Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Must defeat Obama 2012
http://mustdefeatobama2012.blogspot.com/
CHRISTIANS AND JEWS AGAINST THE RE-ELECTION OF Barack Hussein Obama JOIN THE MOVEMENT TO SAVE THE UNITED STATES AND ISRAEL
OBAMA-
Trying to destroy Israel
Aiding the Islamic Caliphate and terror
He's a fraud
Honors Antisemites
Same radical leftist/Muslim
Dangerous foreign policy
Destroying the US economy
Helping Iran get the bomb
Thank God America is wising up
His world view "I will bless those who curse you and curse those who bless you" opposite of Genesis 12:3
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/Defeat-Obama-2012/170024166406281
Monday, August 29, 2011
Obama fraud in chief
August 29, 2011
Early Obama Letter Confirms Inability to Write
By Jack Cashill
On November 16, 1990, Barack Obama, then president of the Harvard Law Review, published a letter in the Harvard Law Record, an independent Harvard Law School newspaper, championing affirmative action.
Although a paragraph from this letter was excerpted in David Remnick's biography of Obama, The Bridge, I had not seen the letter in its entirety before this week. Not surprisingly, it confirms everything I know about Barack Obama, the writer and thinker.
Obama was prompted to write by an earlier letter from a Mr. Jim Chen that criticized Harvard Law Review's affirmative action policies. Specifically, Chen had argued that affirmative action stigmatized its presumed beneficiaries.
The response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his inability to make subject and predicate agree.
"Since the merits of the Law Review's selection policy has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues," wrote Obama, "I'd like to take the time to clarify exactly how our selection process works."
If Obama were as smart as a fifth-grader, he would know, of course, that "merits ... have." Were there such a thing as a literary Darwin Award, Obama could have won it on this on one sentence alone. He had vindicated Chen in his first ten words.
Although the letter is fewer than a thousand words long, Obama repeats the subject-predicate error at least two more times. In one sentence, he seemingly cannot make up his mind as to which verb option is correct so he tries both: "Approximately half of this first batch is chosen ... the other half are selected ... "
Another distinctive Obama flaw is to allow a string of words to float in space. Please note the unanchored phrase in italics at the end of this sentence:
"No editors on the Review will ever know whether any given editor was selected on the basis of grades, writing competition, or affirmative action, and no editors who were selected with affirmative action in mind." Huh?
The next lengthy sentence highlights a few superficial style flaws and a much deeper flaw in Obama's political philosophy.
I would therefore agree with the suggestion that in the future, our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer who would even insinuate that someone with Mr. Chen's extraordinary record of academic success might be somehow unqualified for work in a corporate law firm, or that such success might be somehow undeserved.
Obama would finish his acclaimed memoir, Dreams from My Father, about four years later. Prior to Dreams, and for the nine years following, everything Obama wrote was, like the above sentence, an uninspired assemblage of words with a nearly random application of commas and tenses.
Unaided, Obama tends to the awkward, passive, and verbose. The phrase "our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer" would more profitably read, "we should focus on the employer." "Concern" is simply the wrong word.
Scarier than Obama's style, however, is his thinking. A neophyte race-hustler after his three years in Chicago, Obama is keen to browbeat those who would "even insinuate" that affirmative action rewards the undeserving, results in inappropriate job placements, or stigmatizes its presumed beneficiaries.
In the case of Michelle Obama, affirmative action did all three. The partners at Sidley Austin learned this the hard way. In 1988, they hired her out of Harvard Law under the impression that the degree meant something. It did not. By 1991, Michelle was working in the public sector as an assistant to the mayor. By 1993, she had given up her law license.
Had the partners investigated Michelle's background, they would have foreseen the disaster to come. Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, "Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well."
She did not write well, either. Mundy charitably describes her senior thesis at Princeton as "dense and turgid." The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observes, "To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language."
Michelle had to have been as anxious at Harvard Law as Bart Simpson was at Genius School. Almost assuredly, the gap between her writing and that of her highly talented colleagues marked her as an affirmative action admission, and the profs finessed her through.
In a similar vein, Barack Obama was named an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Although his description of the Law Review's selection process defies easy comprehension, apparently, after the best candidates are chosen, there remains "a pool of qualified candidates whose grades or writing competition scores do not significantly differ." These sound like the kids at Lake Woebegone, all above average. Out of this pool, Obama continues, "the Selection Committee may take race or physical handicap into account."
To his credit, Obama concedes that he "may have benefited from the Law Review's affirmative action policy." This did not strike him as unusual as he "undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career."
On the basis of his being elected president of Law Review -- a popularity contest -- Obama was awarded a six-figure contract to write a book. To this point, he had not shown a hint of promise as a writer, but Simon & Schuster, like Sidley Austin, took the Harvard credential seriously. It should not have. For three years Obama floundered as badly as Michelle had at Sidley Austin. Simon & Schuster finally pulled the contract.
Then Obama found his muse -- right in the neighborhood, as it turns out! And promptly, without further ado, the awkward, passive, ungrammatical Obama, a man who had not written one inspired sentence in his whole life, published what Time Magazine called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
To question the nature of that production, I have learned, is to risk the abuse promised to Mr. Chen's theoretical employer. After all, who would challenge Obama's obvious talent -- or that of any affirmative action beneficiary -- but those blinded by what Obama calls "deep-rooted ignorance and bias"?
What else could it be?
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2011/08/early_obama_letter_confirms_inability_to_write.html
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
krauthammer it won't be Ron Paul
Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann’s victory in Saturday’s straw poll in Ames, Iowa has earned her a lot of media attention for her 2012 presidential bid. But nipping at her heels only 152 votes behind was Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who has gotten little-to-no attention from the media for his feat on Saturday.
And although one might think attention is deserved for Paul, according to Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, Paul is being ignored for one reason: He doesn’t stand a chance. Krauthammer explained this on Monday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel.
“Ron Paul is not going to be president of the United States,” Krauthammer said. “We’re not a libertarian country. It’s a very important strain of conservative thought but it’s not the dominant one.” (RELATED OPINION: Who’s really destroying the Republican Party? Hint: It’s not Ron Paul)
According to Krauthammer, the Ames straw poll lacks the ability to gauge breadth of support for a candidate. And someone like Paul, who has a vociferous following, doesn’t necessarily poll well beyond that following.
“If you look at the poll, this is a straw poll that measures enthusiasm but it doesn’t measure the breadth of support,” he continued. “It measures the depth. If you do a poll, his numbers are usually in single digits. So that’s why people are speaking about him. The next president of the United States is going to have the name Bachmann or Perry, Romney or Obama. That is probably, unless somebody enters the field.”
And although one might think attention is deserved for Paul, according to Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, Paul is being ignored for one reason: He doesn’t stand a chance. Krauthammer explained this on Monday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel.
“Ron Paul is not going to be president of the United States,” Krauthammer said. “We’re not a libertarian country. It’s a very important strain of conservative thought but it’s not the dominant one.” (RELATED OPINION: Who’s really destroying the Republican Party? Hint: It’s not Ron Paul)
According to Krauthammer, the Ames straw poll lacks the ability to gauge breadth of support for a candidate. And someone like Paul, who has a vociferous following, doesn’t necessarily poll well beyond that following.
“If you look at the poll, this is a straw poll that measures enthusiasm but it doesn’t measure the breadth of support,” he continued. “It measures the depth. If you do a poll, his numbers are usually in single digits. So that’s why people are speaking about him. The next president of the United States is going to have the name Bachmann or Perry, Romney or Obama. That is probably, unless somebody enters the field.”
no big cuts in defense
Panetta: Bigger defense cuts would 'weaken' US
By ROBERT BURNS - AP National Security Writer | AP – 1 hr 4 mins ago
tweet1Share
Email
Print
RELATED CONTENT
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton listens as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta …
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta arrive …
WASHINGTON (AP) — Large new cuts in defense spending would "terribly weaken" U.S. national security, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Tuesday as he and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used a rare joint interview to argue that the nation cannot afford to keep playing partisan chicken with its finances.
Panetta expressed optimism about progress by American-led forces against the Taliban in Afghanistan and by NATO forces in support of anti-government rebels in Libya. He cited those conflicts as examples of why severe cuts to spending on defense and diplomacy would be dangerous.
Panetta said the Pentagon is prepared to make $350 billion in cuts over the next 10 years, as agreed by Congress. But he warned of dangers to the national defense if bigger reductions are required.
The recent deficit compromise reached between the White House and Congress set up a special bipartisan committee to draft legislation to find more government cuts. If the committee cannot agree on a deficit-reduction plan by year's end or if Congress rejects its proposal, it would trigger some $500 billion in additional reductions in projected national security spending.
"This kind of massive cut across the board, which would literally double the number of cuts that we're confronting, that would have devastating effects on our national defense; it would have devastating effects on certainly the State Department," Panetta said.
By ROBERT BURNS - AP National Security Writer | AP – 1 hr 4 mins ago
tweet1Share
RELATED CONTENT
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton listens as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta …
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta arrive …
WASHINGTON (AP) — Large new cuts in defense spending would "terribly weaken" U.S. national security, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Tuesday as he and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used a rare joint interview to argue that the nation cannot afford to keep playing partisan chicken with its finances.
Panetta expressed optimism about progress by American-led forces against the Taliban in Afghanistan and by NATO forces in support of anti-government rebels in Libya. He cited those conflicts as examples of why severe cuts to spending on defense and diplomacy would be dangerous.
Panetta said the Pentagon is prepared to make $350 billion in cuts over the next 10 years, as agreed by Congress. But he warned of dangers to the national defense if bigger reductions are required.
The recent deficit compromise reached between the White House and Congress set up a special bipartisan committee to draft legislation to find more government cuts. If the committee cannot agree on a deficit-reduction plan by year's end or if Congress rejects its proposal, it would trigger some $500 billion in additional reductions in projected national security spending.
"This kind of massive cut across the board, which would literally double the number of cuts that we're confronting, that would have devastating effects on our national defense; it would have devastating effects on certainly the State Department," Panetta said.
obama medals antisemite Tutu
Tutu's war on Israel, Jews
Special: Archbishop Tutu leads vile, racist campaign against Israel and Jewish people
Giulio Meotti
Published: 08.11.11, 21:47 / Israel News
share
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whose role in the fight against South African apartheid in the 1980s gained him the Nobel Peace Prize and global fame, is among the world’s most respected figures.
Barack Obama awarded him the US highest honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Tutu has been called “an inspiration" and was compared to Albert Schweitzer and Gandhi. The Wall Street Journal labeled him “the best known priest in the world.” Tutu was even asked to donate his genome to scientists to discover the African roots of mankind.
Receive Ynetnews updates directly to your desktop
With Nelson Mandela in jail, it fell to Tutu to steer the struggle against institutionalized racial oppression in a nonviolent direction. From his church in segregated Soweto, Tutu urged the imposition of economic sanctions against the white government. Since then, Tutu’s face has become the symbol of tolerance and goodness.
However, the Archbishop’s iconic voice has also found another cause no less popular: The global campaign against Israel and the Jewish people. Tutu just promoted an appeal to the US pension fund of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association for cutting the partnership with Israeli companies. He also helped the Australian Marrickville Council approve a boycott of Israel's goods.
Special: Archbishop Tutu leads vile, racist campaign against Israel and Jewish people
Giulio Meotti
Published: 08.11.11, 21:47 / Israel News
share
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whose role in the fight against South African apartheid in the 1980s gained him the Nobel Peace Prize and global fame, is among the world’s most respected figures.
Barack Obama awarded him the US highest honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Tutu has been called “an inspiration" and was compared to Albert Schweitzer and Gandhi. The Wall Street Journal labeled him “the best known priest in the world.” Tutu was even asked to donate his genome to scientists to discover the African roots of mankind.
Receive Ynetnews updates directly to your desktop
With Nelson Mandela in jail, it fell to Tutu to steer the struggle against institutionalized racial oppression in a nonviolent direction. From his church in segregated Soweto, Tutu urged the imposition of economic sanctions against the white government. Since then, Tutu’s face has become the symbol of tolerance and goodness.
However, the Archbishop’s iconic voice has also found another cause no less popular: The global campaign against Israel and the Jewish people. Tutu just promoted an appeal to the US pension fund of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association for cutting the partnership with Israeli companies. He also helped the Australian Marrickville Council approve a boycott of Israel's goods.
Richard Baehr defending Perry from Pam Geller attack
"This is nothing short of a ridiculous smear job. Here are Geller's last lines: "Rick Perry must not be the Republican nominee. Rick Perry must not be President. Have we not had enough of this systemic sedition?" Sedition? Really? What is this charge based on? Perry gave a speech in "the company of Grover Norquist". Wow. Can Ms Geller name a Republican who has not made a speech in the company of Grover Norquist at one point or another? I am not a big fan of Norquist on many counts, but using this as the basis for her conclusion on Perry is nonsense. As for the second crime: "Perry is a friend of Aga Khan", well that must cinch the case. We are not talking about support for CAIR, or ISNA, or the AMC, or Shariah law. What Geller reveals about Perry and Khan also seems inconsequential to me- Perry makes the same milktoast comments every politician makes at one time or another to show they are not an anti-Muslim bigot. Perry, like Romney and Bachmann are all very pro-Israel, an issue that Geller cares about deeply, and seems to be ignoring when she trashes Perry with no basis, as she does in this article. Geller also ignores Perry's foreign policy team. Geller has had a good record on a lot of tough issues. This trashing of Perry is beneath her."
It turns out that Geller seems to have had her "research" done by the liberal magazine Salon, which posted a similar sharia smear label on Perry.
A few responses : http://tinyurl.com/3t5w7na
http://tinyurl.com/3tgnxkz
It turns out that Geller seems to have had her "research" done by the liberal magazine Salon, which posted a similar sharia smear label on Perry.
A few responses : http://tinyurl.com/3t5w7na
http://tinyurl.com/3tgnxkz
Sunday, August 14, 2011
He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president.
What Happened to Obama? Absolutely Nothing.
He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president.
By NORMAN PODHORETZ
It's open season on President Obama. Which is to say that the usual suspects on the right (among whom I include myself) are increasingly being joined in attacking him by erstwhile worshipers on the left. Even before the S&P downgrade, there were reports of Democrats lamenting that Hillary Clinton had lost to him in 2008. Some were comparing him not, as most of them originally had, to Lincoln and Roosevelt but to the hapless Jimmy Carter. There was even talk of finding a candidate to stage a primary run against him. But since the downgrade, more and more liberal pundits have been deserting what they clearly fear is a sinking ship.
Here, for example, from the Washington Post, is Richard Cohen: "He is the very personification of cognitive dissonance—the gap between what we (especially liberals) expected of the first serious African American presidential candidate and the man he in fact is." More amazingly yet Mr. Cohen goes on to say of Mr. Obama, who not long ago was almost universally hailed as the greatest orator since Pericles, that he lacks even "the rhetorical qualities of the old-time black politicians." And to compound the amazement, Mr. Cohen tells us that he cannot even "recall a soaring passage from a speech."
Overseas it is the same refrain. Everywhere in the world, we read in Germany's Der Spiegel, not only are the hopes ignited by Mr. Obama being dashed, but his "weakness is a problem for the entire global economy."
In short, the spell that Mr. Obama once cast—a spell so powerful that instead of ridiculing him when he boasted that he would cause "the oceans to stop rising and the planet to heal," all of liberaldom fell into a delirious swoon—has now been broken by its traumatic realization that he is neither the "god" Newsweek in all seriousness declared him to be nor even a messianic deliverer.
Hence the question on every lip is—as the title of a much quoted article in the New York Times by Drew Westen of Emory University puts it— "What Happened to Obama?" Attacking from the left, Mr. Westin charges that President Obama has been conciliatory when he should have been aggressively pounding away at all the evildoers on the right.
Of course, unlike Mr. Westen, we villainous conservatives do not see Mr. Obama as conciliatory or as "a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election." On the contrary, we see him as a president who knows all too well what he believes. Furthermore, what Mr. Westen regards as an opportunistic appeal to the center we interpret as a tactic calculated to obfuscate his unshakable strategic objective, which is to turn this country into a European-style social democracy while diminishing the leading role it has played in the world since the end of World War II. The Democrats have persistently denied that these are Mr. Obama's goals, but they have only been able to do so by ignoring or dismissing what Mr. Obama himself, in a rare moment of candor, promised at the tail end of his run for the presidency: "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."
View Full Image
Getty Images
This statement, coming on top of his association with radicals like Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Rashid Khalidi, definitively revealed to all who were not wilfully blinding themselves that Mr. Obama was a genuine product of the political culture that had its birth among a marginal group of leftists in the early 1960s and that by the end of the decade had spread metastatically to the universities, the mainstream media, the mainline churches, and the entertainment industry. Like their communist ancestors of the 1930s, the leftist radicals of the '60s were convinced that the United States was so rotten that only a revolution could save it.
