Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, February 08, 2015

02/08 Links: Palestinian hijacker compares IS to Jewish extremists; Brian Williams on the Couch

From Ian:

The title of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book on the resurgence of anti-Semitism in our time, “The Devil That Never Dies,” can also be read as a not-so-veiled allusion to the centuries-old demonization of Jews as devilish or satanic. What began in the Middle Ages was revived by the Nazis, and remains popular among today’s neo-Nazi Jew-haters.
Unfortunately, however, one doesn’t have to venture into the darkest recesses of the Internet to encounter the contemporary expression of this age-old demonization of Jews: prominent Palestinians are not ashamed to denounce Jews or Israelis as “Satan,” and neither are supposedly progressive “pro-Palestinian” activists.
One of the most recent examples emerged when campaigners for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement at the University of California, Davis, celebrated a student government resolution to divest from Israel by harassing their opponents. Several reports on the incident highlighted the role of Azka Fayyaz, a member of the UC Davis student senate, noting that she had previously “helped display a poster likening Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler.”

Palestinian hijacker compares IS to Jewish extremists

Palestinian two-time plane hijacker Leila Khaled condemned Friday the burning to death of a Jordanian pilot by the Islamic State group, but also compared it to the murder of an Arab teenager by Jewish extremists last summer.
“Those people who burned him are the same as the Israelis that burned Muhammed Abu Khdeir in Jerusalem,” Khaled said in South Africa, making a reference to the Palestinian teenager kidnapped and burned alive in east Jerusalem in July last year by three Jewish extremists charged with murder. The attack was allegedly in response to the June kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers by a terror cell linked to Hamas in the West Bank.
Now 70 and living in Jordan, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) member Khaled hijacked a Trans World Airlines flight from Rome to Athens in August 1969, and an El Al plane from Amsterdam to New York in September 1970.
She was arrested by sky marshals during the second attack and the flight was diverted to Heathrow. However, the British government released Khaled a month later in a hostage swap.
She is in South Africa to drum up support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement which is seeking to isolate Israel economically and politically.
She received a warm welcome from the ruling African National Congress — much to the indignation of local Jewish organisations.
“Comrade Leila, this is your home,” said ANC member and Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba, wearing a keffiyeh around his neck.

Brian Williams Over Israel: Rockets Passed ‘Just Beneath the Helicopter I Was Riding In’

Completely separate from the 2003 Iraq helicopter incident Brian Williams confessed to lying about this week, thanks to a Twitter user who alerted Ace Of Spades, we now have a 2007 video of Williams claiming he was involved in a hairy wartime incident involving a different helicopter during a different war. According to the NBC Nightly News anchor, during “the war with Hezballah in Israel, a few years back … there were Katyusha rockets passing just beneath the helicopter I was riding in.”
"It gets me to thinking, I’ve been very lucky the way my life has turned out, I’ve been very lucky to have survived a few things that I’ve been involved in, at a perception a few minutes ago, I was remembering something I tend to forget, the war with Hezballah in Israel, a few years back, where there were Katuyshka rockets passing just beneath the helicopter I was riding in. A few years before that, you go back to Iraq, and I looked down the tube of an RPG that had been fired at us and it hit the chopper in front of ours." (h/t jzaik)

Brian Williams on the Couch

The Weekly Standard’s Jeryl Bier tracked down this dispatch about the incident Williams refers to.
Technically, Williams is correct that Katyushas were flying down below, but they were off in the distance, and not “just under” Israeli Blackhawk. You won’t see any drama inside the chopper or signs of emergency evasive maneuvers. Williams would not have failed to include any of that.
Bottom line: I don’t see anything wrong with the report — everything’s there on film. But his description to Fitzmaurice is disingenuous and just a bit self-inflating to an understandably awed college reporter.
But the more seasoned journalists now probing Williams won’t be wide-eyed or so easily impressed. I’m giving the last word on the matter to New York University’s professor of journalism, Jay Rosen.
Jay Rosen : No desire to put Brian Williams on the couch but if we assume he wasn't maliciously faking the story what is left is anchorman psychology.

As most of you are aware, the Islamic State burned a man alive in a cage the other day.

He was a twenty-six year old Jordanian fighter pilot, First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh. His plane went down near Raqqa, Syria, and he was captured by the Islamists.

The Jordanians pleaded for his release as friends of IS or ISIS or ISIL pondered how best to murder and torture the poor man.

Until these people burned him alive on camera, the capture of the Jordanian pilot was a journalistic sideline. Those of us who follow the Middle East and the Arab-Israel conflict knew Kasasbeh was held. It was one of the stories out there, but it was decidedly second tier. After the Islamists head-chopped their Japanese prisoners, and in the midst of Obama's hissy-fit concerning the fact that Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, agreed to speak with Congress without first kissing Obama's ring, the Jordanian pilot story was of considerably lesser interest.

