Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, July 17, 2015

07/17 Links Pt2: The NGO Campaign to Destroy Israel; Hamas wins a seat on a UN committee

From Ian:

When an NGO receives a sizeable portion of its budget from governments, it is no longer a non-governmental organization. And when such funding to NGOs is provided by allied states such as the U.S. or the UK, or international unions such as the EU, it constitutes disproportionate interference by external governments in the internal affairs of another democratic state.
"NGOs are meant to represent civil society, not the interests of foreign governments. Israeli NGOs that receive foreign government funding benefit from the misleading image of being 'non-governmental,' non-political, and based in 'civil society'" — NGO Monitor.
NGO Monitor research reveals that a number of funders made their grants conditional on the NGO obtaining a minimum number of negative "testimonies." It should be clear that a wide range of church organizations, human rights NGOs, and a number of European governments are engaged in an extremely one-sided enterprise to bring about the defamation and destruction of the Jewish state. All of these NGOs have much the same political agenda of defaming, pressuring and undermining Israel; and using human rights issues to promote a steadily negative view of the country, its government, its laws, and its defence forces.
Many never criticize the Palestinian Authority or Hamas, nor do they turn their attentions to the desperate state of human rights in states such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, China, Russia and Lebanon, among others. NGOs are being well paid to urge total changes in the constitutions of other nations, and in the total abolition of another nation's right to exist at all. No other country in the world would stand for it; why should Israel?

Undercover Jew

Book Review: Catch The Jew!, by Tuvia Tenenbom
If you want to understand why there is no peace in the Holy Land despite the best efforts of the Obama administration and the billion-dollar European “peace and human rights” industry, you owe it to yourself to read Catch the Jew! by Tuvia Tenenbom. This myth-shattering book became an instant bestseller in Israel last year, yet, Germany aside, it has largely been ignored in American and European media outlets and by the reigning Middle East punditocracy. Ostensibly, Tenenbom’s book is disdained because the author lacks the academic or journalistic credentials to be taken seriously as a commentator on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Though he speaks both Arabic and Hebrew, Tenenbom possesses no professional expertise on the modern Middle East, nor has he had any previous journalistic experience covering Israel and the Palestinian territories.
So much for academic and journalistic credentials, then. In this volume full of personal observations, revealing interviews, and Swiftian satire, Tenenbom offers deeper insights into the fundamental realities of the Middle East conflict and the pathologies of the Palestinian national movement than decades of reporting by media outlets such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, and Israel’s Haaretz. No fair-minded person can come away from this book without wondering why such citadels of contemporary liberal journalism have neglected to inform their readers of the scam being conducted in the region by self-styled human-rights activists and their taxpayer-funded European NGOs—not to mention that this massive international intervention actually makes it even more difficult to achieve a peaceful solution to the conflict.

Hamas is set to win a seat at the United Nations table

Is Hamas joining the United Nations? Well, not directly — at least not yet — but through the back door, unless the members of the Economic and Social Council wake up.
On Monday, the 54 member states in ECOSOC (including the United States, Germany and United Kingdom) are scheduled to take the vote on the application of Palestinian Return Centre for accreditation as a non-governmental organization in the UN system.
This campaign is led by Sudan — a notorious terror state led by Omar al-Bashir, who’s wanted for genocide. If the PRC application is granted, the group’s leaders would receive open access to UN facilities in New York, Geneva and elsewhere, as well as the right to participate in committee meetings (including at the Human Rights Council).
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh has had a close affiliation with the PRC, which is based in London and active throughout Europe, for many years, including appearing as the keynote speaker at the organization’s annual conference in Milan in 2009. On June 1, after the PRC passed the preliminary vote in the NGO committee of ECOSOC, Haniyeh’s office warmly congratulated the PRC leadership.

Israel haters try to co-opt promise to Children of Israel

Seen in a Whole Foods:

This comes from "Palestine Free Trade" and "Canaan Free Trade" which heavily use this slogan:

The original source for the phrase is in Exodus chapter 3:

And the Lord said, "I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt, and I have heard their cry because of their slave drivers, for I know their pains. I have descended to rescue them from the hand[s] of the Egyptians and to bring them up from that land, to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivvites, and the Jebusites. And now, behold, the cry of the children of Israel has come to Me, and I have also seen the oppression that the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now come, and I will send you to Pharaoh, and take My people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt."