But whereas the communists had in their delusional vision of the Soviet Union a model of the kind of society that would replace the one they were bent on destroying, the new leftists only knew what they were against: America, or Amerika as they spelled it to suggest its kinship to Nazi Germany. Thanks, however, to the unmasking of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian nightmare, they did not know what they were for. Yet once they had pulled off the incredible feat of taking over the Democratic Party behind the presidential candidacy of George McGovern in 1972, they dropped the vain hope of a revolution, and in the social-democratic system most fully developed in Sweden they found an alternative to American capitalism that had a realistic possibility of being achieved through gradual political reform.
Despite Mr. McGovern's defeat by Richard Nixon in a landslide, the leftists remained a powerful force within the Democratic Party, but for the next three decades the electoral exigencies within which they had chosen to operate prevented them from getting their own man nominated. Thus, not one of the six Democratic presidential candidates who followed Mr. McGovern came out of the party's left wing, and when Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton (the only two of the six who won) tried each in his own way to govern in its spirit, their policies were rejected by the American immune system. It was only with the advent of Barack Obama that the leftists at long last succeeded in nominating one of their own.
To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberaldom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were a bit extreme, he was given a pass. And in any case, what did such ancient history matter when he was also articulate and elegant and (as he himself had said) "non-threatening," all of which gave him a fighting chance to become the first black president and thereby to lay the curse of racism to rest?
And so it came about that a faithful scion of the political culture of the '60s left is now sitting in the White House and doing everything in his power to effect the fundamental transformation of America to which that culture was dedicated and to which he has pledged his own personal allegiance.
I disagree with those of my fellow conservatives who maintain that Mr. Obama is indifferent to "the best interests of the United States" (Thomas Sowell) and is "purposely" out to harm America (Rush Limbaugh). In my opinion, he imagines that he is helping America to repent of its many sins and to become a different and better country.
But I emphatically agree with Messrs. Limbaugh and Sowell about this president's attitude toward America as it exists and as the Founding Fathers intended it. That is why my own answer to the question, "What Happened to Obama?" is that nothing happened to him. He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president, and it is this rather than inexperience or incompetence or weakness or stupidity that accounts for the richly deserved failure both at home and abroad of the policies stemming from that reprehensible cast of mind.
Mr. Podhoretz was the editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995. His most recent book is "Why Are Jews Liberals?" (Doubleday, 2009).
He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president.
By NORMAN PODHORETZ
It's open season on President Obama. Which is to say that the usual suspects on the right (among whom I include myself) are increasingly being joined in attacking him by erstwhile worshipers on the left. Even before the S&P downgrade, there were reports of Democrats lamenting that Hillary Clinton had lost to him in 2008. Some were comparing him not, as most of them originally had, to Lincoln and Roosevelt but to the hapless Jimmy Carter. There was even talk of finding a candidate to stage a primary run against him. But since the downgrade, more and more liberal pundits have been deserting what they clearly fear is a sinking ship.
Here, for example, from the Washington Post, is Richard Cohen: "He is the very personification of cognitive dissonance—the gap between what we (especially liberals) expected of the first serious African American presidential candidate and the man he in fact is." More amazingly yet Mr. Cohen goes on to say of Mr. Obama, who not long ago was almost universally hailed as the greatest orator since Pericles, that he lacks even "the rhetorical qualities of the old-time black politicians." And to compound the amazement, Mr. Cohen tells us that he cannot even "recall a soaring passage from a speech."
Overseas it is the same refrain. Everywhere in the world, we read in Germany's Der Spiegel, not only are the hopes ignited by Mr. Obama being dashed, but his "weakness is a problem for the entire global economy."
In short, the spell that Mr. Obama once cast—a spell so powerful that instead of ridiculing him when he boasted that he would cause "the oceans to stop rising and the planet to heal," all of liberaldom fell into a delirious swoon—has now been broken by its traumatic realization that he is neither the "god" Newsweek in all seriousness declared him to be nor even a messianic deliverer.
Hence the question on every lip is—as the title of a much quoted article in the New York Times by Drew Westen of Emory University puts it— "What Happened to Obama?" Attacking from the left, Mr. Westin charges that President Obama has been conciliatory when he should have been aggressively pounding away at all the evildoers on the right.
Of course, unlike Mr. Westen, we villainous conservatives do not see Mr. Obama as conciliatory or as "a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election." On the contrary, we see him as a president who knows all too well what he believes. Furthermore, what Mr. Westen regards as an opportunistic appeal to the center we interpret as a tactic calculated to obfuscate his unshakable strategic objective, which is to turn this country into a European-style social democracy while diminishing the leading role it has played in the world since the end of World War II. The Democrats have persistently denied that these are Mr. Obama's goals, but they have only been able to do so by ignoring or dismissing what Mr. Obama himself, in a rare moment of candor, promised at the tail end of his run for the presidency: "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."
View Full Image
Getty Images
This statement, coming on top of his association with radicals like Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Rashid Khalidi, definitively revealed to all who were not wilfully blinding themselves that Mr. Obama was a genuine product of the political culture that had its birth among a marginal group of leftists in the early 1960s and that by the end of the decade had spread metastatically to the universities, the mainstream media, the mainline churches, and the entertainment industry. Like their communist ancestors of the 1930s, the leftist radicals of the '60s were convinced that the United States was so rotten that only a revolution could save it.
But whereas the communists had in their delusional vision of the Soviet Union a model of the kind of society that would replace the one they were bent on destroying, the new leftists only knew what they were against: America, or Amerika as they spelled it to suggest its kinship to Nazi Germany. Thanks, however, to the unmasking of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian nightmare, they did not know what they were for. Yet once they had pulled off the incredible feat of taking over the Democratic Party behind the presidential candidacy of George McGovern in 1972, they dropped the vain hope of a revolution, and in the social-democratic system most fully developed in Sweden they found an alternative to American capitalism that had a realistic possibility of being achieved through gradual political reform.
Despite Mr. McGovern's defeat by Richard Nixon in a landslide, the leftists remained a powerful force within the Democratic Party, but for the next three decades the electoral exigencies within which they had chosen to operate prevented them from getting their own man nominated. Thus, not one of the six Democratic presidential candidates who followed Mr. McGovern came out of the party's left wing, and when Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton (the only two of the six who won) tried each in his own way to govern in its spirit, their policies were rejected by the American immune system. It was only with the advent of Barack Obama that the leftists at long last succeeded in nominating one of their own.
To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberaldom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were a bit extreme, he was given a pass. And in any case, what did such ancient history matter when he was also articulate and elegant and (as he himself had said) "non-threatening," all of which gave him a fighting chance to become the first black president and thereby to lay the curse of racism to rest?
And so it came about that a faithful scion of the political culture of the '60s left is now sitting in the White House and doing everything in his power to effect the fundamental transformation of America to which that culture was dedicated and to which he has pledged his own personal allegiance.
I disagree with those of my fellow conservatives who maintain that Mr. Obama is indifferent to "the best interests of the United States" (Thomas Sowell) and is "purposely" out to harm America (Rush Limbaugh). In my opinion, he imagines that he is helping America to repent of its many sins and to become a different and better country.
But I emphatically agree with Messrs. Limbaugh and Sowell about this president's attitude toward America as it exists and as the Founding Fathers intended it. That is why my own answer to the question, "What Happened to Obama?" is that nothing happened to him. He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president, and it is this rather than inexperience or incompetence or weakness or stupidity that accounts for the richly deserved failure both at home and abroad of the policies stemming from that reprehensible cast of mind.
Mr. Podhoretz was the editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995. His most recent book is "Why Are Jews Liberals?" (Doubleday, 2009).
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Obamas foreign policy failures continue -Turkey-Syria
Cambridge Journal: Obama’s Callous, Ineffective Foreign Policy Blunders Onward
Martin PeretzAugust 5, 2011 | 12:00 am 35 comments
|More
Print
MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR
What Explains Fashionable Hostility Toward Israel?
Obama’s Multiplying Middle East Failures
Tel Aviv Journal: President Obama’s Wrongheaded Middle East Counselors
Almost no one in America cares about foreign affairs, especially not for Barack Obama’s foreign affairs. For he has made of almost his entire conduct of peace and war an amateurish mess, crude, provincial, impetuous, peaceably high-minded but stupid—and full of peril to the world, to its democracies, to the United States itself. If only he had the consistency of George McGovern, we would know that Obama is not really interested in other countries and movements friendly to us and our political ideas; actually, he has some sympathies for enemy states, as the 1972 Democratic candidate for president did for both the Soviet Union and North Vietnam. This is not Obama. He believes—or at least believed—that he can change the world by earnest talk with foreign leaders who share not a single philosophical tenet of egalitarian individualism or representative constitutionalism. Of course, it was not only flabby, earnest talk that he brought to the table. It was also a certain haughty sycophancy before alien potentates and despots whom he thought persuadable through blandishments and obsequy about just how central they were to world peace. Or to whatever.
Among the president’s enthusiastic 2008 followers there appears to be no recognition that he has failed at every foreign venture he has attempted. Indeed, the question of Darfur, the litmus test issue for young true-believers in the campaign that never quite became a presidential venture, has been spun off to a principled do-nothing bureaucrat who has not been able (or, for that matter, tried) to persuade any African or Arab government to treat the Sudanese president, indicted on charges of genocide by the International Criminal Court at The Hague, as being subject to arrest wherever he goes, which he is. There is no embarrassment when this head of state arrives anywhere in the region, and there is nothing that embarrasses Omar al-Bashir, neither mass murder nor rapine nor the theft from his people of some $9 billion in cash, according to WikiLeaks documents. Darfur, which should have been the simplest rendezvous with destiny, was unceremoniously dropped from the president’s agenda. Given this, why should we have expected anything more of Obama on more intricate matters? As for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she travels around the world with all kinds of truisms that have not the semblance of conviction behind them, let alone the threat of force to back them up. So she is mostly talk. Hosni Mubarak was “family.” That was a choice she made. Unlike with her brothers, this family was not. With Bashar al-Assad, it was a little different. Hillary and her boss had the idiot idea that the monstrous president of Syria was a key to Arab-Israeli peace—or, if not a “key to,” a “prerequisite for.” He has now brutalized his own people so ruthlessly that, if ours were a parliamentary system, Obama would long ago have had to resign. He actually grasped nothing about the Syria in which he invested so much of his cachet.
Obama’s Middle East adventures began in Turkey, where he set out in the third month of his term to fix American relations with the Muslim world. Some informed people say (although I cannot swear) that the president’s initial ambition/intention was to go to Tehran and break, so to speak, with his own and Ahmadinejad’s hands the nuclear impasse. Such a visit, bound to fail, would in any case have derailed the always fragile but enduring relationship between the United States and Riyadh, where sits the temporal, if unofficial leader of all Sunnis and the absolute ruler of the Saudi oil kingdom. Instead, Obama went to Turkey, which also seemed a bit odd to the Arabs. Though Sunni Muslims, the Turks are, after all, not Arabs. Moreover, the Ottomans (that is, the Turks) had lorded over the Arabs since the second decade of the sixteenth century, almost exactly four centuries before 1917, with the sultan calling himself the Caliph of Islam and the Servant of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. Chutzpah! as the Jews might say.
Why Obama wanted to make himself party to the ongoing destruction of the Ataturk revolution or of Kemalism I do not really know. Still, what has been happening in Turkey over the last decades and especially since 2003, when Recep Tayyip Erdogan became prime minister, is a struggle between imperfect but secular democracy and representative Islamic government with mob support. The drift is toward Muslim fundamentalism in schools, in the legal system, and in the wider culture, which means a clamping down on the liberal tenets that had made the country an ongoing open society. But not entirely, not quite. For example, there have been several attempts at military coups, serious ones. And perhaps most important for Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, it has produced during the last decade a prosperity not known in Europe outside the Scandinavian countries. I suspect, however, that the president’s affections for Turkey are derived more from its religious character than from its prosperity or from its eroding republican virtues.
In fact, the president seems to have assumed that he would have a magic touch with all Muslims. But the fact is that, after two and one half years, he has a magic touch with none. Indeed, he has been a flop with virtually every Islamic society in which he has tried to score. And no one can say he didn’t try. Turkey is the most complicated case. It aspires to membership in the European Union. Europe, however, doesn’t want it. No one can pretend that the grounds are other than demographic: The EU is not happy about absorbing an additional 70 million Muslims as citizens or even quasi-citizens. The recent Danish imbroglio over reimposing border controls (either in violation of the Schengen Agreement or not in violation) is one instance of this resistance. The recent French barring of Libyans and Tunisians from crossing the frontier from Italy is another case of resistance. Maybe the bloodletting enormity in Norway will temper such state acts—though not for long. Still, Turkey makes the second largest troop commitment to NATO, and its soldiers have participated in both the Afghan war and in Libya to the extent, at least, that the alliance’s troops have been fighting on Qaddafi’s turf at all and more certainly than American forces have. Islam was never a problem with NATO. But that was largely because it was not yet the clerisy that was in charge at home.
Turkey will not be much of a democracy for long. It is already quite close to being a clerical state—and a clerical state that cannot make peace with its Kurds (who are also Muslims) or with its own exterminationist history against the Christian Armenians, of whom perhaps 1.5 million were killed, and maybe two million. Not, of course, that the secular Turks were ever able or willing to bridge or erode these defining chasms either.
Nonetheless, the separation of church and state was the defining characteristic of the new Turkey that came into being nearly a century ago. It is true that there was an exchange of populations between the new Turkey and the new Greece, between Muslims and Orthodox Christians—not, by the way, what is now called “ethnic cleansing” to shore up the shabby and utterly ahistorical Palestinian argument that being moved five miles (or 15 and 50) constitutes a fate just short of carnage. (Many such population movements were engineered in the years after World War II, from Eastern Europe to Germany, back and forth between India and Pakistan, from Formosa, Korea, and Manchuria to Japan, much of it entailing great suffering but very little of the historical mortgage brandished against Israel by Arab propaganda.)
“There is growing concern that the secular order in Turkey, based on laicism and the strict separation of church and state, is in danger,” writes the distinguished Turkish-German commentator Baha Gungor in a short essay titled, “Where are you going, Mr. Erdogan?” in Deutsche Welle:
Cambridge Journal: Obama’s Callous, Ineffective Foreign Policy Blunders Onward
Martin PeretzAugust 5, 2011 | 12:00 am 35 comments
|More
Print
MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR
What Explains Fashionable Hostility Toward Israel?
Obama’s Multiplying Middle East Failures
Tel Aviv Journal: President Obama’s Wrongheaded Middle East Counselors
Last Friday evening, the former head of the Turkish armed forces, General Isik Kosaner, alongside the commanders of the army, air force and navy, made for a domestic political earthquake of unseen magnitude in Turkey: They requested early retirement. Only Necdet Ozel kept his post as high commander of the paramilitary gendarmerie, a relatively junior position within the military.
In the meantime, Ozel was named chief of the army as well as temporary commander of the Turkish military. The shock waves will still be felt for a long time, despite all reassurances from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul. The highest military council convened on Monday under Erdogan’s chairmanship, but there were five empty chairs at the table made for 14.
The dissatisfaction of the military proved too great—more than 250 middle- and high-ranking officers currently sit in pretrial detention for alleged coup plans against Erdogan. They share the fate of journalists and intellectuals who have been sitting in prison—some for up to two years—not knowing exactly what they are accused of. That’s why there is already doubt that the joy at a breakthrough against the Turkish military, one of the last bastions of anti-democracy in the country, is in fact misplaced.
The armed forces were namely a counterweight to the growing influence of religion in the government and society. There’s growing concern that the secular order in Turkey, based on the principle of laicism and the strict separation of church and state, is in danger. The revolutionary modernization and related westward orientation of the Turkish Republic, begun by its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is crumbling.
Where are you going with this, Mr. Erdogan? Where will the prime minister start, after his electoral victory of nearly 50 percent elevated him to a virtual democratically legitimate autocrat? The growing pressure on dissidents, on critical voices and on the media does not bode well. Should Erdogan's conservative religious Justice and Development Party win over a handfull of opposition lawmakers, he will rewrite the constitution and, with an approval in a voter referendum, be able to form a presidential republic out of Turkey.
With three coups since 1960 and further interferences in the democratic process under threat of more revolt, the Turkish military has not always served the country well. However it did constitute a guarantee against the turn away from western norms, from democracy and the rule of law. This guarantee is no longer there.
It was not surprising that Washington failed to engage with Ankara in last year’s provocations against Israel with the flotilla of ships trying to interfere with the Gaza blockade. Yet, in the post-takeover period, the U.S. tried and succeeded in fanning down the reflexive anti-Israel diplomacy that can be summoned in the U.N. at a moment’s notice. When the second wave of the flotilla was being launched a few months ago, however, Washington was simply irrelevant. Israel did its own diplomatic work with its new ally, Greece, and with Cyprus. The flotilla simply flopped, with Turkey actually cooperating in the failure.
For years, Turkey had been allied with Assad in his tremulous ventures with Iran and Lebanon, even though this put some strain on Erdogan’s Sunni loyalties, which were fundamentally at odds with the Tehran regime and the Shia insurgency of Hezbollah in Beirut. Now, of course, it is no longer an insurgency. For the truth is that Hassan Nasrallah is the governing figure in Lebanon. But, if Assad falls, Hezbollah falters. And, if both of these occur, Iran will be cut off from its past victories, which provided for it a long unofficial frontier right on the north of Israel. There are some signs that it is disturbed by Assad’s brutal response to what is, after all, a Sunni uprising, the victory of which it would not at all welcome. But countenance, it might. The rub for Ahmadinejad and for his actually more powerful antagonist Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is what Erdogan does.