Until now, of course... at least for me.

I don't know what you guys think, but there is something particularly horrendous about this most recent act of barbarity. There are all sorts of Youtube videos available concerning Islamic head-chopping, but head-chopping is grounded within Islamic religious tradition. It has the full weight of fourteen-hundred years of Islamic religious practice behind it. It may be horrific, brutal, and immoral, but it is certainly nothing new. Burning people alive in cages, however, is definitely different for a western audience and will get people's attention.

It certainly got mine.

And whatever else we are dealing with here, we are dealing with theater. Pallywood, for example, is strictly about theater. It is about manufacturing hatred.

The Islamic State is, you understand, experimenting now in new and creative ways of murder and brutality. This needs to be acknowledged. The Islamic State recognizes no limits on human cruelty and its cruelty is a form of theater.

I even read where one particular Islamic State supporter, an older woman, actually, suggested reviving certain ancient Turkish methods of torture and murder that are so revolting I cannot bring myself to even describe them.

It must be understood that they are doing so for a reason. Just as Pallywood whips up hatred for Jews and for Israel, so these Islamic State videos create an excited passion among certain young Muslims throughout the Middle East and Europe.

The point of all the blood and the murder and the head-chopping is to create enthusiasm among young Muslim men.

These people are not to be trifled with. These are not cave-squatters.

They have tanks and they have taken over large parts of two countries.

And can you imagine what they would do with any old Jewish grandmother or child that they might come across? The word "compassion" is not in their dictionary. This thing - the Islamic State - whatever it is - needs to go away and it needs to go away soon, but that will not happen under the current American administration.

The fact of the matter is that Barack Obama is a coward.

One might even say "chickenshit."

He knows better than anyone that political Islam is an enemy to western liberal society and it is an enemy that can no longer be ignored.

And, in the mean time, anecdotal evidence suggests that American youth on the elite campuses despise Israel and are indifferent to the Islamist head-choppers.

The head-choppers represent the exact opposite of western liberal values, such as democracy or freedom of speech or freedom of religion, but this does not bother soft and seemingly safe western progressive college students in the least.

The video below is by Ami Horowitz and, in fact, won the prestigious 2015 Hasby Award for "Best Pro-Israel Video."

The first part of the video shows a guy on campus waving around the black flag of the Islamic State.

The intention is to gauge student reaction. If you watch the video you will see that the students ignored him. Who knows how this thing is edited, but the intention is to show the indifference of University of California Berkeley students toward political Islam, the most fascistic political movement in the world today.

I suspect that were I a student in my early twenties that I would be likewise indifferent. The reason for this is because (one) the threat seems remote and (two) the concern seems politically tainted by the right-wing. All it takes, you must understand, to get most American university students to support or oppose any issue is to suggest that the opposite opinion is supported by the the Right.

And I say this as someone who speaks to you from a position of progressive-left apostasy.

What makes the video interesting, however, is the second segment wherein the guy is waving an Israeli flag. The Berkeley students included in the video are not the least bit indifferent toward Israel. Quite the contrary. They have very definite feelings toward Israel.

If waving the black flag of the Islamic State ruffled no feathers, waving the flag of the Jewish people stirred considerable hatred.

And that is precisely what is so disconcerting.

We are used to hatred for Jews coming from the Middle East, and the European elite, for trumped up charges. What we are somewhat less used to is youthful American hatred, which is why my reaction to San Francisco State University Jew-Hatred was somewhat raw.

I live in what is perhaps the safest place in the world for a Jewish person to live openly as a Jew, but this is also the place where hatred toward Israel is most prevalent in the United States.

Northern California is probably the most tolerant place on the planet... although just what it is about the Jewish people that requires tolerance remains a mystery, unless you believe that we are slaughtering Arabs like Nazis slaughtered my family.

From my view the United States is next up to bat, if you get me, and Obama has been a disaster because he stokes the flames of the hatred toward us. We can discuss just how that is. The United States will never be anything like Nazi Germany, but Jew hatred is emerging from the American Left due to the influence of the European Left and the Obama administration.

I am just sitting on a hill, watching it play out and observing the diaspora Jewish Left run for cover as they are driven from the non-Jewish Left.

And to my European brothers and sisters, you have no choice but to either run or fight, because no one is going to help you.

{I am sad to say.}

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

From Turkey's Cihan news agency:

Turkey's mutual trade volume with Israel reached over $5.6 billion in 2014, representing a nearly 50 percent rise [sic] over 2009 despite lingering diplomatic tension between the two, official figures show.

