed reporters also said that under the new agreement inspectors would have access to Iran’s nuclear “supply chain”—the covert system used to circumvent global sanctions and procure materials and equipment.

DeSutter, the former State Department arms verification official, said the transparency measures announced after talks in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Thursday at best could detect quantitative excesses at known locations, but not secret illegal activities, like those that Iran carried out on a large scale in violation of its obligations under the NPT.

The transparency regime for the new deal also will “undermine the already challenging verifiability of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by legitimizing Iran’s illegal enrichment and reprocessing programs,” DeSutter said.

Thomas Moore, former professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who specialized in arms control matters, also said Iran’s past cheating on the NPT makes verifying a new agreement nearly impossible.

Iran, in its statement on the framework, also denied it would sign a new IAEA protocol. Tehran said of the protocol that it will be implemented on a “voluntary and temporary basis” for transparency and confidence-building.

The imprecise language is a sign “Iran is keeping its weapon option open but refuses required openness to confirm it no longer wants one,” Moore said.

“Iran would not divert centrifuges or the material they make from a declared site,” Moore said. “Rather, it will instead cheat at an undeclared site.”

Because Iran will not ratify the new protocol, the IAEA will be unable to verify the completeness and correctness of Iran’s declarations, Moore said, both declared and undeclared materials and activities.

Iran is already the single most IAEA-inspected nation in the world and additional IAEA inspections are not expected to be better, although Iran’s nuclear expertise will grow, he added.

“The deal is silent on Iran’s actual military dimensions, except to the extent that its supporters claim the IAEA will be able to verify the absence of a weapons program in Iran. They won’t,” Moore said.

“Contrary to the imprecise political rhetoric, this deal does not yet contain the ‘most intrusive’ inspections ever tried,” he said.

David S. Sullivan, a former CIA arms verification specialist and also a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee arms expert, said confirming Iran’s compliance with new nuclear obligations will be difficult.

“U.S. national technical means of verification is always difficult, fraught with the political process of monitoring, collecting, analyzing, and [achieving] consensus on usually ambiguous evidence of cheating that opponents are trying to hide,” Sullivan said.

“These difficulties are even greater for the UN’s IAEA, which is a multinational political agency.”

Past cheating by Iran, confirmed as recently as July 2014 raised questions about why there are negotiations with Tehran, Sullivan said.

“Why are we negotiating for a new agreement, when existing Iranian NPT violations remain in effect, ongoing, and unresolved, suggesting that Iran is unlikely to comply with any new agreement?” Sullivan said.

“Iran alarmingly is officially within three months of having nuclear warheads, according to the international negotiators, and is therefore about to become another nuclear-armed North Korea,” he said, noting that Pyongyang also cheated on the NPT and now has nuclear-tipped missiles.

By not requiring Iran to correct past violations of the NPT, the new agreement will in effect codify its current cheating. “The negotiations started as an attempt to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program, but now they have legitimized it,” Sullivan said

Egypt Sisi Islamic Reformer ISIS Terrorism

February 17, 2015

Egypt Battles ISIS and Sharia Supremacism

by Andrew C. McCarthy

February 16th, 2015 – 9:50 am

via Egypt Sisi Islamic Reformer ISIS Terrorism | Ordered Liberty.

How does Egypt differ from Saudi Arabia and Qatar? Two ways: (1) It was not invited to join President Obama’s ballyhooed “coalition” of Arab Muslim states fighting against ISIS, and (2) it is actually fighting against ISIS.

Obama, of course, has aligned himself with the anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood, which, like ISIS, wants to impose sharia globally. Thus the State Department continues to host and consult with the Brotherhood about the future of Egypt, even though the Brotherhood has been outlawed as a terrorist organization – the government it dominated having been ousted from power after millions of Egyptians took to the streets to demand its removal.

Meanwhile, the new government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who was elected by a wide margin after the Brotherhood was cashiered, is taking the fight to ISIS – including cooperating with Israel in the Sinai, where ISIS is working with Hamas (the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch), as Caroline Glick detailed last week, here.

Moreover, the New York Times reports that Egypt is conducting airstrikes against ISIS’s new operations base in Libya (the country that Islamists have destabilized and largely overrun thanks to President Obama’s decision to help Islamists overthrow the Qaddafi regime). Unlike the former Brotherhood government that freed jihadist leaders and abetted the persecution of Coptic Christians, Sisi’s government is attacking the jihadists to avenge ISIS’s savage murder of Egyptian Christians. The Times’ David Kirkpatrick notes that:

The Egyptian military said on Monday that it had carried out two rounds of airstrikes in Libya in retaliation for the beheading of more than a dozen Egyptian Christians by a branch of the Islamic State extremist group there.

