Showing posts sorted by relevance for query obama. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query obama. Sort by date Show all posts

Friday, July 31, 2020

From Ian:

GOP Lawmaker Calls on Trump to Designate Top Palestinian Official as Terror Sponsor
A US congressman with a track record of countering terrorism sponsored by the Palestinian Authority (PA) has called on President Donald Trump to blacklist a leading PA official.

In a letter to Trump on Thursday, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) urged Trump to designate the PA’s Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs and its director, Qadri Abu Bakr, as sponsors of terror because of their direct involvement in providing monthly payments to terrorists and their families.

Lamborn was a principal backer of the 2018 Taylor Force Act, which conditions US aid to the PA on a verifiable abandonment its “pay‐for‐slay” policy. Two years after the legislation’s passage, the PA has not changed its policy.

“Unfortunately, the Palestinian leadership has continued to pay the terror rewards to terrorists, spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year to these monsters and their families,” Lamborn wrote in his letter to Trump. “Since the passing of the Taylor Force Act, and a similar law in Israel’s Knesset passed by my friends MKs Elazar Stern and Avi Dichter in July 2018, the Palestinian leadership has spent over 1.2 billion shekels, or $350 million, continuing to reward terror.”

“This vile practice must end, and your administration has the courage and moral clarity to do it,” Lamborn declared.
New UNRWA head to 'Post': No glorifying terrorists in our schools
The phrase “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” may be a cliché, but in the case of Dalal Mughrabi, the difference could define the political landscape of the Middle East for decades to come.

In 1978, Mughrabi took part in the Coastal Road Massacre in which an Israeli bus was hijacked. Thirty-eight Israelis lost their lives in the attack, including 13 children. To Israelis, Mughrabi is a terrorist.

To the Palestinians, she is a national treasure. Children are taught to emulate her example. Five schools under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority are named for Mughrabi, as are town squares, summer camps and a women’s center.

She also pops up regularly in textbooks, where she is lauded as martyr and a hero.

Responsibility for reaching a definitive ruling on Mughrabi’s status – if such a thing is possible – may ultimately fall to Philippe Lazzarini, the incoming commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for the Palestinians.

His agency is committed to delivering international quality education to the more than 530,000 children educated within UNRWA’s 708 elementary and preparatory schools in the region. And as we are always told, the children are our future.

So, is Mughrabi a terrorist, or a martyr? What should the children be taught?

“Let’s be clear, there is no glorification of martyrs being taught in UNRWA schools,” Lazzarini told The Jerusalem Post via Zoom from Amman, Jordan. “There is none of that. No teacher is teaching that.

“We have extremely clear guidance regarding this because UNRWA is also in disagreement with this example [of Mughrabi]. I know this keeps popping up, but UNRWA has given clear instructions that this not be taught in the schools because it can be perceived as incitement, depending on how it is brought to the attention of the children.”





Tuesday, April 02, 2019

From Ian:

Jew-hatred poses as anti-racism in ‘The New York Times’
This week’s New York Times Magazine features an essay by the veteran Israel-hater Nathan Thrall titled “How the Battle over Israel and Anti-Semitism Is Fracturing American Politics.” Employing a variety of lies, half-truths, illogical deductions, and insinuations, it draws a contrast between wealthy Jewish donors to the Democratic party who are sympathetic to Israel and minority, primarily black, activists who are anti-Israel. Jonathan Tobin comments:

Thrall’s object is to justify [boycott-Israel] campaigns that anchor the debate about the subject in “Black-Palestinian solidarity” and the effort to view the war on Israel through the “racial-justice prism.” The result is an 11,000-word essay that seeks to . . . paint Zionism as inherently racist and efforts to destroy Israel as idealistic attempts to defend human rights, [while also seeking] to portray the pro-Israel movement’s effort to push back at anti-Semitic attacks as tainted by prejudice against African-Americans and fueled primarily by the heavy-handed efforts of Jewish donors to manipulate the Democratic party.

One of Thrall’s primary sources is the former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes. . . . The article . . . amplifies Rhodes’s specious claim that President Obama’s inability to persuade Israel’s supporters to back him on the [Israel-Palestinian] issue was due to racial prejudice. He claims that supporters of Israel assumed that Barack Obama was pro-Palestinian because he was black. Rhodes’s thesis, which Thrall endorses, is that this alleged fear of Obama was the result of the pro-Israel community’s understanding that the Jewish state really was “an oppressor.” According to Rhodes, Obama’s critics were “acknowledging, through [their] own fears, that Israel treats the Palestinians like black people had been treated in the United States.”

This argument has it backward. Jewish Democrats [went to enormous lengths] to maintain their faith that Obama had been sincere in his professions of support for Israel when he ran for president in 2008, in spite of evidence to the contrary, both then and later. Far from being prejudiced against him, most American Jews stuck loyally to Obama, despite his belief that more “daylight” was needed between Israel and the United States. They even supported his efforts to appease an Iranian regime that was bent on genocide.

The assumption that Palestinians and Israeli Arabs are treated the same way as the African-American victims of Jim Crow in the pre-civil-rights-era South is a big lie. . . . The standoff about the future of the West Bank exists because the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected offers of peace and statehood. They would have attained independence long ago had they been willing to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders might be drawn.

Former British PM Gordon Brown says Labour has ‘let the Jewish community down’
Former British prime minister Gordon Brown announced Monday he has joined the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) as an affiliate member, in a bid to combat rising anti-Semitism within the opposition party.

In a video released by the Hope not Hate organization, which works to challenge racism, the former Labour leader says the party has “let the Jewish community and itself down” over the past two years, in a reference to the anti-Semitism accusations that have dogged the party and its leadership.

The clip was filmed at London’s Liverpool Street Station, where there is a statue to commemorate the nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children who were rescued in the Kindertransport during World War II. The children were taken out of Europe and fostered in Britain and as a result were often the only members of their families to survive the Holocaust.

In the video, Brown speaks passionately of “the promises we made following the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust to the Jewish community: that you will never walk alone and we will never walk by on the other side.”

He also notes that the party “should never have allowed legitimate criticism — that I share — of the current Israeli government to act as a cover for the demonization of the entire Jewish people.”


When the UK’s left-wing prime minister was one of Israel’s closest friends
Harold Wilson may be less well-known internationally than Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair, but he dominated British politics for much of the 1960s and 1970s — and remains the only modern-day prime minister to win four general elections.

His return to office 45 years ago this month was as unexpected as his defeat had been four years previously when, having rewarded him with a landslide victory in 1966, the voters unceremoniously ejected his Labour government in June 1970.

But, in many regards, Wilson’s roller-coaster ride in the decade between 1964 and 1974, from victory to defeat and back again, was completely predictable.

Famously pragmatic — critics claimed unprincipled — the former prime minister’s name became for a time synonymous with the wheeler-dealing and political game-playing in which he undoubtedly reveled.

As one contemporary newspaper columnist suggested, Wilson’s image was “a dark serpentine crawling trimmer, shifty and shuffling, devious, untrustworthy, constant only in the pursuit of self-preservation and narrow party advantage.” For the historian Dominic Sandbrook, Wilson was “a brilliant opportunist.”

There was, however, a limit to Wilson’s alleged opportunism. As the left wing and veteran Zionist Labour MP, Ian Mikardo, once argued: “I don’t think Harold … [had] any doctrinal beliefs at all. Except for one, which I find utterly incomprehensible, which is his devotion to the cause of Israel.”

