I showed recently how, according to a New Yorker article, President Obama was "shocked" by maps shown to him by the State Department that were essentially identical to the Oslo maps of 1995 ans interpreted them as if Israel was taking more and more land.
The State Department employee credited with what can now be seen to be a deception was Frank Lowenstein, and Times of Israel interviewed him. What he says about that map proves that he knew he was being deceptive.
Lowenstein told The Times of Israel that he’d long been aware of the reality in the West Bank, but had been unable to fully explain it to his superiors until the sixth year of Obama’s presidency when he came across a series of maps that showed how 60 percent of the land beyond the Green Line had become off-limits to Palestinian development.
“We knew this all along. I just couldn’t figure out how to explain it to people until I saw those maps,” he recalled, saying that they were essential in illustrating to then-secretary of state John Kerry and president Obama the reality of Israeli entrenchment in the West Bank.
Lowenstein acknowledged that the 60% he had highlighted was equivalent to Area C, which was placed under full Israeli control under the Oslo Accords. However, he pointed out that the goal of the agreement had been to gradually transfer parts of Area C to the Palestinian Authority.
“That’s how this narrative emerged in my head that this was Oslo reversed. Instead of transitioning power to the Palestinians they were effectively transitioning power over to the settlers,” Lowenstein said.
The goal of the agreement was to create a Palestinian entity, which Israel agreed to do in 2000 and 2001. Much of it would have been from Area C. But as far as I know there was no agreement to slowly transfer Area C to Palestinian hands without a peace agreement.
Beyond that, there are some small matters here and there that Lowenstein is pretending didn't happen.
Like an intifada that killed thousands. Like incitement directly from the Palestinian Authority.
Yet somehow Lowenstein is upset at Israel for not unilaterally giving land to a Palestinian government that consistently rejected peace and chose to encourage citizens to blow themselves up in the first decade of this century, and to stab and run over Jews in the second decade.
What Lowenstein is saying is that no matter what, Israel must be blamed, and he found a convenient way to do that by lying about history and maps to the President.
The only "peace plan" the Palestinians have publicly offered is one where they get everything east of the Green Line, where "refugees" can flood Israel and where they still would refuse to accept a Jewish state. And the Obama White House supported them - even after they spit in Obama's face by rejecting his own plan.
There is a sick, Israel hating pathology behind this.
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Last month, Jonathan Tobin sounded the alarm on Biden's foreign policy in the Middle East, which is guided by the foreign policy establishment now back in charge. Tobin is looking at the return of Robert Malley, who will advise on Iran; the resumption of aid to UNRWA and to the Palestinian Authority itself; and at Biden's decision to halt, at least temporarily, the arms sales to the UAE and Saudi Arabia -- the former considered a part of the Abraham Accords.
As Tobin sees it:
Biden’s choices show that he has learned nothing from the mistakes made during the Clinton and Obama administrations.
But what exactly are the mistakes of the Clinton and Obama administrations?
President Biden’s foreign policy and national security team reflects a resurgence of the State Department’s worldview. An examination of this worldview and its track record is required, in order to avoid past mistakes.
Remember how Abba Eban said the Palestinian Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity?
Notice the pattern of misjudgements that Ettinger finds in US Middle East policy:
1. In 1948, the State Department opposed the recognition of Israel for a variety of reasons:
o Israel would be helpless against the Arab armies arrayed against it
o Israel would be pro-Soviet
o Israel's existence would undermine US-Arab relations
o Israel's existence would destabilize the Middle East
o Israel's existence would threaten the US supply of oil
o Israel's existence would damage US interests
2. During the 1950s, the US courted Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser as a potential Middle East ally, going so far as to extend non-military aid to Egypt. But In return:
o Nasser turned into a key ally of the then-USSR
o Nasser supported anti-Western elements in Africa
o Nasser intensified anti-US sentiments in the Arab world
o Nasser attempted to topple pro-US Arab regimes
3. In 1978-1979, the Carter administration betrayed the pro-US Shah of Iran and instead embraced Ayatollah Khomeini and even shared intelligence with the Khomeini regime during its first few months. Carter assumed Khomeini was controllable and looking for freedom, democracy and positive ties with the US.
4. In 1980-1990, during the Reagan and first 2 years of the George H. W. Bush administrations, the US collaborated with Saddam Hussein and supplied him with:
o intelligence-sharing
o supply of dual use systems o $5 billion loan guarantees
This time, the guiding principle was “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” For his part, Saddam saw this as a green light for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait -- especially when the US Ambassador to Iraq, April Gillespie, 8 days before the invasion, told the leader, in accordance with the position of the State Department that an invasion of Kuwait was an inter-Arab issue.
Interestingly, Ettinger does not list the overthrow of Hussein and the subsequent weakening of Iraq -- removing Iraq as a check on Iran which in turn became a major destabilizing influence and global sponsor of terrorism -- as an error by the Bush administration.
5. From 1993-2000, during the Clinton administration, the US praised Arafat as a messenger of peace, worthy of the Nobel Prize for Peace and of annual US foreign aid. In doing so, Clinton ignored:
o Arafat's goal of destroying Israel, as reflected the 1959 Fatah and 1964 PLO charters,
o Arafat's hate-education system, demonizing Jews and glorifying terrorism
o Arafat's intensified terrorism.
6. In 2009, the Obama administration embraced the anti-US Muslim Brotherhood, ignoring its terroristic nature, and looking at it instead as a political, secular entity and turned a cold shoulder toward the pro-US Mubarak. This paved the way for the Muslim Brotherhood to gain power in 2012/13, which was a blow to pro-US Arab countries, which have been afflicted by Muslim Brotherhood terrorism.
7. Up until the 2011 civil war in Syria, the State Department considered Bashar Assad to be a reformer and possibly a potential moderate, based in part on Assad being
o an ophthalmologist in London
o married to a British woman
o president of the Syrian Internet Association
-- just as his father, Hafiz Assad -- known as “the butcher from Damascus” -- was regarded as a man of his word, and a credible negotiator, justifying Israel’s giving away the strategically important Golan Heights.
8. In 2011, the Obama State Department was a key supporter of the US-led NATO military offensive, which toppled Libya’s Qaddafi, despite the fact that Qaddafi
o dismantled Libya’s nuclear infrastructure
o conducted a war on Islamic terrorism
o provided the US counter-terror intelligence
The overthrow of Qaddafi transformed Libya into a platform for civil wars and global Islamic terrorism.
9. In 2011, the Washington, DC foreign policy and national security establishment welcomed the eruption of violence on the Arab Street in various Arab countries, and interpreted it as a march toward democracy and progress toward peaceful-coexistence -- calling it an Arab Spring.