In a statement Monday morning, the Egyptian military said that it had conducted airstrikes at dawn against training camps and arms depots of the Islamic State group in Libya, but it did not provide further details. The Foreign Ministry said that Egyptian warplanes had struck Derna, a town in eastern Libya that is a hub of Islamist militancy.

* * * * * * *

In a televised address late Sunday night, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt vowed that his country would take action to avenge the killings.

“Egypt preserves the right to respond, with the appropriate manner and timing, in order to carry out retribution on those killers and criminals who are stripped of the most basic of human values,” Mr. Sisi said.

The Egyptian military said in a statement issued around 8:30 a.m. that the dawn strikes were “retribution and response to the criminal acts of terrorist elements and organizations inside and outside the country.”

“We stress that revenge for the blood of Egyptians, and retribution from the killers and criminals, is a right we must dutifully enforce,” the statement said. Egyptian state television showed footage of F-16s taking off in the dark as the statement was read on the air.

* * * * * * *

Egypt’s air assault came less than 12 hours after the main Islamic State group released a video online that appeared to show fighters from the group’s self-proclaimed Tripolitania Province beheading more than a dozen Egyptian Christians.

The Christians were among the thousands of Egyptians who routinely travel across the border to Libya to find work in its oil-rich economy, forging a deep connection between the two neighboring states. About 20 Egyptian Christians disappeared around the coastal city of Surt weeks ago, and last month the Tripolitania Province released a picture showing that it had captured them.

As Roger Simon and Ray Ibrahim have recounted, Sisi, a devout Muslim, began this year by admonishing Islam’s most influential scholars at al-Azhar University that Islam must reform – that it must, in his words, have a “religious revolution.” He was not simply making the fatuous but oft-repeated claims that Islam is innately peaceful and predominantly practiced in moderation. He was imploring sharia jurists to reject unambiguously both violent jihadism and, crucially, the scripturally-rooted ideology that fuels this terrorism:

It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!

That thinking—I am not saying “religion” but “thinking”—that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world.

So here we have what American officials have always said we’ve desperately needed: A respected Muslim leader of a vitally important Muslim country who is courageously opposing – in word and deed – the jihadists and their ideology. And what is the president of the United States doing? He is denying them the support they need and driving them into the arms of Vladimir Putin.

Besides remaining miffed that Egypt has outlawed the Brotherhood, Obama is busy helping Iran become a nuclear power – even as Iran-backed terrorists seize Yemen and target Israel. So Russia has moved in, pledging to aid economically strapped Cairo in both fighting terrorists and building a nuclear power industry.

If President Obama did not have a disastrous foreign policy, he’d have no foreign policy. Our Islamic allies in combating “violent extremism” are not sharia-supremacists like the Muslim Brotherhood and the regimes in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Our ally is Egypt.

Update: PJ Media’s Patrick Poole catches al-Jazeera — the jihadist propaganda arm hosted by President Obama’s “coalition” partner, Qatar — recycling old pictures of dead children to make it look like they were killed by Egypt in the retaliatory strikes against ISIS.

Obama Honouring Presidential Commitments Trumps Protocol

February 2, 2015

Obama Honouring Presidential Commitments Trumps Protocol

Author

By David Singer February 2, 2015

via Obama Honouring Presidential Commitments Trumps Protocol.

 

The furore engendered by House Speaker John Boehner inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress on March 3—supposedly in breach of Presidential protocol – marks the first step in Congress flexing its muscles to persuade President Obama to re-think his concerted attempts to undermine the written commitments made by President Bush to Israel’s then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in his letter dated 14 April 2004 – as overwhelmingly endorsed by the House of Representatives 407-9 on 23 June 2004 and the Senate 95-3 the next day (“American Written Commitments”)

Those 2004 American Written Commitments to Israel have become even more critical in 2015—as a completely changed political environment sees America:

  1. leading negotiations with Iran on curbing Iran’s nuclear program
  2. heading a coalition of 62 States seeking to degrade and destroy Islamic State
  3. forming part of the London 11 countries backing the unsuccessful bid to oust Assad from power in Syria
  4. witnessing the shredding of the 2003 Bush Roadmap calling for the creation of a second Arab State in former Palestine—in addition to Jordan – as PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas chooses instead to travel the road leading to the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.

These American Written Commitments were made to support Sharon’s decision to unilaterally disengage from Gaza—which Israel duly honoured in 2005—when the Israeli Army and 8000 Israeli civilians left Gaza—many after living there for almost forty years.