Data from the Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat) shows that mutual trade volume reached $2.6 billion in 2009. Turkish exports to Israel jumped to $2.92 billion in 2014 from $1.5 billion in 2009, while imports from Israel increased to $2.7 billion from $1.1 billion in the same period.

That is a 115% increase, not a 50% increase.

The escalation in tension between Turkey and Israel after the Davos crisis, when then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stormed out of a panel discussion after lambasting Israeli President Shimon Perez [sic], and over the Mavi Marmara attack, in which nine Turkish civilians were killed by Israeli marines who boarded a Gaza-bound flotilla ship, did not prevent trade between the two from rising steadily.

Government figures recently moved to deny the fact that Turkey and Israel are enjoying a boom in mutual trade, suggesting that much of the Turkish sales to Gaza and the West Bank also go through Israeli customs. Official data, however, reveals that only a small portion of Turkish exports to Palestine constituted total sales to Israel. In 2009, Turkey sent goods worth $29.8 million to Palestine, this figure surged to $75 million in 2013.

According to this article from today, Turkish exports to the territories increased to $280 million in 2014, with imports at only $5 million. This still only represents only 10% of the total exports to Israel.

Turkish opposition had called on the government to revise trade ties with Israel in response to ongoing bloodshed following Israeli air, naval and ground strikes in Gaza last summer.

Common exports include iron and steel, electrical machinery, vehicles, minerals and textiles.

Along with trade, earlier reports of Ankara's alleged role in the sale of oil from the autonomous Kurdish region in north Iraq to Israel, bypassing the central government, led Turkish opposition parties to accuse Erdoğan of hypocrisy in his pro-Palestinian rhetoric. Opposition parties, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Republican People's Party (CHP) blame Erdoğan for disingenuously exploiting the Gaza conflict for domestic political gain.

Erdoğan has vowed to visit Gaza on different occasions for over a year but failed to do so amid his fears of increasing tensions with the Jewish state.

As is often the case, many Muslim and Arab nations use Israel as an excuse to talk tough, but behind the scenes they act quite differently.

PA officials are blaming PLO chief negotiator Saeb Erekat for his role in forcing the resignation of William Schabas from the UNHRC's commission of inquiry/kangaroo court on the Gaza war.

There are rumors that Erekat might resign for his role in this affair.

The sources say that since the PLO had paid Schabas for legal work, he was somehow forced to lie to the UNHRC about not having any financial ties to any party under investigation in order to become the head of the commission. They are blaming Erekat for not foreseeing this issue.

Apparently Erekat should have been positioning Schabas to be able to do much more damage against Israel instead of burning his potential influence with a measly $1300 for an unimportant paper that ended up torpedoing his role in the upcoming UNHRC report.

If it wasn't for Erekat's paying Schabas, the notoriously anti-Israel lawyer would have remained in his role to craft the pre-ordained anti-Israel UNHRC document under the pretense of objectivity.

The critics say that Erekat has been boasting about the PLO negotiations unit's ties with Western legal experts such as Schabas rather than keeping them low-key and allowing the sympathetic Westerners to one day take over important anti-Israel roles in international bodies under the pretext of objectivity.

Schabas was already well-known for his anti-Israel positions before this entire affair. Some 65 anti-Israel NGOs signed a letter to the UNHRC supporting Schabas (or Christine Chinkin) to be the "Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967" to replace the notoriously anti-Israel Richard Falk.

Given that Erekat had already pretended to resign from his role and yet still remains in it, I somehow doubt that he will resign over this.

(h/t Anne)

Mysterious injury stops Arab from competing against Israeli in judo

In the European Judo Open in Bulgaria, in the preliminary men's 60kg round, there was yet another of those frequent forfeits that happen so often against Israeli opponents.

Simon Yakoub, a German who also holds citizenship with the PA, didn't appear at his match against Yoav Shemesh on Saturday morning.

On his Facebook page, Yacoub said "Hey every Supporter, I injured my back while warming up. So i am not able to fight here in sofia. Anyway i keep moving forward and hopefully i am in good health in two weeks on tatami in Düsseldorf."

Israel's coach reacted sharply, saying "The World Judo Association should put out new guidelines regarding such cases where athletes decide not to go into competition because of cheap politics. ...It's weird when the Palestinians seek recognition as a state at the time they are not ready at all to recognize our existence."

Yacoub is the latest in a never-ending series of Arabs who suddenly find that they cannot compete against Israelis in sporting competitions. YNet notes that last week a Tunisian tennis player resigned from a tournament rather than face Israel in the second round.