In fact, this released intra-Arab and intra-Muslim terrorism and violent power struggles across the region.
10. In 2015, the Obama administration ignored Iran’s core fanatical and repressive ideology and its systematic perpetration of war and terrorism. Instead, the architects of the Iran nuclear accord (JCPOA) provided Iran with $150 billion, which allowed it to bolster their terrorism and expansionism across the region.
Obama and his 'experts' operated under the assumption that the Ayatollahs were open to negotiation and willing to live in peaceful-coexistence with their Arab Sunni neighbors. In doing so, the US disappointed most Iranian citizens, by renouncing a military regime-change option against the ruthless Iranian regime.
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In his rush to reinstate the Iran deal, Biden is not merely pushing back the clock on the mistaken policy in which he participated during his time as vice president in the Obama administration.
YouTube screencap
Now Biden is adding his name to the list of US administrations whose foreign policy errors have inflamed the instability of a region that is more than capable of generating tensions and instability all on its own.
If this all seems unbelievable, it’s because it is—and also because you’re probably still imagining that Obama’s goal was to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. But once you understand the real purpose, these moves become much clearer. To wit: Why did Obama give the regime enough uranium to make 10 nuclear bombs? To pressure the incoming Trump administration to stick with the nuclear deal. If Trump chose to leave the JCPOA, he’d have to deal with the fact that with 130 tons of uranium already on hand Iran had an easier path to the bomb. In effect, the last president handed the Iranians a loaded gun to be pointed at his successor.
The press corps was crucial in helping Obama deceive the American public. There were some journalists at the time who asked important questions about the JCPOA; most of them on the State Department beat, like the AP’S Matt Lee and Bradley Klapper. The media echo chamber, on the other hand, who helped sell the deal, consisted largely of reporters covering the White House and national security beat who were accustomed to being hand-fed by the Obama inner circle. This group would later form the core of the media operation pushing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.
For the Iran deal, the task of these correspondents was to drown out anyone who challenged the wisdom of Obama’s fire sale, including senior Democrats, like Sens. Chuck Schumer, Ben Cardin, and Bob Menendez. They were smeared as dual loyalists in formerly prestige press outfits like The New York Times, aghast at the “the unseemly spectacle of lawmakers siding with a foreign leader [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] against their own commander in chief.” The administration also spied on Democrats and pro-Israel activists critical of the deal.
Cory Booker was the one candidate among the field of Democrats running in 2020 who understood the nature of the JCPOA. He backed it at the time but said in a June debate that he wouldn’t necessarily reenter the deal. On Monday Booker announced he was dropping out of the race. And what about the Democrat leading the polls? Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden is proud of his role pushing the JCPOA, even if he’ll have to manage the consequences of the deal if he defeats Trump in November. As for the rest of the field, they’re making their opinions known with their silence regarding the Iranian protesters.
Now three years after Obama left the White House, it’s clear why the former president’s party is worried about the fate of his signature foreign policy initiative. By killing the Iranian commander Obama officials were sending messages to, Trump has shown his fiercest critics to be right—he’s nothing like Obama.
The smoke had not yet cleared above the crater in which the body of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Qasem Soleimani’s languished before the American press pronounced its verdict. “Trump’s Iran war has begun,” pronounced Vox.com’s Zack Beauchamp. Donald Trump’s “actions put the U.S. on a new path of escalation,” McClatchy reported. The president had “miscalculated,” in the view of the Independent’s deputy political editor Rob Merrick. “This is a massive walk up the escalation ladder,” the New York Times quoted the Middle East Institute’s Charles Lister as saying. “With Soleimani dead, war is coming.” Trump sought to “bully” Iran by appealing to the “Jacksonian logic of sudden and terrifying force as a first and last resort,” New York Magazine’s Ed Kilgore opined. Soleimani’s “assassination,” as New Yorker’s Robin Wright characterized it, was “tantamount to an act of war.”
In the ten days that have elapsed, these reactions to the Trump administration’s strike seem more than a little hyperbolic. But that hyperbole was not a product of the fog of war. Those who adopted a cautious response to the president’s actions were informed by the months of preamble leading up to this confrontation, to say nothing of the basics of international relations.
Before Trump’s strike on Soleimani, Iran had engaged in a campaign of attacks on American interests for which it faced no proportionate consequences. When the United States finally did proportionately respond to the killing of a U.S. contractor and the wounding of three service personnel in one of the regular rocket attacks on American positions by Iran-backed militias in Iraq, Iran’s proxy forces mounted the siege of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad that put the U.S. diplomatic presence in Iraq in jeopardy. As I wrote at the time, this was not escalatory but de-escalatory. The administration’s attempt to impose unacceptable costs on a reckless adversary while degrading its capacity to execute attacks on American interests and those of its allies was an effort to step back from the precipice of direct, conventional conflict.
If observers were shocked by Iran’s attempt to take the temperature down with a face-saving volley of rockets into Iraq (which were self-limited, and those limits were communicated to Iraq and the United States), they should not have been. These events might have represented the best-case scenario for the Trump administration, but the administration did not luck its way into a textbook method for deterring an aggressive and revisionist adversary. To recognize the strategy, you need to have read the textbook.
Hundreds of protesters in Iran refused to trample US and Israeli flags and denounced others who did as rallies continued against the regime for the downing of a Ukrainian passenger jet that killed all 176 people on board.
Videos and reports emerged Sunday showing the crowds deliberately walking around the edges of the massive flags painted on the pavement of a university in Tehran.
Those who did walk across the Stars and Stripes and the Star of David were immediately pointed at and booed, with the crowd chanting “shame on you.”
Many of the protesters shouted, “Our enemy is Iran, not America.”
Hillel Neuer, the executive director of the human rights group UN Watch, tweeted out a video of the crowds taking pains from treading on the flags on Sunday.
“These courageous Iranian students who refuse to trample the U.S. & Israeli flags represent the hope for a better Middle East. Engage with and promote them instead of their oppressors, and maybe Iran-backed wars & terror across the region will end,” he posted.
The unrest surged across Tehran and other Iranian cities and towns for a second day on Sunday after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard admitted mistakenly shooting down the Ukrainian airliner on Wednesday.
Trump on Sunday continued to show his support for the protesters as he did Saturday in a series of tweets.
Islamist organizations attacking Israel have always had a propagandist’s keen sense of vocabulary in their communication with the Western world.
Rightly convinced that few of us are able or even interested in deciphering their original speeches — which reveal their true intentions — they have been flooding us for decades with erroneous concepts and false claims, all playing on our desperate desire to do “good” and fight for the oppressed. They try to use our own history and heartstrings to make us react in a way that will be favorable to them.