People who hate Israel are co-opting a promise made to the Children of Israel to inherit the land that the Arabs want exclusively for themselves.

(h/t Alyssa Kaplan)

One year ago: Muslims moving rockets into a mosque

On July 18, 2014, the Washington Post reported:

The ground assault came hours after a short break in the fighting. Residents rushed outside their homes to take advantage of a five-hour “humanitarian truce” between Israel and Hamas requested by the United Nations. It was a brief respite on a day that began with mortar fire from Gaza and ended with the ground assault.

During the lull, a group of men at a mosque in northern Gaza said they had returned to clean up the green glass from windows shattered in the previous day’s bombardment. But they could be seen moving small rockets into the mosque.

That part of the report was deleted hours later. Hamas threats against reporters caused many examples of self-censorship, which the media of course barely covered until after the war.

Here is another event from the Gaza war that Amnesty doesn't want you to know about. Because they aren't interested in violations of humanitarian law, they are interested in blaming Israel for imaginary violations of human rights law.

07/17 Links Pt1: The ICC declares war on Israel; Glick: Obama’s age of nuclear chaos

From Ian:

The ICC declares war on Israel

The Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court, for the first time in its history, has ordered the ICC Prosecutor to pursue an investigation she has decided to close. The Chamber ruled that the Prosecutor was wrong to close the preliminary investigation into war crimes charges against Israel for crimes allegedly committed in boarding the Mavi Marmara and other vessels during the flotilla incident of 2010.
The ruling of the Pre-Trial Chamber is remarkable.
It holds that the Prosecutor should have taken into account facts and actions that are outside the jurisdiction of the court in deciding whether to bring charges.
It holds that the Prosecutor should assume the truth of even the wildest accusations in deciding whether to bring charges; in other words, there should be an irrebuttable presumption of guilt in the preliminary investigation stage.
And most shockingly, it holds that crimes have sufficient gravity to interest the court, even if they have very few actual victims, as long as they are widely covered by the media, and are subject to a lot of political activity at the UN.
Needless to say, none of these holdings are accompanied by any citation to precedent. That’s because they are without any precedent. (h/t Yenta Press)

The Pre-Trial Chamber’s Dangerous Comoros Review Decision

It will be the rare situation indeed that does not satisfy Art. 53(1)(a) and Art. 53(1)(b). How many non-frivolous referrals do not contain allegations of at least one crime within the Court’s jurisdiction? And how many situations will fail gravity analysis in light of the PTC’s insistence that a situation involving only low-level perpetrators and less than a dozen deaths is grave enough for a formal investigation? If allowed to stand, then, the PTC’s decision will force the OTP to either open formal investigations into literally dozens of situations (including all of the current situations it is preliminarily examining) or decline to investigate specifically on the basis of interests of justice — the one criterion, according to the PTC, where it maintains considerable discretion. Given the OTP’s evident resource limitations, that is not really a choice.
And therein lies true danger of the PTC’s Comoros decision. Recall what I said earlier: when the OTP declines to open a formal investigation because a situation does not include a crime within the Court’s jurisdiction or because the situation is not adequately grave, the PTC can only request the OTP reconsider its decision not to investigate. The current decision is an example. But when the OTP declines to open a formal investigation because such an investigation would not be in the interests of justice, the PTC can demand the OTP reconsider. In practice, then, the Comoros decision will force the OTP to decline to open investigations on the one ground that is always subject to “hard” review by the PTC.
Put more simply: if the Comoros decision is allowed to stand, the PTC will have given itself final say over all OTP decisions not to open a formal investigation into a situation. That is fundamentally incompatible with the Rome Statute’s guarantee of prosecutorial independence, and it is not acceptable.