Israel’s disengagement brought Hamas to power in Gaza’s one and only election – which has since seen three wars, thousands of deaths and casualties, property destruction running into billions of dollars and 11000 rockets being indiscriminately fired into Israeli civilian population centres.

Those American Written Commitments assured Israel that the United States:

  1. Would do its utmost to prevent any attempt by anyone to impose any other plan other than the Roadmap envisioned by President Bush on 24 June 2002.
  2. Reiterated America’s steadfast commitment to Israel’s security, including secure, defensible borders,
  3. Was strongly committed to Israel’s security and well-being as a Jewish state.
  4. Understood that an agreed, just, fair and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement would need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.
  5. Accepted as part of a final peace settlement that Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should emerge from negotiations between the parties in accordance with UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338.
  6. Acknowledged that in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it would be unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations would be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, that all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution had reached the same conclusion

President Obama and his administration have sought to circumvent these American Written Commitments—thereby encouraging continuing Arab rejectionism of Israeli peace overtures whilst souring the American—Israeli longstanding relationship.

Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reportedly took the first steps to repudiate these American Written Commitments on 6 June 2009:

“Since coming to office in January, President Barack Obama has repeatedly called on Israel to halt all settlement activity in Palestinian areas, a demand rejected by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Israelis say they received commitments from the previous US administration of President George W. Bush permitting some growth in existing settlements.

They say the US position was laid out in a 2004 letter from Bush to then Israeli premier Ariel Sharon.

Clinton rejected that claim, saying any such US stance was informal and “did not become part of the official position of the United States government.”

Clinton made Obama’s intentions clear—when she stated on 25 November 2009

“We believe that through good-faith negotiations the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements.”

This blatant disregard for the American Written Commitments – which had never mentioned land swaps -signalled trouble for Israel – if Obama ever confirmed Clinton’s statements.

Eighteen months later Israel’s worst fears were realised when President Obama declared on 19 May 2011:

“The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”

Israel’s curt response came the same day:

Mr. Netanyahu said in a pointed statement just before boarding a plane to Washington that while he appreciated Mr. Obama’s commitment to peace, he “expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of American commitments made to Israel in 2004 which were overwhelmingly supported by both Houses of Congress.”

These American Written Commitments cannot be unilaterally revoked or varied—if America is to retain any international credibility for honouring agreements it makes with other States.

Israel—and Israel alone—must determine where its secure, recognized and defensible borders are to be located under these American Written Commitments.

Obama will hopefully get this unequivocal message when Congress welcomes Netanyahu to address it—protocol or no protocol.

Obama Sends Campaign Team to Israel to Defeat Netanyahu

January 27, 2015

Obama Sends Campaign Team to Israel to Defeat Netanyahu

So he DOES have more campaigns to run

1.26.2015

News

Trey Sanchez

via Obama Sends Campaign Team to Israel to Defeat Netanyahu | Truth Revolt.

 


According to Haaretz, President Obama’s 2012 campaign field director has been selected to be a part of a “five-man Obama team” that will run a campaign against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

As Caroline Glick–Israeli journalist and Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center–notes, the far-left Israeli news outlet “for whatever reason… chose not to translate this article in its English edition.” Fortunately, Independent Media Review and Analysis did:

Foreign Funding Bankrolls Anti-Netanyahu Campaign – Flies in 5-Man Obama Team
Dr. Aaron Lerner Date: 26 January 2015 

Haaretz reporter Roi Arad revealed in an article in the Hebrew edition today that the foreign funded organization, “One Voice”, is bankrolling the V-2015 campaign to defeat Binyamin Netanyahu’s national camp in the March 2015 Knesset Elections. 

One indication of the generous financing is that it has now flown in a team of five American campaign experts (including Jeremy Bird, the Obama campaign’s national field director) who will run the campaign out of offices taking up the ground floor of a Tel Aviv office building. 

V-2015 is careful not to support a specific party – rather “just not Bibi”. As such, the foreign funds pouring into the campaign are not subject to Israel’s campaign finance laws. 

The revelation, PJMedia observes, stands in direct contrast with President Obama’s declaration in his State of the Union that he has no more campaigns to run:

‘No more campaigns to run’ in America, at least.

Here is Glick’s post:

 

Iran Builds Two New Nuke Plants As Obama Admin Continues Talks With Regime, Berates Congress For Attempts To Impose Sanctions

January 15, 2015

Iran Builds Two New Nuke Plants As Obama Admin Continues Talks With Regime, Berates Congress For Attempts To Impose Sanctions

via Iran Builds Two New Nuke Plants As Obama Admin Continues Talks With Regime, Berates Congress For Attempts To Impose Sanctions – Breitbart.