And over the years, their terminology has been accepted by everyone, including — it must be said — in Israel itself.
For weeks, Hamas and other terrorist organizations have undertaken what they want the world to believe is a peaceful and “pacifist” popular uprising.
Once again, their deceptive use of vocabulary is clever and manipulative. On one level, these “protests” are peaceful demonstrations, thereby serving as cover for multiple attempts to destroy the separation barrier between Gaza and Israel, kidnap soldiers, kill Israeli and Jewish civilians, and launch terrorist attacks.
Why are the Palestinians “protesting” at the fence? The true answer is to destroy and overrun the Jewish state. But according to Hamas, they are simply seeking a “right of return” for the descendants of “refugees.”
Buses chartered by Hamas and Islamic Jihad — decorated with giant keys and illuminated names of missing villages supposed to symbolize this “right of return” — show up every Friday in front of mosques and schools in Gaza. Hamas has created a manipulated population, ready to kill themselves for these cynical or obsolete words and ideas.
Mahmoud Al-Habbash, the PA Supreme Shari'a Judge and President Mahmoud 'Abbas's advisor for religious affairs, said at a June 4, 2018 conference that the struggle in Jerusalem is between the rightful owners of the city – the Muslims and Christians – and "some foreign Western imperialists that have no connection to this soil." He added that the state of Israel is an imperialist Western enterprise whose purpose is to weaken and divide the Arab world, and that the claim that the Jews have a historical connection to Jerusalem is nothing but a distortion of history.
The conference at which Al-Habbash spoke, organized by "the Muslim-Christian Council for the Salvation of Jerusalem and the Holy Places" and the Organization for Muslim Cooperation (OIC) under the title "The Monotheistic Religions against the Judaization of Jerusalem and Its Holy Places," was also attended by other PA officials, including the Palestinian Mufti, as well as other Christian and Muslim religious leaders, and ambassadors.
The following are translated excerpts fromn Al-Habbash's statements at the confrence:
"The battle for Jerusalem is not a religious one; it a political battle between the rightful owners [of the city] and the imperialists. This obligates us to raise the Arab and Muslim world's awareness of the Arab, Muslim and Christian identity of Jerusalem...
"We must be careful when using a particular term or word in connection with Jerusalem, for this is not a conflict with the Jews, but a struggle between the [real] residents and owners of Jerusalem, who are Muslim, Christian and Arab, and some foreign Western imperialists that have no connection to this soil. The catastrophe of Jerusalem did not begin in 1967 or 1948, or with the Balfour Declaration. It began much earlier, about 450 years ago, when imperialist calls began to be heard in the West.
"Palestine is not the [Jewish] Promised Land or the land of the [Jewish] forefathers – for if it is, why did they consider it as [only] one of several options when they started looking for a place for their state?...
Should Israel and the US sign a mutual defense treaty? Every few years, this perennial question is raised. And every few years, it is set aside.
In 2000 then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak made signing a mutual defense treaty with the US a central component of his national security strategy. That year, as Barak sought to sell the public his plan to give the Temple Mount to Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat and Judea and Samaria to Arafat’s terror armies, he presented the option of signing a mutual defense pact with the US as a reasonable payoff for Israel’s sacrifice for peace.
Barak’s thinking was clear.
True, if the PLO boss had accepted Barak’s peace offer Israel would have been left without its capital and without defensible borders. But there was no reason to worry. The Marines would protect us. At the heart of Barak’s vision of a mutual defense treaty stood his unwillingness to bear the burdens of freedom, power and sovereignty.
The present round of chatter about the prospect of achieving a US-Israel defense treaty was initiated by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). In opposition to the view of the majority of Israelis and of the 2016 Republican Party platform, Graham insists on maintaining allegiance to the so-called “two-state solution,” despite its hundred-year record of continuous failure.
Still, Graham is no foe of Israeli sovereignty and military might. To the contrary. Graham played a decisive role in convincing President Donald Trump to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. So it is inconceivable that Graham shares Barak’s post-Zionist vision of a defenseless Israel protected by Uncle Sam.
Moreover, according to media reports, ahead of the September 17 election Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is making an effort to convince President Trump to make a statement in favor of a new US-Israel defense treaty. Since Netanyahu’s diplomatic policies and his strategic vision of Israel are diametrically opposed to those Barak advanced, it is impossible to imagine that Netanyahu shares Barak’s vision of the purpose of a defense treaty.
What then could be the purpose of a defense treaty? What sort of rearrangement of Israel’s defense ties with the US would advance those ties to both countries’ mutual advantage?
Marrying Israel’s know-how, experience, and innovation with Egypt’s abundant cheap manpower (Egypt’s per capita gross domestic product is about 6% of Israel's) and its hunger to excel after generations of decline and a looming water crisis, promises to bear fruit for both countries.
Of course, cooperation to enhance security and stability will remain paramount. However, imagine the dividends in the not-distant future in tourism and trade if you combine Egypt's and Israel's abundant antiquities, beautiful beaches, delicious cuisines, and rich histories as cradles of civilization and of the world's main monotheistic religions.
Cooperation with Israel's first-rate universities and advanced hospitals could give Egypt's educational and medical facilities a significant boost. Egypt's youth are thirsty for the knowledge, training, and skills that would maximize their productivity. Moreover, because the rapidly increasing populations of Ethiopia and Sudan need more Nile water for their own agriculture and development, Egypt – which is downstream – must learn to use the river wisely. Water conservation, reclamation, purification, distribution, and irrigation techniques, as well as desalination plants on the Mediterranean, are needed to ensure that Egyptians have access to abundant, clean drinking water. Israel is the most experienced country on earth in water technology.
Unfortunately, an enduring Israeli-Palestinian peace seems far off. But ultimately, the time will come when a new Palestinian leadership realizes that Israel is a mature, respected country and a potential ally to them. Egypt could then play a pivotal role in bringing the sides together in mutual acceptance and productive coexistence.
In a world accustomed to thinking in zero-sum terms – where one side's gain is another side's loss – the time has come for a win-win proposition. But the successful implementation of cooperative Israeli-Egyptian ventures requires working diligently on the building of mutual trust. Such ventures would directly benefit both countries and, as a secondary dividend, reduce anti-Semitism and other forms of extremism and contribute to regional peace.
Buried in a recent report from the International Atomic Energy Agency is: "Iran's implementation of its Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol require[s] full and timely cooperation by Iran. The Agency continues to pursue this objective with Iran." That's an exquisite way of saying that Iran is stonewalling the agency.
Last September, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly that Iran had a "secret atomic warehouse for storing massive amounts of equipment and material from Iran's secret nuclear weapons program" on the outskirts of Tehran in a village called Turquz Abad. He urged IAEA chief Yukiya Amano to "inspect this atomic warehouse immediately."