Amir Taheri wrote in Al Arabiya on June 17 that a fight is brewing between Turkey and Iran over the future of Syria. It is not by any means a struggle for the freedom of the Syrian population. It is a struggle over an Arab population between two non-Arab regimes, one Persian, the other Turkish. Erdogan has already laid down the gauntlet. Taheri quotes him: “Today Turkey is offering a model to the Muslim world. … Turkey wants to become a voice for Muslims throughout the world.” Turkey has an advantage over Iran in that, like the great majority of Syrians, it is overwhelmingly Sunni. Whether Erdogan’s words will turn out to be more than words it is perhaps too early to know.
(continued on next
Cambridge Journal: Obama’s Callous, Ineffective Foreign Policy Blunders Onward
Martin PeretzAugust 5, 2011 | 12:00 am 35 comments
|More
Print
MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR
What Explains Fashionable Hostility Toward Israel?
Obama’s Multiplying Middle East Failures
Tel Aviv Journal: President Obama’s Wrongheaded Middle East Counselors
But what we do know is that Obama’s words (and Clinton’s, too), from the first demonstrations in Damascus to the latest in Hama, are morally inappropriate. Instead of applying its own rough sanctions to the Syrian regime, the U.S. has weighed in with paper sanctions on paper money that belong to people close to the Assad apparatus who doubtless did not wait to retrieve their assets from banks accessible to the American government. Still entranced by international institutions, Washington has allowed months to go by until a vague, even meaningless “presidential statement” (not even a resolution) altogether without teeth was passed by the U.N. Security Council two days ago. Of course, it was a compromise—not that the initial measure had any particular teeth in it either. So what did U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice get Beijing and Moscow to agree to? According to a piece in the Christian Science Monitor by Howard LaFranchi, to condemn “widespread violations of human rights and the use of force against civilians by Syrian authorities” and to express “grave concern at the deteriorating situation in Syria.” Yes, and what would that do? Nothing. Except for the continuation of the siege of Hama. And the siege has continued through the day and night. But, after all, the president of Syria has murdered only about 200 denizens of that accursed city. His father murdered tens of thousands. Is this not progress? And anyway, the dead are all Sunnis.
Can you believe it? In the Los Angeles Times of July 21, Paul Richter reported that the Obama administration actually “softened its criticism of Syria” and “stopped short of calling on President Bashar Assad to resign and has toned down its rhetoric.” This is an ethical and political transgression of the worst order, short of murdering the Syrians ourselves. Maybe the president thinks he can still get Bibi Netanyahu to cede the Golan Heights to the dictatorship—and maybe that would stop the insurrection. Inshallah!
The Syrian tyranny is the most brutal, the most coherent, the most transparent in the entire Arab world. In comparison to the state personified by Assad, Mubarak’s Egypt and Ali Abdullah Saleh’s Yemen and the mad Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya are milder. Alas, almost nobody noticed Obama’s sick courting of the oppressor.
But at least one Arab commentator, Khalaf Al Harbi, writing in the Saudi government daily Okaz, did. Titled “Obama—Get Out” (and put on the web by the Middle East Media Research Institute on July 29) it reads:
All last month, I kept my eyes out for Mr. Obama, who appeared so often at the outset of the ‘Arab Spring’ and suddenly disappeared, leaving the tyrants’ armored vehicles to wreak havoc in the land. I sought ‘Abu Hussein’ [i.e. Obama] everywhere [and] wondered where he was hiding—this man whose [face] did not leave the TV screen throughout the Egyptian revolution, and who had asked [Egyptian president Hosni] Mubarak to step down, appearing every five minutes to say to his erstwhile ally: ‘Get out today, not tomorrow!’
Obama got lost in the old neighborhoods of Damascus. He ‘dissolved like a lump of salt,’ as our brothers in Egypt say. [He did so] even though, [in contrast to] the U.S.’s [close] ties with Hosni Mubarak’s regime, U.S. relations with the Syrian regime [are weak], and even though the number of victims in the protests of the Egyptian revolution [was far smaller] than the number of victims in the protests now sweeping Syria’s cities.
In Egypt, ‘mother America’ pressured Hosni Mubarak to step down immediately, while in Syria, ‘mother America’ has pressured the opposition to engage in dialogue with the regime.
How is one to interpret this? Who supports whom, and who is against whom? What is Obama thinking? And why did ‘mother America’ become so hard of hearing the minute the cries broke out in Der’a, Hama, Homs, and Aleppo?
Obama is not the only one who uses a double standard [vis-à-vis the revolutions in Egypt and in Syria]. The Arabs as a whole are toeing his line. The press, the intellectuals, and the revolutionary parties all tried to coordinate [their positions] with the cries of the revolution of Egypt’s youth, raising Cain throughout the world when [Libyan ruler Mu’ammar] Al-Qadhafi began to oppress his people, and demanding that the president of Yemen step down when the revolution broke out there. [But] less than an hour after the bloody events began in Syria, they all fell silent, as if a raven were sitting on their heads and pecked at the bodies of the innocent.
When [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah praised the revolution of Egypt’s youth and then became an enemy of the youth in Syria, by asking them to adhere to their regime—it was not difficult to understand [his motives], nor was [it difficult to understand Iranian Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei’s stance. But the position of the U.S., which is not very different from that of Iran in both cases—the Egyptian and the Syrian—is difficult to understand. Where is Obama hiding?
We do not want him to say a thing. This time, we want to say to him: Obama—get out!
And one thing more. I was dismayed by the editorial in the last print edition of TNR. Demanding a harsher rhetorical policy towards Damascus, the editors forfeit the whole struggle in the next-to-last paragraph: “Our options in Syria are limited, of course.” (The “of course” was what really got me.) “Unlike in Libya, a military intervention is not possible; and the Syrian opposition, despite its bravery, may not yet be cohesive enough to be recognized as the country’s legitimate government.” This actually has it ass-backwards. The fact is that, as recent news has amply shown, the Libyan opposition is not as unified as some had imagined. And the regime, according to its heir-apparent Seif al-Islam Qaddafi (Dr. Qaddafi, thanks to the London School of Economics) may be negotiating with its oldest enemies, Muslim jihadists, who are alienated from the most liberal of the opposition. Maybe this is a fantasy. Maybe not.
Perhaps, in shame and in desperation, Obama will hitch up with his old friend Erdogan and undertake jointly to bring Assad down. There could be far worse results than that. But the president does not even have the courage to contemplate this step. It might work, after all.
Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief emeritus of The New Republic.
Martin PeretzAugust 5, 2011 | 12:00 am 35 comments
|More
MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR
What Explains Fashionable Hostility Toward Israel?
Obama’s Multiplying Middle East Failures
Tel Aviv Journal: President Obama’s Wrongheaded Middle East Counselors
Almost no one in America cares about foreign affairs, especially not for Barack Obama’s foreign affairs. For he has made of almost his entire conduct of peace and war an amateurish mess, crude, provincial, impetuous, peaceably high-minded but stupid—and full of peril to the world, to its democracies, to the United States itself. If only he had the consistency of George McGovern, we would know that Obama is not really interested in other countries and movements friendly to us and our political ideas; actually, he has some sympathies for enemy states, as the 1972 Democratic candidate for president did for both the Soviet Union and North Vietnam. This is not Obama. He believes—or at least believed—that he can change the world by earnest talk with foreign leaders who share not a single philosophical tenet of egalitarian individualism or representative constitutionalism. Of course, it was not only flabby, earnest talk that he brought to the table. It was also a certain haughty sycophancy before alien potentates and despots whom he thought persuadable through blandishments and obsequy about just how central they were to world peace. Or to whatever.
Among the president’s enthusiastic 2008 followers there appears to be no recognition that he has failed at every foreign venture he has attempted. Indeed, the question of Darfur, the litmus test issue for young true-believers in the campaign that never quite became a presidential venture, has been spun off to a principled do-nothing bureaucrat who has not been able (or, for that matter, tried) to persuade any African or Arab government to treat the Sudanese president, indicted on charges of genocide by the International Criminal Court at The Hague, as being subject to arrest wherever he goes, which he is. There is no embarrassment when this head of state arrives anywhere in the region, and there is nothing that embarrasses Omar al-Bashir, neither mass murder nor rapine nor the theft from his people of some $9 billion in cash, according to WikiLeaks documents. Darfur, which should have been the simplest rendezvous with destiny, was unceremoniously dropped from the president’s agenda. Given this, why should we have expected anything more of Obama on more intricate matters? As for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she travels around the world with all kinds of truisms that have not the semblance of conviction behind them, let alone the threat of force to back them up. So she is mostly talk. Hosni Mubarak was “family.” That was a choice she made. Unlike with her brothers, this family was not. With Bashar al-Assad, it was a little different. Hillary and her boss had the idiot idea that the monstrous president of Syria was a key to Arab-Israeli peace—or, if not a “key to,” a “prerequisite for.” He has now brutalized his own people so ruthlessly that, if ours were a parliamentary system, Obama would long ago have had to resign. He actually grasped nothing about the Syria in which he invested so much of his cachet.
Obama’s Middle East adventures began in Turkey, where he set out in the third month of his term to fix American relations with the Muslim world. Some informed people say (although I cannot swear) that the president’s initial ambition/intention was to go to Tehran and break, so to speak, with his own and Ahmadinejad’s hands the nuclear impasse. Such a visit, bound to fail, would in any case have derailed the always fragile but enduring relationship between the United States and Riyadh, where sits the temporal, if unofficial leader of all Sunnis and the absolute ruler of the Saudi oil kingdom. Instead, Obama went to Turkey, which also seemed a bit odd to the Arabs. Though Sunni Muslims, the Turks are, after all, not Arabs. Moreover, the Ottomans (that is, the Turks) had lorded over the Arabs since the second decade of the sixteenth century, almost exactly four centuries before 1917, with the sultan calling himself the Caliph of Islam and the Servant of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. Chutzpah! as the Jews might say.
Why Obama wanted to make himself party to the ongoing destruction of the Ataturk revolution or of Kemalism I do not really know. Still, what has been happening in Turkey over the last decades and especially since 2003, when Recep Tayyip Erdogan became prime minister, is a struggle between imperfect but secular democracy and representative Islamic government with mob support. The drift is toward Muslim fundamentalism in schools, in the legal system, and in the wider culture, which means a clamping down on the liberal tenets that had made the country an ongoing open society. But not entirely, not quite. For example, there have been several attempts at military coups, serious ones. And perhaps most important for Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, it has produced during the last decade a prosperity not known in Europe outside the Scandinavian countries. I suspect, however, that the president’s affections for Turkey are derived more from its religious character than from its prosperity or from its eroding republican virtues.
In fact, the president seems to have assumed that he would have a magic touch with all Muslims. But the fact is that, after two and one half years, he has a magic touch with none. Indeed, he has been a flop with virtually every Islamic society in which he has tried to score. And no one can say he didn’t try. Turkey is the most complicated case. It aspires to membership in the European Union. Europe, however, doesn’t want it. No one can pretend that the grounds are other than demographic: The EU is not happy about absorbing an additional 70 million Muslims as citizens or even quasi-citizens. The recent Danish imbroglio over reimposing border controls (either in violation of the Schengen Agreement or not in violation) is one instance of this resistance. The recent French barring of Libyans and Tunisians from crossing the frontier from Italy is another case of resistance. Maybe the bloodletting enormity in Norway will temper such state acts—though not for long. Still, Turkey makes the second largest troop commitment to NATO, and its soldiers have participated in both the Afghan war and in Libya to the extent, at least, that the alliance’s troops have been fighting on Qaddafi’s turf at all and more certainly than American forces have. Islam was never a problem with NATO. But that was largely because it was not yet the clerisy that was in charge at home.
Turkey will not be much of a democracy for long. It is already quite close to being a clerical state—and a clerical state that cannot make peace with its Kurds (who are also Muslims) or with its own exterminationist history against the Christian Armenians, of whom perhaps 1.5 million were killed, and maybe two million. Not, of course, that the secular Turks were ever able or willing to bridge or erode these defining chasms either.
Nonetheless, the separation of church and state was the defining characteristic of the new Turkey that came into being nearly a century ago. It is true that there was an exchange of populations between the new Turkey and the new Greece, between Muslims and Orthodox Christians—not, by the way, what is now called “ethnic cleansing” to shore up the shabby and utterly ahistorical Palestinian argument that being moved five miles (or 15 and 50) constitutes a fate just short of carnage. (Many such population movements were engineered in the years after World War II, from Eastern Europe to Germany, back and forth between India and Pakistan, from Formosa, Korea, and Manchuria to Japan, much of it entailing great suffering but very little of the historical mortgage brandished against Israel by Arab propaganda.)
“There is growing concern that the secular order in Turkey, based on laicism and the strict separation of church and state, is in danger,” writes the distinguished Turkish-German commentator Baha Gungor in a short essay titled, “Where are you going, Mr. Erdogan?” in Deutsche Welle:
Cambridge Journal: Obama’s Callous, Ineffective Foreign Policy Blunders Onward
Martin PeretzAugust 5, 2011 | 12:00 am 35 comments
|More
MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR
What Explains Fashionable Hostility Toward Israel?
Obama’s Multiplying Middle East Failures
Tel Aviv Journal: President Obama’s Wrongheaded Middle East Counselors
Last Friday evening, the former head of the Turkish armed forces, General Isik Kosaner, alongside the commanders of the army, air force and navy, made for a domestic political earthquake of unseen magnitude in Turkey: They requested early retirement. Only Necdet Ozel kept his post as high commander of the paramilitary gendarmerie, a relatively junior position within the military.
In the meantime, Ozel was named chief of the army as well as temporary commander of the Turkish military. The shock waves will still be felt for a long time, despite all reassurances from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul. The highest military council convened on Monday under Erdogan’s chairmanship, but there were five empty chairs at the table made for 14.
The dissatisfaction of the military proved too great—more than 250 middle- and high-ranking officers currently sit in pretrial detention for alleged coup plans against Erdogan. They share the fate of journalists and intellectuals who have been sitting in prison—some for up to two years—not knowing exactly what they are accused of. That’s why there is already doubt that the joy at a breakthrough against the Turkish military, one of the last bastions of anti-democracy in the country, is in fact misplaced.
The armed forces were namely a counterweight to the growing influence of religion in the government and society. There’s growing concern that the secular order in Turkey, based on the principle of laicism and the strict separation of church and state, is in danger. The revolutionary modernization and related westward orientation of the Turkish Republic, begun by its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is crumbling.
Where are you going with this, Mr. Erdogan? Where will the prime minister start, after his electoral victory of nearly 50 percent elevated him to a virtual democratically legitimate autocrat? The growing pressure on dissidents, on critical voices and on the media does not bode well. Should Erdogan's conservative religious Justice and Development Party win over a handfull of opposition lawmakers, he will rewrite the constitution and, with an approval in a voter referendum, be able to form a presidential republic out of Turkey.
With three coups since 1960 and further interferences in the democratic process under threat of more revolt, the Turkish military has not always served the country well. However it did constitute a guarantee against the turn away from western norms, from democracy and the rule of law. This guarantee is no longer there.
It was not surprising that Washington failed to engage with Ankara in last year’s provocations against Israel with the flotilla of ships trying to interfere with the Gaza blockade. Yet, in the post-takeover period, the U.S. tried and succeeded in fanning down the reflexive anti-Israel diplomacy that can be summoned in the U.N. at a moment’s notice. When the second wave of the flotilla was being launched a few months ago, however, Washington was simply irrelevant. Israel did its own diplomatic work with its new ally, Greece, and with Cyprus. The flotilla simply flopped, with Turkey actually cooperating in the failure.
For years, Turkey had been allied with Assad in his tremulous ventures with Iran and Lebanon, even though this put some strain on Erdogan’s Sunni loyalties, which were fundamentally at odds with the Tehran regime and the Shia insurgency of Hezbollah in Beirut. Now, of course, it is no longer an insurgency. For the truth is that Hassan Nasrallah is the governing figure in Lebanon. But, if Assad falls, Hezbollah falters. And, if both of these occur, Iran will be cut off from its past victories, which provided for it a long unofficial frontier right on the north of Israel. There are some signs that it is disturbed by Assad’s brutal response to what is, after all, a Sunni uprising, the victory of which it would not at all welcome. But countenance, it might. The rub for Ahmadinejad and for his actually more powerful antagonist Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is what Erdogan does.
Amir Taheri wrote in Al Arabiya on June 17 that a fight is brewing between Turkey and Iran over the future of Syria. It is not by any means a struggle for the freedom of the Syrian population. It is a struggle over an Arab population between two non-Arab regimes, one Persian, the other Turkish. Erdogan has already laid down the gauntlet. Taheri quotes him: “Today Turkey is offering a model to the Muslim world. … Turkey wants to become a voice for Muslims throughout the world.” Turkey has an advantage over Iran in that, like the great majority of Syrians, it is overwhelmingly Sunni. Whether Erdogan’s words will turn out to be more than words it is perhaps too early to know.