Wilson’s leadership arguably marked the high point of the relationship between Labour and British Jews, a bond which has today been strained by Jeremy Corbyn’s strident anti-Zionism and the allegations of anti-Semitism which continue to rock the party. It is a reminder not simply of happier times, but of the staunch support that the left once offered to Israel and the rather more ambivalent stance adopted by British conservatives.

Saturday, April 06, 2019

From Ian:

Netanyahu vows to annex settlements in West Bank if he wins election
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began a campaign over the weekend to take seats away from the Likud’s satellite parties on the Right, in an effort to win more seats for Likud than Blue and White in Tuesday’s election, and ensure that President Reuven Rivlin will ask him to form the next government.

As part of that effort, in an interview with Channel 12 on Saturday night, Netanyahu vowed to annex territories in settlements and evacuate the illegal West Bank herding village of Khan Al-Ahmar, if he wins another term.

“We are dealing [with the Americans] on exercising Israeli sovereignty on Ma’aleh Adumim and other things,” Netanyahu said. “Everyone understands the next term will be fateful for guaranteeing our security and our control over key territory in Judea and Samaria.”

In weekend interviews with Channel 13 and the right-wing Makor Rishon and Israel Hayom newspapers, Netanyahu vowed to not permit a single settlement or a single resident of them to be evacuated.

“That [evacuation] will not be happening,” he told Channel 13. “If that’s the plan, there will be no plan.”

In the Makor Rishon interview, Netanyahu promised more clearly than ever that he would form a government with right-wing parties and not invite Blue and White to join his coalition.

“Anyone with a brain understands that a unity government cannot be formed,” he said.
Ben Rhodes is back for more Israel-bashing
In the same Times article, a “former member of the Obama White House” (sounding an awful lot like Rhodes) revealed that the Obama administration played a central role in that U.N. Security Council vote against Israel in the autumn of 2016.

You remember that one. It was a run-of-the-mill U.N. resolution declaring that the Jewish presence in the Old City of Jerusalem was “illegal.” The kind of resolution American presidents routinely vetoed many times in the past. But not President Obama. He had secretly decided to abstain, so that the resolution would pass.

The problem for Obama was the timing: The vote was scheduled to take place shortly before that year’s presidential election. So the Obama team manipulated the schedule. “There is a reason the U.N. vote did not come up before the election in November,” the anonymous “former official” told the Times. “It was because you were going to have skittish donors. That, and the fact that we didn’t want [Hillary] Clinton to face pressure to condemn the resolution or be damaged by having to defend it.”

At the time, of course, Team Obama loudly denied the Israeli government’s claim that the White House was secretly planning to let the U.N. resolution pass. Obama aides like Rhodes, on the record and off the record, vigorously attacked critics who raised such suspicions. But now we know that the suspicions were well-founded.

Why does any of this matter now, years after Obama left office?

First, it matters because Obama is still a major force in the Democratic Party. He will influence the outcome of the race for the Democratic nomination in 2020. His views on Israel will continue to shape the party’s position.

Second, it matters because it sheds some light on why Obama rushed to appoint Rhodes to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council in the waning hours before he left office—and why Rhodes wanted the appointment. Rhodes has harsh opinions about Israel. He seems proud that he helped trick the public into accepting the Iran deal. And he’s proud of his role in Obama’s policies towards Israel—in fact, he regrets that they weren’t harsher. Clearly, Rhodes wants a platform that will help keep him and his opinions in the public spotlight.

Serving on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council gives Rhodes cover as he plans his next move. You can almost hear him warming up the argument: “You can’t accuse me of being anti-Israel—I’m part of the leadership of the Holocaust Museum!” Sadly, Israel and American Jewry have not heard the last of him.
Sarsour Whitewashes Omar
Raging Linda Sarsour recently tried to whitewash her buddy Omar's obvious anti-semitism in a recent speech:

But what has happened often from White Jews when they call you call an antisemite, is they look at Muslim women from an orientalist trope, that we are inherently antisemitic because we are Muslims, right?

"It's a stereotype that has been used often against the Muslim community. That we are antisemitic until proven otherwise. That we are guilty until proven innocent. It's not okay."

"She didn't know nothing in Somalia, about no antisemitism. This is something she is learning along the way now that she is a legislator


Where to begin? White Jews. Two of the most hated groups among leftists and Muslims like Sarsour and Omar evidently. The inclusion of the word white is an attempt I suppose to do the old good Jew Bad Jew thing; a common anti-semitic trope. This is also an attempt, like all the rants these bigots give, to mainstream antisemitic tropes.

Orientalist? Well, this is a reference to failed Jew hater and PLO member Edward Said's definition of "a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous" Exotic? Eye of the beholder. Backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous? Well, look at what they do and say. Geeze, a whole Arab nation, Brunei has progressed so much it is now stoning gays in 2019. If that ain't backward, uncivilized and dangerous, I don;t know what is.

Stereotype? Well, if it walks like duck....show me a Muslim that isn't Pro-BDS or or anti-Israel and I'll show you a Muslim that isn't antisemitic. Until then, the shoe fits Linda.

Friday, December 04, 2020

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The agenda that undermines America’s bond with the Jews
Among those who understood the depth of former US President Barack Obama’s hostility to Israel, there’s understandable anxiety about the Obama retreads and acolytes among the foreign policy and security nominees being chosen by the prospective president-elect, Joe Biden.

Obama’s hostility is assumed to derive from his left-wing mindset which regards Israel, falsely and ahistorically, as a colonialist occupying power. He demonstrates this in his new memoir, A Promised Land, in his profoundly distorted account of the origins of the modern State of Israel.

There is, however, a deeper reason why both Obama and the left find Israel so intensely problematic, and why a Biden presidency will once again have Israel in its cross-hairs. This isn’t about foreign policy. It’s about the programme for America itself.

The core of the left’s agenda is to remake the western world; and the agenda of Obama and the American left is to remake America.

Their target is the western nation-state and its culture. The core precepts of that culture are articulated and enshrined within the different histories, laws, religions, institutions and traditions of individual western nations.

The left, however, deems the western nation-state to be evil because it declares itself superior to cultures that don’t share its values while excluding those who don’t belong to it.

Hence the left’s constant undermining of immigration laws in their attempt to erase national borders; their refusal to grasp that citizenship is a bargain between the citizen and the state to which he or she belongs; and their savage denunciations of those who uphold such notions as racists or xenophobes, in order to erase their voices altogether from the cultural conversation.

The nation, its specific attributes and the borders that define its territory must instead give way to a Kumbaya vision of the brotherhood of man expressed through trans-national institutions and laws.

Much of this erosion of western values has already been achieved, in schools and universities, through the culture wars. Obama’s strategy in his eight years in the White House was to weaponise this agenda through the presidency.
20 years on and still no justice
Out of the hundreds of terrorist attacks etched on Israel's collective memory, the slaughter at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem stands out as one of the worst. On Aug. 9, 2001, when summer vacation was in full swing, Hamas terrorist Muhammad al-Masri entered the restaurant in the city center carrying a bomb hidden inside a guitar. When it detonated, it killed 15 people, including half of the Schijveschuurder family (both parents and three children, and two other children were seriously hurt), wounded a total of 140, and left an indelible trauma.

The victims included six American citizens, four of whom were wounded – including Chana Nachenberg, who remains in a vegetative state – and two of whom were killed – Shoshana Greenbaum, a 31-year-old teacher from New Jersey who was six months pregnant, and 15-year-old Malki Roth, who died alongside her friend Michal Raziel.