PM slams ICC demand to reopen probe into Mavi Marmara raid

Netanyahu said the Israel Navy commandos involved acted in self-defense, on a mission to maintain an internationally backed naval blockade. The ICC judges’ move was “motivated by cynical politics,” he claimed. Israel’s soldiers, he added, would “continue to keep Israel safe,” and Israel would “continue to protect them in the international arena.
“At a time when [Bashar] Assad in Syria is slaughtering tens of thousands of his own people, when Iran is executing hundreds and Hamas in Gaza is using children as human shields, the court chooses to deal with Israel for cynical political reasons,” he charged.
“Against this hypocrisy, our soldiers will continue to protect us in the field and we will defend them in the international arena,” he said.
Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon termed the move hypocritical and scandalous.
Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely (Likud) said the ICC judges making the demand had been mobilized by Palestinian “incitement.”
“It’s very puzzling to me why the International Criminal Court would decide to open a probe into soldiers who defended themselves against brutal attacks by terrorists aboard the Marmara,” she said in a statement to the press.
“There are Palestinian actors who are trying all the time to incite international bodies against Israel. I hope those same bodies will be able to identify the incitement and not help it along,” she went on.

Congress is irrelevant - UNSC to vote to accept Iran deal on Monday

From Arutz-7:

In a diplomatic blitzkrieg, the Obama Administration has set this coming Monday at 9 a.m. EST for a vote at the UN Security Council (UNSC) in New York on the adoption of the Iran nuclear deal, which was announced by the world’s leading powers and the Islamic Republic of Iran in Vienna on Tuesday.

A terse announcement by the New Zealand delegation which assumed the monthly rotating UNSC’s Presidency for July revealed the vote session.

“The Iran JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) resolution is now under silence and its adoption has been scheduled for Monday 20 July at 9 a.m.,” read the announcement on the Iran deal vote.

Here is the tweet from the New Zealand delegation:

#UNSC scheduled to vote on #JCPOA #IranDeal resolution on Monday 20 July at 9am. #NonProliferation #Iran #NZprez
— NZ Mission to the UN (@NZUN) July 17, 2015

A Turkish reporter tweeted it with the words "under silence:"

"The #Iran JCPOA resolution is now under silence and its adoption has been scheduled for Monday 20 July at 9am" #UNSC #UN #nuclear #IranDeal
— kahraman haliscelik (@turkishreporter) July 17, 2015

A7 says:

From the New Zealand statement’s use of the diplomatic jargon of “under silence,” it appears the UNSC may employ a rarely used “under silence” procedure in such an important vote at the UNSC.

In an “under silence” adoption procedure, instead of the UNSC holding a normal positive vote, the motion that is set for adoption “under silence” is deemed automatically adopted unless a party specifically objects to the motion. This “under silence” procedure would put the onus on Israel to be the first, and possibly the only, objector to the UNSC’s adoption of the Iran deal.

In the established handbook on diplomacy, G. R. Berridge’s “Diplomacy: Theory and Practice,” the “under silence” procedure is described as being used by the majority where “a proposal with strong support is deemed to have been agreed unless any member raises an objection to it before a precise deadline: silence signifies assent – or, at least, acquiescence. This procedure relies on a member in a minority fearing that raising an objection will expose it to the charge of obstructiveness and, thereby, the perils of isolation.”

So, applying Berridge’s analysis to the “under silence” adoption of the JCPOA at the UNSC, the Obama Administration’s use of the “under silence” procedure would appear to be an attempt to scare Israel into “fearing that raising an objection [to the Iranian nuclear deal] will expose it [Israel] to the charge of obstructiveness and perils of isolation.”

Contrariwise, Israel’s failure to raise an objection would be seen as “assent - or, at least, acquiescence.” To make matters worse for Israel, with Israel’s objection, the UN Security Council would likely then unanimously vote 15-0 for the Iranian deal.

If true, this is absolutely outrageous - a controversial vote is being rigged to marginalize, and indeed demonize, anyone who objects. Meaning, Israel.

But the bigger issue is that this UNSC vote makes any Congressional action against the JCPOA almost meaningless. As Charles Krauthammer notes in a must-read article:

The action now shifts to Congress. The debate is being hailed as momentous. It is not. It’s irrelevant.

Congress won’t get to vote on the deal until September. But Obama is taking the agreement to the U.N. Security Council for approval within days . Approval there will cancel all previous U.N. resolutions outlawing and sanctioning Iran’s nuclear activities.

