Blog Archives
Obama and the "Official Truth"
Caroline Glick demonstrates that Barack Hussein Obama and his Executive Branch Administration has been giving the American public an Official Truth that is in reality a pack of lies. The list of people Glick writes about is probably a short list rather than an exhaustive; nonetheless the Obama persecuted people and organizations are Conservatives or pro-Israel. If this kind of political harassment isn’t impeachable than nothing is and that means the Office of President has turned into a dictatorship above the laws founded in the U.S. Constitution.
JRH 5/21/13
U.S. National Interests and the Syrian Civil War
John R. Houk
© April 28, 2013
Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime is using chemical weapons to stop the momentum of the Syrian rebels from dethroning the Assad regime. Now I realize perhaps a half to even more than a half of the Rebels are radical Muslims perhaps making them no worse than Assad’s secular-socialized government dominated by Syria’s Alawite-Shia (See Here, Here and Here) minority. Nonetheless, chemical weapons are supposed to be illegal by international convention. I am guessing the U.N. Security Council could empower military sanctions against Assad’s regime.
Now I know many Conservatives – Danny Jeffrey comes to mind – are against the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P). R2P apparently has a few criticisms such as providing an excuse to invade to accomplish the National Interests of perhaps an agreed coalition bloc of nations. And perhaps R2P could embroil the USA in a war that is conducted beyond the pale of the U.S. Constitution.
I believe removing Assad is as much in the National Interests of the USA as there is a R2P military reason to save civilian lives. Now Danny Jeffrey’s concern is that R2P strategy is an Obama mask to discreetly aid invading Arab or Muslim armies to take down the Leftist perceived threat to world peace in the Jewish State of Israel. With Obama at the helm of the U.S. government I can see Danny’s view of a reprehensible motive behind the Obama R2P agenda. President Barack Hussein Obama is NO friend of Israel. Obama has gone beyond satisfying political correctness by saying Palestinians deserve a sovereign nation to forcing the issue including robbing Israel of half its capital city of Jerusalem and giving that to Jew-Hating Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.
Why is it in America’s National Interest to remove Bashar al-Assad? Anything that throws a monkey wrench into the radical Islamic agenda of America’s enemy Iran is good for America and perhaps signals those Twelver maniacs that American muscle might actually spank Iran for making good on their threats to drive Israeli Jews into the sea.
The fine line at issue is what will the U.S. government do after aiding Syrian rebels to give the Assad regime a boot? It would be crazy to get rid of Assad and allow a radical Muslim government to form to be the Sunni mirror image of Iran’s Shi’ite Twelver radical Muslim government.
The information I have managed to cull about the nature of the Syrian Rebels is that the Islamist militias – especially Jabhat al Nusra – are gaining infrastructure control of the rebel held land in Syria. Even though the secular or more moderate Muslim rebels figured prominently early in the Syrian Rebellion against Assad, it appears the radical Muslims by virtue of infrastructure possession would evolve into the controlling faction of any future Syrian government absent of Assad. This would not be good for American National Interests. A Sunni Islamist theocratic nation will be as much of an enemy of the USA and Israel as Iran is. Indeed I suspect Iran would make friendly overtures to a Sunni Islamist regime even though Iran represents Shia Islam. Just for perspective you should know that Sunnis are about 90% of Islam while Shias are roughly 10% of Islam. Radical Muslim Sunni Clerics have labeled Shias a heretic religion thus making the Shias as much of an infidel as Jews and Christians. Perhaps even more worth of death than Jews and Christians because a Shi’ite existence could be perceived as an insult to Allah and Mohammed. Among radical Muslims, in particular insulting Mo and Allah, is a good reason for the execution of the death penalty.
So here are the horns of a dilemma the U.S. government faces. Help the Syrian Rebels defeat Assad quite probably bring into power a Jew-Hating and American-Hating Islamist government OR do nothing while Assad uses chemical weapons of mass destruction to reverse the defeat he has been experiencing utilizing conventional weapons against the Rebels. Undoubtedly an Assad victory to remain in power would result in a wholesale genocide of Sunni Rebels and the civilian Sunni population that supported the Rebels. An Assad victory would also mean acquiring hubris perhaps leading the dictator to make rash moves against American interests and Israel, feeling an illusion of being undefeatable.
In the realm of the lesser of two evils, it still seems to me Assad’s demise will in at least the short term be better for the National Interests of the USA even if the long term outcome of Assad’s removal may not be helpful. The best way to bring down Assad with the least amount of American blood is to provide arms to the Syrian Rebels. It may be a futile hope but weaponry should be distributed to the more secular minded Sunnis who desire an elected government rather than a theo-political Sharia religious government in which the religious elite call the shots.
It will be up to the U.S. government – cough the Obama Administration – to actively influence a relationship that is not inimical to American National Interests. That probably is a tough order for I sense even a secular government based on Islamic elections will still be a Jew-Hating anti-Israel government. Which brings us back to Danny Jeffrey’s thoughts that President Barack Hussein Obama will part of an agenda to use R2P to join Arab and Muslim government to end the existence of Israel.
I was brought to this line of thinking from reading a Caroline Glick article entitled, “Time to confront Obama”. Glick wants to confront Obama’s motives behind the decisions he has made relating to Islamic terrorism, his treatment of Israel, wondering the value the word of BHO in relation to the Chemical WMD attack perpetrated by Bashar al-Assad against his own citizens and so on.
As my thoughts began to evolve it became apparent I was following a different train of thinking than Ms Glick. Nonetheless, you should read her article which is anti-Obama and pro-Israel. I like that way of thinking.
JRH 4/28/13
My Caroline Glick Introduction
Moral relativism and jihad
John R. Houk
© April 16, 2013
Caroline Glick wrote a scathing yet appropriate exposé on the ignorance of Jewish-American organizations when it comes to Israel and Jew-hating Muslims. It is not surprising that that Left Wing self-loathing Jews moronically support anti-Israel agendas but I find it particularly loathing that Jewish organizations that are considered respectable Right leaning on issues and decidedly pro-Israel remained silent in the face of anti-Israel support given to Radical Islamic governments by the Obama Administration. Glick goes further in criticizing Orthodox Jews for supporting a musician that is virulently involved in anti-Israel Boycott Divest and Sanction (BDS) activities that support Palestinian Statehood while Synagogues that invite Counterjihad speakers like Pamela Geller cave in to American Radical Islamic organizations to cancel exposés of Muslim hatred by actually accusing Geller-like speakers of racist bigotry.
Defend Israel against claims of excessive force!
JRH 4/16/13
Obama uses Taxpayers to Fund Israeli Leftists
John R. Houk
© February 17, 2013
I am certain you have heard President Barack Hussein Obama refute his critics that claim Obama is anti-Israel, right?
I was one of the Jewish leaders in that meeting. I remember precisely what happened; it was not as represented in this video.