The ironic part is that on Yacoub's official website he writes "A fair fight ends with the opponents showing their appreciation with a handshake. Why can the same not happen on the street, at school, between neighbors, countries or entire states? Peace begins, so to speak, right next door ... "

(h/t Bob Knot)

Panicked over Egyptian attitude, Hamas video shows Egypt and Hamas against Israel

Last week an Egyptian court ruled that the Hamas Al Qassam Brigades is a terrorist group.

Hamas, panicked over how Egypt has blaming it for its problems with Sinai Islamic militants and how Egyptians are buying it, decided that they must appeal directly to Egyptians about how much Hamas also loves the Egyptian army - and, of course, to remind them of who their real enemy is.

The video shows both an Egyptian soldier and a Hamas terrorist being shot by an Israeli soldier. They reach their bloodied hands together, and then miraculously get up to both shoot the evil Zionist.

As Arabs themselves admit, hating Israel is the only thing that they have in common, so any appeal to unity must include an appeal to kill Jews together.

02/07 Links: Letter to a BBC Jerusalem correspondent – from 1948; BBC WS: the Schabas show

From Ian:

Letter to a BBC Jerusalem correspondent – from 1948

In February 1948 two successive bombings rocked Jerusalem. Three people were killed at the beginning of the month when the building housing the offices of the Palestine Post (later to become the Jerusalem Post) was attacked by means of a car bomb. Three weeks later another car bomb was detonated on Ben Yehuda Street killing over fifty people and injuring dozens more. Both attacks were initiated by the commander of Arab forces in the Jerusalem area and were carried out by two British Army deserters.
Shortly after the second bombing, the founder and editor of the Palestine Post Gershon Agron wrote the letter below to the BBC’s correspondent in Jerusalem at the time, Richard Williams, with whom he had previously engaged in an apparently heated conversation.
There are also a number of quotations that point out that the BBC was too hasty in discovering that the people who threw a bomb at The Palestine Post offices (on February 1, 1948) were either Arabs or Jews. But the Post quoted the BBC news item from London that some 300 British citizens left England to join the Arabs. This news item was never denied, even after it was proven to be false.
But this February we were the bad boys again. The BBC announced that “Jerusalem was quiet after a great Jewish anti-British demonstration.” This was the day after Ben-Yehuda Street was bombed. Jerusalem was not particularly quiet on this very day and night. A search was going on for the bodies of the 66 persons killed in this bombing. To show that in Jerusalem only the British are killed is a sham. But this was, perhaps, what the British listener wished to hear.
All this indicates that everybody falsifies and some do it on purpose. The British try to show that each murder (isn’t this a norm?) was committed by Jews. And why? Because the particulars of the murder do not explain what happened before. It may be understood that somebody wishes to see himself to be just in his own eyes. But why claim that this is the whole truth, and not something that depends on other factors?
If we arrive at a day when we all agree that the Jewish nature will show the way to the Jewish people, exactly as the British try to square things according to the British point of view, we will be able to live in peace, each respecting the other in this not entirely easy country. As one of my friends said yesterday that “only in peace we will find confidence and mutual prosperity.”

College Students Honor Convicted Palestinian Bomber

Students at DePaul University are rallying behind a woman who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a bombing in Jerusalem.
Rasmieh Odeh was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine when the group killed two students in a bombing at a market in 1969.
Odeh, now in her late 60s, was released in 1995 as part of a prisoner exchange and came to the United States.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) held a fundraiser for Odeh’s legal defense after a federal jury found that she lied on her immigration papers by answering “no” to the question of whether she’d been convicted of a crime.
Seth Winberg, an Orthodox rabbi and executive director of Metro Chicago Hillel, talked to Brian Kilmeade this morning about his group’s effort to protest the SJP’s actions.

Irony: Saudi UN Rep Can’t Condemn Israel On Women’s Rights Without Hijab

NOT A JOKE: The Saudis are now investigating why one of its top female envoys spoke at the U.N. without a head scarf. Irony: Manal Radwan’s speech to the U.N. Security Council condemned Israel for violating women’s rights. Maybe Ms. Radwan will want to speak next time in the Israeli parliament, where she can condemn anyone without having to hide her hair or face.

Saudis investigate UN envoy for speaking without veil (condemning Israel on women's rights)

"Israel and the US cheers every time Muslims kill each other"

From Malay Mail Online January 24:

Muslims are doing the US and Israel a favour every time they kill one of their own, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said today as he called for unity among Islam’s followers to push for global recognition of a Palestinian state.

He said Muslims today are too preoccupied with revenge and killing each other over ideological differences, that they have forgotten that the Quran calls for brotherhood among all the faithful.

“Currently we are trying to bring down governments, we are fighting each other, and we are accusing each other of not being Islamic enough, just so that we can murder them.