 

Reuters

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced on Tuesday that Iran has broken ground on two new nuclear power plants in the country’s Bushehr province, Iranian state news agencies reported.

“Construction of two new power plants will increase the capacity of Bushehr province’s power generation to 2,000 megawatts,” Rouhani said in an address in Bushehr province.

The expansion of Iran’s nuclear program has been made possible largely due to Russian cooperation. In March, Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation (AEOI) agreed to help build the two plants in Bushehr.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterpart, Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif, engaged in “substantive meetings” on Wednesday, according to the State Department. Kerry was expected to leave the Geneva-based negotiations with Iran on Wednesday, but stayed in order to engage with more conversation with Zarif, the Jerusalem Post reported. “Secretary Kerry is returning to Mandarin Hotel for another meeting with Foreign Minister Zarif,” a senior State Department official said of the unexpected change of plans.

Instead of responding to Iran’s expansion of its nuclear program, the Obama administration has castigated Congress for introducing its upcoming bill to create additional sanctions against Iran. The State Department said earlier this week that any bill regarding sanctions on Iran will be immediately vetoed by President Obama.

“Even with a trigger, if there’s a bill that’s signed into law, and it is US law, in our mind it is a violation of the Joint Plan of Action, which, as we’ve said, could encourage Iran to violate,” said State Department spokesperson Marie Harf on Tuesday. Harf warned that the Iranian government was extremely sensitive to bills in Congress, and that a bill passed through both chambers could “very well lead to a breakdown in these negotiations.”

However, the Iran sanctions have overwhelming support in both chambers of Congress, with a reported veto-proof majority ready to pass the sanctions. Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel told Al-Monitor on Wednesday: “I respect and understand the White House arguing that sanctions — even triggered sanctions — could be counterproductive or even harmful. That’s their judgment. It’s not necessarily mine.”

Iran also announced on Wednesday that the regime has indicted Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian and that he will stand trial, without speaking to what charges he will face. Rezaian’s fate remains unknown, but Iran reportedly executed 721 people in 2014, which marked a new high under President Hassan Rouhani’s tenure.

Tehran is also reportedly helping construct a nuclear plant in Syria, reported Der Spiegel earlier this week. The ruling Syrian regime under Bashar al-Assad remains a close ideological ally of Ayatollah Khamenei’s Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Real Scandals of the Paris March

January 14, 2015

The Real Scandals of the Paris March

January 14, 2015 by Bruce Thornton

via The Real Scandals of the Paris March | FrontPage Magazine.

French President Francois Hollande welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Elysee Palace before attending a solidarity march in the streets of ParisCommentators on both the left and the right are slamming President Obama for missing the march in Paris last Sunday. Even a stalwart courtier like CNN’s Jake Tapper sniffed that he was “ashamed” that the U.S. was represented by an ambassador––one, by the way, who got her appointment by bundling money for the president’s political campaigns. But who’s surprised at this latest display of diplomatic incompetence? This is the same president who gave the queen of England an I-Pod loaded with his speeches, banished a bust of Churchill from the White House, bowed low to the Saudi King, blew off Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, and insulted on an open mike the prime minister of Israel, our most important ally in the Middle East. Missing the march is just Obama being Obama.

More significant is the fact that these complaints are just distracting us from more important questions about the march. The first is, what took the French so long? In 2012, to take just one example, a jihadist killed 7 people, including 3 Jewish children, in Toulouse and Montauban. Why did those deaths not merit a large display of  “solidarity” and multicultural togetherness? Some will argue that the Charlie Hebdo killings deserve more attention because they struck at a foundational belief of liberal democracy, free speech. Indeed it did.

But killing Jewish children just because they are Jews strikes at equally foundational beliefs––that all people have human rights whatever their race or creed, and that confessional tolerance is mandatory for an open and free society. Yes, the latest massacre also killed 4 Jews just because they were Jews, but those victims of the violent assault on our principles have been an afterthought. Passionate proclamations of the importance of free speech? Heard a lot those. Equally passionate calls to fight anti-Semitism? Not so much. Perhaps some people have some residual decency, and are embarrassed at being reminded that just 6 months ago, these same streets of Paris were filled with protestors marching in support of Hamas, vandalizing synagogues, and shouting anti-Semitic and genocidal slogans.