(continued on next
Cambridge Journal: Obama’s Callous, Ineffective Foreign Policy Blunders Onward
Martin PeretzAugust 5, 2011 | 12:00 am 35 comments
|More
MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR
What Explains Fashionable Hostility Toward Israel?
Obama’s Multiplying Middle East Failures
Tel Aviv Journal: President Obama’s Wrongheaded Middle East Counselors
But what we do know is that Obama’s words (and Clinton’s, too), from the first demonstrations in Damascus to the latest in Hama, are morally inappropriate. Instead of applying its own rough sanctions to the Syrian regime, the U.S. has weighed in with paper sanctions on paper money that belong to people close to the Assad apparatus who doubtless did not wait to retrieve their assets from banks accessible to the American government. Still entranced by international institutions, Washington has allowed months to go by until a vague, even meaningless “presidential statement” (not even a resolution) altogether without teeth was passed by the U.N. Security Council two days ago. Of course, it was a compromise—not that the initial measure had any particular teeth in it either. So what did U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice get Beijing and Moscow to agree to? According to a piece in the Christian Science Monitor by Howard LaFranchi, to condemn “widespread violations of human rights and the use of force against civilians by Syrian authorities” and to express “grave concern at the deteriorating situation in Syria.” Yes, and what would that do? Nothing. Except for the continuation of the siege of Hama. And the siege has continued through the day and night. But, after all, the president of Syria has murdered only about 200 denizens of that accursed city. His father murdered tens of thousands. Is this not progress? And anyway, the dead are all Sunnis.
Can you believe it? In the Los Angeles Times of July 21, Paul Richter reported that the Obama administration actually “softened its criticism of Syria” and “stopped short of calling on President Bashar Assad to resign and has toned down its rhetoric.” This is an ethical and political transgression of the worst order, short of murdering the Syrians ourselves. Maybe the president thinks he can still get Bibi Netanyahu to cede the Golan Heights to the dictatorship—and maybe that would stop the insurrection. Inshallah!
The Syrian tyranny is the most brutal, the most coherent, the most transparent in the entire Arab world. In comparison to the state personified by Assad, Mubarak’s Egypt and Ali Abdullah Saleh’s Yemen and the mad Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya are milder. Alas, almost nobody noticed Obama’s sick courting of the oppressor.
But at least one Arab commentator, Khalaf Al Harbi, writing in the Saudi government daily Okaz, did. Titled “Obama—Get Out” (and put on the web by the Middle East Media Research Institute on July 29) it reads:
All last month, I kept my eyes out for Mr. Obama, who appeared so often at the outset of the ‘Arab Spring’ and suddenly disappeared, leaving the tyrants’ armored vehicles to wreak havoc in the land. I sought ‘Abu Hussein’ [i.e. Obama] everywhere [and] wondered where he was hiding—this man whose [face] did not leave the TV screen throughout the Egyptian revolution, and who had asked [Egyptian president Hosni] Mubarak to step down, appearing every five minutes to say to his erstwhile ally: ‘Get out today, not tomorrow!’
Obama got lost in the old neighborhoods of Damascus. He ‘dissolved like a lump of salt,’ as our brothers in Egypt say. [He did so] even though, [in contrast to] the U.S.’s [close] ties with Hosni Mubarak’s regime, U.S. relations with the Syrian regime [are weak], and even though the number of victims in the protests of the Egyptian revolution [was far smaller] than the number of victims in the protests now sweeping Syria’s cities.
In Egypt, ‘mother America’ pressured Hosni Mubarak to step down immediately, while in Syria, ‘mother America’ has pressured the opposition to engage in dialogue with the regime.
How is one to interpret this? Who supports whom, and who is against whom? What is Obama thinking? And why did ‘mother America’ become so hard of hearing the minute the cries broke out in Der’a, Hama, Homs, and Aleppo?
Obama is not the only one who uses a double standard [vis-à-vis the revolutions in Egypt and in Syria]. The Arabs as a whole are toeing his line. The press, the intellectuals, and the revolutionary parties all tried to coordinate [their positions] with the cries of the revolution of Egypt’s youth, raising Cain throughout the world when [Libyan ruler Mu’ammar] Al-Qadhafi began to oppress his people, and demanding that the president of Yemen step down when the revolution broke out there. [But] less than an hour after the bloody events began in Syria, they all fell silent, as if a raven were sitting on their heads and pecked at the bodies of the innocent.
When [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah praised the revolution of Egypt’s youth and then became an enemy of the youth in Syria, by asking them to adhere to their regime—it was not difficult to understand [his motives], nor was [it difficult to understand Iranian Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei’s stance. But the position of the U.S., which is not very different from that of Iran in both cases—the Egyptian and the Syrian—is difficult to understand. Where is Obama hiding?
We do not want him to say a thing. This time, we want to say to him: Obama—get out!
And one thing more. I was dismayed by the editorial in the last print edition of TNR. Demanding a harsher rhetorical policy towards Damascus, the editors forfeit the whole struggle in the next-to-last paragraph: “Our options in Syria are limited, of course.” (The “of course” was what really got me.) “Unlike in Libya, a military intervention is not possible; and the Syrian opposition, despite its bravery, may not yet be cohesive enough to be recognized as the country’s legitimate government.” This actually has it ass-backwards. The fact is that, as recent news has amply shown, the Libyan opposition is not as unified as some had imagined. And the regime, according to its heir-apparent Seif al-Islam Qaddafi (Dr. Qaddafi, thanks to the London School of Economics) may be negotiating with its oldest enemies, Muslim jihadists, who are alienated from the most liberal of the opposition. Maybe this is a fantasy. Maybe not.
Perhaps, in shame and in desperation, Obama will hitch up with his old friend Erdogan and undertake jointly to bring Assad down. There could be far worse results than that. But the president does not even have the courage to contemplate this step. It might work, after all.
Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief emeritus of The New Republic.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
How Obamnomics are destroying the country
United States loses prized AAA credit rating from S&P
By Walter Brandimarte and Daniel Bases | Reuters – 1 hr 26 mins ago
tweet493Share
Email
Print
RELATED CONTENT
A trader stands outside the New York Stock Exchange following the end of the trading …
A trader stands outside the New York Stock Exchange following the end of the trading …
Article: Instant view: U.S. loses AAA credit rating from S&P
Reuters - 15 hrs ago
Article: Obama officials attack S&P's credibility after downgrade
Reuters - 13 hrs ago
Article: HK says U.S. downgrade expected, will monitor market reaction
Reuters - 2 hrs 42 mins ago
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The United States lost its top-tier AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor's on Friday in an unprecedented blow to the world's largest economy in the wake of a political battle that took the country to the brink of default.
S&P cut the long-term U.S. credit rating by one notch to AA-plus on concerns about the government's budget deficit and rising debt burden. The action is likely to eventually raise borrowing costs for the American government, companies and consumers.
"The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics," S&P said in a statement.
The outlook on the new U.S. credit rating is "negative," S&P said in a statement, indicating another downgrade was possible in the next 12 to 18 months.
The move reflects the deterioration in the global economic standing of the United States, which has had a AAA credit rating from S&P since 1941, and it could have implications for the U.S. dollar's reserve currency status.
"The global system must now adjust to the many implications and uncertainties of the once-unthinkable loss of America's AAA," said Mohamed El-Erian, co-chief investment officer at Pacific Investment Management Co which oversees $1.2 trillion in assets.
The decision follows a fierce political battle in Congress over cutting spending and raising taxes to reduce the government's debt burden and allow its statutory borrowing limit to be raised.
On August 2, President Barack Obama signed legislation designed to reduce the fiscal deficit by $2.1 trillion over 10 years. But that was well short of the $4 trillion in savings S&P had called for as a good "down payment" on fixing America's finances.
By Walter Brandimarte and Daniel Bases | Reuters – 1 hr 26 mins ago
tweet493Share
RELATED CONTENT
A trader stands outside the New York Stock Exchange following the end of the trading …
A trader stands outside the New York Stock Exchange following the end of the trading …
Article: Instant view: U.S. loses AAA credit rating from S&P
Reuters - 15 hrs ago
Article: Obama officials attack S&P's credibility after downgrade
Reuters - 13 hrs ago
Article: HK says U.S. downgrade expected, will monitor market reaction
Reuters - 2 hrs 42 mins ago
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The United States lost its top-tier AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor's on Friday in an unprecedented blow to the world's largest economy in the wake of a political battle that took the country to the brink of default.
S&P cut the long-term U.S. credit rating by one notch to AA-plus on concerns about the government's budget deficit and rising debt burden. The action is likely to eventually raise borrowing costs for the American government, companies and consumers.
"The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics," S&P said in a statement.
The outlook on the new U.S. credit rating is "negative," S&P said in a statement, indicating another downgrade was possible in the next 12 to 18 months.
The move reflects the deterioration in the global economic standing of the United States, which has had a AAA credit rating from S&P since 1941, and it could have implications for the U.S. dollar's reserve currency status.
"The global system must now adjust to the many implications and uncertainties of the once-unthinkable loss of America's AAA," said Mohamed El-Erian, co-chief investment officer at Pacific Investment Management Co which oversees $1.2 trillion in assets.
The decision follows a fierce political battle in Congress over cutting spending and raising taxes to reduce the government's debt burden and allow its statutory borrowing limit to be raised.
On August 2, President Barack Obama signed legislation designed to reduce the fiscal deficit by $2.1 trillion over 10 years. But that was well short of the $4 trillion in savings S&P had called for as a good "down payment" on fixing America's finances.
Friday, August 5, 2011
stopping Muslim takeover
Several Republican presidential candidates have warned of a Muslim plot to force American courts to rule by the religious code. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum recently called it "an existential threat" to the United States; former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty shut down a program in his state that would allow practicing Muslims to pay for mortgages without violating their religious teachings against borrowing with interest; businessman Herman Cain said he would require Muslims to take an extra loyalty oath to serve in his administration; and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called for a federal law to ban Sharia from U.S. courts.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Obama negates Israeli security
bama’s hollow claim of commitment to Israel’s security
By MORTON KLEIN AND DANIEL MANDEL
08/01/2011 00:03
For a year, Obama prohibited any new US sanctions to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons – a looming existential threat to both Israel and the US.
Is President Barack Obama committed to Israel’s security? Reassuring bromides to that effect in his recent speeches are nullified by specific statements that spell out dangerous Israeli concessions and disregard for Israeli vital interests. Worse, the administration’s wider Middle East policies further denude those commitments of meaning.
Thus, when Obama said Israel must have secure, recognized borders “different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967,” many missed the point that this means little, when the new borders are to be “based on the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed swaps” and therefore be virtually indistinguishable from those lines. Indeed, with Palestinians unlikely to agree to any swaps, Obama gave the Palestinians a veto over any continued Israel presence beyond the pre-1967 lines.
Moreover, Obama’s unprecedented call for a Palestinian state to have “permanent Palestinian borders with… Jordan” would require Israel ceding the Jordan Valley, whose retention successive Israeli governments have regarded as vital– another first for a US president.
Obama has also become the first US president to suggest that issues of “territory and security” be agreed upon first, before proceeding to negotiations on all other matters, including Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees and their millions of descendants.
Upholding Israel’s basic security would also mean repudiating the repatriation of the refugees and their descendants. Bush did so in his May 2004 letter; Obama has not. On the contrary, he has supported the so-called Saudi peace plan, which demands not only a return to the 1967 lines, but also the return of all refugees and their descendants.
In May, Obama reiterated that the US “will hold the Palestinians accountable for their actions and their rhetoric.”
But he never has – nor does he now.
When, in August 2009, Fatah held a conference in Bethlehem, reaffirming its refusal to accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, glorifying terrorists, insisting on the so-called ‘right of return,’ and rejecting an end of claims in any future peace agreement, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton astonishingly claimed that the conference showed “a broad consensus supporting negotiations with Israel and the two-state solution.”
When in 2010, the PA named a Ramallah square after terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, Clinton falsely claimed that this ceremony was initiated by a “Hamas-run municipality.”
Refusing to identify the PA as responsible, Obama has not penalized it.
INDEED, FAR from holding Palestinians accountable, Obama has consistently rewarded them, increasing aid to almost $1 billion per year. A Palestinian Media Watch report just presented to the US Congress documents that, in May 2011 alone, the PA paid $5,207,000 in salaries to Palestinians in Israeli jails, including blood-soaked terrorists. Last year the US provided $225 million to the general Palestinian budget from which these salaries are paid.
If Obama was genuine about holding the PA accountable, he would be demanding the disbanding of Fatah’s own Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades – a US- recognized terrorist group. He would demand the abrogation of the PA’s unity agreement with Hamas (which calls for a genocide of Jews) as a precondition of any future talks. He has done neither.
It is also difficult to imagine what conception of American and Israeli security interests led Obama in January to ditch Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and call for political “transition… now” when protests erupted in Cairo. Still less clear is why his administration spoke immediately of involving “non-secular actors” – a clear allusion to the Muslim Brotherhood – given its virulent hostility to the US and Israel. Now, Obama has legitimized the Brotherhood by initiating contacts with it.
THE NET result is that Egypt is on the road from lukewarm ally and peace-maker to a dependable enemy – one to which Obama has announced the sale of 125 state-of-the-art M1A1 Abrams tanks. It is also disturbing that Obama has not pressured Egypt to close its Gaza border at Rafah, whose recent opening has enabled the flow of weaponry into Hamas-run Gaza.
For a year, Obama prohibited any new US sanctions to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons – a looming existential threat to both Israel and the US. Indeed, further measures which must be taken to stop Iran is precisely what Obama left untouched in his recent speeches.
Thus Obama’s words and deeds not only fail to match his stated commitment to Israel’s security – they negate it.
Morton A. Klein is National President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Dr. Daniel Mandel is Director of the ZOA’s Center for Middle East Policy and author of H.V. Evatt & the Establishment of Israel (London: Routledge, 2004).
By MORTON KLEIN AND DANIEL MANDEL
08/01/2011 00:03
For a year, Obama prohibited any new US sanctions to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons – a looming existential threat to both Israel and the US.
Is President Barack Obama committed to Israel’s security? Reassuring bromides to that effect in his recent speeches are nullified by specific statements that spell out dangerous Israeli concessions and disregard for Israeli vital interests. Worse, the administration’s wider Middle East policies further denude those commitments of meaning.
Thus, when Obama said Israel must have secure, recognized borders “different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967,” many missed the point that this means little, when the new borders are to be “based on the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed swaps” and therefore be virtually indistinguishable from those lines. Indeed, with Palestinians unlikely to agree to any swaps, Obama gave the Palestinians a veto over any continued Israel presence beyond the pre-1967 lines.
Moreover, Obama’s unprecedented call for a Palestinian state to have “permanent Palestinian borders with… Jordan” would require Israel ceding the Jordan Valley, whose retention successive Israeli governments have regarded as vital– another first for a US president.
Obama has also become the first US president to suggest that issues of “territory and security” be agreed upon first, before proceeding to negotiations on all other matters, including Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees and their millions of descendants.
Upholding Israel’s basic security would also mean repudiating the repatriation of the refugees and their descendants. Bush did so in his May 2004 letter; Obama has not. On the contrary, he has supported the so-called Saudi peace plan, which demands not only a return to the 1967 lines, but also the return of all refugees and their descendants.
In May, Obama reiterated that the US “will hold the Palestinians accountable for their actions and their rhetoric.”
But he never has – nor does he now.
When, in August 2009, Fatah held a conference in Bethlehem, reaffirming its refusal to accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, glorifying terrorists, insisting on the so-called ‘right of return,’ and rejecting an end of claims in any future peace agreement, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton astonishingly claimed that the conference showed “a broad consensus supporting negotiations with Israel and the two-state solution.”
When in 2010, the PA named a Ramallah square after terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, Clinton falsely claimed that this ceremony was initiated by a “Hamas-run municipality.”
Refusing to identify the PA as responsible, Obama has not penalized it.
INDEED, FAR from holding Palestinians accountable, Obama has consistently rewarded them, increasing aid to almost $1 billion per year. A Palestinian Media Watch report just presented to the US Congress documents that, in May 2011 alone, the PA paid $5,207,000 in salaries to Palestinians in Israeli jails, including blood-soaked terrorists. Last year the US provided $225 million to the general Palestinian budget from which these salaries are paid.
If Obama was genuine about holding the PA accountable, he would be demanding the disbanding of Fatah’s own Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades – a US- recognized terrorist group. He would demand the abrogation of the PA’s unity agreement with Hamas (which calls for a genocide of Jews) as a precondition of any future talks. He has done neither.
It is also difficult to imagine what conception of American and Israeli security interests led Obama in January to ditch Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and call for political “transition… now” when protests erupted in Cairo. Still less clear is why his administration spoke immediately of involving “non-secular actors” – a clear allusion to the Muslim Brotherhood – given its virulent hostility to the US and Israel. Now, Obama has legitimized the Brotherhood by initiating contacts with it.