Meaning: Whatever Congress ultimately does, it won’t matter because the legal underpinning for the entire international sanctions regime against Iran will have been dismantled at the Security Council. Ten years of painstakingly constructed international sanctions will vanish overnight, irretrievably.

Even if Congress rejects the agreement, do you think the Europeans, the Chinese or the Russians will reinstate sanctions? The result: The United States is left isolated while the rest of the world does thriving business with Iran.

The rest of his column is even more devastating.

The game is rigged. The Obama administration is hell-bent on putting moderate lipstick on the Iranian terror-supporting pig. All that the president has said in the past few years, about how serious he takes Iranian cheating and how all options are on the table and how the US red lines will not be crossed, is revealed to be a huge smokescreen. The very few increased controls revealed in the agreement are more than offset by the legitimacy and cash the deal gives Iran, instantly erasing the leverage - both financial and political - built up over years of sanctions. Iran is now an honored member of the world community, while the Gulf nations and Israel are holding the bag.

The naysayers, who have been vilified by the Obama-worshipers, have been proven right. But it is too late.

UPDATE: Omri Ceren at The Israel Project summarizes how this action undermines the Corker bill:

Remember how we got here. The March 9 Cotton letter, signed by 47 Senators, declared that without Congressional buy-in any deal with Iran would not be binding on future presidents [8]. Iranian FM Zarif responded with a temper tantrum in which he revealed that the parties intended to fast-track an UNSCR that would make Congress irrelevant and tie the hands of future presidents: "I wish to enlighten the authors that if the next administration revokes any agreement with the stroke of a pen, as they boast, it will have simply committed a blatant violation of international law"[9]. That created a firestorm of criticism from the Hill [10]. Zarif doubled down from the stage at NYU: "within a few days after [an agreement] we will have a resolution in the security council ... which will be mandatory for all member states, whether Senator Cotton likes it or not" [11].And so Congress responded with the Corker legislation. 98 Senators and 400 Representatives passed the bill with the intention of preventing the Obama administration from immediately going to the U.N. after an agreement and making good on Zarif's boast. President Obama signed the bill. Now the administration is doing exactly what the legislation was designed to prohibit.

Even more bias revealed in Amnesty's "Gaza Platform"

Amnesty continues to tweet about supposed Israeli war crimes that happened last year. And the group continues to show how biased it is.

Its latest tweet is about the Gaza beach incident where four boys unfortunately were killed:

Wounded boy carried as 4 children on Gaza beach killed by Israeli missile: http://t.co/65rNI3jQUD #50Days4Gaza pic.twitter.com/XDGnKYZfzL
— AmnestyInternational (@AmnestyOnline) July 16, 2015

As usual, their link to their Gaza Platform does not go to the specific incident. The platform does not seem to include a way to link to specific events altogether, which is a major shortcoming for something that is meant to be a useful research tool.

In order to preclude the charge of bias, the Gaza Platform includes, in some cases, a link to Israel's investigation of the same incident.

However, the creators of this expensive piece of anti-Israel software apparently never tested that feature. Because every link to an Israeli investigation is broken and causes a nearly incomprehensible error message.

Isn't that interesting? A professional platform, ostensibly for research purposes, with sophisticated features, just happens to break when one attempts to use it to find the other side of the story. The coders didn't bother to test part of their platform that just happens to contradict the entire point of the platform.

But that isn't the only issue. While Amnesty's'platform integrates the words of two biased, anti-Israel sources (Al Mezan and PCHR) directly into the platform, even if the links to the Israeli response worked, they raised the bar considerably for reading them because the platform forces people who want to read the other side of the story to jump through hoops - to download a PDF file and to find the specific incident within that document.

They hand-feed the anti-Israel propaganda, but they make Israel's response difficult or impossible to read.

But it is even worse. Al Mezan and PCHR wrote their reports in real time and could not, even if they wanted to, determine who is a civilian and who is a militant. All of the information available to researchers in the platform was written within a day of the incidents, so any new facts that have been uncovered since then - facts that almost always put the IDF in a better light - are ignored. (Amnesty is not the only organization that did this, of course - the UN did the same.)