In a response that was considered harsh at the time, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered that the Palestinian Authority offices in Jerusalem, primarily the Orient House, be shut down. And as the horrific days of the Second Intifada continued, the public's attention shifted to the even more deadly attacks that soon followed.

Twenty years after the Sbarro catastrophe, one matter remains unresolved. The 22-year-old suicide bomber had been driven into the heart of Jerusalem by a pair of terrorists, Mohammad Daghlas, who was behind the wheel, and Ahlam Tamimi, a Palestinian TV anchor who used her press pass to get through the security checkpoints on the way to the capital. Tamimi directed the suicide bomber to his target destination, and immediately fled the scene. She got on a bus at Damascus Gate and heard radio reports that the number of Jews who had been killed was mounting.

"There was great joy on the bus. People congratulated each other, even though they didn't know each other. They didn't know about my part," Tamimi said later in several interviews. Later that evening, she reported on the attack without revealing the part she had played. A few weeks later, the IDF arrested her. She was sentenced to 16 life sentences and another 15 years in prison. While in prison, she announced that he had married her cousin Nizar Tamimi, who had murdered Beit El resident Haim Mizrahi in 1993.

A decade after Tamimi was imprisoned, Israel made a deal for the release of captive IDF soldier Gilad Schalit. Tamimi and the driver were both released, and subsequently, Tamimi arrived in Jordan. She was the only Jordanian citizen among the 1.027 prisoners who were released in the deal.

Nizar Tamimi was also freed. He was supposed to remain in the West Bank, but someone in the Israeli establishment helped him move to Jordan, duping Malki Roth's father, attorney Arnold Roth, who had been trying to keep the couple from being reunited.


Frimet Roth: Forever 15
This week, we mark yet another agonizing birthday.

My sweet daughter, Malki, would now be 35 years old if Hamas operative Ahlam Tamimi had made some misstep on Aug. 9, 2001.

But Tamimi was and still is a seasoned, determined, efficient and bloodthirsty terrorist.

In the Sbarro bombing, which she confesses she masterminded and which she calls “my operation,” seven babies and children perished with nine adults—some parents alongside their offspring. It was an unmitigated massacre.

Never could we have imagined that her murderer would now be free as a bird—and protected by a ruler who is coddled by both the United States and Israel—King Abdullah II of Jordan.

Tamimi’s stated determination to kill Jews is matched only by the determination of world leaders to ignore our pleas to correct the travesty of justice that Tamimi’s freedom embodies.

Our letters, phone calls, op-eds, tweets and front-page advertisements have fallen on deaf ears. They have only elicited excuses, evasive double-talk, or total silence from most of the people who could easily assist us if they cared to.

There are no obstacles in their path: - Legislation has existed for years empowering the United States to arrest, try and convict terrorists in U.S. courts under U.S. law if they kill a U.S. national, which Malki was. - In 1995, an extradition treaty was signed and ratified between the U.S. and Jordan, and accepted as valid by both countries. The State Department still takes that view. - Tamimi was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list in 2017. A $5 million State Department reward for her capture and conviction was announced in 2018. - Legislation enacted in 2019 empowers the U.S. to impose a foreign-aid sanction on any country failing to abide by its treaty obligation to the U.S.

None of the steps that could be taken to right this moral wrong has been taken.

Thursday, November 26, 2020

From Ian:

Obama’s revisionist ‘Promised Land’
I have never criticized former U.S. President Barack Obama publicly—neither during my time in the Knesset nor anywhere else—despite my having disagreed with many of his policies. I am of the strong opinion that Israelis should not engage in or interfere with American politics, and I regularly offer a blanket thank you to all American presidents, including Obama, for their economic and military support for Israel.

However, his memoir, A Promised Land, is filled with historical inaccuracies that I feel the need to address. His telling of Israel’s story (at the beginning of Chapter 25) not only exhibits a flawed understanding of the region—which clearly impacted his policies as president—but misleads readers in a way that will forever shape their negative perspective of the Jewish state.

Obama relates, for example, how the British were “occupying Palestine” when they issued the Balfour Declaration calling for a Jewish state. But labeling Great Britain as an “occupier” clearly casts doubt on its legitimacy to determine anything about the future of the Holy Land—and that wasn’t the situation.

While it is true that England had no legal rights in Palestine when the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917, that changed just five years later. The League of Nations, precursor to the United Nations, gave the British legal rights over Palestine in its 1922 “Mandate for Palestine,” which specifically mentions “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

The League also said that “recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”

The former president’s noted omission of the internationally agreed-upon mandate for the British to establish a home for the Jews in Palestine misinforms the reader, who will conclude that the movement for a Jewish state in Palestine had no legitimacy or international consent.

“Over the next 20 years, Zionist leaders mobilized a surge of Jewish migration to Palestine,” Obama writes, creating the image that once the British illegally began the process of forming a Jewish state in Palestine, Jews suddenly started flocking there.


Supreme Court Blocks Cuomo’s Limits On Synagogues, Churches in Thanksgiving Ruling
The Supreme Court sided with a coalition of Orthodox Jewish groups and the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn Thursday in an emergency appeal that alleged New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's (D.) COVID-related worship restrictions discriminate against Jews and violate the First Amendment.

The vote in the early Thanksgiving morning ruling was five to four, with Chief Justice John Roberts and the liberal trio in dissent. "Statements made in connection with the challenged rules can be viewed as targeting the ‘ultra-Orthodox Jewish' community. But even if we put those comments aside, the regulations cannot be viewed as neutral because they single out houses of worship for especially harsh treatment," the majority wrote in an unsigned opinion.

Cuomo's contested regulations establish three kinds of hotspot zones with corresponding restrictions. In red zones, where transmission is highest, church attendance is capped at 10. In less severe orange zones, that number is 25, while houses of worship in yellow zones may open at 50 percent attendance. A portion of Brooklyn and about half of Queens are currently in yellow zones.

"It is time—past time—to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues, and mosques," Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in defense of the ruling.

Thursday, October 24, 2019

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Disempowered
Review of 'The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir' by Samantha Power

It surprised no one, least of all U.S. intelligence agencies. As Joby Warrick reported in the Washington Post the following week, “U.S. spy agencies recorded each step in the alleged chemical attack, from the extensive preparations to the launching of rockets to the after-action assessments by Syrian officials.” The administration had no doubt now, and no plausible deniability either.

Obama was now convinced he had to strike Syria. But he had a problem of his own making: UN inspectors were on the ground. So the president waited. And as he waited, he got cold feet and started looking for a way out. He chose to put the matter in the hands of Congress—he needed no authorization for strikes, he said, but wouldn’t strike without congressional say-so. No real strategy to persuade even Democrats in Congress was set forth. And there was, Power writes, no Plan B.

In the end, Obama’s desperation to be bailed out of action led him to agree to a joint U.S.-Russian plan to rid Syria of the chemical weapons. It was a sham. Assad hid some weapons from inspectors and continued bombing civilians with chemicals that were left off the list. Obama rewarded Assad and Vladimir Putin by ceding them the playing field conclusively. Power looks back on one administration meeting after the August chemical attacks:

What I did not know in that Saturday meeting was that this would end up being the only time Obama would seriously contemplate using military force against the Assad regime. We would have countless meetings and debates on Syria over the next three and a half years, but he would never again consider taking the kind of risk he had been prepared to bear in the immediate aftermath of the August 21st attack.

And why wouldn’t he ever again consider it? Because he had undertaken to strike a deal with Assad’s patron in Tehran and to reorganize American alliances to allow Iran and Russia to fill the vacuum of U.S. influence in the region, a vacuum that Obama specifically aimed to create. As Frederic Hof, a U.S. envoy to Syria in 2012, put it: “To complicate the ability of Iran’s man in Syria to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity would have placed at risk nuclear negotiations aimed ultimately at dissolving American relationships of trust and confidence with key regional powers.”