The truth is that President Obama spent an hour with 16 Jewish leaders from a wide spectrum of the American Jewish community. We dialogued with the president about ensuring the security of Israel, plans for advancing peace in the Middle East and strategies for ending Iran’s growing nuclear capacity.
The president was clear, unequivocal and passionate. The president articulated that he and his administration are resolutely committed to the security and safety of Israel, to the survival of Israel as the Jewish homeland, and to the pursuit of sustainable peace in the Middle East, a peace that secures Israel.
I, along with many other Jewish leaders, left that meeting confident about President Obama’s commitment to Israel and promising vision for moving towards peace in the region. I left a proud American and a secure Jew. (President Obama is Israel’s ally; Nancy Ratzan; Miami Herald; 10/15/12)
“Now, I feel an obligation – not pressure but obligation — to make sure that we’re in close consultation with the Israelis on these issues because it affects them deeply,” Obama said. “They’re one of our closest allies in the region. And we’ve got an Iranian regime that has said horrible things that directly threaten Israel’s existence.” (Obama: Israel ‘One of Our Closest Allies’ in the Middle East; Fred Lucas; cnsnews.com; 9/24/12)
“Israel is a true friend, it is our greatest ally in the region and if Israel is attacked, America will stand with Israel. I’ve made that clear throughout my presidency.” (DEBATE QUOTE: Obama — “If Israel Is Attacked, America Will Stand With Israel;” Fox News Insider; 10/22/13 9:59 PM ET)
Barack Obama makes no bones about it; he alleges that he and the Obama Administration are committed to our ally Israel in the Middle East.
Just like any other good Leftist and Muslim Apologists, Obama tells American voters one thing and takes action that indicates an aversion to Israel. Caroline Glick exposes that the Obama Administration is utilizing U.S. taxpayer money to support Leftist organizations in Israel that have the typical Leftist policies that will lead to the destruction of Israel. It is unimaginable but there are a huge contingent of Jewish Leftist that actually believe that the establishment of a Jew-hating sovereign Palestinian State will bring peace between Israel and the Arab refugees that call themselves Palestinians. Read Glick’s article to discover the reality of President BHO’s efforts that will destroy Israel.
JRH 2/17/13
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US government funding radical Israeli NGOs’ information operations
By Caroline Glick
February 15, 2013, 2:17 AM
Earlier this month NGO Monitor released its report on foreign government funding of radical political Israeli NGOs which work to undermine Israel’s international standing and subvert Israeli society. Along with the usual European suspects who give millions of shekels (or Euros or pounds) to Israeli groups like this, it works out that the US government is also funding extremely radical organizations, courtesy of American taxpayers. Notably, the three groups that reported receiving funding from the US are all in the business of waging political warfare campaigns directed at the Israeli public.
According to the report, in accordance with the NGO Transparency Law which requires NGOs to report on donations received from foreign governments, three Israeli NGOs received funding from the US.
Keshev, a radical leftist “media watchdog” group run by some of Israel’s most outspoken, and radical journalists and writers received NIS 492,452 in direct aid from the US government. To understand how subversive Keshev is, it suffices to note that they criticized the Israeli media for rushing to judgment about Fatah’s unity deal with Hamas. That is, the group the US supports believes we should not criticize Fatah for joining forces with a genocidal jihadist movement committed to the obliteration of Israel that is in cahoots with the Iranians.
Through Catholic Relief Services, the US also gave NIS 220,304 to the anti-Israel pressure group B’Tselem. The money was used to fund B’Tselem’s video project. B’tselem’s video project involves the distribution of video cameras to Palestinians to film snuff films that portray Israelis as aggressive bullies who seek to harm the Palestinians for no reason.
Numerous examples have already been reported of how those film clips have falsely portrayed events.
Finally, the US government donated NIS 15,474 through the Foundation for Middle East Peace to the far left internet outlet Social TV. To a certain degree, Social TV can be — and has been — portrayed as the anti-Zionist answer to Latma, the Hebrew-language media criticism site that I run. But Latma is wholly funded by private contributors and foundations.
It would have never occurred to me to ask a foreign government to fund the project. It never would have occurred to me to ask a foreign government to get into the media watchdog game in Israel. But then, from reading the report it is clear that the aim of the US government is not, in fact to help Israeli media outlets do a better job reporting on events. Rather, the report indicates that the US government has decided to use radical Israeli NGOs to wage political warfare in Israel. The aim of this campaign is to convince the public that Israel is to blame for the absence of peace with our neighbors.
It is worth noting that through US Embassy cables published by Wikileaks we learned from B’Tselem’s Executive Director Jessica Montell that B’Tselem is almost entirely dependent on foreign governmental assistance. She said that 95 percent of B’tselem’s budget is paid for by foreign governments. Montell told her interlocutor at the Embassy that B’Tselem wished to engender an international climate of hostility towards Israel that would make Israeli leaders fear the international response to IDF operations against Palestinian terror campaign so much that they would fear taking action. The cable was written after Operation Cast Lead. B’Tselem was one of the Israeli NGOs that told the Goldstone Commission Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza.
According to the leaked cable:
She [Montell] wanted the highest level decision-makers held accountable for the decisions they made on how to prosecute the conflict, including, Military Advocate Gneral (MAG) [BG Avi] Mandelblit…Her aim she said, was to make Israel weigh world opinion and consider whether it could “afford another operation like this.”
The Israeli media itself is already controlled in large part by the far Left. Channel 2 news and the station’s flagship satire program “Eretz Nehederet” played a huge role in shaping public perceptions in the last elections. Both worked overtime trying to demonize Naftali Bennett and the Jewish Home Party. This they did after they worked overtime demonizing the winners of Likud’s party primaries as right wing extremists. Muli Segev, Eretz Nehederet’s editor in chief bragged in an interview in Haaretz that his show was directly responsible for the party’s loss of several Knesset seats.
The media’s overwhelming far left bias has been on shocking display this week with their wall-to-wall coverage of the story of the prison suicide of suspected traitor Benjamin Zygier. This man was apparently a double agent, a turncoat. He was imprisoned under a false name, as agreed to by him, his attorneys and his family. He killed himself. His body was sent to his family in Australia for burial. End of story.
Who cares about him? He was a traitor.
The entire story was brought to light because three radical post-Zionist and anti-Zionist members of Knesset abused their parliamentary immunity to announce on live television what the military censor had, for reasons of national security placed a gag order on. That is, by covering this story — and for the past two days, Channel 2, which has a monopoly share of the prime time news ratings — has devoted half of its broadcast time to the story — the media is dancing to the tune dictated by the most radical leftist forces in Israeli politics. It is a travesty.
But apparently, the State Department thinks this anti-Israel activism posing as the local media is insufficiently pro-Arab. And so it is funding these even more radical Israeli pressure groups.