The IAEA only got around to inspecting the site earlier this year, long after the suspicious materials had vanished. But nuclear inspectors were nonetheless able to detect radioactive particles, corroborating Israeli claims about the purpose of the warehouse.
The agency's unwillingness to follow up promptly and effectively on Israel's allegations, along with its reluctance to disclose what it found, inspire little confidence in the quality of its inspections and even less in its willingness to call out cheating.
Moreover, Iran's hiding of nuclear materials is further evidence that Tehran was in violation of the nuclear deal from the moment it was signed. "If Iranians aren't cooperating, it tells you that potentially they are hiding more," notes David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security.
If those who fear an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear sites are serious about averting it, they could play a helpful part by demanding more credible inspections and honest reporting from the IAEA, starting with a thorough accounting for what went mysteriously missing from Turquz Abad.
For the first time, the Trump administration referred to the Golan Heights on Wednesday as “Israeli-controlled” and ceased to refer to the West Bank as “occupied” in the State Department’s annual report on human rights around the world.
While last year’s report marked a departure from years of American foreign policy by no longer calling the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights “occupied” in the section title, this year’s report went two small steps further.
“Authorities subjected non-Israeli citizens in Jerusalem and the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights to the same laws as Israeli citizens,” this year’s text says. In previous iterations of the same report, the Golan Heights was described in the text as “Israeli-occupied.”
This year’s report also refrains from labeling any of the territories as “occupied.” In last year’s document, the US government took a position in referring to these areas. “Authorities prosecuted Palestinian non-citizens held in Israel under Israeli military law, a practice Israel has applied since the 1967 occupation,” read one passage. The new report, by contrast, uses the term “occupied” just twice — and only when quoting outside organizations, such as the Israeli nonprofit Breaking the Silence and the United Nations.
Despite the change in language vis-a-vis the Golan Heights, an administration official on Wednesday denied that it amounted to American recognition of Israeli sovereignty over that area.
“Our policy on Golan has not changed,” a spokesperson for the US embassy in Jerusalem told The Times of Israel. (h/t Elder of Lobby)
Lost in the mists of the last decade is Barack Obama’s mainstreaming of anti-Semitism into Democratic and American politics. To be clear, even after two terms as president, Obama remains such a cipher that saying he mainstreamed anti-Semitism is hardly the same thing as saying he’s personally anti-Semitic. It is fair, however, to say he has consorted with Israel critics with dubious motivations and people with anti-Israel terror connections to such a degree that the most charitable thing one can say is that there’s a possibility his embrace of these people was just a way to cynically advance his political career and foreign policy priorities, priorities that were just coincidentally threatening to Israel’s security.
In fact, when Obama ran for president in 2008, people spoke openly of his “Jewish problem.” It wasn’t strictly a partisan concern, either: Hillary Clinton raised the issue in the Democratic Party. Obama did a poor job of persuading people that this wasn’t a legitimate concern.
In 2008, Jimmy Carter met with the leader of terror group Hamas, a move condemned by Condoleezza Rice, who then was secretary of state. Obama declined to condemn the meeting because “he’s a private citizen. It’s not my place to discuss who he shouldn’t meet with.” This is a remarkably calm reaction to Carter’s blatant Logan Act violation, a crime the Obama administration would later deem so serious it was used to justify investigating and surveilling the Trump campaign.
Obama reversed course a few days later, after it became obvious that refusing to condemn the meeting was damaging his campaign. As the Los Angeles Times observed then, when the condemnation finally came it was “as he tried to reassure Jewish voters that his candidacy isn’t a threat to them or U.S. support for Israel.”
Of course, there were plenty more reasons to think Obama didn’t really think that the murderous and anti-Semitic Hamas was all that bad. When Hamas came out and officially endorsed his candidacy in 2008, Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, said the endorsement was “flattering.” This is not an exaggeration. “We all agree that John Kennedy was a great president, and it’s flattering when anybody says that Barack Obama would follow in his footsteps,” Axelrod said.
Much has been made of Obama’s friendship with scholar Rashid Khalidi, who has been accused of working as an advisor for the PLO terror group (Khalidi claims he was only helping the press understand the group). Obama sat on the board of a foundation that gave $40,000 to a local charity Khalidi’s wife headed.
In 2008, the Los Angeles Times notoriously reported on a videotape of Obama speaking at an event in Khalidi’s honor, where one of the speakers compared Zionists to Osama bin Laden. While the still unreleased video of this event attracted the most attention, other aspects of the Los Angeles Times’s lengthy report on Obama’s close ties to Palestinian activists are noteworthy. For instance, in the same report Khalidi heavily implies that any pro-Israel sentiment Obama expresses while running for president was “a stance that Khalidi calls a requirement to win a national election in the U.S.” (h/t MtTB)
A critical element of the trans-Atlantic Corbynista project is to knock Jews down a few pegs in the progressive victim hierarchy. Democratic House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn’s perverse defense of Omar–that her experience as a refugee is “more personal” than that of the children of Holocaust survivors, and that this somehow legitimates her spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories–was a clumsy effort at privileging Muslims over Jews. Omar and her defenders seek, in the words of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, “a left-of-center politics that remembers the Holocaust as one great historical tragedy among many.” To achieve this reordering, Corbynism exploits fringe Jewish activists and organizations to deflect charges of anti-Semitism. As the most high-profile Jewish politician in America, Sanders has disgracefully assumed this role, alleging that Omar is being slandered for “legitimate criticism” of Israel, when it is her imputation of dual loyalties that is at issue. In so doing, Sanders lends credence to the view, increasingly prevalent among progressives on both sides of the Atlantic, that left-wing anti-Semitism does not really exist and that accusations of it are really just cynical attempts to forestall socialism and smear people of color. No other form of bigotry–whether anti-black racism, homophobia, misogyny, ableism–is subject to such exacting standards of proof and semiotic scrutiny by left wingers.
For these people, condemning the U.S.-Israel alliance is a way of condemning something much larger than a country 10,000 miles away. Attacking the Jewish state is the means by which they express their broader antipathy toward American exceptionalism. America and Israel are exceptional nations, the only two founded upon an idea. They are linked by shared values and, yes, religious affinity. When Americans look at the Middle East, they naturally see Israel as the polity with which they have the most in common. American support for Israel, then, is not explained by “Benjamins,” as Ilhan Omar conspiratorially tweets, but by a deep and widely held conviction that the two nations share a providential fate. This is something which the American Corbynistas, like their British cousins, deeply resent, and thus try to undermine with their sneers and tweets and purges.