“Every time a Muslim kills another Muslim, the Israelis and Americans cheer because we are doing their work for them. We should realise that and stop fighting each other,” he said in his keynote address at the launch of a US$1 billion (RM3.6 billion) fund raiser to rebuild Gaza.

This dovetails nicely with the video yesterday of Abd Al-Bari Atwan saying that Arabs must wage jihad against Israel since it is all they can unite on.

Mahatir is arguing the flip side: the reason that Muslims shouldn't kill each other is because it makes Israel happy. Clearly, Mahatir knows that telling them not to fight each other because killing is a bad thing won't get through to them, but if they know that Israelis are happy that they are killing each other, that might be enough to get them to stop - because who can stand when Jews are happy?

Mahatir is a known antisemite, a fact of which he is proud.

Dr Mahathir, long a critic of US foreign policy, claimed that the Muslim world in its current state of disunity is unable to counter the West’s “hypocrisy of the highest order” in dealing with terrorism and human rights.

He accused Israel and its western backers of being “state terrorists” responsible for the killing of 200,000 Palestinians, describing it as a far worse act of terrorism compared to the deadly attack on French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo earlier this month.

200,000? Not quite. The number of Palestinian Arabs killed by Israel in 66 years is about one tenth of his estimate.

But it seems a little silly to expect him to say anything truthful to begin with.

(h/t Mike)

02/06 Links Pt2: PA pays terrorist prisoners salary based on carnage caused; LATMA returns!

From Ian:

Edwin Black: PA studies details of each terrorist act before issuing salaries

Congressional legislators were astonished last year to learn that the Palestinian Authority was issuing monthly payouts totaling $3-7 million as salaries and other financial rewards to specific terrorists and their families. The money was channeled, in part, through the Ministry of Prisoners pursuant to the Law of the Prisoner. The law set forth a graduated scale, pegging monthly salaries to the length of Israeli jail sentences, which generally reflects the severity of the crime and the number of people killed and/or injured.
Thousands of documents, newly obtained by this reporter through a lawsuit to unseal court-protected files, demonstrate that these payouts are not blind automated payments. Rather, senior Palestinian Authority officials as high as President Mahmoud Abbas scrutinize the details of each case, the specific carnage caused, and the personal details of each terrorist act before approving salaries and awarding honorary ranks in either the PA government or the military.
Ministry of Prisoners spokesman Amr Nasser has explained, “We are very proud of this program and we have nothing to hide.” Nonetheless, in response to the international furor over the payments, the Palestinian Authority announced last year it would replace the Ministry of Prisoners with an outside PLO commission known as the Higher National Commission for Prisoners and Detainees Affairs.
The PA is dependent upon foreign donor countries to supply much of its budget, which now exceeds $4.2 billion annually. About ten percent of the PA budget, more than $400 million, is contributed annually by United States foreign aid. The US and many other countries have enacted laws forbidding any payments when the monies directly or indirectly support or encourage terrorism.

Douglas Murray: More On "No-Go Zones": Displacing What Is Disagreeable

Amid all the giggling and the Twitter hashtags, something dark is going on in France and Britain. None of these areas is a place where non-Muslims are "forbidden" to go. But they do exist. They are places where behavior that is commonplace in wider society would certainly be discouraged, sometimes intimidatingly so.
Last year in the UK, we discovered that a portion of Birmingham's secular state schools had been taken over by Islamic fundamentalists. The results of these discoveries -- which included teachings that Muslims were to distance themselves from non-Muslims, look down on then and not take them as friends -- shocked the nation. It still seems shaken. Yet most Muslim leaders in the UK simply denied the findings of successive government-led inquiries. Instead of tackling the outrages, they dismissed them as some "Islamophobic" plot.
It seemed we were witnessing an example of "displacement:" it is so much easier to laugh at a foreign news station than to deal with the jolting nugget of truth that may have been exaggerated. So much easier to choke on your porridge at the "idiocy" of an American than to stop your schools from being lost to extremist ideologies. And so much easier to talk of "suing" a news channel than to prevent atrocities of the kind we saw last month from happening again in your city.

Right-Wing Satire Latma Finally Breaks Leftist TV Hold

Fans of the right-wing satire show Latma finally got their long-awaited wish on Thursday night, as the show that went off the internet back in August 2013 due to a budget crisis caused by a reneged-upon contract made history by airing on TV, and in doing so breaking the leftist monopoly on Israeli satire.
After Israel Broadcasting Authority's (IBA) Channel 1 initially gave the show something of a run-around, promising to air the show and leading it to raise production values that eventually bankrupted it after a full four years of donation-based glory on YouTube, the satire series has finally found a home on the TV channel.
Latma, the brainchild of veteran journalist Caroline Glick, appeared with a slick new look and graphics on TV under the new name Hakol Shafit, loosely meaning "everything can be judged."
The star of the show Noam Jacobson reprised his central position on the show in numerous roles, playing Binyamin Netanyahu, Avigdor Liberman and an elitist Supreme Court judge.