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Obama uses Taxpayers to Fund Israeli Leftists
John R. Houk
© February 17, 2013
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US government funding radical Israeli NGOs’ information operations
© 2013 Caroline Glick
About Caroline Glick:
I grew up in Chicago’s ultra-liberal, anti-American and anti-Israel stronghold of Hyde Park. Hyde Park’s newest famous resident is Barack Obama. He fits right into a neighborhood I couldn’t wait to leave.
I made aliyah to Israel in 1991, two weeks after receiving my BA in Political Science from Beir Zeit on the Hudson — otherwise known as Columbia University. I joined the Israel Defense Forces that summer and served as an officer for five and a half years.
From 1994-1996, as an IDF captain, I served as Coordinator of Negotiations with the PLO in the office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. In this capacity I … READ THE REST
Should Jews leave Britain
Not to long ago Caroline Glick and Danny Dayan were debating Daniel Levy and William Sieghart. Glick and Dayan took the pro-Israel stand and Levy and Sieghart took the pro-Palestinian statehood stand.
Levy became so incensed at Glick that an article by Douglas Murray said he had to be physically restrained. Apparently Levy took umbrage to Glick’s argument that a lack of solution about statehood was Palestinian rejectionism more than Israeli Settlements in Judea/Samaria (aka West Bank).
Glick came away from this debate writing that she sees no future for Jews in the United Kingdom. The implication being that antisemitism has become ingrained into the UK public that they would rather allow the practice of unwestern Sharia Law than remember the treatment of Jews in Europe during WWII which was the Holocaust that killed about six million Jews.
Below is that Murray article which I will follow with a one hour and 45 minute Youtube video of the debate.
JRH 2/7/13 (Hat Tip: Danny Jeffrey)
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Should Jews leave Britain?
29 January 2013 15:39
Should Jews leave Britain? The question is prompted by this piece written by the Israeli journalist Caroline Glick.
Glick recently came to London to take part in an Intelligence Squared debate. The debate was about Israeli settlements. Glick and Danny Dayan attempted to explain to the London audience that Palestinian rejection rather than Jewish settlement in the West Bank is the primary reason there is still no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The debate is now available on Youtube and there you can see the deeply rancorous tone of the discussion. At one point Lord Levy’s son, Daniel Levy, (arguing against Glick and Dayan) has to be almost physically restrained by his own co-debater (William Sieghart). Levy’s frustration appears to come from being pulled up on an allegation he casually makes against Israel for which he turns out to have absolutely no evidence.
But the audience go with him, and go against Glick and Dayan in the final vote by a factor of 5 to 1. As Glick notes in her bitter farewell to London, the audience was so hostile towards her argument that when she even mentioned the matter of Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini and his involvement with the Nazis during World War II she was booed down by the audience. They – having been presented to her as open-minded – turned out to be so close-minded and partial that they would not even hear a historical fact about a Palestinian figure who was an actual Nazi. Glick writes:
‘I was prepared to conduct a civilized debate based on facts and reasoned argumentation. I expected it to be a difficult experience. I was not expecting to be greeted by a well-dressed mob.’
I suppose that there will be those who think Glick’s recommendation to Jews to be over-statement:
‘There is no future for Jews in England.’
But after the events of the last week you do have to wonder.
After all it was a week in which David Ward, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East, used the opportunity provided by Holocaust Memorial Day to punish the Jews for the Holocaust:
‘Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools – I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.’
And on the day itself the Sunday Times saw fit to publish a cartoon by the witless Gerald Scarfe showing the Prime Minister of the Jewish state building a wall consisting of bloodied and dying Palestinians.
Much of the comment on these latter cases has focussed on the ‘inappropriateness’ of running an anti-Semitic cartoon or making an anti-Semitic comment so close to Holocaust Memorial Day. I cannot help thinking that this is missing the point. Ward and Scarfe should be excoriated not for their sense of timing but for the fact that they are wrong. Wholly, completely and outright wrong. There is absolutely no connection between, for instance, the liquidation of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank. There is absolutely no connection between the situation in Gaza and the herding of six million Jews into concentration camps. The wonder then is not over Scarfe or Ward’s sense of timing, but why at any point in any year they would be so keen to spread lies and to bait Jews by comparing the actions of the Jewish state with those of a genocidal doctrine of Nazism which sought to annihilate the Jews.
Rupert Murdoch has apologised for the Scarfe cartoon and Ward now seems to be reluctantly towing what Liberal Democrat party line can be held. But Glick’s question returns. What sort of future is there in Britain for Jews? I would submit that there is a future. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that the price of that future is that Jews will increasingly be expected to distance themselves from Israel. There is a fair amount of evidence from the Jewish community suggesting that this process is already underway. Once it is complete then those ‘good’ anti-Israel Jews will be able to proclaim victory. But the same force that they encouraged to come for their co-religionists will then just as surely come for them. And then where will they hide?
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VIDEO: Israel is destroying itself with its settlement policy
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The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP
All articles and content Copyright © 2012 The Spectator (1828) Ltd | All rights reserved
Obama and the politics of contempt
Caroline Glick tackles the campaigning of President Barack Hussein Obama by criticizing one of his ads. The essence of the ad is a young gal that relates voting for Obama is like having sex for the first time with a great guy. So you ladies you can get that first orgasmic memory back by voting for Obama.
Obama is trying to be pro-woman but in reality is showing a sex-object misogynistic attitude toward women.
Then Glick shows what it is really like voting for Obama. A vote for Obama is like voting for one of the most popular movements in the Muslim world known as the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). The MB is a classic example of the misogynistic demonizing of women. And you can add to this misogynism with Jew-hatred, Christian-hatred and America-hatred. Obama’s appeasement of Radical Islam under the delusion that this will bring world peace is one of the biggest deceptions being thrown at American voters.
So you can vote for Obama and make believe that first orgasm occurs as you place the ballot in the receptacle or you can use your head and dump Obama on November 6, 2012.
VIDEO: Lena Dunham: Your First Time
JRH 11/3/12
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Obama and the politics of contempt
By Caroline Glick
November 2, 2012, 10:37 AM
“Your first time shouldn’t be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy.”
So begins the now famous official Barack Obama for President campaign ad that was released last week. The ad depicts a young woman named Lena Dunham, who is apparently a celebrity among Americans in their teens and 20s.
After that opening line, Ms. Dunham continues on for another minute and a half discussing how having sex for the first time and voting for Barack Obama for president are really the same thing, and how young women don’t want to be accused of either being virgins or of having passed up on their chance to cast their votes for Obama next Tuesday.
I’ve never been particularly interested in so-called “women’s issues.” It never seemed to me that any party or politician was particularly good or bad for me due to the way they thought of women. That all changed with the Dunham ad for Obama.
With this ad, Obama convinced me he is a misogynist.