THE NET result is that Egypt is on the road from lukewarm ally and peace-maker to a dependable enemy – one to which Obama has announced the sale of 125 state-of-the-art M1A1 Abrams tanks. It is also disturbing that Obama has not pressured Egypt to close its Gaza border at Rafah, whose recent opening has enabled the flow of weaponry into Hamas-run Gaza.
For a year, Obama prohibited any new US sanctions to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons – a looming existential threat to both Israel and the US. Indeed, further measures which must be taken to stop Iran is precisely what Obama left untouched in his recent speeches.
Thus Obama’s words and deeds not only fail to match his stated commitment to Israel’s security – they negate it.
Morton A. Klein is National President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Dr. Daniel Mandel is Director of the ZOA’s Center for Middle East Policy and author of H.V. Evatt & the Establishment of Israel (London: Routledge, 2004).
Monday, August 1, 2011
Obama destroying the US economy
1. Here is one way to look a the debt ceiling, deficit debate. From 2010 to 2011, total federal spending grew by about $250 billion, to $3.7 trillion. Absent any cuts, over the next ten years, it will be at least 50 trillion in total, likely several trillion higher, since interest costs are likely to rise, the estimated cost of Obamacare subsidies is almost certainly too low, and estimates of economic growth ( between 3% and 4% a year) are likely way too high, meaning that health and welfare costs will be higher than estimated. The agreement reached yesterday reduces government spending by $2.4 trillion over this period, or less than 20% of the projected GROWTH in spending estimated for the next ten years. Only with government, are baseline spending levels considered holy, and cuts (always draconian, according to the left) nothing more than reductions in the growth rate in spending. Federal spending is now 25% of GDP, 5 points higher than in the Bush years, and probably headed higher unless GDP growth accelerates . Given that the GOP had limited leverage, short of allowing a default to occur, they did not do badly with this deal. They got the nation to focus on the deficits, and realize they were unsustainable. Obama showed once again that he is a weak leader, and at times a brittle, angry man. The left is apoplectic, favoring even more spending and bigger deficits. Paul Krugman' s astonishingly arrogant comment on ABC yesterday is below. Krugman will never admit that stimulus spending that temporarily preserves jobs , or creates new temporary make work jobs, will not reduce structural unemployment. Krugman was for using lots of stimulus money to save state and local government job in 2009s, before he concluded two years later that this was not effective stimulus spending. In 2001, Krugman was a deficit hawk, decrying the Bush tax cuts, over 80% of which went to middle income people. Now deficits do not matter. As Gilda Radner would say, "Never mind."
In the dumb and dumber category, check out this gem from the lady who told us to pass Obamacare, so we could learn what was in it.
The former speaker seems to need help with the English language, including the use of the word "some" .
"I don't know all the particulars of what the final product is in writing and what the ramifications will be," Pelosi said, noting the measure will have an impact for a decade or more. Asked about the outcome, she warned: "We all may not be able to support it or none of us may be able to support it."
My article: http://tinyurl.com/3zm9r3j
Krugman: http://tinyurl.com/3w47q5o
Mark Steyn on Pelosi and other "the world is ending leftists: http://tinyurl.com/3qunpn3
2. Do you thik it is just accident that gas prices have doubled under Obama? Cutting off domestic supply growth, and forcing the use of ethanol have not helped.
http://tinyurl.com/3zdsy33
In the dumb and dumber category, check out this gem from the lady who told us to pass Obamacare, so we could learn what was in it.
The former speaker seems to need help with the English language, including the use of the word "some" .
"I don't know all the particulars of what the final product is in writing and what the ramifications will be," Pelosi said, noting the measure will have an impact for a decade or more. Asked about the outcome, she warned: "We all may not be able to support it or none of us may be able to support it."
My article: http://tinyurl.com/3zm9r3j
Krugman: http://tinyurl.com/3w47q5o
Mark Steyn on Pelosi and other "the world is ending leftists: http://tinyurl.com/3qunpn3
2. Do you thik it is just accident that gas prices have doubled under Obama? Cutting off domestic supply growth, and forcing the use of ethanol have not helped.
http://tinyurl.com/3zdsy33
Friday, July 29, 2011
Obama ratings drop drop drop
Obama’s approval numbers hit all-time low
The Daily Caller – 2 hrs 11 mins ago
tweet
13
Share
Email
Print
President Barack Obama’s approval rating sank to a new low Friday, according to Gallup’s daily presidential tracking poll.
Just 40 percent of Americans say they approve of Obama’s performance as president. That is down three percentage points from Thursday. 50 percent say they do not approve of the job he is doing.
The poor rating comes amidst an increasingly chaotic debate over raising the debt ceiling, as the deadline to raise it or risk the government defaulting on its debts looms.
Just 41 percent of the public said they approved of the way Obama was handling the debt-ceiling negotiations, while 52 percent disapproved, according to another Gallup poll released Thursday. Nonetheless, Obama still polls better than congressional leadership. Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid both received even lower approval rates.
The president’s 40 percent approval rating follows a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll released Thursday that found Obama’s support among independents has eroded a great deal. 54 percent of independents disapprove of Obama’s performance as president, according to the Pew poll, the most during his time in office. Just 36 percent approve of the job he is doing.
Obama has also lost ground against a generic Republican challenger — getting 41 percent of the vote when matched with an unnamed Republican who polled 40 percent.
The Daily Caller – 2 hrs 11 mins ago
tweet
13
Share
President Barack Obama’s approval rating sank to a new low Friday, according to Gallup’s daily presidential tracking poll.
Just 40 percent of Americans say they approve of Obama’s performance as president. That is down three percentage points from Thursday. 50 percent say they do not approve of the job he is doing.
The poor rating comes amidst an increasingly chaotic debate over raising the debt ceiling, as the deadline to raise it or risk the government defaulting on its debts looms.
Just 41 percent of the public said they approved of the way Obama was handling the debt-ceiling negotiations, while 52 percent disapproved, according to another Gallup poll released Thursday. Nonetheless, Obama still polls better than congressional leadership. Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid both received even lower approval rates.
The president’s 40 percent approval rating follows a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll released Thursday that found Obama’s support among independents has eroded a great deal. 54 percent of independents disapprove of Obama’s performance as president, according to the Pew poll, the most during his time in office. Just 36 percent approve of the job he is doing.
Obama has also lost ground against a generic Republican challenger — getting 41 percent of the vote when matched with an unnamed Republican who polled 40 percent.
Americans wising up to Obama
>>
>> WE'VE FIGURED HIM OUT!
>> By Ben Stein
>>
>>
>> Why was President Barack Obama in such a hurry to get his socialized
>> medicine bill passed? Because he and his cunning circle realize some
>> basic
>> truths:
>>
>> The American people in their unimaginable kindness and trust voted for a
>> pig
>> in a poke in 2008.
>> (Pig in a poke means: an offering or deal that is foolishly accepted
>> without being examined first. A poke means sack.)
>>
>> They wanted so much to believe Barack Obama was somehow better and
>> different
>> from other ultra-leftists that they simply took him on faith.
>>
>> They ignored his anti-white writings in his books.
>>
>> They ignored his quiet acceptance of hysterical anti-American diatribes
>> by
>> his minister, Jeremiah Wright.
>>
>> They ignored his refusal to explain years at a time of his life as a
>> student.
>>
>> They ignored his ultra-left record as a "community organizer," Illinois
>> state legislator, and Senator.
>>
>> The American people ignored his total zero of an academic record as a
>> student and teacher, his complete lack of scholarship when he was being
>> touted as a scholar.
>>
>> Now, the American people are starting to wake up to the truth. Barack
>> Obama
>> is a super likeable super leftist, and not a fan of this country.
>>
>> The American people have already awakened to the truth that the stimulus
>> bill -- a great idea in theory -- was really an immense bribe to Democrat
>> interest groups, and in no way helped all Americans.
>>
>> The American people already know that Mr. Obama's plan to lower health
>> costs
>> while expanding coverage and bureaucracy is a myth, a promise of
>> something
>> that never was and never can be --
>> "a bureaucracy lowering costs in a free society." Either the costs go up
>> or
>> the free society goes away... an historical truth.
>>
>> These are perilous times. Mrs. Hillary Clinton, our Secretary of State,
>> has
>> given Iran the go-ahead to have nuclear weapons, an unqualified betrayal
>> of
>> the nation. Now, we face a devastating loss of freedom at home in health
>> care.It will be joined by controls on our lives to "protect us" from
>> global
>> warming, itself largely a fraud, if believed to be caused by man.She has
>> also signed on to a Small Firearms Treaty at the U.N. This is a back door
>> gun control move. This is approved by the Senate and a 2nd Amendment
>> majority doesn't exist in the Senate now. It will supersede all U.S. Law
>> and
>> the 2nd Amendment. All citizen possession will be eliminated through
>> confiscation. Just Like Great Britain and Australia .
>>
>> Mr. Obama knows Americans are getting wise and will stop him if he delays
>> at
>> all in taking away our freedoms.There is his urgency and our opportunity.
>> Once freedom is lost, America is lost. Wake up, beloved America .
>>
>> Ben Stein is a writer, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and
>> Malibu . He writes "Ben Stein's Diary" for every issue of The American
>> Spectator.
>> WE'VE FIGURED HIM OUT!
>> By Ben Stein
>>
>>
>> Why was President Barack Obama in such a hurry to get his socialized
>> medicine bill passed? Because he and his cunning circle realize some
>> basic
>> truths:
>>
>> The American people in their unimaginable kindness and trust voted for a
>> pig
>> in a poke in 2008.
>> (Pig in a poke means: an offering or deal that is foolishly accepted
>> without being examined first. A poke means sack.)
>>
>> They wanted so much to believe Barack Obama was somehow better and
>> different
>> from other ultra-leftists that they simply took him on faith.
>>
>> They ignored his anti-white writings in his books.
>>
>> They ignored his quiet acceptance of hysterical anti-American diatribes
>> by
>> his minister, Jeremiah Wright.
>>
>> They ignored his refusal to explain years at a time of his life as a
>> student.
>>
>> They ignored his ultra-left record as a "community organizer," Illinois
>> state legislator, and Senator.
>>
>> The American people ignored his total zero of an academic record as a
>> student and teacher, his complete lack of scholarship when he was being
>> touted as a scholar.
>>
>> Now, the American people are starting to wake up to the truth. Barack
>> Obama
>> is a super likeable super leftist, and not a fan of this country.
>>
>> The American people have already awakened to the truth that the stimulus
>> bill -- a great idea in theory -- was really an immense bribe to Democrat
>> interest groups, and in no way helped all Americans.
>>
>> The American people already know that Mr. Obama's plan to lower health
>> costs
>> while expanding coverage and bureaucracy is a myth, a promise of
>> something
>> that never was and never can be --
>> "a bureaucracy lowering costs in a free society." Either the costs go up
>> or
>> the free society goes away... an historical truth.
>>
>> These are perilous times. Mrs. Hillary Clinton, our Secretary of State,
>> has
>> given Iran the go-ahead to have nuclear weapons, an unqualified betrayal
>> of
>> the nation. Now, we face a devastating loss of freedom at home in health
>> care.It will be joined by controls on our lives to "protect us" from
>> global
>> warming, itself largely a fraud, if believed to be caused by man.She has
>> also signed on to a Small Firearms Treaty at the U.N. This is a back door
>> gun control move. This is approved by the Senate and a 2nd Amendment
>> majority doesn't exist in the Senate now. It will supersede all U.S. Law
>> and
>> the 2nd Amendment. All citizen possession will be eliminated through
>> confiscation. Just Like Great Britain and Australia .
>>
>> Mr. Obama knows Americans are getting wise and will stop him if he delays
>> at
>> all in taking away our freedoms.There is his urgency and our opportunity.
>> Once freedom is lost, America is lost. Wake up, beloved America .
>>
>> Ben Stein is a writer, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and
>> Malibu . He writes "Ben Stein's Diary" for every issue of The American
>> Spectator.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Obama destroying the economy-welfare state
The Welfare State
1. The goal of the left is to create enough entitlements, for enough people, that America’s two party system will become similar to those in Europe- where the essential components of the welfare state are never challenged any more. The quibbling between the parties is then only at the margins. The good society becomes an ordered society, with the rules and results , dictated by the bureaucrats. Obamacare, if not reversed, is likely to be the final nail in the coffin – creating a new class of tens of millions of people dependent on government. It will, of course, come at horrific cost- it will be jobs killing, and guarantee slower economic growth in the future, which will lower the average standard of living. It is likely to create demand driven inflation, which will be treated by the new classes of regulators through rationing, and price controls, which are very likely to drive physicians from their practice. And it is certain to be far more expensive than the CBO estimates for the legislation, moving up the day of reckoning for the nation’s spiraling out of control debt. The left will argue that the rich just need to pay their fair share. They will ignore the fact that the Bush tax cuts of 2001 removed almost half the population from the income tax roles, and Obamacare is financed at least half, and likely more than that, by tax increases , exclusively on upper income Americans. In Europe, everyone who works, pays taxes and rates are generally higher at all income levels than they are in America. . The left in America, behaves as if all their social programs can be paid for by squeezing those in the top bracket to pay higher taxes. They are very wrong on this, which means they are either bad at math, or liars, or too lazy to do the analysis. In no case, is the let willing to challenge any program, once they are established. All spending is essential. All cuts, they argue are draconian, impacting the poor, the elderly, the middle class, and disproportionately, minorities. Can anyone identify any spending programs that President Obama has shown a willingness to cut, other than defense? Where are the $3 trillion in cuts he supposedly put on the table? The left is allergic to spending cuts in domestic programs. Several articles below on America’s new welfare state, and what it means:
Randall Hoeven on Obama’s spending binge. . His message- please just spend like Bush did . http://tinyurl.com/4xgy9ah
The very blue states, like Illinois, have been a proving ground for the spending excesses in Washington. How sweet a deal do public employees have in Illinois? Very sweet: http://tinyurl.com/42ajnhe
Dennis Prager on how big government impacts society’s moral character. The left like to thing they are better people, since they care for other people. Prager provide evidence of why this does not hold up. http://tinyurl.com/3wlvohp
Walter Russell Mead on how liberalism has failed those in urban America: http://tinyurl.com/5ww69ps
Noemie Emery on how the failed welfare state has led to bankruptcy and recriminations : http://tinyurl.com/3jpev76
Are you ready for 70% marginal tax rates? http://tinyurl.com/43j2bek
James Ceasar and John York on the success to date, and the unfinished business of the tea party- http://tinyurl.com/5uh9n9c
Sheldon Adelson is the Las Vegas casino operator who has been a supporter of the Republicans. Steve Wynn, is the casino opera , who has leaned in the other direction. Here Wynn tees off on how Obama has been terrible for business across the country.
http://tinyurl.com/3gucs7p
1. The goal of the left is to create enough entitlements, for enough people, that America’s two party system will become similar to those in Europe- where the essential components of the welfare state are never challenged any more. The quibbling between the parties is then only at the margins. The good society becomes an ordered society, with the rules and results , dictated by the bureaucrats. Obamacare, if not reversed, is likely to be the final nail in the coffin – creating a new class of tens of millions of people dependent on government. It will, of course, come at horrific cost- it will be jobs killing, and guarantee slower economic growth in the future, which will lower the average standard of living. It is likely to create demand driven inflation, which will be treated by the new classes of regulators through rationing, and price controls, which are very likely to drive physicians from their practice. And it is certain to be far more expensive than the CBO estimates for the legislation, moving up the day of reckoning for the nation’s spiraling out of control debt. The left will argue that the rich just need to pay their fair share. They will ignore the fact that the Bush tax cuts of 2001 removed almost half the population from the income tax roles, and Obamacare is financed at least half, and likely more than that, by tax increases , exclusively on upper income Americans. In Europe, everyone who works, pays taxes and rates are generally higher at all income levels than they are in America. . The left in America, behaves as if all their social programs can be paid for by squeezing those in the top bracket to pay higher taxes. They are very wrong on this, which means they are either bad at math, or liars, or too lazy to do the analysis. In no case, is the let willing to challenge any program, once they are established. All spending is essential. All cuts, they argue are draconian, impacting the poor, the elderly, the middle class, and disproportionately, minorities. Can anyone identify any spending programs that President Obama has shown a willingness to cut, other than defense? Where are the $3 trillion in cuts he supposedly put on the table? The left is allergic to spending cuts in domestic programs. Several articles below on America’s new welfare state, and what it means:
Randall Hoeven on Obama’s spending binge. . His message- please just spend like Bush did . http://tinyurl.com/4xgy9ah
The very blue states, like Illinois, have been a proving ground for the spending excesses in Washington. How sweet a deal do public employees have in Illinois? Very sweet: http://tinyurl.com/42ajnhe
Dennis Prager on how big government impacts society’s moral character. The left like to thing they are better people, since they care for other people. Prager provide evidence of why this does not hold up. http://tinyurl.com/3wlvohp
Walter Russell Mead on how liberalism has failed those in urban America: http://tinyurl.com/5ww69ps
Noemie Emery on how the failed welfare state has led to bankruptcy and recriminations : http://tinyurl.com/3jpev76
Are you ready for 70% marginal tax rates? http://tinyurl.com/43j2bek
James Ceasar and John York on the success to date, and the unfinished business of the tea party- http://tinyurl.com/5uh9n9c
Sheldon Adelson is the Las Vegas casino operator who has been a supporter of the Republicans. Steve Wynn, is the casino opera , who has leaned in the other direction. Here Wynn tees off on how Obama has been terrible for business across the country.
http://tinyurl.com/3gucs7p
Sunday, June 26, 2011
The agony of being a Jewish conservative
The agony of being a Jewish conservative
Posted: June 01, 2011
1:00 am Eastern
© 2011
I am not overly surprised when the majority of American Jews continue to support Obama, but I know it confounds Christians. What they fail to grasp is that Israel's survival is not only a low priority item for the president, but for a great many Jews.