Kasim Hafeez, a British Muslim and former Islamist who is now a proud Zionist who stands with Israel, will land in Israel this week for #DigiTell, a gathering of 100 pro-Israel bloggers and social network managers from all over the world.
“We are bringing together those who have fought this year against anti-Israel and antisemitic hate-writers and those promoting the boycott campaign against Israel,” said Ido Daniel, senior director for digital strategy for the Strategic Affairs Ministry, the ministry running the #DigiTell seminar. “We are opening our doors to the influencers and social media activists for Israel who are fighting our fight every day.”
Hafeez is among the most interesting and unlikely participants. He grew up being exposed to radical anti-Western, antisemitic and anti-Israel ideas on what he describes as a daily basis. During his teenage years, Hafeez embraced a radical Islamist ideology and became very active in the anti-Israel movement.
But in the early 2000s, he came across Alan Dershowitz’s book, The Case for Israel.
“I was so convinced that I was right, I bought the book and read it to essentially read the ‘Zionist lies' for myself,’” he told The Jerusalem Post. “I was presented with ideas and arguments I had never come across in all my years of being anti-Israel. While I did dismiss them all as lies, I did however want to reassure myself that I was right.”
So, he read a few more books.
“I began to see a lack of factual argument on the anti-Israel side, a lot of rhetoric and emotion but little fact,” he said.
Of all the problems President Trump threw at senior adviser Jared Kushner, developing a peace plan for the Middle East was the toughest, a win that has eluded administrations for years.
For the Jewish adviser, bringing peace to Israel was personal. And any victory would provide the administration with an everlasting legacy in the region and the world.
He ignored the ridicule of former administration officials when he took a different and secretive path, as he had on several other projects.
“If you look up the definition of an impossible objective in the dictionary, people say Middle East peace. It's almost a metaphor for impossibility,” he told Secrets.
Kushner built a plan that had a big economic and prosperity push, and while many in Washington brushed it off, it has taken root in the region.
And it set the stage for the Abraham Accords, which has led four former foes — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco — to sign peace agreements with Israel.
“We took a very different approach, and this isn't a rebuke of Democrats, it's a rebuke of maybe more of the foreign policy people who've come before because they're Republicans and Democrats, and for years, they did this dance and didn't get results. Then, those were the people who criticized me the loudest for doing things differently than the way they did. I was like, 'Wait, so you want me to accomplish a different result than you got, but you want me to do the exact same way that you tried?'” he said.
Joel Rosenberg, a bestselling author, editor of All Israel News and All Arab News, and a roving diplomat, called Kushner one of “the most innovative and successful Middle East peace brokers in history.”
Amid a COVID-19-induced economic recession, Irish independent Senator Frances Black has revived a draft law targeting Israel after a previous failed attempt. The Occupied Territories Bill, if enacted, could have disastrous consequences for U.S. economic relations with Ireland – and Ireland itself.
The Occupied Territories Bill seeks to criminalize trade in goods and services produced in Israeli settlements. When the bill was initially introduced in January 2018, it triggered a sharp denouncement from the Irish government and U.S. policymakers.
During the 32nd session of the Irish parliament, which was dissolved in January 2020, the bill reached the seventh of 10 steps toward becoming law. Unpassed bills typically lapse at the end of Ireland’s parliamentary session and must begin the process anew in the subsequent session. However, Black succeeded in now having the bill reinstated at the same stage during the 33rd session.
If enacted, the bill could force U.S. companies with an Irish division or subsidiary to choose between one of two costly options: violate Irish law by continuing to do business with companies and persons in Israeli settlements, or violate U.S. law by participating in a foreign boycott not endorsed by the U.S. government. Major U.S. companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, employ over 155,000 people in Ireland. All four of these corporations have substantial research and development centers in Israel. Not only would these and other U.S. companies risk running afoul of U.S. federal law prohibiting compliance with an unsanctioned boycott, they would also be violating nearly two dozen U.S. state laws that prohibit unauthorized boycotts against Israel.
The bill has already received sharp criticism from officials of Ireland’s two leading political parties, as well as bipartisan criticism from the U.S. Congress. Earlier this year, Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin of Ireland’s Fianna Fail party asserted that the bill would violate EU trade regulations by undermining the European Union’s exclusive right to determine trade policy for its member states.
The words leap out and grab you. Former President Barack Obama characterizes no other world leader in anything like the terms he reserves for former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
In his recent memoir, Obama tells us that Sarkozy is a “quarter Greek Jew.” Little wonder, then, that Sarkozy has “dark, expressive, Mediterranean features,” which resemble the exaggerated, often distorted figures “of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting.”
Little wonder, too, that he is “all emotional outbursts and overblown rhetoric,” while his conversation, which reflects unbridled ambition and incessant pushiness, “swoops from flattery to bluster to genuine insight.”
One might have thought Obama was deliberately directing at Sarkozy the insults notoriously hurled at Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), the first person of Jewish birth to become Britain’s prime minister. The colonial administrator Lord Cromer said of Disraeli that he was driven by “a tenacity of purpose” that was “a Jewish characteristic.” With his swarthy, “Oriental features,” Disraeli was consumed by an “addiction” to the “passionate outbursts” and “excesses of flattery” that were the hallmarks of his “nimble-witted” race.
Cromer’s taunts, which Obama so uncannily echoes, were hardly unusual. On the contrary, the traits Obama attributes to Sarkozy — from oily complexion to pushy, self-centered assertiveness — were at the heart of the anti-Semitic caricature of the Jew that crystallized, with murderous consequences, in the 19th century.
That history makes calling Sarkozy a Jew vastly different from noting, say, that Angela Merkel’s father was a Lutheran pastor; and if anti-Semitism involves using the label “Jew” to evoke, emphasize or explain an interrelated complex of unattractive attributes, Obama’s description of Sarkozy is unquestionably anti-Semitic.
Yet from The New York Times to The Washington Post and beyond, not one of the gushing reviews considered Obama’s statement even worth mentioning.
Nixon wasn't particularly friendly to Jews, but he was a friend of Israel.
Compare him with Donald Trump, whom Democrats accuse of trafficking in antisemitic tropes.
Better yet, compare Nixon to Joe Biden.
Joe Biden. Public Domain
Is there any politician, especially among the Democrats in the running for their party's presidential nomination, who is more highly regarded as a friend of Israel than Joe Biden?
o Biden's ties to the Jewish state go back almost 50 years, to his visit to Israel on the eve of the Yom Kippur War o Biden has personally known every Prime Minister since Golda Meir o Biden talks about his large collection of yarmulkes he has accumulated from attending Jewish functions over the years o One of Biden's favorite anecdotes retells his conversation with Golda Meir, where she confided in him "We have a secret weapon in our conflict with the Arabs. You see, we have no place else to go." o Biden's friendliness comes in spite of the fact that his state, Delaware, has a Jewish population of only 15,000.