So there is a fair amount of hypocrisy in such calls for free speech and tolerance, coming as they do from the same people who institute “hate speech” codes against the critics of Islam, and who brand as “Islamophobes,” and “xenophobes,” and “neo-fascists” those political parties that call for a renewed commitment to Western civilization, and take pride in the culture that created human rights, democracy, tolerance, and all the other goods the scorners of national and cultural pride take for granted. Hence Bernard Henry-Levy snidely dismisses as “arsonists of the soul” those parties that call for patriotism and pride in their culture, and the need to defend it from the enemies that want to destroy it. So much for Henry-Levy’s cries for “national unity,” an invitation apparently valid only for those who endorse the flabby “tolerance” and multicultural fantasies that have enabled the illiberal, homophobic, misogynistic, and lethally intolerant jihadists shedding blood in the streets of Paris.

One suspects that the outcry reflects anger not so much at those who murder innocents in order to destroy liberal democracy and human rights, but at these particular killers who dared to slaughter left-wing journalists in what François Hollande laughably called the “capital of the world.” One wonders what the response would have been had the same number of people been murdered in a National Front office out in the sticks. It’s the arrogant provincialism of the has-been great power, the Gallic version of that old New Yorker cover showing the U.S. as a vast wasteland west of the East River. Killing Jews or cops in the provinces is one thing, but left-wing journalists in the City of Lights? Now that’s a cause for outrage. Roger Kimball got it right when he wrote, “The whole production is slightly nauseating in its fakeness, its self-aggrandizing narcissism, and its essential mendacity.”

But the most nauseating scandal of the march was the presence of Palestinian honcho

Mahmoud Abbas, participating with other heads of state in an event supposedly memorializing victims who include 4 Jews killed by jihadists. But Abbas is not a “head of state.” He is the “chairman” of a terrorist gang called the Palestinian Liberation Organization, a member of another terrorist outfit, Fatah, and a holocaust denier. Since 1993 he has headed up the Palestinian Authority, that Potemkin “government” behind which for 20 years now he and his cronies have incited hatred against Jews in Arab Palestinian popular culture and schools, brutally suppressed political rivals, fleeced the West of funds that arm soldiers and line the pockets of the PA’s “leaders” ($100 million just for Abbas), and serially engineered terrorist murders of Israelis, over 1500 since Oslo handed control of Judaea and Samaria to the Palestinians.

So a “leader” whose whole life has been committed to the destruction of Jews and their national homeland, who has colluded in terrorist murder, who regularly praises murderers of Israelis as “martyrs” and names schools after them, and who has rejected offers of the nation that he tells gullible Westerners is people’s purpose of their violence––this man who embodies everything opposed to the liberal democratic principles of Western civilization is invited to march in a celebration of those principles? A “leader” who arrests and tortures journalists marches in support of free speech? A killer of Jews attends a memorial in which Jews have been killed? But what should we expect when nations forged by Western principles have sunk so low that they make a terrorist gang a member of U.N. institutions––with the approval of France, remember–– and the International Criminal Court, one of whose charges is to prosecute genocide and war crimes like randomly firing rockets into cities. You have to go back to the bloodstained Soviet judges sitting on the Nuremberg Tribunal to find such absurd hypocrisy.

The rot in the West, its failure of cultural nerve and collapse of civilizational morale, will not be stopped by big talk and displays of communal emotion. To quote Churchill’s words in response to the Munich debacle, “This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in olden time.” And that “stand” will require more than just words and marches.

U.S. Gov’t. Seeks Excuse to Nuclear-Attack Russia

December 17, 2014

U.S. Gov’t. Seeks Excuse to Nuclear-Attack Russia

Posted on December 16, 2014

by Eric Zuesse.

via U.S. Gov’t. Seeks Excuse to Nuclear-Attack Russia Washington’s Blog.

 


Eric Zuesse

When French President Francois Hollande urgently side-tracked his return flight from a diplomatic mission recently, in order to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a private room that had been scoured ahead of time to eliminate any possible bugging devices, there was much speculation as to what it was about, and rumors of a planned American “false-flag” event to blame on Russia as a pretext for going to war against Russia were rife. What is not rumor, but proven fact, by Obama’s own actions, is that he wants a war against Russia and is trying hard to get Europe onboard with this goal in order to win it; and that America’s Republican Party want this at least as much as he does.