There is a year's worth of research, some done by me but most of it formally documented by the Meir Amit ITIC, that is being consciously ignored by Amnesty and the Gaza platform. The Davis Commission included data from the Meir Amit center in its report - but Amnesty decided that they didn't want the world to see that there was another side to the story.

Moreover, the Israeli Military Advocate General has access to crucial information that is unavailable to Amnesty's chosen sources, information that directly relates to the legal issue of whether war crimes were committed. Amnesty decided first that Israel was guilty of war crimes, and only then created a product that was written specifically to prove it.

Amnesty's claims of being fair and impartial have been torn to shreds by their commitment to this one-sided project and 50 days of demonizing Israel on their social media accounts.

Next week we will look at the people Amnesty chose to write this example of data propaganda masquerading as an unbiased research tool. And you won't be surprised to learn that the people behind it weren't chosen for their technical skills, but for their hate for Israel.

Hamas isn't the only terror group that the PLO wants to unify with

From Ma'an:

A delegation of independent political figures met with members of the Islamic Jihad Movement in the Gaza Strip on Thursday to continue reconciliation talks among Palestinian factions.
The delegation was headed by Yasser al-Wadiya, member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leadership, who updated Islamic Jihad's leaders on the results of his latest visit to Egypt to work on the ongoing process of national reconciliation.

The PLO executive committee appointed a committee to consult all Palestinian factions on reforming a new government in mid-June, and it was widely expected that the new government would see factional leaders replace the current government's independent technocrats.

Islamic Jihad and Hamas are not PLO members but are allegedly included in talks.

There are plenty of people throughout the years that have tried to rehabilitate Hamas' image, claiming that it now runs a (shadow) government and it is more practical and pragmatic and not solely fixated on terror, despite daily statements calling for genocide against Jewish Israelis.

But Islamic Jihad cannot be considered anything but a terror group. And the "moderate" PLO is considering them as legitimate as any other political party.

Which tells you all you need to know about the PLO. Too bad the rest of the world closes its eyes to that small fact.

Elder gets results!

On Wednesday I reported that the College Board had published AP Art History materials saying that Jerusalem was in "Palestine."

Today - they fixed it online.

I hadn't written to them but they tweeted me and emailed me as well:

We have corrected the geographic attribution for the Dome of the Rock to “Jerusalem” to be consistent with prominent college-level Art History texts. The change has been made in our online AP History materials, and we will distribute an updated printed edition to teachers. We deeply regret the error.
Zach Goldberg Director Media Relations

Two cheers for fixing that issue. The third cheer will come when they recognize that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

07/16 Links Pt2: ICC orders its prosecutor to reconsider 'Mavi Marmara' war crimes allegations

From Ian:

ICC orders its prosecutor to consider 'Mavi Marmara' war crimes allegations against IDF

In a shocking 2-1 decision, the International Criminal Court on Thursday ordered its Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to consider opening a full criminal investigation into 2010 Mavi Maramara flotilla war crimes allegations against IDF personnel only 7 months after Bensouda had closed the file.
With harsh language, the ICC told Bensouda that she should have more seriously considered the possibility that those killed by the IDF in the incident were “systematic or resulted from a deliberate plan or policy to attack, kill or injure civilians.”
The decision puts the ICC the closest it has ever been to intervening directly into the Israeli-Arab conflict and places the court in the position of potentially being harsher on Israel than Bensouda, who herself has been criticized by Israel for recognizing a State of Palestine.
Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely responded to the decision derisively, stating, “the International Court in the Hague has turned with this decision into a tool for Palestinian propaganda.”
Foreign Ministry Spokesman Emmanuel Nachshon echoed those sentiments, saying, “Israel harshly rejects” the ICC ruling and that “Israel had acted in self-defense and in line with international law.”
Further, Nachshon recalled that a quasi-independent Israeli commission with international observers as well as a UN Secretary General-sponsored commission confirmed Israel’s self-defense claims.