My fellow Jews, by and large, are far more connected to liberalism than they are to Judaism, far less familiar with the Talmud than with "Dreams From My Father" or "The Audacity of Hope." The more religious a Jew is, the more likely he is to be a political conservative and to be concerned with Israel's security.
On the other hand, the younger and more secular a Jew is, the more likely he is to identify with Israel's sworn enemies and the more likely he is to prioritize green energy, socialized medicine, same-sex marriages and federally funded abortions.
It is no mystery that so many iconic figures on the left are secular Jews. They would include Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Saul Alinsky, Noam Chomsky, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Barney Frank, Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Barbara Boxer, Charles Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Henry Waxman, Barbra Streisand, Brad Sherman, Norman Lear, Jon Stewart, Alan Colmes, Bernie Sanders, Steven Spielberg, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Anthony Weiner, Michael Bloomberg and George Soros.
I'm afraid that attending synagogue once or twice a year, sprinkling one's conversation with the occasional "schlemiel" and "schmendrick," and having a taste for corned beef or pastrami does not a Jew make. In liberal circles, however, all it takes is voting for the most left-wing candidate on the ballot.
Any Jewish Democrat who takes umbrage at that list will, if experience counts for anything, label me a self-hating Jew. But I think, in my own defense, I need only share a few additional facts to make my case. There are, I believe, 154 Catholics in Congress, 24 in the Senate and 130 in the House. Of the 154, 84 are Democrats, 70 are Republicans.
There are 70 Baptists and Southern Baptists in Congress, 10 in the Senate and 60 in the House. Of the 70, 26 are Democrats, 44 are Republicans.
There are 47 Presbyterians in Congress, 15 in the Senate and 32 in the House. Of the 47, 16 are Democrats, 31 are Republicans.
When you realize that the Republicans in Congress currently out-number the Democrats 287 to 246, you can see that the 145 to 126 Republican advantage in those three major religious groups is nearly perfectly in sync with the overall makeup of the legislature.
However, there are 33 Jews currently in Congress, 12 in the Senate, 21 in the House. Of the 33, 32 are Democrats, while Eric Cantor constitutes the entire Republican contingent.
In his new book, Burt Prelutsky talks to some of the most fascinating people in modern America -- you'll be inspired by "Portraits of Success: Candid Conversations with 60 Over-Achievers"
Even though Barack Obama has displayed a personal bias favoring Arabs and Muslims ever since he entered the Oval Office, whether it was demanding that Israel stop erecting housing in the so-called settlements, going back to its 1967 borders or glowering at its prime minister as if he'd just nuked Chicago, he's not the first president who has held Israel to an impossible standard while giving the Arabs a pass. At least since Carter, they've all behaved as if the stumbling block to peace is that Israel is just too damn big. Why else would every "path to peace" invariably begin with Israel's being asked to cede land? Inasmuch as Israel is by far the smallest nation in the region, it suggests that each of them, but especially Obama, would have insisted that if it had been up to him, David would have had to first hand over his slingshot, and then fight Goliath from his knees with one arm tied behind his back.
It's a strange form of amnesia that causes the world to forget that in 1948, it wasn't the Jews who banished the Arabs; it was Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, the invading coalition, that suggested to their friends that they temporarily vacate the premises while the Arab legions finished the job Hitler began. These weasels were told it would be over in a day or two, and they could then return to divvy up the spoils.
The world also tends to overlook the fact that for decades before Israel achieved statehood, the Zionists had been buying up land at wildly inflated prices from the local Arabs. The world also ignores the fact that thousands of Jews had lived there since biblical times.
Yet another inconvenient truth the world turns a blind eye to is that it was the Arab and Muslim nations in 1948 that banished their Jewish populations and, for good measure, confiscated their money and property.
As if all of that weren't enough to sway public opinion in their favor, 20 percent of Israelis are Arabs, who not only have the vote but have seats in the Knesset, Israel's legislature, and whose wives and daughters actually have the rights and freedoms they're denied everywhere else in the sewer known as the Middle East.
Within a few years following the end of World War II, all the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust had found homes, mainly in Israel, Europe, Canada and the U.S. But 63 years after they voluntarily abandoned Israel so the Jews could be slaughtered without any collateral damage to themselves, the so-called Palestinians continue to be "refugees" demanding the right of return, although how one returns to where one has never been is a mystery best left to science fiction writers.
The reason there are still "refugees" six decades after the fact is that not a single nation in the region wants the riffraff inside their borders. Far better for Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and the rest to keep them right where they are, to be used as pawns in their attempt to scapegoat the Jews for the hunger, unemployment, ignorance and oppression, rampant in their own countries.
Jewish Democrats may be willing to give Obama high marks, but fortunately there are others who have a clearer vision – which is why some wag has seen to it that the following piece of fiction has gone viral in recent weeks. Claiming to be a message to Obama from Netanyahu, while on his way to the U.S., it reads: "Tens of thousands of ordinary Mexicans were driven out of their homes, the only homes they had known for centuries, and forced to live in poverty and squalor south of the border, thanks to American aggression. This festering wound will never heal until America takes steps to return to the internationally accepted lines of 1845. Clearly the settlement activity that's taken place in occupied Mexico since then is illegal. When I meet the president tomorrow, I will tell him to halt all building activity in Texas immediately. Two lands for two people, yes, but not on land taken by force from Mexico."
It's a shame that it never happened. At least if it had, it might have made sense why, at their get-together the next day, Obama glared at Netanyahu as if he had caught him trying to swipe the White House silverware.
Read more: The agony of being a Jewish conservative http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=305425#ixzz1QPkAzeTa
Posted: June 01, 2011
1:00 am Eastern
© 2011
I am not overly surprised when the majority of American Jews continue to support Obama, but I know it confounds Christians. What they fail to grasp is that Israel's survival is not only a low priority item for the president, but for a great many Jews.
My fellow Jews, by and large, are far more connected to liberalism than they are to Judaism, far less familiar with the Talmud than with "Dreams From My Father" or "The Audacity of Hope." The more religious a Jew is, the more likely he is to be a political conservative and to be concerned with Israel's security.
On the other hand, the younger and more secular a Jew is, the more likely he is to identify with Israel's sworn enemies and the more likely he is to prioritize green energy, socialized medicine, same-sex marriages and federally funded abortions.
It is no mystery that so many iconic figures on the left are secular Jews. They would include Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Saul Alinsky, Noam Chomsky, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Barney Frank, Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Barbara Boxer, Charles Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Henry Waxman, Barbra Streisand, Brad Sherman, Norman Lear, Jon Stewart, Alan Colmes, Bernie Sanders, Steven Spielberg, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Anthony Weiner, Michael Bloomberg and George Soros.
I'm afraid that attending synagogue once or twice a year, sprinkling one's conversation with the occasional "schlemiel" and "schmendrick," and having a taste for corned beef or pastrami does not a Jew make. In liberal circles, however, all it takes is voting for the most left-wing candidate on the ballot.
Any Jewish Democrat who takes umbrage at that list will, if experience counts for anything, label me a self-hating Jew. But I think, in my own defense, I need only share a few additional facts to make my case. There are, I believe, 154 Catholics in Congress, 24 in the Senate and 130 in the House. Of the 154, 84 are Democrats, 70 are Republicans.
There are 70 Baptists and Southern Baptists in Congress, 10 in the Senate and 60 in the House. Of the 70, 26 are Democrats, 44 are Republicans.
There are 47 Presbyterians in Congress, 15 in the Senate and 32 in the House. Of the 47, 16 are Democrats, 31 are Republicans.
When you realize that the Republicans in Congress currently out-number the Democrats 287 to 246, you can see that the 145 to 126 Republican advantage in those three major religious groups is nearly perfectly in sync with the overall makeup of the legislature.
However, there are 33 Jews currently in Congress, 12 in the Senate, 21 in the House. Of the 33, 32 are Democrats, while Eric Cantor constitutes the entire Republican contingent.
In his new book, Burt Prelutsky talks to some of the most fascinating people in modern America -- you'll be inspired by "Portraits of Success: Candid Conversations with 60 Over-Achievers"
Even though Barack Obama has displayed a personal bias favoring Arabs and Muslims ever since he entered the Oval Office, whether it was demanding that Israel stop erecting housing in the so-called settlements, going back to its 1967 borders or glowering at its prime minister as if he'd just nuked Chicago, he's not the first president who has held Israel to an impossible standard while giving the Arabs a pass. At least since Carter, they've all behaved as if the stumbling block to peace is that Israel is just too damn big. Why else would every "path to peace" invariably begin with Israel's being asked to cede land? Inasmuch as Israel is by far the smallest nation in the region, it suggests that each of them, but especially Obama, would have insisted that if it had been up to him, David would have had to first hand over his slingshot, and then fight Goliath from his knees with one arm tied behind his back.
It's a strange form of amnesia that causes the world to forget that in 1948, it wasn't the Jews who banished the Arabs; it was Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, the invading coalition, that suggested to their friends that they temporarily vacate the premises while the Arab legions finished the job Hitler began. These weasels were told it would be over in a day or two, and they could then return to divvy up the spoils.
The world also tends to overlook the fact that for decades before Israel achieved statehood, the Zionists had been buying up land at wildly inflated prices from the local Arabs. The world also ignores the fact that thousands of Jews had lived there since biblical times.
Yet another inconvenient truth the world turns a blind eye to is that it was the Arab and Muslim nations in 1948 that banished their Jewish populations and, for good measure, confiscated their money and property.
As if all of that weren't enough to sway public opinion in their favor, 20 percent of Israelis are Arabs, who not only have the vote but have seats in the Knesset, Israel's legislature, and whose wives and daughters actually have the rights and freedoms they're denied everywhere else in the sewer known as the Middle East.
Within a few years following the end of World War II, all the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust had found homes, mainly in Israel, Europe, Canada and the U.S. But 63 years after they voluntarily abandoned Israel so the Jews could be slaughtered without any collateral damage to themselves, the so-called Palestinians continue to be "refugees" demanding the right of return, although how one returns to where one has never been is a mystery best left to science fiction writers.
The reason there are still "refugees" six decades after the fact is that not a single nation in the region wants the riffraff inside their borders. Far better for Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and the rest to keep them right where they are, to be used as pawns in their attempt to scapegoat the Jews for the hunger, unemployment, ignorance and oppression, rampant in their own countries.
Jewish Democrats may be willing to give Obama high marks, but fortunately there are others who have a clearer vision – which is why some wag has seen to it that the following piece of fiction has gone viral in recent weeks. Claiming to be a message to Obama from Netanyahu, while on his way to the U.S., it reads: "Tens of thousands of ordinary Mexicans were driven out of their homes, the only homes they had known for centuries, and forced to live in poverty and squalor south of the border, thanks to American aggression. This festering wound will never heal until America takes steps to return to the internationally accepted lines of 1845. Clearly the settlement activity that's taken place in occupied Mexico since then is illegal. When I meet the president tomorrow, I will tell him to halt all building activity in Texas immediately. Two lands for two people, yes, but not on land taken by force from Mexico."
It's a shame that it never happened. At least if it had, it might have made sense why, at their get-together the next day, Obama glared at Netanyahu as if he had caught him trying to swipe the White House silverware.
Read more: The agony of being a Jewish conservative http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=305425#ixzz1QPkAzeTa
Friday, June 24, 2011
Liberal American Jewish suckers
World Review June 24, 2011 / 22 Sivan, 5771
Liberal American Jewish suckers
By Caroline B. Glick
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | This week we have been witness to two transparent attempts to sell liberal American Jews a bill of goods. And from the looks of things, both were successful.
The first instance of liberal American Jewish credulity this week unfolded Monday night in Washington. At a five-star hotel, eighty Jewish donors shelled out between $25,000- 35,800 to attend a fundraiser with US President Barack Obama.
As has become his habit, Obama opened his remarks by talking about his commitment to Israel's security. And as has become his habit, Obama went on to say that it is his job to force Israelis to bow to his demands because he knows what is best for Israel.
Speaking of his ongoing efforts to force Israel to concede its right to defensible borders before entering into negotiations with the Hamas-Fatah unity government, Obama said, "There are going to be moments over the course of the next six months or the next 12 months or the next 24 months in which there may be tactical disagreements [between the US and Israel] in terms of how we approach these difficult problems."
Obama went on to say that he expects his American Jewish supporters to take his side in his attacks on Israel.
As he put it, the quest for peace between Israel and the Hamas-Fatah government is, "going to require that not only this administration employs all of its creative powers to try to bring about peace in the region, but it's also going to require all of you as engaged citizens of the United States who are friends of Israel making sure…that you're helping to shape how both Americans and Israelis think about the opportunities and challenges."
And how did the Jewish donors respond to Obama's presentation? They loved it. They were, in the words of Obama donor Marilyn Victor, "reassured."
FREE SUBSCRIPTION TO INFLUENTIAL NEWSLETTER
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". HUNDREDS of columnists and cartoonists regularly appear. Sign up for the daily update. It's free. Just click here.
Speaking with Politico, New York businessman Jack Bendheim said, "I think he nailed and renailed his commitment to the security of the State of Israel." Other attendees interviewed in the article echoed his sentiments.
Imagine how they would have swooned if Obama had confessed a secret love for bagels and lox.
What does Obama have to do for these liberal American Jews to accept that he is no friend of Israel's?
Apparently the answer is that there is nothing Obama can do that will convince his many American Jewish supporters that he is not Israel's friend. They will never believe such a thing because doing so will require them to choose between two unacceptable options. The first option is to admit to themselves that in voting for Obama, they are voting against Israel.
The self-righteousness shared by many of Obama's Jewish supporters makes this option unacceptable. These are people who demonstrate their goodness by embracing every politically correct liberal cause as their own. From abortion to socialized medicine to free passes for illegal immigrants, to opposition to the Iraq war, liberal American Jews are ready to go out on a limb for every cause the liberal media supports.
But ask them to support anything that in any way compromises their self-image as do gooders and liberals and they will shut you out. Consider their willingness to turn a blind eye to Obama's twenty-year association with his anti-Semitic preacher Jeremiah Wright. Just this week Wright was back in the news when he delighted a crowd of thousands of African American worshippers in Baltimore by libeling Israel saying, "The State of Israel is an illegal, genocidal … place. To equate Judaism with the State of Israel is to equate Christianity with [rapper] Flavor Flav."
During the 2008 presidential campaign liberal American Jews attacked critics of Obama's long-standing devotion to his Jew hating preacher as McCarthyites who were spreading allegations of guilt by association.
And now, when Obama has made supporting Israel a socially costly thing for his supporters to do, rather than pay the price, his self-righteous American Jewish supporters refuse to admit that Obama is not pro-Israel. They attack as a liar anyone who points out that his policies are deeply hostile to Israel.
For instance, Monday National Jewish Democratic Council Chairman Marc Stanley told reporters, "Key donors are much more savvy than Republicans would have you believe and have taken a much more critical eye towards Republican attempts to lie about the President's record."
Aside from being morally inconvenient, the other problem with admitting that Obama is anti-Israel is that it requires his Jewish supporters who are unwilling to consciously abandon Israel to contemplate the unattractive option of voting for the Republican nominee for president. And this is something that their liberal conceit cannot abide.
The inability of many liberal American Jews to abide by the notion of supporting someone who isn't part of their fancy liberal clique was on display in their responses to another event that occurred this week.
Just hours before Obama snowballed his Jewish donors in Washington, Yale University engaged in a similarly transparent bid to romance its willfully gullible Jewish supporters.
Yale University's announcement two weeks ago that it was shutting down the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA), unleashed a storm of protest. Students, faculty, alumni and major Jewish organizations all expressed anger and disappointment with Yale's surprise move.
Yale justified its decision on the basis of two falsehoods. First it claimed that YIISA had failed to undertake sufficient top quality scholarship. Yet in the wake of the announcement dozens of leading scholars of anti-Semitism co-signed a letter authored by Prof. Alvin Rosenfeld who directs Indiana University's Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism praising the YIISA as "a pioneer in advancing research on contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism."
The second reason that Yale claimed it was closing YIISA was because there was insufficient faculty and student interest in its programs. This falsehood was ridiculous on its face since several dozen Yale faculty members served on YIISA's various academic committees and boards of advisors. And in the wake of the university's announcement that it was shuttering YIISA, several faculty members and students protested the move angrily.