The Democratic Party (in the House and Senate) are staying as quiet as possible about a ‘Democratic’ President pushing them toward World War III, which is a goal that Republicans have always been far more eager for than Democrats. (Republicans are famous for “Speak softly but carry a big stick,” and for swinging it as hard as they can, especially against Russians.) In fact, one of the reasons why Obama won the Presidency is that he criticized his 2012 Republican opponent Mitt Romney for saying of Russia, “This is without question our number geopolitical foe.” That dissent by him appealed to the U.S. public at the time, but not to America’s aristocracy, who are a mix of people some of whom hate Russians and others of whom don’t care about Russians, but none of whom are passionate opponents of nuclear war (a diverse group they lump contemptuously with “peaceniks”).

For example, one major mouthpiece of Democratic Party aristocrats has always been The New Republic, and on 17 September 2014 they headlined “Obama Can’t Admit That Romney Was Right: Russia Is Our ‘Top Geopolitical Threat’.” Another one is the National Journal, the aristocracy’s version of its companion propaganda-operation (owned by the same aristocrat) The Atlantic. On 7 May 2014 (just five days after Obama’s people had massacred pro-Russians in the House of Trade Unions in Odessa and thereby started the extermination-campaign against them, or “civil war” that’s still raging), the National Journal headlined “Mitt Romney Was Right: Russia Is Our Biggest Geopolitical Foe.” Conservative ‘Democrats’ are just Republicans spelled with a “D”; but, when it’s an aristocrat, they know how to spell, and are just trying to deceive the ones who don’t. This is why ‘liberal’ magazines are prized possessions of the aristocracy.

The people who fund both political Parties are virtually united in that belief: they don’t mind backing racist facists or “nazis”; many of them are precisely that themselves. Obama is with them (and with Wall Street, and with Big Ag, and Big Oil, and Big Military), against the public. But he’s smart enough a politician to pretend otherwise, and his aristocratic funders respect this. (There were no hard feelings for his exploiting Romney’s politically stupid public assertion.)

For America’s elite, the Cold War never ended, because it was never really about communism versus capitalism — not for them. They are fascists, and they want global dominance. Capitalism, shmapitalism; all they really care about is dominating the world, destroying enemies. Aristocracy hasn’t changed since, well, long before the Bible began. Domination is the big thing, for them. Russia threatens their global control, their dominance, because Russia is the second-most-powerful military nation. Russia is the only nation that can say no to U.S. aristocrats and get away with it.

As President Obama’s speech at West Point, on 28 May 2014, propagandized for (rationalized) this conquer-Russia view on the part of America’s aristocracy: “Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us.” So, Obama made clear to the graduating West Point cadets that the BRIC countries are the enemy (Russia and its leading supporters of international independence, the enemies against a mono-polar or “hegemonic” world), from the standpoint of America’s aristocracy, whom the U.S. military now serves. Ours want to crush the aristocrats in Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Though it’s alright for those other countries to produce more, that’s true only if American aristocrats control the local ones there, like in any other international empire — not if the local nation’s aristocrats control the country. That’s not the way aristocrats in banana republics are supposed to behave. They’re not supposed to be independent countries. Not really.

The President who had invaded Libya and Syria, and re-invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and who perpetrated a violent overthrow and installed racist fascists (nazis) in control of Ukraine, is lecturing the world against “Russia’s aggression,” for its having accepted back into Russia’s traditional fold little Crimea, which craved to return to Russia. He’s got some gall to do that, but in order to be a cadet at West Point you need to be either a sucker or else a cravenous tool of the aristocracy, as the military has traditionally served; so, Obama played them for being both, and they evidently liked it. Obama knows how to speak down to an audience and fool them into thinking he respects them. But to aristocrats, it’s no act at all; he respects them, he protects them, because he self-identifies with them, and not with the public.

Similarly, for example, the British Empire didn’t wish for local aristocrats in India to be in control, but only for those client aristocrats to be of use. That’s what it means to be a client nation.

Obama, in his speech, added, placing a clear hyper-nationalistic coloration on his promotion of America’s empire: “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.” He promised to keep it that way: “That has been true for the century passed [sp.: past [[somebody at the White House didn’t know the difference between ‘past’ and ‘passed’]] and it will be true for the century to come.” (At least he wasn’t predicting a Thousand-Year Reich.)

So: that’s historical background to Obama’s plan for using Ukraine as a stepping-stone toward conquering Russia — one of the few favors he hasn’t yet achieved for his sponsors, after having protected them from what he contemptuously calls (in private) the “pitchforks”; a.k.a., the public.