I had missed this from AP, in the story about the UNSC condemnation of the killing of a UN peacekeeper during the incident when Hezbollah attacked Israeli soldiers:

A council diplomat said Russia blocked a French-drafted press statement on Tuesday that would have condemned the Hezbollah attack on the Israeli soldiers as a violation of the resolution that ended the 2006 war as well as the death of the Spanish peacekeeper, saying it was "unbalanced."

The blocked statement, supported by Spain and many other council members, also expressed grave concern over the deterioration of the situation along both sides of the so-called Blue Line separating Lebanon and Israel, the diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity because discussions were closed.

Hezbollah is bragging about the condemnation being stopped, writing in its Al Manar site:

Lebanon has managed to frustrate a French endeavor in the UN Security Council to issue a presidential statement that condemns Hezbollah over Shebaa operations.

The efforts exerted by the Lebanese Foreign Ministry and the Russian stance in the Security council contributed to foiling the French attempt which was clearly backed by the Israeli envoy who considered, as a result, that Hezbollah is represented in the International Organization.

02/06 Links Pt1: Phillips: The Obama doctrine says ‘Israel’s enemy is my friend’; V15's plans revealed

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The Obama doctrine says ‘Israel’s enemy is my friend’

The brouhaha over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed address to the US Congress next month is simply jaw-dropping.
Uproar ensued after Netanyahu was invited by the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner. Democrats have been furiously accusing the prime minister of crude Israeli electioneering. In Israel itself, he has come under widespread attack for putting the delicate relationship between Israel and the Obama administration at risk.
What planet are these people living on? The issue, and it could hardly be more urgent or grave, is not Netanyahu’s behavior. The issue is how to stop Iran.
It is astounding to claim that Netanyahu is putting the relationship with Obama at risk. The wholly artificial storm whipped up by the White House merely illustrates once again Obama’s sustained malice toward Israel, the invaluable bulwark of Western defenses in the Middle East, while he empowers Iran and other enemies of America and the free world.
That is what everyone should be talking about.

Carline Glick: Hamas and the nexus of global jihad

In its war against Sunni and Shi’ite jihadist forces that threaten to destroy Egypt, and among other things, cause mass harm to the global economy by imperiling maritime traffic, Egypt finds itself betrayed by the Obama administration.
Last month, just a few days before the Muslim Brotherhood called for “a long and uncompromising jihad” against Egypt, leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood met with senior US officials at the State Department. In response to a reporter’s question about the meeting, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki insisted that despite the Brotherhood’s call for holy war against the US’s closest Arab ally, the administration has no regrets about meeting, and so conferring legitimacy and implying US support for the Brotherhood in its war against the Sisi government.
Opposition leaders Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni have based their electoral campaign against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on blaming him for the crisis in Israel’s relations with the White House. It is hard to think of a more cynical, destructive allegation.
As the administration’s continued embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood despite its full membership in the terrorist nexus that threatens the US and all of its closest allies, along with its desperate courtship of the Iranian mullahs, makes clear, the Obama administration has chosen to appease rather than combat America’s worst enemies.
Perhaps the most sympathetic interpretation of Livni’s and Herzog’s unwarranted and harmful assaults against Netanyahu is that they simply cannot accept that the world has changed.
But the trends are clear. The only responsible thing that Israel can do is to act accordingly.
Today Israel’s closest ally is Egypt. Under Obama, the US is a force to be worked around, not worked with.

Galloway on Question Time

There was a worrying and thinly veiled menace in some of Galloway’s remarks. He warned the audience that he and those who support him would resent this section of the programme. He went on to claim that Islamophobia was a bigger problem than antisemitism – that’s both debatable (not that it’s a competition), and beside the point. He implied that those present cared more about antisemitism than anti-Muslim bigotry. This accusation was gratuitous, groundless and divisive. In fact Jonathan Freedland, in particular, has often spoken out against attacks on Muslims. This was particularly worrying.
‘I beg you, don’t conflate Zionism, Israel and Jews in London. It’s a very dangerous thing to do.’ … ’It’s a very dangerous game that you are playing here – very, very dangerous’
Again, there’s an implication that Zionist Jews, and Jews who support Israel (and of course you can be a Zionist and supporter of Israel while having strong reservations about the Likud government) are in some way responsible for antisemitism – although one might ask what Zionism has to do with a Kosher supermarket.
Tristram Hunt got an enthusiastic round of applause from the Finchley audience when he pointed out that this is not an arms race between Islamophobia and antisemitism. Galloway, by contrast, seemed intent on stirring up antagonism between Jews and Muslims.