Eugene Kontorovich: Dutch Supreme Court Ruling on Israeli Criminal Jurisdiction in the West Bank

So Berland would seem to have a receptive audience for his argument that Israel cannot be understood to apply to crimes committed across the Green Line.
However, the Dutch Supreme Court came to a different conclusion (adopting the opinion of the Court's Attorney General). It began by establishing the relevant presumptions. In considering an extradition request pursuant to a treaty, a court can only reject it if the requesting state's lack of jurisdiction is clear on the face of the papers. That is, if the lack of jurisdiction is manifest without further investigation.
While the Court noted the state of international opinion on the issue, it said that Israel's lack of territorial jurisdiction in East Jerusalem and Beitar was not one of these black-and-white issues that it could in effect take judicial notice of. One would imagine that if China requested extradition regarding a crime that occurred in Spain, this would be one of the "clear" case that fall outside the presumption.
To be sure, the Court made no pronouncement on Israel's borders, and indeed suggested it would be inappropriate to do so in an extradition case. It simply decided that the lack of territorial jurisdiction is not an apparent, day vs. night, judicial notice kind of fact. Even given the presumption in favor of finding territorial jurisdiction, the fact that it was not overcome under the present circumstances is quite noteworthy. To put it simply, the conclusion that the anti-jurisdiction argument does not overcome the presumption means the argument is not a 100 percent unquestioned winner.
Indeed, it suggests that the International Criminal Court may face difficulties in exercising jurisdiction over Israeli settlements. If these are within Israeli territorial jurisdiction (albeit not sovereignty), there is no basis for the Court to act. Here again, the Court would have to overcome very high presumptions to exercise jurisdiction, because Israel is a non-member state and because of the Monetary Gold principle. While extradition is presumptively valid, jurisdiction in the ICC needs to be affirmatively established, rather than disproved.

Bernard Lewis, the intellectual giant and the grasshoppers

Bernard Lewis is the greatest scholar of the Middle East and the Islamic and Arab past in the world. The shallow political correctness in the New York Times, which has lauded the pygmie Edward Said in scathing opposition to Lewis's superior mind, is a sad statement of our times
It is a truth universally acknowledged, except by book reviewers in the New York Times, that Bernard Lewis is the most important and distinguished scholar on the history of the Middle East and of the Islamic and Arab past.
Therefore, it was startling that Jacob Heilbrunn in his review of the book Ally by Michael Oren (Sunday, July 12, 2015) when referring to the “legendary Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis,” under whom Oren studied at Princeton, repeated Edward Said’s scurrilous remark that Lewis was, “dripping with condescension and contempt toward the Arab world.”
In repeating this infamous comment, Jacob Heilbrunn reveals he writes more from a political perspective than from scholarly analysis. Even if Heilbrunn himself does not subscribe to this offensive statement, he has disgraced himself by quoting it.

The antisemitic author

I've mentioned the popular Egyptian Ramadan TV series "Jewish Quarter." That series is virulently anti-Zionist but it treats Egyptian Jews who were loyal citizens in the 1950s as normal people.

This caused some controversy, forcing the actors who played Jewish roles to defend themselves and reiterate that, indeed, they really hate Israel.

Nevertheless, Egyptian media has been very supportive of the series, which follows a popular movie documentary called "The Jews of Egypt" that also nostalgically looked back at the time that Egypt had many Jews integrated into society and how they were forced out of the country.

Syria also has a popular, multi-year Ramadan historical series called Bab Al-Hara. It takes place in the 1930s before Syrian independence, and it follows a number of Damascus clans. while Jews are not the focus of this series, they are shown as normal members of Syrian society. This year, the seventh year of the series, focused much more on the Jewish section of Damascus.

This rankles a writer in JordanZad. In an explicitly antisemitic article, Samaher Abdullah Alsaaida says that this series is calling for "normalization" with the enemy. she quotes the Koran about how Jews cannot be trusted and says that the series whitewashes how evil Jews really are. She's upset that a rabbi in the series calls for good relations between Jews and Muslims when, in fact, the Jews were scheming against Muslims and the series is whitewashing their historic evil in Syria.

"The screenwriter and director of the series and those who support it forgot that Jews are not part of human civilization, but they have only one message: the message of corruption on earth and the dissemination of bad ideas and obscene culture," says Assaaida.