Power never realized that she wasn’t there to be heeded. Rather, she was there to be silenced. Obama’s conduct of U.S. foreign policy required the coopting of his critics. He found a way to let the world burn without running afoul of Samantha Power’s network of interventionist scolds: Make Power the public face of doing nothing.

Book review: A respectable fig leaf
A key problem is denialism. As Stellman points out, “Anti-Zionists are very sensitive when charged with antisemitism.” Anti-Zionists protest their revulsion against all forms of racism and, in an ironic twist, accuse their accusers of conspiring against them “to shut down criticism of Israel.”

What is astonishing is that this transparent ruse, itself utilizing an antisemitic trope, appears to have worked. At a recent Intelligence Squared debate in London, the motion that “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism” was defeated by a margin of 4-1. Those who applaud that result will be discomfited to read Kaplan and Small’s landmark 2006 study of 5,000 citizens in 10 European countries. Stellman quotes their important finding of a direct statistical correlation between anti-Israel rhetoric and antisemitism: “Even after controlling for numerous potentially confounding factors...anti-Israel sentiment consistently predicts the probability that an individual is antisemitic.”

The sickness that lies at the heart of the current assault on Israel’s legitimacy is laid out in forensic detail by Stellman’s dispassionate, methodologically rigorous approach. The result is this little volume packed with valuable – if often depressing – information presented in a way that activists and scholars alike should find compelling. The short chapters are easy to read, aided by bullet points and a comprehensive index. The final section contains a set of tools specifically designed for use by trainers and educators.

Some of Stellman’s assertions will elicit controversy: is there really any practical difference between “political” and “anti-Israel” anti-Zionism? Both have the same ultimate objective. And are statements lacking nuance, such as “Islam is basically an expansionist religion” and that “Muslims must wage a ‘Jihad’, a ‘Holy War’, until the whole world becomes “Dar al-Islam” appropriate in a text that explores (among other issues) religiously inspired hatred of one group by another?

The evidence for the central thesis of the book – that anti-Zionsim and antisemitism are closely interlinked – is overwhelming. This is an observation with major implications for the discourse around the Arab-Israeli conflict, yet it is one that is rarely discussed or even acknowledged by allegedly “expert” commentators, academics, politicians, NGOs and the media. That lacuna of awareness represents an existential threat to the future of Israel (and, by extension, the Jewish people) and, in consequence, the prospects for peace.

This handbook is an important contribution to the scant but growing literature on anti-Zionism. Stellman has formulated an important response to that vacuum of serious academic thought. In any future edition (and I gather that the Stellman is planning a follow-up book containing new material), it would be helpful to the reader if the author could add a section by tying together the disparate threads of his argument into a small number of key conclusions. Ideally, these would be linked to a series of recommendations as to how activists might develop practical and effective strategies for countering the anti-Zionist threat to Israel, Jews and civilized norms everywhere.
Talk about Anti-Semitism at a College Campus, and the Anti-Semites Will Show Up
At a conference held at Bard College two weeks ago on the subject of “racism and anti-Semitism,” a group of protesters—organized by Students for Justice in Palestine—attempted with some success to disrupt a talk by Ruth Wisse and two (Jewish) discussants. (Wisse, known for speaking her mind forcefully against campus anti-Semitism, thanked the protestors for “providing a demonstration” of the topic at hand.) Administrators and security did little to stop the demonstrators.

While such scenes are hardly remarkable in today’s universities, more notable was the flood of indignant denials from conference participants that followed an article by one of the discussants, Batya Ungar-Sargon, describing what happened. The indignation, perhaps, stemmed from Ungar-Sargon’s willingness to label the demonstrations anti-Semitic. Shany Mor, a professor at Bard and the third participant on the panel, defends Ungar-Sargon’s account and exposes the feeble excuses for the thuggish behavior of the students:

The protest was only against Wisse, I was told repeatedly, even though flyers against all three of us were distributed. This was the reception controversial speakers should expect, I was told, even though there were many far more controversial speakers at the conference. But this is a liberal campus, I was told, and the reception was always going to be worse for controversial speakers from the right than from the left. This was doubly odd, as neither Ungar-Sargon nor I can be fairly imagined as being on the right by anyone’s imagination.

And, while many of the more provocative lectures were not terribly provocative to a left-liberal audience, [others] were. There was a panelist who argued that black underachievement was not due to racism but to fathers. There was a panelist arguing that “chosenness” had distorted Jewish political thought and as such infected later European thought on colonialism. . . . . There was a panelist who argued that certain African and Asian countries might have been better off had they remained under European colonial rule. . . . Some had difficult questions from the audience; many didn’t even have that. None was protested.

This is what makes [one Bard professor’s] claim that the demonstration was motivated by nothing more than the fact that the three panelists “espouse political opinions with which the students disagree” so outrageous. It’s understandable that this is what he might want believe, but it’s verifiably false. The three of us up there on that stage actually have radically different political views from each other, and radically different views on the issue in question at that session. This would have been apparent had a civilized discussion taken place.

Tuesday, December 01, 2020

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of JStreet, on Sunday condemned the assassination of senior Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Ben-Ami took his cue from the EU, which took its cue from Tehran. One can understand why Tehran would condemn the assassination of the man considered to be the father of Iran’s nuclear program, someone considered “irreplaceable” in the mullahs’ quest to get the bomb. Iran wants the bomb, and the elimination of Fakhrizadeh is a setback. Big time. The condemnations coming out of Brussels and from Ben-Ami, on the other hand, can be explained only by the famous quote from Winston Churchill:

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."

It makes sense that JStreet would want to appease Iran by condemning the elimination of Fakhrizadeh, a man with deep knowledge of the Iranian nuclear program. A nuclear Iran threatens the free world, not least of all the United States. Go to any protest, or even to the Iranian parliament after Soleimani was killed, and you will hear the chants of, "Marg bar Āmrikā," (Death to America).


JStreet’s Ben-Ami hopes that in agreeing with his wannabe murderers, they will consent to eat him last.

Perhaps more to the point, JStreet is an anti-Israel organization pretending to engage in Israel advocacy. JStreet actually shares the aim of the Iranian nuclear program: the elimination of the Jewish State—witness the organization's covert support for BDS. It is believed that Israel is behind the assassination of Fakhrizadeh, though the Jewish State has neither confirmed nor denied a role in the targeted killing of the scientist. Israel has a good motive for taking out Fakhrizadeh and that is that while a nuclear Iran may be the greatest existential threat to the free world—which unfortunately includes Jeremy Ben-Ami among its inhabitants—Israel is Iran’s closest target, and the elimination of the Jewish State a primary goal for Khameini.

Ben-Ami, knowing that Israel is first on the menu, hopes that in condemning the actions of the Jewish State, he will be last on the list of tasty items to be consumed by the crocodile named Iran. That is why Ben-Ami was pleased to be included on the guest list of Jewish leaders invited to Obama’s table to discuss how Israel might be pressured to give away more indigenous Jewish land to the Arabs. Obama is the main architect of that ultimate appeasement of Iran: the JCPOA (which Iran never signed). It is Obama who sent the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, pallets of untraceable cash.

