Monday, February 23, 2015
From Ian:
Michael Lumish: Why is Obama so Afraid of Benjamin Netanyahu?
Michael Lumish: Why is Obama so Afraid of Benjamin Netanyahu?
One has to wonder how it is that Barack Obama, a man who was once president of the Harvard Law Review, could be so afraid of spreading the idea that Iran should not be allowed to gain nuclear weaponry? That is pretty much all Netanyahu is likely to say, after all. Nothing that the man is likely to say to Congress will be earth-shattering or new.Is the Era of Euphemism in Washington beginning to end?
If I am right – and I suspect that I am – all we are going to hear from Netanyahu are reasons why a nuclear-armed Iran is a terrible idea, not the least which reason is that it will lead to Middle Eastern arms race with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, not to mention Turkey and perhaps even Jordan, scrambling to gain their own nuclear weapons.
Obama is manufacturing hatred toward both Benjamin Netanyahu and the Jewish State of Israel, and thereby Jews more generally, merely because Netanyahu is going to plea to the American people to support Israel in preventing Iranian nuclear break-out capacity.
If Obama believes otherwise, he should allow Netanyahu to speak and then clearly tell the American public just how it is the Netanyahu is mistaken.
If the president of the United States cannot even bring himself to refute such an argument, then how can we possibly trust him to refute Iranian nuclear potential?
Finally, for Barack Obama to snub Netanyahu on the grounds that meeting so close to the Israeli election would amount to interfering with that election is the very height of hypocrisy. Everyone who follows Israel knows that the Obama administration has sent a team into Israel for the purpose of unseating the despised Netanyahu in favor of a US puppet like Herzog or Livni.
Obama likes his Jews soft and malleable.
Euphemism: The act or example of substituting a mild, indirect, or vague term for one considered harsh, blunt or offensive. (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1992.)'Do not hesitate': Terror group calls for 'Westgate-style' attacks on Westfield shopping centres in chilling new threat from militants behind bloody Kenya siege
In years to come we may look back on the past week as the beginning of the end of an era of euphemism in American political history. It may be ending because the gap between the language of the government of the United States and the reality of Islamist inspired terror and barbarism has become an abyss. For two decades, various academics and political figures have warned us against committing the sins of Orientalism and then Islamophobia. Yet now millions of people see with their own eyes on television and computer screens that the sins of our error are being committed in the name of a fanaticism born of Islamist ideology. This fact is now so obvious that denying it leads officials into embarrassing linguistic acrobatics that finally make them objects of ridicule. Simply put, the past strategies of avoidance and deflection have ceased to convince because they are being contradicted by facts available to millions.
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, two American Presidents, but especially our current one, have spoken a language of euphemism concerning the ideology inspiring the major terrorist organizations and states of our era. They have substituted mild, indirect or vague terms to refer to the causes of global terrorism in place of others considered harsh, blunt or offensive. Those terms held to be offensive and thus taboo in government statements include “radical Islam,” “Islamism,” and “Islamic fundamentalism,” or other such terms that connect interpretation of the religion of Islam to the practice of terrorism. Those who used such terms were held to be either “Islamophobic” or simply politically harmful because doing so was bound to offend over a billion Muslims and thus undermine Western counterterrorism efforts. As a result two famous euphemisms continue to shape the public stance of the United States government.
In the Bush years, the term of art was “the war on terror,” which suggested we were, absurdly, at war with a tactic. In the Obama era, the acceptable term has been a fight against unspecified sources of “violent extremism.”
An al-Qaeda linked terror group has issued a chilling propaganda video threatening Western shopping centres and singling out 'Jewish owned' Westfield malls as targets.
In a 76-minute long message issued overnight, a masked militant purportedly from the al-Shabaab organisation encouraged Islamic fundamentalists to strike at shopping centres around the world.
Dressed in military fatigues, the spokesman named complexes owned by Frank Lowy's Australian group as among potential targets, dwelling on two Westfield malls in East and West London.
'If just a handful of mujahideen fighters could bring Kenya to a complete stand-still for nearly a week, just imagine what the dedicated mujahideen could do in the West to American or Jewish shopping centres across the world,' he said.
‘What if such an attack on the Mall of America in Minnesota or the West Edmonton mall in Canada or in London’s Oxford Street. Or any of the hundred or so of the Jewish owned Westfield shopping centres.
‘Take the Westfield shopping centre in (London's) Stratford or White City for example, what would be the implications of such an attack, one can only imagine.
‘All it takes is a man with firm determination, of which our Muslim ummah (community) has plenty of.
‘So hurry up and hasten to Heaven and do not hesitate.'
