Sohrab Amari: The EU Picks Iran and Hamas
From the mullahs’ nuclear-weapons program to Hamas’s calculated campaign to rush the barrier fence with Israel to the Iranian-led insurgency in Yemen, Mogherini and the EU see only diplomatic challenges to overcome. And the answer is always, always to convene a gabfest in Basel, Lausanne, Vienna or some other plush Continental city, where civilizational clashes and historic animosities and sharp moral contrasts can be dissolved in technical solutions.PMW: PMW posters of terrorists and their PA salaries distributed to Israeli MPs at committee hearing
Never mind that the Iranian nuclear deal on its own terms puts Tehran on the glide path to the bomb, and never mind that it fails to address the mullahs’ missile program, regional aggression, and human-rights violations. “We had a process,” say the Brussels mandarins, “and that process must be preserved at all costs.” Never mind that Hamas is constitutionally committed to the destruction of world Jewry and has been staging terror attacks and bloody stunts for decades. “We had a process,” say the mandarins, “and Trump’s embassy move disrupts the process.” In this worldview, the likes of Iran and the Palestinians can appear as friends and good guys, because they cynically embrace European process games. All the while, the U.S. and Israel are cast as the bad guys since they don’t play geopolitics the European way.
Along with Mogherini, Barack Obama and Angela Merkel epitomized this bankrupt mindset. One of the three, Obama, has already exited the world stage. The tectonic electoral shifts underway in Europe mean the other two are likely to fade sooner than later.
Palestinian Media Watch was invited to the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defense committee once again last week for the latest debate on new legislation to deduct the amount the Palestinian Authority pays terrorists and their families from Israel's tax transfers to the PA.
In order to impress upon members of Parliament the horror of the PA practice of paying salaries to terrorists, PMW produced 13 small posters with information about a number of Palestinian terrorists, their hundreds of victims and how much money the PA has paid each of the terrorists since they were arrested.
PMW's Director, Itamar Marcus, and Head of Legal Strategies, Maurice Hirsch, both actively participated in the debate. In addition, PMW had invited relatives of terror victims who also spoke at the hearing, demanding that Israel not transfer any money to the PA that might go to pay salaries to the murderers of their loved ones. Some of them held up PMW's posters while they spoke, documenting how much money the PA has already paid the terrorist who murdered their relatives.
Caroline Glick: Pompeo Presents the Trump Doctrine
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech Monday at the Heritage Foundation marked a pivotal moment in U.S. foreign policy.
Pompeo made several important arguments in the course of his half hour address, in which he set out President Donald Trump’s policy regarding Iran in the wake of his May 8 announcement that he is abandoning Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
The key line in his speech was, inarguably, “As President Trump said two weeks ago, he is ready, willing and able to negotiate a new deal [with Iran]. But the deal is not the objective. Our goal is to protect the American people.”
The basic insight that there is no intrinsic value to any agreement – or foreign policy initiative of any sort – that does not advance the interests of the United States or protect the American people is striking, because it has been absent from American foreign policy in relation to rogue regimes and entities for better part of the last generation.
In 1994, when then president Bill Clinton sought to contend with North Korea’s illicit nuclear program, the first fantasist president, Jimmy Carter, turned up in Pyongyang to see if there was a deal to be had.