The main suspicion provoked by Yale's decision to close YIISA was that it was doing so to appease Islamic critics. YIISA's Director Prof. Charles Small focused its attention on contemporary forms of anti-Semitism. Since the most dangerous form of contemporary anti-Semitism is Islamic anti-Semitism, Small made Islamic anti-Semitism a focus of YIISA's research activities. The concern arose that Yale closed YIISA in order to end campus research and discourse on the topic.
Monday Yale tried to quell the controversy surrounding its decision to close YIISA by announcing that it was forming a new institute called the Yale Program for the Study of Anti-Semitism. Yale announced that its tenured professor Maurice Samuels will serve as director of the program. Samuels is a scholar of French literature.
In his acceptance announcement Samuels addressed Yale's critics promising that "YPSA will discuss both contemporary anti-Semitism and historical anti-Semitism."
He also said that in the coming year YPSA will hold a major conference on the topic of French anti-Semitism.
Samuels' statement is notable for two reasons. First, if it is true, then the only difference between YPSA and YIISA is the director. And the only thing Yale was really interested in doing was firing Small. The question is why would they want to fire him?
The answer to that question appears to be found in the second notable aspect of Samuels' announcement: his planned conference. At a time when millions in post-Mubarak Egypt assembled in Tahrir Square and cheered as the Muslim Brotherhood's spiritual leader Yusuf Qaradawi called for the invasion of Jerusalem, and with Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the brink of nuclear weapons, why would YPSA want to place its focus on France?
Following Yale's announcement that it is launching YPSA, Small released a statement in which he said, among other things, "It appears that Yale, unlike YIISA, is not willing to engage in a comprehensive examination of the current crisis facing living Jews, but instead is comfortable with reexamining the plight of Jews who perished at the hands of anti-Semites. The role of a true scholar and intellectual is to shed light where there is darkness, which is why we at YIISA, are committed to critical engaged scholarship with a broader approach to the complex, and at times controversial context of contemporary global anti-Semitism."
As Small hints, it appears that by forming YPSA, Yale proved its critics right. It closed YIISA because it found Small's concentration on Muslim Jew hatred ideologically problematic. And it opened YPSA because Yale's admininistrastors' trust Samuels to keep researchers and students focused on historic forms of anti-Semitism.
To offset criticism of its transparent move, Yale has been waging a whispering campaign against Small. Yale administrators have been insinuating that because the university did not hire him as a regular member of the Yale faculty that Small is not an academic, or somehow not good enough for Yale.
This campaign brought Holocaust scholar Prof Deborah Lipstadt from Emory University to pen a column in the Forward attacking Small. As she put it, "Part of Yale's discomfort might have come from the fact that a Yale-based scholarly entity was administered by an individual who, while a successful institution builder, was not a Yale faculty member and who had no official position at the university."
But Small was in fact on the Yale faculty. He was a lecturer in the Political Science department and ran one of Yale's post-doctorate and graduate studies fellowship programs. Despite his intensive work building YIISA, Small taught a heavy course load.
But while its actions vindicate its critics' greatest concerns, just as Obama was able to win over his Jewish supporters with empty platitudes so Yale's decision to open YPSA has satisfied its most powerful critics. The ADL released a statement applauding the move. Yale's Rabbi James Ponet emailed his colleagues and friends and urged them to email Yale's President and Provost expressing their support for the move.
Their willingness to support Yale's bid to curtail research and discussion of Islamic Jew hatred and allow Yale to scapegoat Small demonstrates an affliction common to liberal American Jews today. It is the same affliction that makes them unable to countenance voting for a Republican. That affliction is class snobbery. By insinuating that Small is not up to Yale's academic standards, Yale was able to rally the Jewish members of its larger community by appealing to their snobbery. The fact that Yale didn't mind Small serving as a dissertation advisor to its doctoral candidates is immaterial. The facts be damned.
The same Ivy League snobbery that makes it socially unacceptable to vote for a Republican — and certainly not for a Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann despite their deep-seated and consistent support for Israel — is what allowed Yale to get away with ending its study of Islamic anti-Semitism by besmirching Small's academic achievements and good name. Remove him from the club, and you end opposition to his academically unjustifiable firing.
The great circus master P.T. Barnum said famously that there is a sucker born every minute. Liberal American Jews aren't born suckers. They become suckers out of their own free will.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Interested in a private Judaic studies instructor — for free? Let us know by clicking here.
Comment by clicking here.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, where her column appears.
Liberal American Jewish suckers
By Caroline B. Glick
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | This week we have been witness to two transparent attempts to sell liberal American Jews a bill of goods. And from the looks of things, both were successful.
The first instance of liberal American Jewish credulity this week unfolded Monday night in Washington. At a five-star hotel, eighty Jewish donors shelled out between $25,000- 35,800 to attend a fundraiser with US President Barack Obama.
As has become his habit, Obama opened his remarks by talking about his commitment to Israel's security. And as has become his habit, Obama went on to say that it is his job to force Israelis to bow to his demands because he knows what is best for Israel.
Speaking of his ongoing efforts to force Israel to concede its right to defensible borders before entering into negotiations with the Hamas-Fatah unity government, Obama said, "There are going to be moments over the course of the next six months or the next 12 months or the next 24 months in which there may be tactical disagreements [between the US and Israel] in terms of how we approach these difficult problems."
Obama went on to say that he expects his American Jewish supporters to take his side in his attacks on Israel.
As he put it, the quest for peace between Israel and the Hamas-Fatah government is, "going to require that not only this administration employs all of its creative powers to try to bring about peace in the region, but it's also going to require all of you as engaged citizens of the United States who are friends of Israel making sure…that you're helping to shape how both Americans and Israelis think about the opportunities and challenges."
And how did the Jewish donors respond to Obama's presentation? They loved it. They were, in the words of Obama donor Marilyn Victor, "reassured."
FREE SUBSCRIPTION TO INFLUENTIAL NEWSLETTER
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". HUNDREDS of columnists and cartoonists regularly appear. Sign up for the daily update. It's free. Just click here.
Speaking with Politico, New York businessman Jack Bendheim said, "I think he nailed and renailed his commitment to the security of the State of Israel." Other attendees interviewed in the article echoed his sentiments.
Imagine how they would have swooned if Obama had confessed a secret love for bagels and lox.
What does Obama have to do for these liberal American Jews to accept that he is no friend of Israel's?
Apparently the answer is that there is nothing Obama can do that will convince his many American Jewish supporters that he is not Israel's friend. They will never believe such a thing because doing so will require them to choose between two unacceptable options. The first option is to admit to themselves that in voting for Obama, they are voting against Israel.
The self-righteousness shared by many of Obama's Jewish supporters makes this option unacceptable. These are people who demonstrate their goodness by embracing every politically correct liberal cause as their own. From abortion to socialized medicine to free passes for illegal immigrants, to opposition to the Iraq war, liberal American Jews are ready to go out on a limb for every cause the liberal media supports.
But ask them to support anything that in any way compromises their self-image as do gooders and liberals and they will shut you out. Consider their willingness to turn a blind eye to Obama's twenty-year association with his anti-Semitic preacher Jeremiah Wright. Just this week Wright was back in the news when he delighted a crowd of thousands of African American worshippers in Baltimore by libeling Israel saying, "The State of Israel is an illegal, genocidal … place. To equate Judaism with the State of Israel is to equate Christianity with [rapper] Flavor Flav."
During the 2008 presidential campaign liberal American Jews attacked critics of Obama's long-standing devotion to his Jew hating preacher as McCarthyites who were spreading allegations of guilt by association.
And now, when Obama has made supporting Israel a socially costly thing for his supporters to do, rather than pay the price, his self-righteous American Jewish supporters refuse to admit that Obama is not pro-Israel. They attack as a liar anyone who points out that his policies are deeply hostile to Israel.
For instance, Monday National Jewish Democratic Council Chairman Marc Stanley told reporters, "Key donors are much more savvy than Republicans would have you believe and have taken a much more critical eye towards Republican attempts to lie about the President's record."
Aside from being morally inconvenient, the other problem with admitting that Obama is anti-Israel is that it requires his Jewish supporters who are unwilling to consciously abandon Israel to contemplate the unattractive option of voting for the Republican nominee for president. And this is something that their liberal conceit cannot abide.
The inability of many liberal American Jews to abide by the notion of supporting someone who isn't part of their fancy liberal clique was on display in their responses to another event that occurred this week.
Just hours before Obama snowballed his Jewish donors in Washington, Yale University engaged in a similarly transparent bid to romance its willfully gullible Jewish supporters.
Yale University's announcement two weeks ago that it was shutting down the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA), unleashed a storm of protest. Students, faculty, alumni and major Jewish organizations all expressed anger and disappointment with Yale's surprise move.
Yale justified its decision on the basis of two falsehoods. First it claimed that YIISA had failed to undertake sufficient top quality scholarship. Yet in the wake of the announcement dozens of leading scholars of anti-Semitism co-signed a letter authored by Prof. Alvin Rosenfeld who directs Indiana University's Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism praising the YIISA as "a pioneer in advancing research on contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism."
The second reason that Yale claimed it was closing YIISA was because there was insufficient faculty and student interest in its programs. This falsehood was ridiculous on its face since several dozen Yale faculty members served on YIISA's various academic committees and boards of advisors. And in the wake of the university's announcement that it was shuttering YIISA, several faculty members and students protested the move angrily.
The main suspicion provoked by Yale's decision to close YIISA was that it was doing so to appease Islamic critics. YIISA's Director Prof. Charles Small focused its attention on contemporary forms of anti-Semitism. Since the most dangerous form of contemporary anti-Semitism is Islamic anti-Semitism, Small made Islamic anti-Semitism a focus of YIISA's research activities. The concern arose that Yale closed YIISA in order to end campus research and discourse on the topic.
Monday Yale tried to quell the controversy surrounding its decision to close YIISA by announcing that it was forming a new institute called the Yale Program for the Study of Anti-Semitism. Yale announced that its tenured professor Maurice Samuels will serve as director of the program. Samuels is a scholar of French literature.
In his acceptance announcement Samuels addressed Yale's critics promising that "YPSA will discuss both contemporary anti-Semitism and historical anti-Semitism."
He also said that in the coming year YPSA will hold a major conference on the topic of French anti-Semitism.
Samuels' statement is notable for two reasons. First, if it is true, then the only difference between YPSA and YIISA is the director. And the only thing Yale was really interested in doing was firing Small. The question is why would they want to fire him?
The answer to that question appears to be found in the second notable aspect of Samuels' announcement: his planned conference. At a time when millions in post-Mubarak Egypt assembled in Tahrir Square and cheered as the Muslim Brotherhood's spiritual leader Yusuf Qaradawi called for the invasion of Jerusalem, and with Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the brink of nuclear weapons, why would YPSA want to place its focus on France?
Following Yale's announcement that it is launching YPSA, Small released a statement in which he said, among other things, "It appears that Yale, unlike YIISA, is not willing to engage in a comprehensive examination of the current crisis facing living Jews, but instead is comfortable with reexamining the plight of Jews who perished at the hands of anti-Semites. The role of a true scholar and intellectual is to shed light where there is darkness, which is why we at YIISA, are committed to critical engaged scholarship with a broader approach to the complex, and at times controversial context of contemporary global anti-Semitism."
As Small hints, it appears that by forming YPSA, Yale proved its critics right. It closed YIISA because it found Small's concentration on Muslim Jew hatred ideologically problematic. And it opened YPSA because Yale's admininistrastors' trust Samuels to keep researchers and students focused on historic forms of anti-Semitism.
To offset criticism of its transparent move, Yale has been waging a whispering campaign against Small. Yale administrators have been insinuating that because the university did not hire him as a regular member of the Yale faculty that Small is not an academic, or somehow not good enough for Yale.
This campaign brought Holocaust scholar Prof Deborah Lipstadt from Emory University to pen a column in the Forward attacking Small. As she put it, "Part of Yale's discomfort might have come from the fact that a Yale-based scholarly entity was administered by an individual who, while a successful institution builder, was not a Yale faculty member and who had no official position at the university."
But Small was in fact on the Yale faculty. He was a lecturer in the Political Science department and ran one of Yale's post-doctorate and graduate studies fellowship programs. Despite his intensive work building YIISA, Small taught a heavy course load.
But while its actions vindicate its critics' greatest concerns, just as Obama was able to win over his Jewish supporters with empty platitudes so Yale's decision to open YPSA has satisfied its most powerful critics. The ADL released a statement applauding the move. Yale's Rabbi James Ponet emailed his colleagues and friends and urged them to email Yale's President and Provost expressing their support for the move.
Their willingness to support Yale's bid to curtail research and discussion of Islamic Jew hatred and allow Yale to scapegoat Small demonstrates an affliction common to liberal American Jews today. It is the same affliction that makes them unable to countenance voting for a Republican. That affliction is class snobbery. By insinuating that Small is not up to Yale's academic standards, Yale was able to rally the Jewish members of its larger community by appealing to their snobbery. The fact that Yale didn't mind Small serving as a dissertation advisor to its doctoral candidates is immaterial. The facts be damned.
The same Ivy League snobbery that makes it socially unacceptable to vote for a Republican — and certainly not for a Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann despite their deep-seated and consistent support for Israel — is what allowed Yale to get away with ending its study of Islamic anti-Semitism by besmirching Small's academic achievements and good name. Remove him from the club, and you end opposition to his academically unjustifiable firing.
The great circus master P.T. Barnum said famously that there is a sucker born every minute. Liberal American Jews aren't born suckers. They become suckers out of their own free will.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Interested in a private Judaic studies instructor — for free? Let us know by clicking here.
Comment by clicking here.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, where her column appears.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Obama so tough on Israel, weak on Syria
Jackson Diehl
Deputy Editorial Page Editor
Why is Obama so tough on Israel and timid on Syria?
Text Size PrintE-mailReprints
By Jackson Diehl, Published: June 19
One of the hallmarks of the Arab Spring has been the emergence of a new and more modest American foreign policy. The Obama administration has insisted on not taking the lead in promoting democratic change; it has declined to act unless not just the French and British but the Arab League go first. It still can’t bring itself to say that Bashar al-Assad, a dictator and implacable U.S. enemy who is using tanks and helicopter gunships to slaughter his people, is not qualified to lead Syria to democracy.
Yet there is one big exception: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On a Middle Eastern front that has remained mostly quiet in 2011, the position of the United States is: a) it possesses a detailed solution; b) action must be taken immediately; and c) it doesn’t matter whether the people concerned — Israelis and Palestinians — are agreeable or ready.
793
Comments
Weigh InCorrections?
Jackson Diehl
The Post’s deputy editorial page editor, Diehl also writes a biweekly foreign affairs column and contributes to the PostPartisan blog.
Archive
@JacksonDiehlFacebookRSS
More On This Topic
Diehl: Misplaced superpower chutzpah
P.J. Crowley: Obama, tell Assad he must go
Obama the timid suddenly turns tough when the “peace process” comes up. He has spoken in public on Syria just twice since its massacres began three months ago. But he chose to spell out U.S. terms for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations without the agreement of Israel’s prime minister, on the eve of meeting him at the White House and with only a few hours’ notice — arguably the most high-handed presidential act in U.S.-Israeli relations since the Eisenhower administration.
Now, with prodding from the European Union, Obama is attempting to strong-arm Israelis and Palestinians into beginning negotiations on the parameters he set. The talks must be agreed to this month, says Washington; they should begin by September. U.S. and European envoys were shuttling between Jerusalem and Ramallah last week in an attempt to extract a “yes” from Binyamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas.
It would be wonderful if this imperialist diplomacy succeeded. If it does, it will disprove the Obama administration’s nascent doctrine about the limits of U.S. power and influence in the Middle East.
Consider the two parties who would be dragged to the negotiating table. Netanyahu heads a right-wing coalition that would almost certainly collapse if he agreed to Obama’s terms — which, in any case, he opposes. A senior Israeli official last week gave me a long list of fixes he said would be needed before his government could accept the Obama formula — and even then, he added, the proposal wouldn’t fly “unless there was a deep reservoir of mutual confidence” between the two leaders, “which doesn’t exist.”
Then there is Abbas, who at 76 is planning his retirement. He has committed himself to spending the next year seeing through a reconciliation with the Hamas movement, arranging elections for his successor and seeking recognition for Palestine at the United Nations. For two years he has refused to negotiate with Netanyahu, whom he despises. Even Yasser Arafat appeared more disposed than this Palestinian leader to make the wrenching concessions needed for a deal. And who would guarantee that the Palestinian president elected next May would pick up where Abbas left off?
What’s extraordinary about Obama’s initiative is not its details, which don’t differ meaningfully from the ideas of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or, for that matter, several of Netanyahu’s predecessors as prime minister. It is, rather, its superpower chutzpah — the brazen disregard for the views and political posture of this Israeli government, and the fecklessness and disarray of the current Palestinian leadership. Never mind, goes the implicit Euro-American line: We will make this happen.