It is only natural that Ben-Ami would wish to be a starring ingredient in the dessert course, to ally himself with Obama. Ben-Ami, like Obama, wants to be eaten last. Alas, the only way for these men to fulfill this aim is to make themselves relevant until the end. They hope that if they appear to share the goal of the crocodile, and even assist in procuring food for the beast, the beast might save them for another day, when there is nothing tastier to eat.

The problem is that the crocodile is a bully, and the problem with appeasing a bully is that the bully always comes back for more. Which means that the bullied are never free, even as they delude themselves that the opposite is true, that they are saved. Being last to be eaten, on the other hand, by definition means that one is eventually eaten. Which is how the game ends.

And the game always ends unless you stand up to the crocodile, to cut off its sustenance for good. That is the only way to do away with the crocodile, once and for all. Which Israel knew. Which is why Fakhrizadeh had to go.

It only makes sense. It’s the only real way to game the system, to not get eaten, last or otherwise.

Anyone who understands this, anyone with a modicum of sechel or common sense, therefore did not vote for Joe Biden. Biden, predictably, intends to revive the JCPOA, because he too, hopes to be eaten last, as do those who voted for him. The Biden voters either hope to be last to be eaten by the Iranian crocodile, or else they are oblivious to the danger in the swamp. They are oblivious because the media dangles progressive sugar plums before their eyes, the shiny and exciting causes they prefer to embrace above life itself: BLM, Antifa, illegal immigrants, and above all, a supreme hatred of the Orange Man.

The people who voted for Biden (and Obama before him), can’t see the crocodile lurking, waiting to pounce on those with no clue of the danger waiting for them in the wings. The crocodile, meanwhile, watches on as its early prey, the Biden voters, spew their hatred of anyone who thinks differently from them: the people who won’t get with the plan. The Biden voters don’t know that all along, the plan has been out of their hands and even unknown to them, the people to be eaten first.

The people who voted for Biden, knowing he would probably reinstitute the JCPOA, are like so much unwitting chum. They have no idea how delicious they are, as an appetizer, or even a main course. Ben-Ami, meanwhile, awaits his turn on the platter with bated breath—perhaps garnished with edible gold—as the crocodile opens its yawning cavern of a mouth, never to be sated or satisfied.

Always wanting more.



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Tuesday, November 10, 2020

From Ian:

Can Biden See What’s at Stake in the Middle East?
The real issues in the immediate future are how the Biden Administration positions American interests vis a vis Iran and, in particular, the JCPOA. Trump’s Iran adviser, Elliott Abrams, was dispatched over the weekend to Israel to engage in a series of meetings and briefings with top Israeli officials, including, of course, Prime Minister Netanyahu. Media reports indicate that, in its final two months, the Trump Administration will issue a barrage of sanctions against Iran in coordination with Saudi Arabia and, likely, other Gulf states. The focus of such sanctions will be to impact the development of the Iranian ballistic missile system and, generally, to frustrate the incoming administration’s instinct to pander to the Iranian regime, a la Obama.

The Iranian economy is on the finest knife-edge, more imperiled than at any time during Obama’s tenure. Perhaps the hope of the Trump Administration is that sharpening the blade a touch more could be lethal and tip the balance, forcing Iranian capitulation on certain civil liberties and human rights issues, and further pressuring the increasingly besieged tyrannical regime in Tehran.

Biden and his team have been very clear regarding their intentions to “reopen” the JCPOA for renewed American leadership and participation pending Iranian compliance with its terms. The incoming administration has also telegraphed a desire to support the realization of a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.

Each of those sweeping positions is code for a radical re-alignment of Mideast geopolitical policy from the Trump years; basically, reverting to the so-called “Obama doctrine”, which was far from a raging success in its eight-year lifespan.

Biden enters the White House at a time when the strategic and commercial alliances in the Middle East have been utterly transformed from what they were four years ago. Among his earliest tests will be whether he understands the gravity and irreversibility of this change. Obama turned his back on traditional U.S. allies in the region, causing a deep mistrust to set in and harden. Biden cannot just walk back into the room and flick the switch. The centrality of Palestinian statehood to Middle Eastern reality was the foundation of Obama’s approach to the region. That “reality” no longer exists. The Gulf states have made clear that they recognize a permanent Israeli presence in the region and urge the Palestinians to do so, too.

Without fresh eyes and policies, Biden risks the humiliation of a very downgraded relevancy in the region. The same old same old just won’t cut it.
Mordechai Kedar: How Israel Should React to President-Elect Biden
One of the realities to which Israel will have to adjust during a Biden administration is that Barack Obama will probably play a role, officially or otherwise, as an advisor on national security or political affairs. This means Israel needs to start having conversations with members of the emerging Biden administration rather than move forward, in the waning days of Trump’s term in office, to achieve goals that the Biden administration will not accept.

It has been suggested that Israel should exploit the remaining months of the Trump presidency to extend sovereignty over parts of the West Bank. Doing so would echo the approach of Barack Obama, who, during his own transition out of the Oval Office in December 2016, supported the thoroughly anti-Israel UN Security Council Resolution 2334, spurning President-elect Trump’s request that he not do so.

Applying Israeli sovereignty to parts of the West Bank over the next two months without coordination with the incoming Biden administration might so greatly disturb a Biden administration that pressure could be brought to bear to declare all Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank illegitimate. Implementation of sovereignty could even result in the imposition of US sanctions on Israel (in relation to settlement, sovereignty, or both), a move that would be heartily endorsed by members of Congress of the likes of Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Senator Bernie Sanders.

Israel must absorb the fact that the Democratic Party of today is not the same party it was eight years ago. It has become extremist in some ways, a process that intensified sharply in response to Trump’s entry into the White House and accelerated throughout his four-year term in response to his policies, both domestic and foreign. Pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel positions have multiplied and increased their grip on Democratic constituencies. Voices are already being heard suggesting the reopening of Palestine Liberation Organization offices in Washington and moving US embassy activities back to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem.

But the most complicated problem with applying sovereignty right now concerns the UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan, and also (implicitly) Saudi Arabia. These countries will view an Israeli implementation of sovereignty without prior coordination with them as evidence of Israeli fraud, because the excuse to normalize relations with Jerusalem was Israel’s agreement to indefinitely postpone the application of sovereignty in the West Bank. If Israel responds to Trump’s loss by immediately withdrawing from its commitment not to enforce sovereignty, Jerusalem’s new friends will feel it has deceived them. That feeling will surely work against Israeli interests.

Friday, June 29, 2018

From Ian:

In Menachem Begin’s Rise, Lessons for the #Resistance to Trump
No one saw him coming.

Certainly not the nation’s entrenched political class: To them, he was one part clown and one part petty tyrant. They mocked his hyperbolic way of speaking—to him, everything, from his supporters to his family, was very, very great, the best, the most—and warned that if he somehow got elected, it would be the end of democracy. But they didn’t really think he could win, so they continued to campaign at a leisurely pace and rely on the sycophantic media to present their candidate as inevitable.

He, on the other hand, campaigned furiously. Knowing that the press had it in for him, he set up a series of mass rallies all over the country. His fans came out in droves to see him. They were working class folks, and they felt that the elites had pushed them around for too long. In him, they found an unlikely messiah: He wasn’t of them, but he seemed to understand their frustrations and, most important, offer them some sort of nostalgic promise. He could make the nation great again.

Besides, the rallies were such good fun! He was funnier than anyone ever gave him credit for, and he mocked his political rivals mercilessly, commenting on their looks and ridiculing their weaknesses. Still, no one seemed too worried: There was no way, they thought, that Menachem Begin could really win the election.