The Obama campaign’s use of a double entendre to compare sex – the most personal, intimate act we engage in as human beings, with voting – the most public act we engage in as human beings – is a scandal.
It is demeaning and contemptuous of women. It reduces us to sexual objects. When called on to vote, as far as Obama is concerned, as slaves to our passions, we make our decisions not based on our capacity for rational choice. Rather we choose our leaders solely on the basis of our sexual desires.
Beyond the ad’s bald attempt to impersonalize, generalize and cheapen the most personal act human beings engage in, the ad is repulsive because it takes for granted that what happens in our private lives is the government’s business.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a totalitarian position.
THE WHOLE point of liberal democracy is to put a barrier between a person’s personal life and his or her government. A liberal democracy is founded on the notion of limited government. It assumes there are a lot of places where government has no role to play. And first and foremost among those places is the bedroom.
The theory behind limited government is that if the government is permitted in our private space then we are no longer free. When – as in the case of the Dunham ad – a political campaign conveys the message that there is something personally wrong with not actively supporting its candidate, it communicates the message that it sees no distinction between personal and public life, and therefore rejects the basic notion of freedom from government. And this is repugnant, not just for women, but for everyone who values freedom.
One of the oddest aspects of the Obama sex ad is that to believe that this sort of message can be effective, the campaign had to ignore mountains of data about the demographic group the ad targets – young college-educated women.
According to just about every piece of survey data collected over the past 20 years, young women in America today are more accomplished, more professionally driven, and more intellectually successful than their male counterparts. That the Obama campaign believes the votes of this successful, smart group of women can be won by appealing to their basest urges rather than their capacity to reason is demeaning and perverse and, one would think, counterproductive.
But it isn’t surprising.
The fact is that the Obama campaign – and indeed, the Obama presidency – has treated the American people with unprecedented arrogance and contempt. On issue after issue, Obama and his minions have eschewed intellectual argumentation.
On issue after issue they have preferred instead to attack Obama’s detractors as stupid, backwards, bigoted, bellicose and evil.
For instance, however one feels about current events in the Middle East, there is a legitimate – indeed critical – argument to be had about the nature of the Islamist forces the Obama administration is supporting from Cairo, Egypt, to Alexandria, Virginia.
The Muslim Brotherhood is the most popular movement in the Islamic world. It is also a totalitarian, misogynist, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian and anti-American movement. It seeks Islamic global supremacy, the genocide of Jewry, the subjugation of Christianity and the destruction of the United States.
There is an intellectual case to be made for appeasing these popular, popularly elected forces.
There is a (stronger) intellectual case to be made for opposing them. But rather than make any of the hard arguments for appeasing the Muslim Brotherhood, the Obama administration has deflected the issue by castigating everyone who opposes its appeasement policies as racist, McCarthyite warmongers.
If women who don’t support Obama are prudish geeks, Americans who oppose his appeasement policies are bloodthirsty bigots.
Then there was the attack in Benghazi on September 11 and the general Islamic assaults on US embassies throughout the Muslim world that day.
The acts of aggression that Muslims carried out against several US embassies on September 11 and since have all been acts of war against America.
The rioters who stormed the US embassies in Egypt, Tunis and Yemen and replaced the American flag with the flag of al-Qaida all violated sovereign US territory and carried out acts of war. The US had the right, under international law, to repel and respond with military force against the rioters as well as against their governments. Instead the White House blamed the acts of war on a US citizen who posted a video on YouTube.
Then there was Benghazi. In Benghazi, jihadists took this collective aggression a step further. They attacked the US Consulate and a US government safe house with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Their goal was to murder all the US citizens inside the compounds. In the event, they successfully murdered four Americans, including the US ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.
In the six weeks that have passed since the attack in Benghazi, despite administration attempts to stonewall, and despite the US’s media’s inexcusable lack of interest in the story, information has continuously dribbled out indicating that Obama and his senior advisers knew in real time what was happening on the ground. It has also come out that they rejected multiple requests from multiple sources to employ military power readily available to save the lives of the Americans on the ground.
There may be good reasons that Obama and his top aides denied those repeated requests for assistance and allowed the American citizens pinned down in Benghazi to die. But Obama and his aides have not provided any.
Rather than defend their actions, Obama and his advisers first sought to cover up what happened by blaming the acts of war on that YouTube video.
When that line of argument collapsed of its own absurdity, Obama shifted to blaming the messenger.
His campaign accused everyone asking for facts and truthful explanations about what happened in Benghazi of trying to politicize the attack.
Obama himself has twice struck the Captain Renault pose and declared himself “Shocked, shocked!” that anyone would dare to insinuate that he did not do everything in his power to save the lives of the Americans whose lives he failed to save.
The reason specific sectors of a society usually feel compelled to vote on the basis of their sectoral interests rather than their general interests as citizens of their country is that they feel that one candidate or party specifically endangers their sectoral interests. Hence, the Lena Dunham ad, which insults women specifically, compels women to vote as women against Obama.
In the case of Obama’s appeasement of the Muslim world, there is no specific group that is hurt more than any other group by his policies.
As we saw in Libya, Egypt, Tunis, Yemen and beyond, his appeasement policies endanger all Americans equally.
This is not the case with Obama’s treatment of Israel and Jews. Obama’s supporters always highlight statements he has made and actions he has taken in relation to Israel and Jews that are relatively supportive of both.
To be sure, like every other US president, Obama has made some statements, and taken some actions, that have been supportive of Jews and of Israel. But unlike most other US presidents, he has made far more statements and taken far more actions that have been contemptuous and hostile to Israel and Jews. And this is inexcusable.
It is inexcusable that Obama uses coded anti- Semitic language to blame America’s economic woes on “fat cat bankers.” It is inexcusable that his secretary of state and his senior advisers have repeatedly made references to the so-called Israel Lobby to explain why America is supposedly hamstrung in its ability to sell Israel to the wolves.
It is inexcusable that Obama sends his surrogates before the cameras to refer to Israel’s prime minister as “ungrateful,” or to castigate Israel for permitting Jews to build homes in Jerusalem on land they own and for permitting Jews to exercise their legal rights to their property – simply because they are Jews.
Israel is the US’s most important ally in the Middle East. As such, it deserves to be treated well by the US – all the time. Any move to treat Israel with contempt is an unprovoked hostile act and therefore inexcusable.
So, too, US Jews have a right to make an honest living doing anything they wish – including working on Wall Street or owning a casino in Las Vegas. Jews have a right to be treated with respect by the US government. They should not have to be concerned about having their reputations maligned by politicians who use anti-Semitic tropes to gain political advantage.
Obama’s contemptuous vilification of Israel and successful American Jews make him bad for Jews specifically. Just as the Dunham ad exposes his underlying hostility towards women and so makes clear that women’s interests are imperiled by his presidency, so Obama’s repeated hostile treatment of Israel and American Jews make him a specific danger to Jewish interests.