Guardian editor accuses George Galloway of fueling antisemitism

What’s remarkable about the Feb. 5th episode of BBC’s Question Time (from Finchley in north London) is not only that senior Guardian editor Jonathan Freedland criticizes George Galloway for using rhetoric which fuels antisemitism, but that Galloway then proceeds to lash out at the entire British Jewish community.

Galloway on Question time

Obama's Iran strategy HAS been consistent. That's what's scary.

Today's Washington Post editorial opposing the president's Iran policy will get a lot of attention:

AS THE Obama administration pushes to complete a nuclear accord with Iran, numerous members of Congress, former secretaries of state and officials of allied governments are expressing concern about the contours of the emerging deal. Though we have long supported negotiations with Iran as well as the interim agreement the United States and its allies struck with Tehran, we share several of those concerns and believe they deserve more debate now — before negotiators present the world with a fait accompli.

The problems raised by authorities ranging from Henry Kissinger, the country’s most senior former secretary of state, to Sen. Timothy M. Kaine, Virginia’s junior Democratic senator, can be summed up in three points:

●First, a process that began with the goal of eliminating Iran’s potential to produce nuclear weapons has evolved into a plan to tolerate and restrict that capability.

●Second, in the course of the negotiations, the Obama administration has declined to counter increasingly aggressive efforts by Iran to extend its influence across the Middle East and seems ready to concede Tehran a place as a regional power at the expense of Israel and other U.S. allies.

●Finally, the Obama administration is signaling that it will seek to implement any deal it strikes with Iran — including the suspension of sanctions that were originally imposed by Congress — without seeking a vote by either chamber. Instead, an accord that would have far-reaching implications for nuclear proliferation and U.S. national security would be imposed unilaterally by a president with less than two years left in his term.

This is good, but to really understand what is going on, you must read a long, must-read article published in Mosaic this week that seeks to explain Obama's Iran policy.

The article is frightening in showing how the president is betting the security of the entire world based on a very flawed adherence to wishful thinking.

From time to time, critics and even friends of the president have complained vocally about the seeming disarray or fecklessness of the administration’s handling of foreign policy. Words like amateurish, immature, and incompetent are bandied about; what’s needed, we’re told, is less ad-hoc fumbling, more of a guiding strategic vision. Most recently, Leslie Gelb, a former government official and past president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has charged that “the Obama team lacks the basic instincts and judgment necessary to conduct U.S. national-security policy,” and has urged the president to replace the entire inner core of his advisers with “strong and strategic people of proven . . . experience.”

One sympathizes with Gelb’s sense of alarm, but his premises are mistaken. Inexperience is a problem in this administration, but there is no lack of strategic vision. Quite the contrary: a strategy has been in place from the start, and however clumsily it may on occasion have been implemented, and whatever resistance it has generated abroad or at home, Obama has doggedly adhered to the policies that have flowed from it.

In what follows, we’ll trace the course of the most important of those policies and their contribution to the president’s announced determination to encourage and augment Iran’s potential as a successful regional power and as a friend and partner to the United States.

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But Obama does have a relatively concrete vision. When he arrived in Washington in 2006, he absorbed a set of ideas that had incubated on Capitol Hill during the previous three years—ideas that had received widespread attention thanks to the final report of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan congressional commission whose co-chairs, former secretary of state James Baker and former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, interpreted their mission broadly, offering advice on all key aspects of Middle East policy.

The report, published in December 2006, urged then-President Bush to take four major steps: withdraw American troops from Iraq; surge American troops in Afghanistan; reinvigorate the Arab-Israeli “peace process”; and, last but far from least, launch a diplomatic engagement of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its junior partner, the Assad regime in Syria. Baker and Hamilton believed that Bush stood in thrall to Israel and was therefore insufficiently alive to the benefits of cooperating with Iran and Syria. Those two regimes, supposedly, shared with Washington the twin goals of stabilizing Iraq and defeating al-Qaeda and other Sunni jihadi groups. In turn, this shared interest would provide a foundation for building a concert system of states—a club of stable powers that could work together to contain the worst pathologies of the Middle East and lead the way to a sunnier future.