But while he has been friendly with members of the Israeli government, has Biden been supportive of the Israeli government?
From the start, we understand that this is not an issue of backing every decision Israel has made or every action it has taken -- but has Biden consistently supported Israel?
a young senator rose and delivered a very impassioned speech - I must say that it's been a while since I've heard such a talented speaker - and he actually supported Operation "Peace for the Galilee" [The Lebanon War]. He even went further, and said that if someone from Canada were to infiltrate into the United States, and kill its citizens all of us (and thus he indicated a circle) would demand attacking them, and we wouldn't pay attention as to whether men, women or children were killed. That's what he said.
Begin distanced himself on the spot from what were ostensibly supportive remarks, noting that "according to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war...We did not want to hurt civilians under any circumstances...we never approved a plan knowing that civilians would be hurt directly or on purpose. Unintentionally, that can happen. It must not be denied."
We know that "young senator" was Joe Biden because Begin went on to recount the famous clash between the two that immediately followed. After overplaying his hand in what was supposed to be a supportive comment, Biden went beyond criticizing Israel. He not only voiced his opposition to the Israeli settlements (a criticism which Begin did not begrudge him), but went on to suggest that he would propose cutting financial aid to Israel because of them. Begin's rebuke of Biden is famous:
Don't threaten us with slashing aid. Do you think that because the US lends us money it is entitled to impose on us what we must do? We are grateful for the assistance we have received, but we are not to be threatened. I am a proud Jew. Three thousand years of culture are behind me, and you will not frighten me with threats. Take note: we do not want a single soldier of yours to die for us.
Biden's first comment was an attempt to be 'friendly.'
Biden's second comment, however, was not the type made by a friend.
Kampeas notes that similarly, Biden made 2 different kinds of statements depending on whether speaking to AIPAC or J Street.
During his speech at AIPAC in 2013, Biden stressed that Netanyahu wanted peace, and the Arabs needed to step up. In fact, if you read the actual speech, Biden -- who once threatened Begin he would cut off aid on account of the settlements -- not only mentions the settlements, but goes so far as to brag:
As recently as last year, the only country on the United Nations Human Rights Council to vote against — I think it’s 36 countries, don’t hold me to the exact number — but the only country on the Human Rights Council of the United Nations to vote against the establishment of a fact-finding mission on settlements was the United States of America. [emphasis added]
Did Biden change his mind about the settlements?
Not really.
“I firmly believe that the actions that Israel’s government has taken over the past several years — the steady and systematic expansion of settlements, the legalization of outposts, land seizures — they’re moving us and, more importantly, they’re moving Israel in the wrong direction,” he said.
At AIPAC he proudly claimed that the US is the sole defender of Israel's settlement policy, but at J Street Biden turns around and condemns Israel over that very same policy.
There is nothing wrong with Biden criticizing Israel over the settlements.
o But it was presumptuous of him to publicly threaten the leader of a sovereign country. o As a "friend" of Israel, Biden should be consistent in his position and not flip-flop in order to curry favor with the current crowd he is speaking to. US policy has been to refrain from approving of the settlements. o Furthermore, Biden - as a friend of Israel - should not be going around exaggerating the "systematic expansion" of the settlements. In 2012, Peace Now noted on their website For the First Time Since 1990 – the Government is to Approve the Establishment of New Settlements. That number of settlements was 3. If Biden wants to criticize Israel, at the very least he should have gotten his facts straight.
During this mutual admiration society meeting with J Street, Biden talked knowingly about Israel and what "they know in their gut"
In the absence of an Israeli leader like Menachem Begin, Biden feels free to openly speak of what Israel must do, ignoring the changing Israeli electorate that even 3 years ago was showing signs of moving to the right and an unwillingness to unilaterally make concessions to a non-existent peace partner.
“This is not a question for us to tell the Israelis what they can and cannot do,” said the Democratic vice presidential candidate. ”I have faith in the democracy of Israel. They will arrive at the right decision that they view as being in their own interests.”
We have an overwhelming obligation — notwithstanding our sometimes overwhelming frustration with the Israeli government — we have an obligation to push them as hard as we can toward what they know in their gut is the only solution: a two-state solution.
Which of these two stands will Biden adopt during the months leading up to next years election?
More importantly, which of these 2 stands would Biden adopt if he should be elected president?
I’ve spent 35 years of my career dealing with issues relating to Israel. My support for Israel begins in my stomach, goes to my heart and ends up in my head.”
Part of Biden's claim as a "friend of Israel" is that he knows Israel so well, so let's just skip the first 2 parts and see what's there.
President Obama was considering clemency, but I told him, ‘Over my dead body are we going to let him out before his time. If it were up to me, he would stay in jail for life. [emphasis added]
One question is whether his claim was accurate, or whether Biden was trying to protect Obama from the ire of the rabbis.
But it is not completely clear from what he said if Biden realized that Pollard was in fact sentenced to life and "his time" would never be up. It simply was not "up to Biden" for Pollard to stay in jail for life, since that was, in fact, his sentence, despite the plea deal he had made and the US government had violated.
Giving Obama Credit For Bush's Agreement
Another example of Biden's misstatement of fact is when he told AIPAC in 2013:
President Obama last year requested $3.1 billion in military assistance for Israel — the most in history.
At the time, the actual record was held by the Clinton administration, which in 2000 gave Israel $3.12 billion "which is not only slightly more in nominal dollars but much more in inflation-adjusted dollars"
More to the point, Biden was crediting Obama for something that Bush had done:
Biden is also taking credit for a level of spending that was set by the Bush administration as part of a 10-year, $30 billion agreement reached with Israel in 2007. In requesting $3.1 billion in his fiscal 2013 budget last February, Obama was honoring that agreement.
Here's what the president [Bush] said when we said no. He insisted on elections on the West Bank, when I said, and others said, and Barack Obama said, "Big mistake. Hamas will win. You'll legitimize them." What happened? Hamas won.
When we kicked -- along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, "Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't know -- if you don't, Hezbollah will control it."
Now what's happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel.
Another absurdly wrong statement from Joe “Foreign Policy Expert” Biden, who very obviously does not know the difference between the Gaza Strip [where Hamas rules] and the West Bank [where the PA rules]
But Biden didn't get Hezbollah quite right either --
o First, the US did not kick Hezbollah out of Lebanon. o Second, if Hezbollah was kicked out, how would it be able to fill that vacuum Biden warns about?
The demographic realities make it difficult for Israel to be a Jewish homeland and a democratic country. The status quo is not sustainable.