MANY WOULD-BE deep thinkers have proclaimed that the presidential election is a choice between two competing narratives. But that isn’t an accurate description of the race.
Only Republican nominee Mitt Romney is presenting a narrative. In his narrative, the US faces very difficult problems in domestic and foreign policy alike. Romney has laid out his priorities for which problems he wishes to contend with, and has presented policies he will adopt to do so if he is elected next Tuesday.
On the other hand, by Obama’s telling, the real problems America faces are all the result of the empowerment of his political opponents and America’s allies.
Benghazi wouldn’t be a problem if his political opponents weren’t talking about it. Jihadists aren’t a problem. The problem is the people who say they are a problem. The national debt isn’t a problem. The problem is the “fat cat bankers.”
Women will vote for him because we are dimwitted sex objects. And Jews will vote for him because we are taken in by his occasional Borscht Belt schmaltz platitudes about Hanukka.
God help us all if his contemptuous assessment of his countrymen is borne out next Tuesday.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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© 2012 Caroline Glick
The limits of American power
Caroline Glick is a Jewish gal that has been born, raised and educated in the USA. She moved to Israel to further her education and has been involved with the political process in Israel. I believe she holds a dual citizenship with Israel and America.
I mention this about Glick because the link to her essay that showed up in my inbox are her musings about the ramifications of the U.S. elections on November 6, Iran’s looming nuclear weapon production, Israel’s ability to attack Iranian nuke sites and America’s support or lack thereof in backing an Israeli attack on Iranian nuke sites.
Of question for those who don’t follow international geopolitics has to ask – why is Israel interested in destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons capability? The reason is Iran has threatened Israel’s existence since the Mullah revolution in 1979 and especially since the Administration Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President. Ahmadinejad has been rattling the Iranian military sword against Israel’s existence in ever increasing ways.
So prepare to get your thinking cap on and to muse with Caroline Glick about the USA, Iran and Israel.
JRH 10/26/12
The Left’s only enemy
Evidently the nation of Israel is experiencing the same Left-Right polarization that the USA is experiencing. Mahmoud Abbas stood at the UN podium and spoke egregious lie after lie (See Commentary on Abbas Lies) about Israel. The Israeli Right quite properly expressed the reality about Arabs that call themselves Palestinians; i.e. LIAR.
But here is some incredulity! The Israeli Left and the American Left praised the leader of the Palestinian Authority (PA – See Also Jewish Virtual Library) and Chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as a great seeking Liberty and Freedom for the non-existent group of Arabs that maintain they are Palestinians. Arabs as Palestinians did not exist until the Arab League via Egypt set up the PLO (Early Seeds of PLO: HERE and HERE) to create a reason for continuous attacks on Independent Israel to exterminate all the Jews living there. That creation date was 1964. Israel’s hard fought Independence from about SIX invading Muslim Arab armies were won in 1948.
Caroline Glick exposes the Leftists of America and Israel. Her theme is that American Leftists and Israeli Leftists don’t see a foreign enemy; rather they see their fellow citizens of the Right as the enemy. If the Left succeeds, Israel’s existence will be very tenuous.
JRH 10/5/12
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The Left’s only enemy
By Caroline Glick
October 4, 2012, 9:27 PM
Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s legal term in office expired nearly four years ago. But his supporters don’t care. In Israel, Washington and throughout the world, Abbas’s supporters extol the authoritarian leader as a great moderate. In 2002, desperately searching for a face for the Palestinians that wasn’t Yasser Arafat’s face, the Left pushed Abbas out from behind Arafat’s shadow. Abbas, who served as Arafat’s deputy for 39 years, was upheld as a great moderate and placed in the invented position of Palestinian prime minister.
The fact that Abbas was an inveterate Jew-hater who spent four decades in the senior leadership of a terrorist organization and whose doctoral dissertation was a long denial of the Holocaust, was brushed aside.
His leftist supporters don’t care that he says Israel has no right to exist. They are untroubled by his 2008 rejection of then-prime minister Ehud Olmert’s unprecedentedly generous offer of peace and Palestinian statehood. They don’t mind that Abbas has refused to negotiate peace with Israel for the past four years. They don’t care that he has signed two unity government deals with Hamas or that he seeks to gain sovereignty for a Palestinian state through the UN and so establish a Palestinian state in a formal state of war with Israel.
They don’t care. But most Israelis do. Due to their recognition of his hatred for Israel and due to the terrorism Abbas has condoned and financed for decades, the vast majority of Israelis do not consider him a potential partner for peace. They do not believe that either Abbas or the Palestinians as a whole are remotely interested in being appeased by Israel.
As a consequence, most Israelis greeted Abbas’s speech at the UN General Assembly last week with indifference. In that speech, Abbas made clear – yet again – that he remains Arafat’s loyal deputy. The majority of Abbas’s speech involved a litany of libels against Israel, which he accused of everything from terrorism to apartheid, colonialism, racism, murder, theft, etc., etc., etc.
Then he moved on to his demands. In addition to reinstating his demand that Israel agree to every Palestinian demand as a precondition for negotiations, Abbas demanded that Israel release all Palestinian terrorists from its prisons.
No, none of Abbas’s attacks had an iota of truth to them.
But who cares? Abbas certainly doesn’t. And neither do his supporters. Their support for Abbas has nothing to do with what he says or does. It has to do with who they are and what they want. Abbas is their prop, not their partner.
Abbas’s Israeli supporters are the core of far-leftists who brought us the phony peace process with the PLO. Two thousand dead Israelis later, and with no peace in sight, their camp is much smaller today than it was in 1993. But it is still dedicated. And it is overpopulated by members of the media.
TIPPING HIS hat to this group, this week Defense Minister Ehud Barak announced in a media interview that he thinks that Israel should unilaterally withdraw from much of Judea and Samaria.
For most Israelis, Barak’s plan is self-evidently insane.
We left Gaza and see the consequences of that unilateral withdrawal every day as southern Israel is bombarded with missiles and rockets. We left and Gaza was transformed into a hub for global jihad, increasingly indistinguishable from Sinai. The very notion that our defense chief could suggest adopting an identical strategy for Judea and Samaria is both obscene and frightening.
What can he be thinking? Barak is thinking about elections, which are apparently about to be called. Barak thinks his best bet politically is to try to win the support of Abbas’s ever shrinking support base.
Barak lost his political base when he left the Labor Party and formed his own Independence faction with other breakaway Labor politicians at the beginning of 2011. He needs Abbas’s Israeli supporters to vote for him if he is to get elected to the next Knesset. Even more crucially, Barak needs Abbas’s supporters in the Israeli media. So to win their support, he opted to run on a platform of expelling Jews from their homes.
Barak’s move doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about him. He remains the political opportunist he has always been. His move is interesting because of what it reveals about the nature of Israel’s Left.