But on May 17, 1977, he did, sending Israel’s upper crust into a tailspin. Anyone who wants to understand the current American political moment would do well to study Begin, who began his political life as a boogeyman and ended it as one of the greatest leaders in the nation’s history.
Ben Shapiro: How Trump Haters End Up Helping Trump
Perhaps those cheering such extreme rhetoric think they’re doing a world of good. In truth, their hatred for Trump, extended to his supporters, is actually emboldening Trump and strengthening his base of support. Even those of us uncomfortable with Trump’s character aren’t likely to side with Waters or crowds shouting down Cabinet secretaries eating dinner. Nor are we likely to go along with labeling Trumpian immigration policy Nazi-like — particularly without any serious historical references, and combined with on-the-ground activism that sometimes looks like a fair bit like brownshirt thuggery. Last week, George Will called on Republicans to vote for Democrats in order to check Trump — but no self-respecting Republican is going to vote for the people who call them Nazis and who avoid making serious arguments in favor of shouting about Orange Hitler.

The great irony is that Trump is an unpopular president by any objective measure — he’s spent his entire presidency hovering around 40 percent, despite a booming economy and a dearth of foreign crises. All the left would have to do to win over independents and disenchanted Republicans is provide some semblance of stability and decency. Instead, hatred for Trump has driven the left to polarization — and that polarization is forcing the same binary choice that led to Trump’s presidency in the first place. Trump hatred has led to disproportionate, irrational responses that have pushed people into his corner. These unhinged attacks against Trump don’t defeat Trump. They strengthen him.

Caroline Glick: The Grand Bazaar, AMIA and Lockerbie
News coverage of the large and growing anti-regime protests in Iran this week has included warnings by Iran “experts” insisting that the vocal support the protesters are receiving on social media from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is counterproductive.

Israeli and US statements of support for the Iranian people and their desire to rid themselves of the regime that oppresses them will only weaken them, experts warn. But several counter-indications make clear that these warnings should be disregarded.

In 2009, when millions of Iranians took to the streets in the Green Revolution, then-US president Barack Obama refused to support them. Like today’s experts, Obama argued that it would be counterproductive for the US to support the protesters as they demanded the overthrow of the regime that had just stolen the presidential election. Obama claimed that the US is so hated that the regime would use its support of the protesters to discredit the demonstrations.

In the event, Obama’s silence demoralized the revolutionaries who asked again and again why he refused to stand with them. Perhaps more importantly, by refusing to stand for the men and women of Iran who risked death to stand up to America’s bitter enemy, Obama gave Iran’s dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his henchmen a green light to brutally repress the revolution. Which is exactly what they proceeded to do with nary a whimper of protest from the Obama White House.

Monday, June 01, 2020

From Ian:

Sovereignty over the Jordan Valley Is Key to Israel's Security
In order to thrive, and not just survive, Israel must have a minimally defensible eastern border, located in the Jordan Valley, and it must retain control of the eastern mountain ridge.

Yitzhak Rabin, architect of the Oslo Accords, included full Israeli security control over Jewish cities in Judea and Samaria/the West Bank, and full freedom of maneuver for Israelis along the main roads of the area, within those parameters.

The Trump peace plan, with its endorsement of Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley, accurately reflects the Rabin parameters. It also calls for a two-state solution and a demilitarized Palestinian state, with Israeli security control over the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

The U.S. peace plan was coordinated with Sunni states and Israel. That coordination is the result of the Sunni view that an alliance with Israel is an existential imperative in their fight against Iran - something that is of far greater significance to them than the Palestinian-Arab cause.

Jordan, despite its rhetoric, is unlikely to cancel its peace treaty with Israel. It is Israel and the U.S. that stabilize Jordan, not the other way around. There is no Jordanian interest in having a Palestinian military presence on their western border.

The Palestinian public in Judea and Samaria, for its part, has demonstrated that it is primarily interested in its economic wellbeing. The Palestinian-Arab street has shown little appetite to return to the days of the Second Intifada.
David Singer: Trump Needs to Revise his Vision for Judea and Samaria
President Trump’s deal of the century envisioning the creation of a second Arab state in former Palestine – in addition to Jordan – is in tatters following its absolute rejection by the PLO – requiring its urgent revision by the president.

Trump has vainly struggled to keep the statehood possibility alive despite PLO President Mahmoud Abbas having consigned it to the dustbin of history on the day of its publication – 28 January 2020 -but the PLO has refused to play ball.

Being a beggar does not fit Trump’s persona. He is allowing Israel to apply sovereignty in 30% of Judea and Samaria in July – with allocation of the remaining 70% requiring another Arab interlocutor to negotiate with Israel.Trump’s vision was always a mirage – offering the PLO less than 100% of Judea and Samaria it had been demanding since 1967– supported by the international community since the 1980 Venice Declaration.

Trump had predicated his vision without even defining who comprised the “Palestinians”. In addition his plan had incorrectly asserted:
1. “Palestinians have aspirations that have not been realized, including self-determination”.

All West Bank Arabs became Jordanian nationals in 1954 until their nationality was revoked by Jordan in 1988.

2. “The State of Israel has also exchanged sizeable territories for the sake of peace, as it did when it withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for peace with the Arab Republic of Egypt.”

Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 didn’t rate a mention.

3.“One reason for the intractability of this problem is the conflation of two separate conflicts: a territorial, security and refugee dispute between Israel and the Palestinians and a religious dispute between Israel and the Muslim world regarding control over places of religious significance. ”

There is only one conflict – between Jews and Arabs - fuelled by the Arab League’s refusal to recognise the State of Israel since its establishment in 1948.

The religious dispute was resolved under the 1994 Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty granting Jordan control over places of Islamic religious significance in Jerusalem
.

Jonathan Tobin: Whatever happened to the Emergency Committee for Israel?
Ten years ago, it came in with a bang, but this spring, it disbanded without even a whimper.

The Emergency Committee for Israel came into existence in 2010 in response to President Barack Obama's increasingly aggressive criticism of Israel and his attempt to pressure it to make concessions to the Palestinians. In the following years, as Obama's push for appeasement of Iran culminated in a disastrously weak nuclear deal, the ECI depicted the administration's policies as not just wrongheaded or counterproductive, but an "emergency" that decent Americans should mobilize to oppose.

Democrats blasted the group for what they claimed was an attempt to turn Israel into a partisan wedge issue. Yet by helping to frame the debate about Obama's push for more "daylight" between the United States and Israel, and a rapprochement with Iran, the ECI played a not insignificant role in generating dissent about such dangerous folly and electing members of the House and Senate who disagreed with the administration.

Once Obama got his way on the Iran nuclear deal, the ECI went silent. Earlier this spring, it formally disbanded. But it's prime mover, former Weekly Standard publisher William Kristol has moved on to a different cause, albeit one that puzzles many of those who agreed with him about Obama's attitude towards Israel.

After leading the effort to brand Obama a threat to Israel's existence, Kristol has, along with some other celebrity pundits like The Atlantic's David Frum and The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin, who were cheerleaders for the ECI, become the voice of the #NeverTrump movement. He leads a new organization whose purpose is to convince Republicans to support presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. But unlike the ECI, which was often torched by the mainstream media, his new effort is gaining the same kind of sympathetic coverage in The New York Times that the left-wing lobby J Street – ECI's principal antagonist during its most active period – usually receives.

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

From Ian:

PMW: Israelis/Jews "defile" Muslim and Christian holy sites
Muslim and Christian holy sites in "Palestine" are "defiled" and "desecrated" by the presence of Israelis/Jews. This hateful demonization is often expressed by Palestinians, including Palestinian leaders.