She is also worried that Muslim children will grow up and want to marry Jews as a result of thie series, and she laments the fact that it was not properly censored.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column:

So Barack Obama has got his agreement, his legacy. There will be debate and a vote (or votes) taken in the US Congress, but even if the Congress passes a resolution that disapproves the deal, and even in the unlikely event that such a resolution survives a presidential veto, the horse is out of the barn. The US is only one of the Western parties to the deal, which will likely receive the backing of a UN Security Council resolution. Who would enforce continued sanctions?

I’m not going to enumerate all the reasons this is a bad deal on a global scale (you can read about some of them here). What I wonder is why Obama and his people pushed for it. Did they think at first that they could get an agreement that would moderate Iran’s behavior and hold back their nuclear project, and then found themselves suckered by Iran’s negotiators? Or were they going for something entirely different?

As an Israeli, I can’t see anything good in the deal, and both Israel’s government and opposition agree with me (although the opposition is somewhat comically trying to blame the Prime Minister for it). But looking at it from an American point of view, what were they thinking?

One explanation is sheer incompetence. I suppose this is possible, especially since John Kerry is involved, but it’s not terribly interesting. What other explanations are there?

Another is the one I suggested in “Breakdown and Betrayal:” they were following the Iraq Study Commission recommendations to buy the friendship of the Arab and Iranian troublemakers in the Middle East by giving them Israel. This is certainly part of it, especially for Obama, who I am convinced would like nothing better than another Arab state in the place of Israel.

But there’s one other – even worse – possibility: that the deal represents a tactical withdrawal from the Middle East. Could it be that the administration has decided that the US can’t successfully confront Iran in any case, and the deal exists to put a pleasant face on the American surrender?

Iran has staked its claim. It wants to establish a Shiite caliphate to dominate the Middle East (and much of the world’s oil supply). It wants US influence out of the region. It wants Israel gone. Its long-term ambitions may well be much greater.

No prior administration would have accepted that. But apparently Obama and his advisors have convinced themselves that they can live with an Iranian Middle East. At least, they think, it will solve the problem of ISIS. And – very importantly – perhaps they have convinced themselves that they do not have the power to stop it.

But isn’t it true that sanctions brought Iran to the verge of capitulation? Supposedly its financial straits brought the regime to the table. All that would be needed would be to keep the pressure on.

I disagree, and I think the administration does too. What happened was that despite the sanctions, Iran managed to develop its nuclear program almost to completion. It was simply a matter of reallocating resources, and the totalitarian Iranian regime had the power to do that indefinitely, despite the pain it caused the population. What could the people do, vote for the opposition?

What brought Iran to the table was not economic pressure, but the opportunity presented by the Obama Administration, which was anxious to shed its obligations in the Middle East. The administration understood that only a credible threat of military action could stop Iran, and it was not prepared to make such a threat – because it might have to carry it out. And it was not prepared to pay the price for that.

The mighty USA, the nation with the largest GDP and military budget in the world, a nation that possesses thousands of deliverable nuclear warheads and massive conventional forces, could crush Iran in a matter of days or weeks. But the consequences would include some casualties, a huge bump in the price of oil, and terrorist attacks against American interests all over the globe, perhaps even the homeland. Don’t forget that while America is a superpower in many ways, it is a soft target. And in the field of terrorism, Iran is the superpower.

This explains why the negotiations proceeded as they did. The West wasn’t holding the high cards – the Iranians were.

Obama, who is ideologically opposed to coercion by the West in any event, simply does not see that continued US influence in the Middle East is worth the cost. So he’ll make the best of his weakness, give Iran what it wants without a struggle, and contract the sphere of influence of the US a little. So what if it means that the corrupt House of Saud goes down the drain, and the Jewish state of Israel – which he believes should never have been created in the first place – is lost as well?

One can only imagine the consequences. A newly empowered Iran would push the boundaries of its caliphate in all directions. Russia and China have spheres of influence to think about too, and would rush to fill the vacuum created by a withdrawing United States. Everyone that could get nuclear weapons, would. Muslim supremacists in Europe and elsewhere would be encouraged.