Biden claims that the larger birthrate of the Arabs as opposed to the Jews, is a potent argument for Israel to "make peace" -- i.e., retreat from the "West Bank" as soon as possible.
In 2001, there were around 95,000 Jewish births in Israel and 41,000 Arab births. Just seven years later, in 2008, Jewish births had risen to over 117,000, but Arab births had declined to less than 40,000. In a period that constitutes barely a quarter of a generation, Arab births had fallen from around 30 percent of the total to around 25 percent. This has been a steady trend and, should it continue, it will only be a very short time before Jewish and Arab births each year are broadly proportionate to the overall balance of Jews and Arabs in the population as whole - that is, 4:1, or 80 percent and 20 percent, respectively.
But the problem with Joe Biden goes beyond his misstatements and insistence he knows better than Israel what is best for it.
The issue is not that Biden does not support Israeli policy, but rather the kinds of actions Biden has actively taken that are directly against Israeli interests
Does Joe Biden Really Support Putting The Western Wall Under Palestinian Control?
Biden took an active part in US support for the UN vote on Resolution 2334, which was passed at the end of Obama's term in office thanks to the US abstention. That resolution did more than just condemn Israeli settlements.
A wealth of evidence is now emerging that, far from simply abstaining from a UN vote, which is how the Administration and its press circle at first sought to characterize its actions, the anti-Israel resolution was actively vetted at the highest levels of the U.S. Administration, which then led a pressure campaign—both directly and through Great Britain—to convince other countries to vote in favor of it.
Tablet has confirmed that one tangible consequence of the high-level U.S. campaign was a phone call from Vice President Joseph Biden to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, which succeeded in changing Ukraine’s vote from an expected abstention to a “yes.” According to one U.S. national security source, the Obama Administration needed a 14-0 vote to justify what the source called “the optics” of its own abstention.
Among its many “biased and false” clauses, he recalled, the resolution designated Israel’s presence in parts of Jerusalem liberated in 1967 as a flagrant violation under international law. That included Jerusalem’s Old City and Jewish Quarter, as well as the Western Wall, the last remnant of the temple first built by King Solomon some 3,000 years ago
A pity that in this case, Biden went along instead of telling Obama "over my dead body." But the question is whether Biden has actually thought through the ramifications of his position on the settlements.
Biden Opposed Sanctions on Iran Even Before Becoming Obama's Running Mate
The Senate approved a resolution on Wednesday urging the Bush administration to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, and lawmakers briefly set aside partisan differences to approve a measure calling for stepped-up diplomacy to forge a political solution in Iraq.
Also called for economic sanctions.
Among those voting against it was Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who said he feared that the administration could use the measure to justify military action against Iran.
It would be a good idea to hear Biden articulate just what he would be prepared to do to counteract Iran's support of global terrorism in general and support of Hezbollah and Hamas in particular.
AIPAC does not speak for the entire American Jewish community. There’s other organizations as strong and as consequential.
What other organizations?
Was he referring to J Street -- which had only just been founded the year before?
Biden also claimed that despite any occasional claims to the contrary, AIPAC does not speak for Israel. He did not elaborate on that one.
In any case, Biden and AIPAC patched things up, but it is obvious that it is J Street and not AIPAC that he is listening to.
Biden & Sharpton
On the other hand, Biden has apparently had no problems with Al Sharpton, whose anti-Jewish incitement played a role in both the Crown Heights Riots and the Freddie's Fashion Mart Massacre.
Sharpton and Biden. Screengrab from Facebook
It was in part as a result of his many visits to Obama at the White House that Sharpton's image was rehabilitated, and Biden is far from being the only one of the Democratic candidates to seek Sharpton's endorsement.
But this serves as a reminder that Biden's claim to friendship with Israel does not outweigh certain political considerations.
The bottom line is that Biden is a staunch opponent of the Israeli settlements. If elected, he would not be the first president to oppose them. The issue is what policies he might pursue, based on actions he has taken and the statements he has made. Biden was willing to actively support UN Resolution 2334. That raises the question of where he stands on the real-world implications of that stand.
Biden told an appreciative J Street that "we have an obligation to push them as hard as we can toward what they know in their gut is the only solution: a two-state solution." It is not hard to imagine Biden ignoring the implications of Netanyahu's re-election for what Israelis actually do know "in their gut" and instead pushing what he "knows" is the only solution -- with the aid of the same J Street that once bragged about being the "blocking back" for Obama.
That is not to say that none of the other Democratic candidates might try the same thing, but Biden has the reputation of being a "friend" of Israel that would shield him from a lot of the resultant criticism.
It is the fact that so many seem to buy into Biden's "friend of Israel" shtick that can be so disconcerting.
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Along with several other European countries, France has strongly opposed America’s decision to relocate its embassy to Israel’s capital. To support its position, Paris has claimed, on the basis of various UN resolutions, that international law militates against recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. These legal claims, writes Michel Gurfinkiel, are muddled—at best:
Both France and the EU claim that the 1949 cease-fire lines between Israel and Jordan in the Jerusalem area (the “Green Line”) are an international border. If this were indeed the case, those sectors in Jerusalem held by Israel [following the cease-fire] would be internationally recognized Israeli territory; accordingly, Israel would have every right to turn them into its capital, and the United States, or any other country, to locate its embassy there.
Likewise, France and the EU countries [already] recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s de-facto capital, since they routinely visit the Israeli government or the Israeli parliament there. Under international law, a de-facto recognition is as valid as a de-jure recognition. . . .
Paris and Brussels [therefore] point to Security Council Resolution 470, passed on August 20, 1980, which condemned the enactment by Israel’s parliament of a constitutionally binding law enshrining Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and called upon the governments that had already established embassies in that city to withdraw them. Resolution 470 was largely based on the . . . General Assembly’s Resolution 303 of December 9, 1949.
However, Gurfinkiel argues, France refuses to apply the same logic to itself, as evidenced by the case of the island of Mayotte. Mayotte had been a French colony along with the other Comoros Islands, but when the Comoros became independent, its populace repeatedly voted to remain part of France, which to this day treats the island as its own:
With President Donald Trump’s fulfillment of his campaign promise to recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel, his moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, his subsequent refusal to ratify the Obama administration’s Iran Nuclear Deal, and official statements from the White House twitter account such as:
"The U.S. condemns the Iranian regime’s provocative rocket attacks from Syria against Israeli citizens, and we strongly support Israel’s right to act in self-defense." – @WhiteHouse, May 10, 2018
(and all of this in just one year!), Trump has set the foundations for what could be the most stalwartly pro-Israel American foreign policy since Israel’s birth in 1947.