In December 2018, the PA "presidential office" stressed that Mahmoud Abbas was to have "urgent conversations" with Arab and international bodies about "the dangerous Israeli escalation," which among other things Abbas' office said is being expressed by "the defilement of the holy sites." [Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Dec. 11, 2018]

Every time an Israeli/Jew enters Judaism's holiest site, the Temple Mount plaza, the PA calls it "an invasion" and a "defilement" or a "desecration."

Recently, official PA radio broadcast a song which included the lyrics: "The Zionist" has "defiled the mosques and churches" in the cities of "Haifa, Ramallah, Gaza, Jaffa, Ramle, Acre, and occupied Jerusalem":
"Where is the Arab army, where? ...
Haifa, Ramallah, Gaza, and occupied Jerusalem call to you
Jaffa, Ramle, Acre, and occupied Jerusalem call to you...
The Zionist has defiled their mosques and churches, and trampled our sanctity."

[Official PA radio station The Voice of Palestine, Dec. 19, 2018]


Khaled Abu Toameh: Muslims protest against kippah-clad policeman at Temple Mount
Muslim worshipers and guards for the Wakf Islamic religious trust protested on Monday against an Israeli policeman wearing a kippah who tried to enter the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount as part of a routine security patrol.

The protesters barricaded themselves inside the shrine after a large police force was rushed to the area, witnesses said. They demanded that the policeman remove the kippah before entering the site, triggering a standoff with police. The incident ended several hours later.

The Wakf claimed the police detained five east Jerusalem men as they were leaving the Temple Mount after the incident. The five were identified as Fadi Elayan, Yahya Shehadeh, Ahmed Abu Alya, Awad Salaymeh and Luay Abu al-Sa’ed.

The Wakf said in a statement that it had ordered the closure of the Dome of the Rock after an Israeli policeman “attempted to storm it while wearing a kippah.” It said that two Israeli policemen enter the site daily – in the morning and evening – for a routine security check.

“The guards at the Dome of the Rock asked the policeman to remove his kippah before entering the site, but he refused and insisted on entering it even by force,” the Wakf statement said. “The guards then closed all the gates of the Dome of the Rock. Later, police officers were deployed at the entrances to the Dome of the Rock, while the guards and worshipers remained inside.”

Khaled Abu Toameh: The UN, the "State of Palestine" and the Torture of Women
This is the kind of story that the "State of Palestine" does not intend to raise during its chairmanship of the largest bloc of developing countries at the UN. It seems that, from the point of view of the Palestinian Authority leadership, Jbara's ordeal does not fall within the category of human rights.

Jbara's story has barely attracted the attention of the international mainstream media. As far as many foreign journalists covering the Middle East are concerned, a Palestinian woman complaining about torture in a Palestinian prison is not newsworthy. Had she been detained by Israel, Jbara would have most likely made it to the front pages of the world's leading newspapers and magazines in a matter of minutes.

The PA regularly complains about human rights violations of Palestinians held in Israeli prison for security-related offenses. But when the PA's own security forces detain and torture a mother of three, Palestinian leaders are found elsewhere -- like at the helm of a UN bloc.
Caroline Glick: Mike Pompeo Destroys the Ideological Legacy of Obama’s Middle East
To sum up, Obama rejected America’s moral right to lead in world affairs. He undermined the morality of Israel’s very existence. He rejected the legitimacy of Arab governments and elevated the Muslim Brotherhood as a legitimate force in the Muslim world. And he ignored all of the pathologies of the Arab and Muslim world.

Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran; his hostile treatment of Israel; his support for the overthrow of allied and non-threatening Arab governments in Egypt, in Tunisia, and in Libya; and his refusal to take decisive action against either ISIS or Iranian aggression in Syria all were rooted in the anti-American principles he set out in his Cairo speech.

On Tuesday, Pompeo disavowed and condemned Obama’s speech point by point. Pompeo rejected Obama’s denunciation of American power insisting, “America is a force for good in the Middle East.”

Of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt following Mubarak’s ouster in 2011, Pompeo said

Pompeo went on to describe the Trump administration’s actions to restore and strengthen America’s alliances with its Arab allies, its strategy for countering Iranian aggression, and cultivating good relations between the Arab states and Israel.

He underlined the America’s continued commitment to utterly destroying Islamic State forces in Syria, even after U.S. forces are withdrawn. And he spoke in great detail about U.S. actions to curtail Iranian power and influence throughout the region.

There is little doubt that the media, the foreign policy establishment, the European Union and the Democrats will continue to seek to undermine Trump’s policies in the Middle East with the intention of paving the way for a restoration of Obama’s policies – based on Obama’s Cairo speech from January 4, 2009.

But on Thursday, by condemning and disavowing that speech in detail, from the place where it was delivered, Pompeo drove a spear through the lie at its very heart – that America is anything other than a force of good in the Middle East.

Thursday, October 29, 2020

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column


The end of the historic “Arab-Israeli conflict” may be on the horizon, depending on the outcome of the US presidential election.

Oh, It wouldn’t mean that the Palestinian Arabs will soon give up on the idea that they can flood Israel with the descendants of 1948 refugees and reverse the result of the War of Independence. It wouldn’t mean that the antisemitism and misoziony that are rife in our neighbors Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, are likely to end in our lifetimes. It wouldn’t mean that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will stop trying to re-establish the Ottoman Empire, including Jerusalem, or that the revolutionary regime in Iran will stop planning to wipe Israel off the map and establish a Shiite caliphate in the region. ISIS, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood will not be normalizing relations with the Jewish state no matter what. There will be plenty of conflict and terrorism in our region for the foreseeable future.

But the classical Arab-Israeli conflict, as expressed by the Three No’s of 1967 may soon be history. The idea that no Arab nation can accept the existence of the Jewish state – or even mention it by name – until all of the extreme demands of the Palestinian Arabs have been met has already fallen by the wayside. It is becoming obvious to any honest observer that the reason the Palestinian issue has festered for so many years is that the Palestinians, encouraged by the Arab nations and European antisemites, have never entertained any possibility short of total victory. Now Arab support for their intransigence and rejectionism is falling away.

The UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan have already made normalization agreements with Israel. Others are expected to follow. The most important of those would be Saudi Arabia, the leader of the Sunni Muslim world, the custodian of the Holy Mosques, and the source of funds for countless Islamic institutions around the world. There are reliable reports that the Saudi regime, which is increasingly under the control of Crown Prince, Deputy Prime Minister, and Minister of Defense, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), will normalize relations after the US election – if Donald Trump wins.

It’s hard to imagine that any of this would have happened if not for the change in US policy initiated by the Trump Administration. The recognition of Israeli rights in Jerusalem and sovereignty over the Golan, and the downgrading of relations with the PLO, sent an unmistakable message that America did not support the Palestinian program to replace Israel with an Arab state. Trump’s peace plan, unlike those proposed during the previous administration, is not based on the transformation of the 1949 cease-fire lines into borders, but respects the concept of “secure and recognized boundaries” as expressed in UNSC resolution 242.

In order to truly appreciate the change in policy, compare it to that of the previous administration. Even before his inauguration in January 2009, Barack Obama forced Israel to abandon its campaign to oust Hamas from Gaza, probably the last practical opportunity to do so. In June of that year he visited Cairo and made a speech in which he directly compared the Holocaust to Palestinian “suffer[ing] in pursuit of a homeland” (he didn’t visit Israel until 2013, and then chose not to speak to the Knesset in Jerusalem but rather informally to students). Obama deliberately refrained from helping Iranian dissidents in Iran’s failed Green Revolution. He supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Arab Spring conflicts in Egypt, endangering Israeli-Egyptian relations. He demanded a freeze on all “settlement activity” which was used by the Palestinians as an excuse to refuse to talk. He deliberately humiliated PM Netanyahu when he visited the White House in 2011. He stopped a shipment of missiles to Israel during the 2014 conflict with Hamas in Gaza. At the same time the FAA ordered flights to Israel canceled, in an action that many thought was ordered by the administration.