On December 11th, the U.S. Senate voted 100% (unanimously) to donate U.S. weapons to the Ukrainian Government in its war against Russia. On December 4th, 98% of the U.S. House had done likewise. Both bills also accuse Russia of having invaded Ukraine, and this accusation of an aggressive Russia provides a pretext for the U.S. to attack Russia, now that the Ukrainian Government has flipped from neutral (according to some estimations) or pro-Russian (according to others) to being clearly and publicly anti-Russian, by means of their U.S.-engineered coup that occurred in February of this year, when masked gunmen, who were actually hired mercenaries, dressed themselves as if they were instead Ukrainian security forces, and fired into a crowd of “Maidan” anti-corruption protesters and police, and the U.S. Government immediately blamed Ukraine’s then-President for doing that, and Ukraine’s parliament or “Rada,” who weren’t in on the scheme and didn’t know about it, promptly elected “Yats” Yatsenyuk, who had secretly been appointed 18 days prior to lead the country, by Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department. Yats immediately installed a far-right Government, filled with people who had already committed themselves to a Ukrainian war against Russia. They then promptly set about terminating Russia’s 42-year Crimean lease for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which is key to Russia’s security. Crimeans, who had always overwhelmingly considered themselves to be Russians and not Ukrainians, demonstrated against that Ukrainian move against them and against Russia, and Russian troops came into Crimea, to local applause, but to the condemnation from Washington and its allies.

Russia’s taking back Crimea was not aggression at all; it was protection of Crimeans. When the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev donated Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, it was much to the consternation of Crimeans at the time, and ever since. Yet, one of the explicit alleged ‘justifications’ for war against Russia, that are listed in the House’s bill (“Whereas the Russian Federation’s forcible occupation and illegal annexation of Crimea. …”) is a blatant lie, because Crimeans overwhelmingly wanted Russia’s protection against the new, Obama-imposed, regime, which Obama’s State Department and CIA had just installed when overthrowing the President for whom nearly 80% of Crimeans had voted. A poll that was issued by Gallup in June 2014 showed then that 71.3% of Crimeans viewed as “Mostly positive” the role of Russia there, and 4.0% viewed it as “Mostly negative”; by contrast, only 2.8% viewed the role of the United States there as “Mostly positive,” and a whopping 76.2% viewed it as “Mostly negative.” This wasn’t much changed from a year-earlier Gallup poll. The Republican Party (and thus the Republican-controlled House) is willing to lie blatantly (about this and other matters) in order to justify invading Russia, as it did in invading Iraq; and Barack Obama is willing to lie blatantly too for the same reasons — such as about the source of the sarin gas attack in Libya, etc. — but there were enough Democrats in the U.S. Senate to block Obama’s getting such blatant lies into the Senate’s bill on Ukraine, so it’s much milder. However, when Republicans take over the Senate in January, their bill will match the House’s, and Obama will get all he wants for his planned war against Russia.

So, now, both the Senate and the House, plus the U.S. President (via his State Department, CIA, FBI, and entire Administration), are actually at war, a hot war not a cold war, against Russia, through their proxy, their made-in-Washington, racist-fascist or nazi, Government of Ukraine, which currently is doing the fighting and the killing and the dying, but which couldn’t do it but for that Western backing.

This should be analogized to Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba and his and Soviet leader Khrushchev’s attempt to base near the U.S., Soviet nuclear missiles aimed against America. At that time, in 1962, U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy said that we’d go to war against the USSR if necessary to prevent this; and today Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has implied, but not yet said, that his country will likewise go to war against the United States if necessary to stop our current attempt to do against Russia what Khrushchev had been stopped from doing against the U.S. in 1962.

However, the U.S. is now already farther along the warpath than the USSR had been in 1962. Already, many thousands of deaths have resulted from Ukraine’s war against Russia and against its supporters inside what had previously been parts of Ukraine. In 1962, Cuba was at peace, except for a few bands of U.S.-backed Cubans, who were trying to overthrow Fidel Castro. Consider Ukraine today’s Cuba, but even more of a danger.

Clearly, U.S. President Obama was serious when he tossed out Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych; and clearly he has the full backing of the U.S. Congress (though with some hesitation on the part of Democrats) to go to war against Russia and finish the job.

If it weren’t for the ongoing donations — officially loans, but ‘loans’ to an already-bankrupt Government — by both U.S. taxpayers and EU taxpayers, that are channeled mainly through the U.S. and EU and IMF, Ukraine would simply stop its hot war against Russia and against its own ethnic Russians; and the Ukrainian Government that we installed in February would simply collapse. The IMF and EU seem likely now to have ended their donations, but U.S. taxpayers certainly haven’t ended ours.