Obama could cut military budgets even further and stop droning ISIS and other terrorists – the Shiite militias will take care of that for him. He could play Cyrus to the ‘Palestinians’, bringing them ‘back’ to their ‘homeland’ at last. He could reopen the US Embassy in Teheran and build one in al-Quds, ‘Palestine’.

Yes, Barack Obama could be the third world hero that he has always envisaged himself as, revered like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela. Only, his importance would be even greater than theirs.

He would go down in history as the man that finally brought about the end of the Pax Americana, the twilight of the West.

07/16 Links Pt1: No, we don’t want war. And yes, there was a better deal; Obama's ME Exit Strategy

From Ian:

David Horovitz: No, we don’t want war. And yes, there was a better deal

Three months ago, defending what he called the “historic” framework understandings reached with Iran in Lausanne over its rogue nuclear program, US President Barack Obama planted a false and highly unpleasant insinuation. “It’s no secret,” the president declared in an April 2 address, “that the Israeli prime minister and I don’t agree about whether the United States should move forward with a peaceful resolution to the Iranian issue.” The nasty implication? That while America favors diplomacy to thwart Iran’s march to the bomb, Benjamin Netanyahu wants war.
In the House of Commons on Wednesday, a day after the US-led world powers had signed their comprehensive accord with the Islamic extremists who rule Iran, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond escalated that false narrative by another few degrees. “The question you have to ask yourself is what kind of a deal would have been welcomed in Tel Aviv,” Hammond said in Parliament, and then continued, despicably, “The answer of course is that Israel doesn’t want any deal with Iran.”
Finally, later Wednesday, Obama cemented the foul misrepresentation of Israel’s stance. “There really are only two alternatives here,” the president correctly asserted at a press conference. “Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through a negotiation, or it’s resolved through force, through war. Those are the options.” So far, true enough. But he went on to claim that the accord signed Tuesday was the best that could have been achieved — and that critics such as Netanyahu had failed to present viable alternative conditions. “What I haven’t heard is, what is your preferred alternative?” claimed the president, his voice full of injured good intention.
The consequence of all this disingenuous oratory: The United States and its partners have concluded a dreadful agreement with a treacherous regime in Tehran — an agreement that places Israel, but emphatically not only Israel, in considerable danger. And they are now busily compounding their failure by misrepresenting what has unfolded, and pointing some of the blame, thoroughly unjustifiably, at what Hammond so charmingly called “Tel Aviv.”

Countering Obama, Israel says it offered alternative to Iran deal

Israel forcefully rejected Thursday US President Barack Obama’s assertion that critics of the nuclear agreement with Iran have failed to present better options, arguing that a good deal is still possible if the international community, led by Washington, maintains the sanctions regime on Tehran.
“We have consistently laid out an alternative, which is a better deal that actually blocks Iran’s path to the bomb and links the lifting of restrictions on Iran to tangible changes in Iranian behavior,” a senior Israeli official said Thursday.
The official also disputed Obama’s contention that the entire international community backs the Vienna agreement, which the United States and five world powers signed with Iran on Tuesday. He also indicated that the Israeli government is convinced it can persuade US lawmakers to oppose the deal. “We believe we can win on the substance,” he told The Times of Israel.

Obama Defends Nuclear Deal: Either My Deal Or War With Iran

President Obama challenged critics of his newly minted Iran nuclear deal, asserting that his agreement was the only one that would prevent the country from getting a nuclear bomb.
“The facts are the facts,” he insisted, saying his argument was “hard to dispute” by critics who’s arguments he asserted “defies logic” and “makes no sense.”
He also mocked some critics, suggesting that they were unfairly raising concerns about Iran “taking over the world.”
“I say that not tongue in cheek, because if you look at some of the statements by some of our critics, you would think that Iran is, in fact, going to take over the world as a consequence of this deal, which I think would be news to the Iranians,” he said.
Obama held his press conference this afternoon in the East Room of the White House instead of the briefing room, the first time in that location since the aftermath of the November 2014 elections.
His overall argument rested with the message the administration has been sending for months – that his deal would be the only way to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon – using the phrase “nuclear weapon” 28 times. He added that the international community would be able to catch any “funny business” if Iran tried to cheat the inspectors.