Thursday, August 18, 2022
From Ian:
Jonathan Tobin: Why the world won’t care about Abbas’s ‘Holocaust’ lie
Caroline Glick: Biden ushers in an era of nuclear chaos and war
Jonathan Tobin: Why the world won’t care about Abbas’s ‘Holocaust’ lie
There’s something almost pathetic about the outrage generated after the latest comments by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. In Berlin for a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who was standing with him, the Palestinian was asked about his role in funding the 1972 Olympic massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches in Munich, and whether he ought to apologize on the 50th anniversary of that infamous crime. In response—and speaking in English so that there could be no doubt about his meaning—he said: “If we want to go over the past, go ahead. I have 50 slaughters that Israel committed … 50 massacres, 50 slaughters, 50 holocausts.”
Of course, this unrepentant and libelous comment deserves to be harshly condemned. Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid was entirely correct to say that for Abbas to falsely claim that the Jewish state had committed “holocausts” while standing on German soil “is not only a moral disgrace but a monstrous lie. Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, including one and a half million Jewish children. History will never forgive him.”
Other condemnations, such as that of Scholz, who, to his shame, did not contradict Abbas when he uttered these words in his presence, were also angry and entirely justified.
But the fury about this seems both oddly misplaced as well as somewhat hypocritical, especially when it comes from those in Israel, Europe and the United States who have spent so much energy and time puffing up Abbas as a partner for peace and doing their best not only to appease him, but to pressure the Jewish state to accommodate his every demand.
This was no gaffe. Abbas’s long career has been nothing of a series of offensive actions, decisions and statements that should have long ago convinced the civilized world to shun him completely. After a lifetime of criminal behavior in which he has aided and abetted the slaughter of countless victims of terrorism, coupled with corruption and opposition to peace, the real question about this incident is why anyone should bother getting upset about a mere offensive comment from such a person?
Caroline Glick: Biden ushers in an era of nuclear chaos and war
The Biden administration is on the verge of closing its long-sought for nuclear agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Europeans distributed a “final draft” of an agreement to the Americans and the Iranians last week. While the text was billed as a “take it or leave it” offer, neither the Europeans nor the Americans walked away after Iran returned with reservations. Instead, President Joe Biden and his advisers are avidly looking into Iran’s positions and are reportedly trying to incorporate them into the agreement, which will likely be concluded quickly, if only the Iranians will agree.Caroline Glick: ‘In Israel and the US, an assault on democracy using the language of law’
Back in 2015, news that the Obama-Biden administration was closing in on a final draft of what became its nuclear deal with Iran provoked a mass public outcry. The majority of Americans opposed the deal. Many key Democrats opposed it. The entire Republican Party opposed it. News of the deal was greeted by mass protests in Washington, New York and countrywide.
Today, the opposite is the case. News of Biden’s deal is greeted with yawns and apathy.
The difference is doubly striking because since 2015, the warnings the deal’s opponents sounded have all been borne out by events. Just as the opponents warned, Iran began cheating on the deal the moment it was concluded: Iran stockpiled uranium beyond what was permitted and refused to come clean to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency on its previous nuclear work.
Even worse, Iran exploited the deal’s loopholes—first and foremost its non-limitation of research and development work. While ostensibly abiding by the agreement, Iran developed advanced centrifuges capable of enriching uranium 10 times faster and to much higher levels of purity than the centrifuges it fielded in 2015. Although administration officials and their allies insist that Iran only began to use the advanced centrifuges in response to then President Donald Trump’s abandonment of the nuclear deal in 2018, in truth, Iran’s activities were dictated by its operational timeline. Iran completed development of the centrifuges in late 2020, and immediately put them to use.
As the deal’s opponents had warned, Iran used the tens of billions of dollars it received from sanctions relief in 2015 and 2016 to massively expand its funding of terror proxies. The Iranian people got no dividend from the deal. Their economic privation and suffering only grew. But the Iranian proxy Houthis attacked Saudi oil installations with guided missiles and drones. Iranian proxy Hezbollah massively expanded its capabilities as did Iranian proxies Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other Iran-backed terrorist groups and militias in Iraq and Syria.
The nuclear deal was supposed to keep Iran a year away from breakout, but last month Teheran announced it had already crossed the nuclear threshold and could develop bombs at will. The nuclear deal Biden is now negotiating won’t push Iran’s nuclear genie back in the bottle. Iran will enter the deal—if it agrees—as a threshold nuclear state. And it will exit the deal as a nuclear power.
Yet, despite the manifest dangers Iran poses, and everything we have learned since 2015, no one is in the streets protesting today. No one is campaigning against Biden’s deal.
In Israel and the U.S., unelected jurists and police forces are arrogating themselves the right to decide what is the law and to use it as a political tool, Caroline Glick and Abraham Bell, a Law Professor at Bar Ilan University, argue on this week’s episode of “Mideast News Hour.”
“[Criminal] charges are part of the political game and are designed to drive people out of office or out of positions,” Bell tells Glick. “[They] are used selectively in order to achieve political aims.”
Bell explains how in his view these mechanisms are behind the trials of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to Bell, “no matter how much the prosecution continues to show that it acted corruptly in putting together this case, and it acted incompetently in believing that it has a case, no matter how much that happens, I think that at the end of this, there is a conviction.”