Obama rammed through the Iran deal over the objections of a majority in Congress, including huge cash payments that the regime used to finance terrorism and Hezbollah’s military buildup. In 2013, his administration leaked information to the press about Israeli attacks against Iranian weapons shipments in Syria, making a wider conflict more likely. Finally, as a lame-duck parting shot at Israel in 2016, he encouraged the introduction of an anti-Israel Security Council resolution, and instructed his ambassador to abstain, ensuring its passage. And there is much more.

One can understand why Arab leaders might have thought that there was no percentage in improving relations with Israel while the US was kicking her to the curb.

Joe Biden was deeply involved in the Obama Administration’s relationship with Israel. You may recall that Biden was “furious” after an Israeli official announced the completion of a step in the process of approval for the construction of apartments in eastern Jerusalem while he was visiting Israel, precipitating a 45-minute angry phone call full of demands from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to PM Netanyahu.

Biden has said that he would “rejoin the [nuclear deal with Iran] … as a starting point for follow-on negotiations.” He opposes Trump’s “maximum pressure” approach and even blames it for Iranian progress toward nuclear weapons. He is likely to reopen the American consulate in eastern Jerusalem that was the unofficial “US Embassy in Palestine,” and the PLO office in Washington that were closed by Trump. He will restore financial aid to the Palestinian Authority that was cut off by Trump because the PA would not agree to stop payments to convicted terrorists (“pay to slay”). He will probably restore payments to UNRWA, which supports the descendants of 1948 refugees and is closely aligned with Hamas in Gaza. And he will bring back the tired rhetoric of the impossible “two-state solution” based on 1949 lines. It’s doubtful that he would be as hostile to Israel as Barack Obama, but he would undo much of the progress made by Trump.

This explains the statement by MBS that he would not normalize relations with Israel immediately if Biden becomes president. There is plenty of opposition in Saudi Arabia to such a bold step, which could even express itself violently. MBS is willing to take the risk if it will lead to the development of a powerful, US-supported Sunni-Israel bloc which could challenge Iran for regional leadership. Why should he do so if the US returns to the Obama-era policy of appeasement of Iran? And the same applies to other Arab countries that are waiting in the wings.

The development of a Sunni-Israel bloc in the region would be a breakthrough that would fundamentally alter the balance of power, and reduce the need for the US to physically intervene to keep the peace. It might set the stage for greater regional independence, so that outside players like Russia, the US, and Turkey would be less able to use its nations as pawns in their power struggles. It might lead to the Iranian people finally throwing off the corrupt and oppressive regime of the Mullahs. It might even bring a solution to the Palestinian problem somewhat closer. It would not fix all of the region’s problems, but it would be a good start.

But all of this depends on continuing Trump’s sharp turn towards rationality in Middle East policy. And Joe Biden is not the guy to do it, especially since he has already adopted some of the same advisers and former officials of the Obama Administration that were responsible for its destructive policies, including several architects of the Iran deal. Biden’s mental condition is a matter of dispute, but the specter of the enormous power of the US president in the hands of unelected and unaccountable operatives who have demonstrated their hostility to Israel and their approval of Iranian regional hegemony is truly frightening.



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Friday, November 06, 2020

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Electing a president under an erupting cultural volcano
The U.S. presidential election has illustrated more graphically than ever before that we are living beneath an erupting civilizational volcano.

The flaming cultural lava is spreading well beyond America. We have to wonder whether we are now watching the steady asphyxiation in the West of both liberalism and democracy.

Nowhere is waiting with greater apprehension for the eventual outcome of the election than Israel. If President Donald Trump is finally edged out, the recent startling prospects for peace in the Middle East may well be extinguished by the hideous prospect of a terrible war.

Those who most threaten the Jewish people, as well as the peace of the world, have been banking on Joe Biden winning the presidency.

He has said he will reactivate the Iran nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew the United States. This would open the cash spigots for the Iranian regime, ending the financial pressure under which it has been weakened.

It would instead be enabled to resume its regional power grab, ramp up its attacks on Israel through its Palestinian and Lebanese proxies, and speed up its development of nuclear weapons with which it intends to wipe out Israel and attack the West. War between Iran and Israel would become much more likely.

There would also be a domino effect in the Arab world. The unprecedented moves by the Gulf states to normalize relations with Israel have been driven principally by their perception that Trump was determined to neutralize Iran, and that their interests therefore lay in an alliance with Israel and America.

If America reactivates the nuclear deal, these Arab states may well revert to the strategy they adopted during the Obama administration’s appeasement of Iran: to cozy up to the “strong horse” in the region, which would once again be the Iranian regime.
Michael Lumish: The Idiocy of the Jews
The American public, along with 71 percent of American Jews, just voted for a presidential ticket that has vowed to fund the Palestinian Authority even as the PA insists that it will finance the "Martyrs Fund" which we call "pay-for-slay."

What this means is that whenever some random Arab in Israel runs out to stab a Jew to death in the streets of Jerusalem or Haifa or Tel Aviv they will pay him or his family out of US tax dollars. That is what we mean by "pay-for-slay" and financing it is against the Taylor Force Act and, thus, against American law.

It is also against anything resembling human decency.

The Democrats, if they take the White House, will now require American Jews to pay for the murder of our brothers and sisters in Judea and Samaria (aka Israel) and will do so while smiling at us and telling us what great friends they are to both Israel and the Jewish people.

And please do not forget this, they honestly believe that Jews, even within our traditional homeland, deserve whatever beating we get for allegedly being mean to the innocent, bunny-like Palestinian Arabs.

The Jews and other dhimmis, like Christians and Zoroastrians, spent thirteen hundred years as second and third-class non-citizens under the boot of Arab and Muslim theocratic imperialism in the Middle East. They claimed traditional Jewish holy sites, such as the Temple Mount and the Tomb of the Patriarchs, as their own.
David Singer: The next 72 days
President Trump – fighting for re-election in America - has now lifted restrictions on American federal investment in science, research and agriculture projects undertaken in Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria (West Bank).

Trump’s peace plan, it should be recalled, provides for Israel to ultimately extend its sovereignty into about 30% of Judea and Samaria where some 460000 Israelis presently live.

Signing the agreement lifting the investment restrictions on 28 October - U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman – said:

“Just as we have seen tremendous regional progress on the Abraham Accords, we are also seeing the tangible benefits of President Trump’s policies for bilateral cooperation with Israel”

The Abraham Accords - brokered by President Trump - signed on 15 September by Israel, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and expanded on 23 October to include Sudan after Sudan and Israel agreed to normalize relations – states:

“We support science, art, medicine, and commerce to inspire humankind, maximize human potential and bring nations closer together.”

Trump’s initiative is consistent with this noble principle and has not met with any opposition from its Arab signatories.

However a spokesman for PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said lifting of the funding ban represented:

"American participation in the occupation of Palestinian lands".

The PLO continues to bury its head in the sand as the Arab world’s burgeoning relations with Israel expand. Abbas also runs the risk of missing out on the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian Arab State in Gaza and 70% of Judea and Samaria - as envisioned in Trump’s plan.

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