The investigative journalist Wayne Madsen has published his analysis of the American aristocrats, ranging from the Kochs on the right to the Soroses on the left, who are lobbying for this campaign to get taxpayers to fund the American aristocracy’s military take-over of other nations’ aristocracies and resources. Madsen sees as being the few politicians in Washington who are resisting that, both Ron Paul (and definitely not his son Rand Paul) libertarians, and Dennis Kucinich progressives.

Madsen doesn’t note, however, that both of those men are now retired; so, they can afford to speak the truth without losing their jobs, since they’ve already lost them. Among the U.S. aristocracy that finances politicians into federal offices, there is no visible support whatsoever for such dissidents challenging the aristocracy: when one of them somehow manages to get into the political system, they’re removed from it, in one way or another, before they can do any damage to the U.S. aristocracy.

This is how it came to be that 98% of the House and 100% of the Senate voted for war against Russia, even though at least 67% of the American public who expressed an opinion about that in a Pew poll were opposed (and this 67% figure might have been far higher if the question had been more directly asked, such as: “Should the U.S. go to war against Russia in order to enable Ukraine to get back Crimea and conquer the rebelling regions in Ukraine’s own former southeast?”).

Madsen also has an interesting explanation as to why Israel is so passionately supportive of the racist-fascist, or nazi, Ukrainian political parties that the Obama Administration has placed in control of Ukraine.

Regardless of such speculations and evidence, however, there is nothing speculative about the American Government’s drive to nuclear war.

It’s part and parcel of the same deal that just passed in the U.S. Congress and was signed by the President, that in the event of any future U.S. financial crash, FDIC-insured bank accounts won’t be paid until and unless the mega-banks that hold derivatives contracts get full payment on all of those gambling policies they had bought — i.e, never. Granny’s savings account will get emptied out to pay Wall Street’s gambling-debts. Suddenly wall street looks like Bestuscasinos.org. (Not that the U.S. ‘news’ media ever made such things clear to the public. But how do you think we had managed to obtain a Congress and a President like these are? The public had to be fooled by the aristocrats’ propaganda, and the ‘news’ media had to let them be fooled by it, because the ‘news’ media receive their funding from aristocrats, both as their owners and as their advertisers. The public are just pawns on their chessboard. This is what became of democracy: it’s the verbal shell, ‘democracy.’)

As Obama told the mega-bank chiefs on 27 March 2009 in private, “I’m protecting you … My Administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

He’s going to teach those granny-bank-account “pitchforks,” and such, a thing or two about “the one indispensable nation.” Namely: those people in it are dispensable, even if not quite as much so as are the people his forces are slaughtering (ethnically cleansing) in southeast Ukraine and other such places, where the ‘real riffraff’ live. The people in those areas are punished and killed for the crime of living where “the right people” want them simply to be gone.

“Sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.” But it’s long since gone, and is now aiming to clear out land elsewhere, especially southeast Ukraine.

America’s ‘entrepreneurs’ have work to do, across the globe; and all the charred remains of the nuclear ‘victory’ will be passed on to their proud heirs.

It’s the new American way.

Obama had it all figured out. Everything else from him was just an act.

If you don’t think so, then how do you explain this, and this, and this, and this? Are those just innocent tragedies; and, if not, then who was the most indispensable person toward causing them to happen — causing them to be imposed by the Ukrainian Government that Obama’s coup imposed upon Ukraine? Obama’s decisions were essential in order to empower the people who are perpetrating this extermination-campaign, which is the bait intended to draw Putin into a conflict so as to provide a pretext for an American nuclear attack against Russia.

If the next U.S. President protects Obama from criminal prosecution for Ukraine like Obama protected Bush from criminal prosecution for Iraq, then the U.S. is hopelessly a lawless nation, no democracy at all.

Unfortunately, the nuclear bombs in the war that Obama and the other stooges of America’s aristocracy are building up to will not be targeted against themselves and their psychopathic (often billionaire) sponsors. Those people have their bomb-shelters, and their corporate jets.

Oligarchs are foreign to a democracy. Consequently, their servants in government, especially America’s current and former President, are foreign to the U.S. Constitution, and to their Oath of Office, and thus to this country, irrespective of their technical citizenship as ‘American.’ They both should be brought up on charges of treason against the United States of America; for, if they are not, then truly democracy is ended in this country, and America’s Presidents are not subject to American Law, but instead stand above it, beyond it, and immune from it.

Reader-comments to this commentary, pro-and-con, are invited regarding this conclusion, especially because a public forum to discuss this severe matter is needed now, a turning-point in American, and (sad to say), perhaps also (if a nuclear attack occurs) in global history. That’s the case regardless of which side of this debate one is on. The fundamental character of this country is at stake now. The public should have a say in it.