Expressing the ethos of an influential segment of the foreign-policy elite, the Baker-Hamilton report became the blueprint for the foreign policy of the Obama administration, and its spirit continues to pervade Obama’s inner circle. Denis McDonough, now the president’s chief of staff, once worked as an aide to Lee Hamilton; so did Benjamin Rhodes, who helped write the Iraq Study Group’s report. Obama not only adopted the blueprint but took it one step further, recruiting Vladimir Putin’s Russia as another candidate for membership in the new club. The administration’s early “reset” with Russia and its policy of reaching out to Iran and Syria formed two parts of a single vision. If, in Bushland, America had behaved like a sheriff, assembling a posse (“a coalition of the willing”) to go in search of monsters, in Obamaworld America would disarm its rivals by ensnaring them in a web of cooperation. To rid the world of rogues and tyrants, one must embrace and soften them.

Obama based his policy of outreach to Tehran on two key assumptions of the grand-bargain myth: that Tehran and Washington were natural allies, and that Washington itself was the primary cause of the enmity between the two. If only the United States were to adopt a less belligerent posture, so the thinking went, Iran would reciprocate. In his very first television interview from the White House, Obama announced his desire to talk to the Iranians, to see “where there are potential avenues for progress.” Echoing his inaugural address, he said, “[I]f countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.”

Unfortunately, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, ignored the president’s invitation. Five months later, in June 2009, when the Green Movement was born, his autocratic fist was still clenched. As the streets of Tehran exploded in the largest anti-government demonstrations the country had seen since the revolution of 1979, he used that fist to beat down the protesters. For their part, the protesters, hungry for democratic reform and enraged by government rigging of the recent presidential election, appealed to Obama for help. He responded meekly, issuing tepid statements of support while maintaining a steady posture of neutrality. To alienate Khamenei, after all, might kill the dream of a new era in U.S.-Iranian relations.

If this show of deference was calculated to warm the dictator’s heart, it failed. “What we intended as caution,” one of Obama’s aides would later tell a reporter, “the Iranians saw as weakness.” Indeed, the president’s studied “caution” may even have emboldened Tehran to push forward, in yet another in the long series of blatant violations of its obligations under the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), with its construction of a secret uranium enrichment facility in an underground bunker at Fordow, near Qom.This time, Obama reacted. Revealing the bunker’s existence, he placed Khamenei in a tough spot. The Russians, who had been habitually more lenient toward the Iranian nuclear program than the Americans, were irritated by the disclosure of this clandestine activity; the French were moved to demand a strong Western response.

But when Khamenei finessed the situation by adopting a seemingly more flexible attitude toward negotiations, Obama quickly obliged. Delighted to find a receptive Iranian across the table, he dismissed the French call for toughness, instead volunteering a plan that would meet Iran’s desire to keep most of its nuclear infrastructure intact while proving to the world that it was not stockpiling fissile material for a bomb. In keeping with his larger aspirations, the president also placed Moscow at the center of the action, proposing that the Iranians transfer their enriched uranium to Russia in exchange for fuel rods capable of powering a nuclear reactor but not of being used in a bomb. The Iranian negotiators, displaying their new spirit of compromise, accepted the terms. Even President Ahmadinejad, the notorious hardliner, pronounced himself on board.

Obama, it seemed to some, had pulled off a major coup. Less than a year after taking office, he was turning his vision of a new Middle East order into a reality. Or was he? Once the heat was off, Khamenei reneged on the deal, throwing the president back to square one and in the process weakening him politically at home, where congressional skeptics of his engagement policy now began lobbying for more stringent economic sanctions on Tehran. To protect his flank, Obama tacked rightward, appropriating, if with visible reluctance, some of his opponents’ rhetoric and bits of their playbook as well. In 2010, he signed into law the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act (CISADA), which eventually would prove more painful to Iran than any previous measure of its kind.

In later years, whenever Obama would stand accused of being soft on Iran, he would invariably point to CISADA as evidence to the contrary. “[O]ver the course of several years,” he stated in March 2014, “we were able to enforce an unprecedented sanctions regime that so crippled the Iranian economy that they were willing to come to the table.” The “table” in question was the negotiation resulting in the November 2013 agreement, known as the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA), which we shall come to in due course. But masked in the president’s boast was the fact that he had actually opposed CISADA, which was rammed down his throat by a Senate vote of 99 to zero.

Once the bill became law, a cadre of talented and dedicated professionals in the Treasury Department set to work implementing it. But the moment of presumed “convergence” between Obama and his congressional skeptics proved temporary and tactical; their fundamental difference in outlook would become much more apparent in the president’s second term. For the skeptics, the way to change Khamenei’s behavior was to place him before a stark choice: dismantle Iran’s nuclear program—period—or face catastrophic consequences. For Obama, to force a confrontation with Khamenei would destroy any chance of reaching an accommodation on the nuclear front and put paid to his grand vision of a new Middle East order.