With religiously anti-Trump pundits (see here, or here) insisting that Trump’s policies and rhetoric are actually damaging to Israel and somehow worse than those of his predecessors, it’s worth taking a stroll down memory lane to see how past presidents perceived Israel, and how they conducted their foreign policies.
Barack Obama (Democrat) (January 20, 2009 – January 20, 2017)
Barak Obama made strong statements in his campaign for the oval office, marketing himself as an ostensibly pro-Israel candidate. He even called Jerusalem the capital of Israel: "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided. I have no illusions that this will be easy."
When speaking with Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy bewailed Israel’s PM saying, "I can’t stand Netanyahu; he is a coward and a liar." Rather than defend Netanyahu, Obama replied, "You can’t stand him? I have to deal with him more than you."
Obama also signed 38-billion-dollars in aid to Israel. The 10-year foreign aid package came on the heels of Obama’s Iran nuclear deal which Israel warned would only further empower Iran and do nothing to mitigate its funding of terrorist organizations or pursuit of nuclear weapons. Moreover, under a provision of the deal called, the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), Israel is barred from receiving any additional funds with the notable exception of wartime.
As one of his final actions as US president, Obama refused to exercise the United States’s veto power in the United Nations, allowing a virulently anti-Israel resolution calling for a halt to Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem (a region Obama previously stated was without question part of Israel’s undivided capital).
One of dozens of rockets launched Tuesday by terrorists from the Gaza Strip hit facilities supplying electricity to the Gaza Strip.
Due to the damage to the facilities, three lines supplying electricity to the southern Gaza Strip were stopped.
The electricity company said it would take several days to repair the equipment for a regular supply of electricity.
Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz instructed the Israel Electricity Company (IEC) not to endanger its employees and to repair the problem only after a lull.
Israel has led the world in rapidly vaccinating much of its population, so naturally the global left has to find fault: hence the drive to condemn Jerusalem for not taking responsibility for vaccinations in Gaza and the West Bank.
In a series of tweets, Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth accused Israel of racism for this supposed failure; a week later, Palestinian officials decided to join the blame game, announcing that Israel is responsible for vaccinating Palestinians despite past statements to the contrary.
In reality, as UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer notes, the 1995 Oslo II Accord designates responsibility for the health care and vaccinations of its people to the Palestinian Authority.
And while the two countries are supposed to cooperate in terms of handling epidemics, Palestinian Health Ministry officials admitted back in December that they didn’t ask for help in obtaining vaccines from Israel.
Top Palestinian officials routinely go to Israel for major medical care, but PA propaganda discourages it for everyone else, with dark hints that Jewish doctors will offer Arabs only substandard care — if they’re not secretly experimenting on Palestinian patients.
From Obama’s perspective, Iran was the state with which to develop a relationship. The mullahs have the will, aggression and desire to destroy Israel, which they have expressed continuously. However, Iran’s nuclear ambitions posed a PR problem. Therefore, Obama relied on the belief that Iran could not be stopped, and as a result the US and some of its European partners negotiated a deal, which on the surface could be sold to a compliant and ever helpful main stream media, which in turn would sell it to the world’s public. Iran would agree not to develop a nuclear weapon for at least ten years, after which they would be free to do so. This could follow without any international interference. Obama, by then, would have “kicked the can down the road” for a future President to deal with along with the possible fate of Israel.
Whether Iran would comply didn’t really bother anyone, and clauses contained in the agreement limited inspections to civilian sites only whilst excluding military sites -- which is, of course, exactly where nuclear weapons would be developed. This was not only an awful and extremely bad agreement, which appeared to be Obama’s intention, but it has never been ratified by the US Congress. Part of the “deal” was that Obama would transfer huge amounts of cash to the Iranians in the amount of $150 to $170 billion. It remains questionable as to how much of it would find its way into Obama’s pocket. If this was so, a Democrat aligned media would be part of the conspiracy in covering it up.
During the signing and lead up to the JCPOA, I was always struck by the arrogance and cocksureness of Mohammad Javad Zarif so much on display I suspected and speculated that he possibly had Obama and Kerry in his pocket.
This whole scheme essentially threw the USA’s Sunni Arab allies “under the bus” abandoning them with Iran simultaneously threatening them. The great unintended irony, which had not been clearly thought through or even imagined, was that this would encourage the Sunni Arabs to make peace with Israel for their mutual defence as they no longer trusted America. As a result, these states were no longer bound by a ridiculous Palestinian-imposed veto. Their interests and defence obviously took precedence and under a Biden presidency, this situation would be even more relevant, with Obama very likely in the background pulling the Biden strings.
What appealed to Obama and his useless sidekick, John Kerry, was more the potential destruction of Israel, and perhaps to a lesser extent, limiting Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The JCPOA agreement said nothing about the development of missiles, which should have been a logical inclusion. Why something so fundamental was omitted remains a mystery. What should have occurred to them during negotiations was that a nuclear bomb has to be delivered. Iran has an antiquated air force which could not manage such a task. It could of course acquire aircraft from Russia or China. However, the obvious and only alternative was via a ballistic missile. This is precisely what Iran has been developing and testing for years.
Indian terrorist group Jaish-ul-Hind has claimed responsibility for the blast that took place near the Israeli embassy in New Delhi on Friday, local media reported.
No one was injured in the explosion, which took place on the 29th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between India and Israel.
According to the India.com news site, the investigation so far has recovered social-media chatter according to which Jaish-ul-Hind operatives boast about carrying out the attack.
The Indian Express reported on a police source as saying that the bomb appeared to have been planted in a flowerpot on the road divider. According to the report, a letter found on the scene, addressed to “Israel Embassy ambassador,” said that the blast was a “trailer,” suggesting that it was a prelude to future attacks against the embassy or other Israeli targets in the country.
The note also refers to “Iranian martyrs” Qassem Soleimani, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force commander killed in a US drone strike in Iran on Jan. 3, 2020, and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, head of the Iranian military nuclear program, who was assassinated near Tehran on Nov. 27 in a hit for which Iran has blamed Israel.
New Delhi Blast: 2 Suspects Seen on Security Footage
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.
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.”
Talk about Chutzpah! @Twitter literally wrote to Minister @FarkashOrit, flat out saying that Iran leader @khamenei_ir calling Israel a ‘cancerous growth’ to be ‘uprooted and destroyed’ is mere “foreign policy saber rattling”?
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 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.”
This is genuine solidarity. I’d heard rumours that Gordon Brown was releasing a video. No one asked him to stand up to antisemitism and to stand by @JewishLabour He just did. pic.twitter.com/wGUPj3dg7A
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.
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*(With thanks: Edna, Sami and Gladys)*
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