There is no rational way to argue that Israel can gain any advantage by surrendering Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians. If Israel departs, either Abbas will gobble up the territory and demand more, or he will swallow the concession and get swallowed by Hamas, which will demand more – as happened in Gaza.
Either way, Israel loses.
But that doesn’t matter for the Left. The Left continues to support Israeli withdrawals because its members know that the biggest loser of such an action won’t be Israel as a whole. It will be the Israeli Right. And that is all the Left cares about.
The only enemy they are interested in fighting, the only adversary they wish to defeat, is their fellow Israelis. And in a bid to win their support at the ballot box – and on the evening news – Barak has decided to embrace their cause. He will fight their fight against their Israeli enemies for them.
The Israeli Left is not alone in its belief that its number one priority is to destroy its domestic political opposition. Throughout the Western world, the political Left is increasingly rallying around positions that are in fundamental conflict with their nation’s interests as well as with the specific ideological commitments of the Left, for the sole purpose of gaining and maintaining power.
In recent weeks, the Left in the US has exposed its motivations and purpose in profoundly troubling ways. If Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel is the core of the Zionist revolution, freedom of speech is the foundation of America. Without Jewish settlement, there is no Israel. Without freedom of speech, there is no America.
IN RECENT weeks, US President Barack Obama and all of his senior aides and supporters have launched an assault on freedom of speech. They have attacked previously unknown figures because they dared to exercise their freedom of speech to produce an anti-Islamic film and broadcast it on YouTube. The White House pressured Google (which owns YouTube) to take the movie down. Obama’s media supporters have gone along with this shocking assault on bedrock American principles.
The Left’s support for Obama’s bid to repress freedom of speech in relation to the movie was not an isolated incident. Today the enlightened leftists of New York and Washington are apoplectic because a federal judge required New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority to post paid advertisements by the Stop the Islamization of America human rights group calling for Americans to support Israel against jihad.
The content of the ads is self-evidently reasonable. They read, “In any war between the savage and the civilized man, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”
SIOA’s founder Pamela Geller submitted the ads to the MTA last year in response to a rash of anti- Israel ads calling for the US to end its support for the Jewish state. Those ads were published on New York buses and subways and on public transportation around the US.
The MTA rejected SIOA’s ad but the group sued. Citing the US Constitution, the court required the MTA to post them. When after a year’s delay the ads were finally posted last week, the US Left in the media and beyond had a collective fit.
From The New York Times to radical rabbis to pro- Islamic Christian pastors to The Washington Post, everyone is wringing their hands. In a televised debate with Geller, the anti-Israel evangelical pastor Rev. Jim Wallis condemned the ads, told Geller she was going to get Christians killed, (by what or whom, he never said), and demanded that Geller silence herself. As he put it, “Stop talking.”
It is important to be clear. The American Left doesn’t have a problem with free speech, per se. And they aren’t concerned – as Wallis would have you believe – that calling jihad savagery is going to get people killed, (by not-at-all savage jihadists).
The problem with messages like Geller’s is that talk about jihad distracts people from what the Left wants them to be thinking about.
Like the Israeli Left, the American Left doesn’t want Americans to think about the actual threats to the US emanating from the Islamic world. They want the public to think about what for them is the only real threat to their values and their ability to win and wield power.
That threat doesn’t emanate from the Islamic world where women are treated worse than farm animals, homosexuals are hanged in public squares, Christians are forcibly converted and assaulted, churches are burned to the ground, the annihilation of the Jewish people throughout the world is an ardent desire, and “Death to America” is a political program.
For the American Left, the primary threat to their way of life comes from people who oppose abortions and gay marriage and gun control. It comes from people who oppose unionization of government workers and nationalization of healthcare.
And it comes from people like Geller who state the obvious about jihad.
The reason that Islam is supposed to be immune from criticism is that for American leftists as for Israeli leftists, the only important battle is the one against domestic foes. And just as the abysmal results of leftist policies have left the Israeli Left with no choice but to shoot the messengers, so too the American Left must deal with policy failure by silencing the opposition.
In Israel, leftist appeasement of Palestinian terrorists has led to a horrific death toll and the obvious absence of peace. So the Left must silence those who have the temerity to oppose that failed policy. The Right’s most visible members are the religious Zionists, who are disproportionately situated beyond the 1949 armistice lines, and so the Left must destroy them through expulsions, no matter what the cost to Israel.
In America, the Left’s most conspicuous failure is its claim to promote women’s rights, equality and civil liberties in the culture war, even as it defends the Islamic world’s addiction to female genital mutilation, forced marriages, honor killings and executions of homosexuals for the “crime” of being gay. So the Left must silence critics of jihad and Islamism, and hope no one will notice its hypocrisy.
The upshot of all of this is that the Left must be denied its ability to dominate national discourses. Because Abbas and the pathologically Jew-hating society he leads is a threat to the Jewish state, while religious Zionists are not. And the assaults on American embassies throughout the Islamic world are not due to Internet movies, but to the savagery inherent in jihadist Islam.
In these perilous times we cannot permit ourselves to be led astray by those who insist we are our worst enemies.
Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.
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© 2012 Caroline Glick
Intro: Obama’s Dangerous Consistency
John R. Houk
© September 22, 2012
Caroline Glick has some awesome insight on Obama’s Foreign Policy in relation to Egyptian animus toward the USA.
She begins by pointing out the Islamic hatred for American Free Speech. This Egyptian hatred of America is evidenced by Egypt placing arrest warrants against the makers of the Mohammed Movie and anyone associated with promoting the movie.
Just as a sidebar: Egypt asking the U.S. government to honor the arrest warrants for something that is protected by the First Amendment should give more importance to the grassroots movement of enacting American Laws for American Courts (ALAC). – End of sidebar
Glick points out that Egyptian Clerics – like from the Muslim Brotherhood – are calling for an end of attacks on U.S. Embassies; however call for Muslims to rise up in the USA to murder anyone connected to the Mohammed Movie.
Glick points out that the Obama Administration has been consistent in an appeasement foreign policy by using an apologetic strategy of courting friendship with Muslim nations and most notoriously the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt.
Glick rounds out her criticism of President Barack Hussein Obama by pointing out his Administration is attempting to take the voters’ eyes off the foreign policy failure by dredging memories of the Neocons of the old Bush Administration yet only and oddly falling into the myth that Neocons are Jewish. Hence, without using anti-Semitic words the Obama Administration is using antisemitism to separate Obama policies as the source of Muslim rage against Americans.
This is a good read!
JRH 9/22/12
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Obama’s dangerous consistency
By Caroline Glick
September 21, 2012, 9:39 AM
On Tuesday, Egypt’s chief prosecutor issued arrest warrants against eight US citizens.
Their purported crimes relate either to their reported involvement in the production of the Internet movie critical of Islam that has received so much attention over the past 10 days, or to other alleged anti-Islamic activities.
One of the US citizens indicted is a woman who converted from Islam to Christianity.
According to the Associated Press, Egypt’s general prosecution issued a statement announcing that the eight US citizens have been indicted on charges of insulting and publicly attacking Islam, spreading false information, and harming Egyptian national unity.
The statement stipulated that they could face the death penalty if convicted.
The AP write-up of the story quoted Mamdouh Ismail, a Salafi attorney who praised the prosecution’s move. He claimed it would deter others from exercising their right to free expression in regards to Islam. As he put it, the prosecutions will “set a deterrent for them and anyone else who may fall into this.” That is, they will deter others from saying anything critical about Islam.
This desire to intimidate free people into silence on Islam is clearly the goal the heads of the Muslim Brotherhood seek to achieve through their protests of the anti-Islamic movie. This was the message of Muslim Brotherhood chief Yussuf Qaradawi. Three days after the anti-American assaults began on the anniversary of the September 11 jihadist attacks on America, Qaradawi gave a sermon on Qatar television, translated by MEMRI.
Qaradawi struck a moderate tone. He called on his followers to stop rioting against the US. Rather than attack the US, Qaradawi urged his Muslim audience to insist that the US place prohibitions on the free speech rights of American citizens by outlawing criticism of Islam – just as the Europeans have done in recent years in the face of Islamic terror and intimidation.
In his words, “We say to the US: You must take a strong stance and try to confront this extremism like the Europeans do. This [anti-Islamic film] is not art. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech. This is nothing but curses and insults. Does the freedom to curse and insult constitute freedom of speech?”
Both the actions of the Egyptian prosecution and Qaradawi’s sermon prove incontrovertibly that the two policies the US has adopted since September 11, 2001, to contend with Muslim hatred for the US have failed. The neoconservative policy of supporting the democratization of Muslim societies adopted by President Barack Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush has failed. And the appeasement policy adopted by Obama has also failed.
Bush’s democratization policy claimed that the reason the Muslim world had become a hotbed for anti-Americanism and terror was that the Muslim world was not governed by democratic regimes. Once the peoples of the Muslim world were allowed to be free, and to freely elect their governments, the neoconservatives proclaimed, they would abandon their hatred of America.
As a consequence of this belief, when the anti-regime protests against the authoritarian Mubarak regime began in January 2011, the neoconservatives were outspoken supporters of the overthrow of then-president Hosni Mubarak, despite the fact that he had been the US’s key ally in the Arab world for three decades. They supported the political process that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power. They supported the process despite the fact that Qaradawi is the most influential cleric in Egypt. They supported it despite the fact that just days after Mubarak was ousted from power, Qaradawi arrived at Cairo’s Tahrir Square and before an audience of two million followers, he called for the invasion of Israel and the conquest of Jerusalem.
In the event, the Egyptian people voted for Qaradawi’s Muslim Brotherhood and for the Salafi party. The distinction between the two parties is that Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood are willing to resort to both violent and nonviolent ways to dominate the world in the name of Islam. The Salafis abjure nonviolence. So while Qaradawi called for the riots to end in order to convince the Americans to criminalize criticism of Islam, his Salafi counterparts called for the murder of everyone involved in producing the anti-Islamic film.
For instance, Salafi cleric Ahmad Fouad Ashoush issued a fatwa on Islamic websites last weekend calling for American and European Muslims to murder those involved with the movie. His religious ruling was translated by the SITE Intelligence Group on Monday.
Ashoush wrote, “Those bastards who did this film are belligerent disbelievers. I issue a fatwa and call on the Muslim youth in America and Europe to do this duty, which is to kill the director, the producer and the actors and everyone who helped and promoted the film.
“So, hurry, hurry, O Muslim youth in America and Europe, and teach those filthy lowly ones a lesson that all the monkeys and pigs in America and Europe will understand. May Allah guide you and grant you success.”
These are the voices of democratic Egypt. The government, which has indicted American citizens on capital charges for exercising their most fundamental right as Americans, is a loyal representative of the sentiments of the Egyptian people who freely elected it. The Salafi preacher is a loyal representative of the segment of the Egyptian people that made the Salafi party the second largest in the Egyptian parliament. Qaradawi’s call for the abolition of freedom of speech in America – as has happened in Europe – and to ban all criticism of Islam is subscribed to by millions and millions of Muslims worldwide who consider him one of the leading Sunni clerics in the world.
Free elections in Egypt have empowered the Egyptian people to use the organs of governance to advance their hatred of America. Their hatred has been empowered, and legitimized, not diminished as the neoconservatives had hoped.
The behavior of the Egyptian government, Qaradawi and the Salafis also makes clear that Obama’s policy of appeasing the Muslim world has failed completely. Whereas Bush believed the source of Muslim hatred was their political oppression at the hands of their regimes, Obama has blamed their rage and hatred on America’s supposed misdeeds.
By changing the way America treats the Muslim world, Obama believes he can end their hatred of America. To this end, he has reached out to the most anti-American forces and regimes in the region and spurned pro-American regimes and political forces.
When Obama’s policies are recognized as driven by appeasement, the seeming inconsistency of his war against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi on the one hand, and his passivity in the face of the anti-regime uprising in Iran in 2009 and the Syrian uprising against the Assad regime today makes sense. Gaddafi was not a threat to the US, so he was unworthy of protection. The mullahs in Iran and Assad are foes of the US. So they deserve protection. Obama has assiduously courted the Muslim Brotherhood from the outset of his presidency.
The official and unofficial Egyptian exploitation of the Internet film as a means to intimidate and attack the US into disavowing its core principles is proof that Obama’s theory of the source of Muslim rage is wrong. They do not hate America because of what the US government does. They hate America because of what America is. And it is because of this that since September 11, the rationale for Obama’s foreign policy has disintegrated.
Rather than accept this basic truth and defend the American way of life, Obama has doubled down in the only way now available to him. He, his administration, his campaign and his supporters in the media have responded to the collapse of the foundations of his foreign policy by resorting to the sort of actions they accused George W. Bush, his administration and supporters of taking. They have responded with a campaign of political oppression and nativist bigotry directed against their political opponents.
Late last Friday night, law enforcement officers descended on the California home of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man who made the film that the Muslims of the newly free Arab lands find so offensive. Nakoula was questioned by federal authorities and later released. His arrest was photographed. The image of a dozen officers arresting an unarmed man for making a movie was broadcast worldwide within moments.
Beyond persecuting an independent filmmaker, the White House requested that YouTube block access to it. YouTube – owned by Google – has so far rejected the White House’s request.
The Obama administration’s abetment of bigoted nativism to silence criticism of its substantively indefensible foreign policy was on prominent display last Sunday. Obama’s campaign endorsed an anti-Semitic screed published by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
In her column, titled, “Neocons slither back,” Dowd wrote that Republican Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are mere puppets controlled by “neocon puppet master, Dan Senor.”
Neocon is a popular code for Jewish. It was so identified by Dowd’s Times’ colleague David Brooks several years ago.
Dowd said that “the neocons captured” Bush after the September 11 attacks and “Now, amid contagious Arab rage sparked on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, they have captured another would-be Republican president and vice president, both jejeune about the world.”
One telling aspect of Dowd’s assault on Senor as a neoconservative is that he and his boss in the Bush administration, Paul Bremer, were the nemeses of the neoconservatives at the Pentagon. The only thing Senor has in common with the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith is that all three men are Jews.
Moreover, Dowd drew a distinction between supposed “neocons” like Senor, and non-Jewish US leaders Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney who merely “abetted” the neocons.
So Senor doesn’t share the same ideological worldview as Feith and Wolfowitz but he’s a neocon. And Cheney and Rumsfeld do share the same worldview as Feith and Wolfowitz. And they are not neocons.
The Times’ public editor Andrew Rosenthal dismissed claims that Dowd’s column was anti- Semitic, arguing it couldn’t be since she never said a word about Jews.
The Obama campaign linked to Dowd’s column on its Twitter account with the message, “Why Romney and Ryan’s foreign policy sounds ‘ominously familiar.’” Obama’s campaign’s willingness to direct the public to anti-Semitic screeds against his political opponents is consistent with the administration’s general strategy for defending policies. That strategy involves responding to criticism not with substantive defense of his policies, but with ad hominem attacks against his critics.
His failed economic policies’ critics are attacked as “Wall Street fat cats.” His failed foreign policies’ critics are demonized as ominous neocon puppet masters.
There is a difference between appeasing parties that have been harmed by your actions and appeasing parties that wish your destruction. In the 1970s the US appeased the Philippines by transferring sovereignty over the Clark Air Force Base to the Philippine government. America was still America and the US and the Philippines became friends.
To appease a party that hates your way of life, you must change your way of life. The only way America can appease the Muslim world is for America to cease to be America.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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© 2012 Caroline Glick
Obama’s Foreign Policy is Unfavorable to Israel
John R. Houk
© August 17, 2012
Caroline Glick has written an essay that begins with the U.S. Foreign Policy debacle of doing nothing to keep Mao Zedong (Mao Tse Dung) from his Communist conquest of China. Mao wrested control of the Chinese government from the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-Chek who ended up fleeing to Formosa (Today’s Taiwan).
Glick compares Mao’s usurpation of power in China to allowing the Muslim Brotherhood Islamist President Mohamed Morsi of winning a close Egyptian election. Glick reports that Egyptian military authorities and generals have been fired and replaced with Muslim Brotherhood loyalists. Also Morsi has not called the Egyptian Parliament back (disbanded originally by Egyptian military) which Glick believes gives Morsi the power to write Egypt’s new Constitution. If Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood write the next Egyptian Constitution, this will probably instill dictatorial powers on the new Egyptian President. Glick believes these dictatorial powers will be on a larger scale than the Obama abandoned and deposed Hosni Mubarak’s power.
Glick then properly goes on to criticize Obama’s Foreign Policy of joining Turkey in supporting the Islamist rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Now I realize there will be really no difference in Israel-hate and American-hate from which ever Syrian broker eventually stabilizes control of Syria; however deposing Assad would throw a monkey wrench into the Iranian-Syrian military alliance at least for awhile. That actually would be to America’s benefit. Anything that sets Iran back with only a little resource involvement by the US is a plus for America.
If the Sunni-Islamists succeed in taking over Syria the animosity with Iran would only be temporary in my opinion. The one thing that unites and smoothes over the hatred between Sunni and Shia Muslims (Iran is a Shia Theocracy) is a mutual hatred for Jews and Israel.
I suspect if Israel attacks Iranian nuke sites the Sunni regimes of Turkey (Islamist government) and now Egypt (Muslim Brotherhood Islamist government) might begin to offer at the very least clandestine military aid to Iranian client Hezbollah and the Sunni-Islamist terrorists Hamas. Undoubtedly Hamas would join a Hezbollah attack from the north by making a southern military front against Israel. The Saudi Royal Family hates and fears the militant Shia Iran regime in becoming a regional hegemon. I believe it is a pretty good guess that the Wahhabi Clerics in Saudi Arabia would fully support the elimination of Israel’s existence. If the Saudi Royal Family does not want its own civil war it would probably support yet another invasion of Israel while working clandestinely with the USA to help thwart Iranian influence.
Israel’s existence is in volatile times. A nuclear armed Iran would be suicide for Israel. Israel must take the risk of regional war to stop the formation of nuclear warheads that can be placed on Iranian missiles that can easily reach Israel. If a regional war breaks out Israel would have to be harsh on the Arabs that call themselves Palestinians just to survive. I sense a President like Obama would condemn Israel for such self-preservation harshness against Palestinian Authority Arabs and Hamas governed Gaza Arabs. An Obama-like President might even desire to punish Israel by not helping the Jewish State to survive.
YOU DO KNOW what would happen to Jews in a defeated Israel, right? There would be a SECOND Holocaust that would either rival the Hitler-Nazi Holocaust or even exceed those dimensions of butchery.
American voters need to vote for a President that is Pro-Israel and willing to stand with Israel even if doing so is not Politically Correct to the rest of the Western World. Currently that man is GOP Nominee Mitt Romney. Standing with Israel will bring the blessings of God Almighty for blessing God’s Chosen People.
I am not Jewish; nonetheless I and other Biblical Christians support Israel because the Jewish State’s existence is prophetic. Eventually Jesus Himself will Return and the Jews will comprehend He is their Messiah as much as He is the Christian Messiah (i.e. the Christ) of Christian Believers looking for the fulfillment of God’s plans for His Creation. Salvation is of the Jews.
Yup, you pegged me: I am a Christian Zionist (SA Jewish Virtual Library). The kind of person Leftists, Muslims and erstwhile so-called Progressive Christians dislike immensely. Unfortunately many Liberal and Observant Jews distrust the motivation of Christian Zionists.
[SlantRight Editor Side Note: The distrust is in the Christian Zionist motivation to be a friend of Israel. Jews are not real hip to Christian proselytizing because of the unscriptural and horrid treatment Jews received at the hands of Christians taught to hate Jews as Christ-killers. The accusation was unfair in Christian history and it is unfair now.
For one thing polytheistic Romans were goaded into Crucifying Christ at the behest of power-station minded Jewish leadership (viz. the Sanhedrin monopolized by Pharisees but dominated by Greek mindset Sadducees).]
Well that is my two-cents. The analysis of Israel’s predicament and U.S. Foreign Policy is much more eloquently provided by Caroline Glick. You should READ IT.
JRH 8/17/12