What could account for such an attitude, given the timorous approach to the rest of the region? Part of it is understandable frustration with years of Israeli-Palestinian impasse, which is magnified by the conviction in much of official Washington that the terms for peace are well known and widely accepted, and need only be implemented. Part is legitimate worry that the Israeli-
Palestinian front, though quiet now, could explode later this year after a United Nations vote, helping extremists in places such as Egypt. Yet the damage to U.S. interests from a U.N. resolution on Palestine would pale compared to the consequences of an Iranian-backed victory by Assad in Syria or the failure of NATO in Libya. Those crises have not moved Obama to lead.
There is, in his diplomacy, an implicit conviction that the United States must first of all deal with the sins of its own client. “Here are the facts we must all confront,” Obama declared in his speech to the AIPAC conference last month, before proceeding to deliver a lecture about Palestinian demography, Arab politics and the United Nations. It wasn’t that he was entirely wrong. But it’s revealing of this president that he is determined to speak truth to Binyamin Netanyahu — and not to Bashar al-Assad.
Deputy Editorial Page Editor
Why is Obama so tough on Israel and timid on Syria?
Text Size PrintE-mailReprints
By Jackson Diehl, Published: June 19
One of the hallmarks of the Arab Spring has been the emergence of a new and more modest American foreign policy. The Obama administration has insisted on not taking the lead in promoting democratic change; it has declined to act unless not just the French and British but the Arab League go first. It still can’t bring itself to say that Bashar al-Assad, a dictator and implacable U.S. enemy who is using tanks and helicopter gunships to slaughter his people, is not qualified to lead Syria to democracy.
Yet there is one big exception: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On a Middle Eastern front that has remained mostly quiet in 2011, the position of the United States is: a) it possesses a detailed solution; b) action must be taken immediately; and c) it doesn’t matter whether the people concerned — Israelis and Palestinians — are agreeable or ready.
793
Comments
Weigh InCorrections?
Jackson Diehl
The Post’s deputy editorial page editor, Diehl also writes a biweekly foreign affairs column and contributes to the PostPartisan blog.
Archive
@JacksonDiehlFacebookRSS
Diehl: Misplaced superpower chutzpah
P.J. Crowley: Obama, tell Assad he must go
Obama the timid suddenly turns tough when the “peace process” comes up. He has spoken in public on Syria just twice since its massacres began three months ago. But he chose to spell out U.S. terms for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations without the agreement of Israel’s prime minister, on the eve of meeting him at the White House and with only a few hours’ notice — arguably the most high-handed presidential act in U.S.-Israeli relations since the Eisenhower administration.
Now, with prodding from the European Union, Obama is attempting to strong-arm Israelis and Palestinians into beginning negotiations on the parameters he set. The talks must be agreed to this month, says Washington; they should begin by September. U.S. and European envoys were shuttling between Jerusalem and Ramallah last week in an attempt to extract a “yes” from Binyamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas.
It would be wonderful if this imperialist diplomacy succeeded. If it does, it will disprove the Obama administration’s nascent doctrine about the limits of U.S. power and influence in the Middle East.
Consider the two parties who would be dragged to the negotiating table. Netanyahu heads a right-wing coalition that would almost certainly collapse if he agreed to Obama’s terms — which, in any case, he opposes. A senior Israeli official last week gave me a long list of fixes he said would be needed before his government could accept the Obama formula — and even then, he added, the proposal wouldn’t fly “unless there was a deep reservoir of mutual confidence” between the two leaders, “which doesn’t exist.”
Then there is Abbas, who at 76 is planning his retirement. He has committed himself to spending the next year seeing through a reconciliation with the Hamas movement, arranging elections for his successor and seeking recognition for Palestine at the United Nations. For two years he has refused to negotiate with Netanyahu, whom he despises. Even Yasser Arafat appeared more disposed than this Palestinian leader to make the wrenching concessions needed for a deal. And who would guarantee that the Palestinian president elected next May would pick up where Abbas left off?
What’s extraordinary about Obama’s initiative is not its details, which don’t differ meaningfully from the ideas of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or, for that matter, several of Netanyahu’s predecessors as prime minister. It is, rather, its superpower chutzpah — the brazen disregard for the views and political posture of this Israeli government, and the fecklessness and disarray of the current Palestinian leadership. Never mind, goes the implicit Euro-American line: We will make this happen.
What could account for such an attitude, given the timorous approach to the rest of the region? Part of it is understandable frustration with years of Israeli-Palestinian impasse, which is magnified by the conviction in much of official Washington that the terms for peace are well known and widely accepted, and need only be implemented. Part is legitimate worry that the Israeli-
Palestinian front, though quiet now, could explode later this year after a United Nations vote, helping extremists in places such as Egypt. Yet the damage to U.S. interests from a U.N. resolution on Palestine would pale compared to the consequences of an Iranian-backed victory by Assad in Syria or the failure of NATO in Libya. Those crises have not moved Obama to lead.
There is, in his diplomacy, an implicit conviction that the United States must first of all deal with the sins of its own client. “Here are the facts we must all confront,” Obama declared in his speech to the AIPAC conference last month, before proceeding to deliver a lecture about Palestinian demography, Arab politics and the United Nations. It wasn’t that he was entirely wrong. But it’s revealing of this president that he is determined to speak truth to Binyamin Netanyahu — and not to Bashar al-Assad.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
The Muslim Brotherhood and Weiner
June 19, 2011
The Muslim Brotherhood and Weiner
By Eileen F. Toplansky
Far more disturbing than the salacious details of Weiner's dalliances is the fact that apparently his mother-in-law is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Furthermore, Huma Abedin's brother, Hassan, "is listed as a fellow and partner with a number of Muslim Brotherhood members." Hassan works at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS) at Oxford University. The Egyptian Al-Azhar University, well-known for a curriculum that encourages extremism and terrorism, is active in establishing links with OCIS.
How is it that the Western media, with its hourly analyses of Weiner, missed this salient point, yet Arab news sources revealed this connection? Walid Shoebat, formerly with the PLO, explains that Saleha Mahmoud Abedin, a professor in Saudi Arabia "belongs to the Sunni movement's women's division known as the Muslim Sisterhood." During the recent uprising in Egypt, which resulted in Mubarak's removal, "a special women's unit within the Muslim Brotherhood served as 'mules' to deliver messages and acted as messengers for the terrorist group."
The Muslim Sisterhood is also known as the International Women's Organization (IWO) and members are located "across 16 different countries." Its goal is to "work at all levels in accordance with the message of the Brotherhood." The Muslim Brotherhood's goal is Islamic world domination and "[i]t is now public knowledge that nearly every major Muslim organization in the United States is actually controlled by the [Muslim Brotherhood] or a derivative organization. Consequently, most of the Muslim-American groups of any prominence in America are now known to be, as a matter of fact, hostile to the United States and its Constitution."
This chart on page four of the Domestic Intelligence Briefing by Mark Hass shows the FBI - Identified Terror Networks connected to the Muslim Brotherhood in North America.
Which should now raise even greater concerns since Huma Abedin-Weiner is the deputy chief of staff to Hillary Clinton, the United States Secretary of State. Did any vetting occur by Clinton's people concerning Huma Abedin, her brother Hassan, or her mother Saleha Mahmoud Abedin, and any connections with known Islamists, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood?
But then again, would it have troubled Mrs. Clinton? After all, during her husband's time as President, she warmly embraced Suha Arafat the wife of Yasser Arafat, arch-terrorist, right after a speech during which Suha Arafat falsely accused Israel of poisoning the Palestinian water supply.
Huma's brother has "worked with Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal on a program of "spreading Islam to the west." More intriguing is the fact that the Abedin family left Michigan for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, around 1977, which is the same year that the Muslim Sisterhood was formed.
Couple this with the Clinton family playing a key role in promoting Fethullah Gulen who has worked assiduously to overthrow Turkey's secular government. Gulen, who currently resides in Pennsylvania, has told his followers that in order for "worldwide Islamic domination to succeed, every method and path is acceptable, including lying to people."
In March of this year, the FBI was investigating the more than 120 charter schools in the United States that are linked to Gulen's movement. These schools, funded with millions of taxpayer dollars, promote Gulen's worldview that is both anti-Israel and anti-America. In fact, in 2010 it was reported that Bill Gates had given almost 11 million dollars to the Cosmos Foundation, which is a Gulen enterprise.
Moreover, one needs to question why Huma Abedin, a member of a family of devout Muslims, would ever marry a Jewish Congressman -- in a ceremony officiated by Bill Clinton. Sharia law clearly forbids Muslims from marrying non-believers, so what does this portend?
Furthermore, when Huma Abedin accompanied Hillary Clinton to the Dar El-Hekma women's college in Saudi Arabia, where Huma's mother is co-founder and vice dean, it was reported that "Hillary explained that Huma holds an important and sensitive position in her office." Where was the scrutiny?
Why are so many at the highest levels of American government ignoring the methodology of Islamists like Gulen, who has declared that the best way to seize power is to lie in wait "with the patience of a spider" in order to "wait for people to get caught in the web"? Is Clinton so naïve?
Thus, Huma Abedin's position with Clinton in the State Department, as well as her marriage to Representative Weiner, has given her enormous exposure "to state secrets and access to the inner workings of Congress."
This would be unsettling enough if it were not also for Obama's latest appointee. The 44th president has just appointed Azizah al-Hibri to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. Al-Hibri believes that sharia law is superior to American law. Yet, al-Hibri is only one of the pro-sharia adherents that Obama has placed in influential positions since he became president. Dalia Mogahed was one of the earliest appointees and as Nonie Darwish has written, "[t]he empowerment of Radical Islam under the Obama administration" is extremely disturbing.
Last year, Obama appointed two devout Muslims to Homeland Security. Obama's record concerning Islamic terror was alarming from the beginning of his term and it has only become more entrenched. Congressman Keith Ellison aka Keith Hakim, who converted to Islam, is already in place in Congress. His connections to CAIR are troubling.
Is the Weiner scandal really covering up a far more disturbing scenario whereby jihadists continue to infiltrate and influence American universities, military installations, homeland security, even local police forces, all while the press ignores the steady encroachment of these radicals who seek to overturn and destroy America?
The disgraceful indifference by the general press to Weiner's in-laws and their connections to the Muslim Brotherhood keeps eroding America's ability to rout those who wish to see her destroyed.
Fethullah Gulen has exhorted his followers to "move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing [their] existence until [they] reach all the power centers...until the conditions are ripe..." Can America continue to close its eyes to this deliberate hibernation strategy of our enemies?
Eileen can be reached at middlemarch18@gmail.com.
Sponsored Link: “Underground” Video Gets 10 Mill
The Muslim Brotherhood and Weiner
By Eileen F. Toplansky
Far more disturbing than the salacious details of Weiner's dalliances is the fact that apparently his mother-in-law is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Furthermore, Huma Abedin's brother, Hassan, "is listed as a fellow and partner with a number of Muslim Brotherhood members." Hassan works at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS) at Oxford University. The Egyptian Al-Azhar University, well-known for a curriculum that encourages extremism and terrorism, is active in establishing links with OCIS.
How is it that the Western media, with its hourly analyses of Weiner, missed this salient point, yet Arab news sources revealed this connection? Walid Shoebat, formerly with the PLO, explains that Saleha Mahmoud Abedin, a professor in Saudi Arabia "belongs to the Sunni movement's women's division known as the Muslim Sisterhood." During the recent uprising in Egypt, which resulted in Mubarak's removal, "a special women's unit within the Muslim Brotherhood served as 'mules' to deliver messages and acted as messengers for the terrorist group."
The Muslim Sisterhood is also known as the International Women's Organization (IWO) and members are located "across 16 different countries." Its goal is to "work at all levels in accordance with the message of the Brotherhood." The Muslim Brotherhood's goal is Islamic world domination and "[i]t is now public knowledge that nearly every major Muslim organization in the United States is actually controlled by the [Muslim Brotherhood] or a derivative organization. Consequently, most of the Muslim-American groups of any prominence in America are now known to be, as a matter of fact, hostile to the United States and its Constitution."
This chart on page four of the Domestic Intelligence Briefing by Mark Hass shows the FBI - Identified Terror Networks connected to the Muslim Brotherhood in North America.
Which should now raise even greater concerns since Huma Abedin-Weiner is the deputy chief of staff to Hillary Clinton, the United States Secretary of State. Did any vetting occur by Clinton's people concerning Huma Abedin, her brother Hassan, or her mother Saleha Mahmoud Abedin, and any connections with known Islamists, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood?
But then again, would it have troubled Mrs. Clinton? After all, during her husband's time as President, she warmly embraced Suha Arafat the wife of Yasser Arafat, arch-terrorist, right after a speech during which Suha Arafat falsely accused Israel of poisoning the Palestinian water supply.
Huma's brother has "worked with Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal on a program of "spreading Islam to the west." More intriguing is the fact that the Abedin family left Michigan for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, around 1977, which is the same year that the Muslim Sisterhood was formed.
Couple this with the Clinton family playing a key role in promoting Fethullah Gulen who has worked assiduously to overthrow Turkey's secular government. Gulen, who currently resides in Pennsylvania, has told his followers that in order for "worldwide Islamic domination to succeed, every method and path is acceptable, including lying to people."
In March of this year, the FBI was investigating the more than 120 charter schools in the United States that are linked to Gulen's movement. These schools, funded with millions of taxpayer dollars, promote Gulen's worldview that is both anti-Israel and anti-America. In fact, in 2010 it was reported that Bill Gates had given almost 11 million dollars to the Cosmos Foundation, which is a Gulen enterprise.
Moreover, one needs to question why Huma Abedin, a member of a family of devout Muslims, would ever marry a Jewish Congressman -- in a ceremony officiated by Bill Clinton. Sharia law clearly forbids Muslims from marrying non-believers, so what does this portend?
Furthermore, when Huma Abedin accompanied Hillary Clinton to the Dar El-Hekma women's college in Saudi Arabia, where Huma's mother is co-founder and vice dean, it was reported that "Hillary explained that Huma holds an important and sensitive position in her office." Where was the scrutiny?
Why are so many at the highest levels of American government ignoring the methodology of Islamists like Gulen, who has declared that the best way to seize power is to lie in wait "with the patience of a spider" in order to "wait for people to get caught in the web"? Is Clinton so naïve?
Thus, Huma Abedin's position with Clinton in the State Department, as well as her marriage to Representative Weiner, has given her enormous exposure "to state secrets and access to the inner workings of Congress."
This would be unsettling enough if it were not also for Obama's latest appointee. The 44th president has just appointed Azizah al-Hibri to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. Al-Hibri believes that sharia law is superior to American law. Yet, al-Hibri is only one of the pro-sharia adherents that Obama has placed in influential positions since he became president. Dalia Mogahed was one of the earliest appointees and as Nonie Darwish has written, "[t]he empowerment of Radical Islam under the Obama administration" is extremely disturbing.
Last year, Obama appointed two devout Muslims to Homeland Security. Obama's record concerning Islamic terror was alarming from the beginning of his term and it has only become more entrenched. Congressman Keith Ellison aka Keith Hakim, who converted to Islam, is already in place in Congress. His connections to CAIR are troubling.
Is the Weiner scandal really covering up a far more disturbing scenario whereby jihadists continue to infiltrate and influence American universities, military installations, homeland security, even local police forces, all while the press ignores the steady encroachment of these radicals who seek to overturn and destroy America?
The disgraceful indifference by the general press to Weiner's in-laws and their connections to the Muslim Brotherhood keeps eroding America's ability to rout those who wish to see her destroyed.
Fethullah Gulen has exhorted his followers to "move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing [their] existence until [they] reach all the power centers...until the conditions are ripe..." Can America continue to close its eyes to this deliberate hibernation strategy of our enemies?
Eileen can be reached at middlemarch18@gmail.com.
Sponsored Link: “Underground” Video Gets 10 Mill
Idiot Jews support Obama
The Low Standards of Jewish Democrats
Jonathan S. Tobin 06.21.2011 - 10:38 AM
There are those who claim there is virtually nothing a Democratic president can do to Israel to cause liberal Jews to abandon his cause. But that is an exaggeration. Were a Democratic president to dramatically shift U.S. Middle East policy to Israel’s disadvantage without at the same time paying lip service to the concept of the U.S.-Israel alliance, there would probably be drastic consequences in terms of liberal Jewish support for that president. But even a president who made it clear from the first day of his administration he would distance the United States from Israel could retain the backing of liberal Jewish activists so long as he still claimed to be the friend of the Jewish state.
That is the only way to explain the willingness of so many Jewish Democrats who profess to be backers of Israel to line up in support of President Barack Obama’s re-election. As accounts of last night’s Barack Obama fundraiser for Jewish donors show, it doesn’t take much for a Democratic leader to seduce the Jewish faithful. As far as Israel is concerned, Barack Obama may be the least friendly resident of the White House since the first president George Bush or even Dwight Eisenhower, but that has not prevented him from raising large amounts of cash in the Jewish community. Nor will it prevent him from winning the majority of Jewish votes next year.
It was less than a month ago that Obama specifically timed a major Middle East policy speech in order to ambush visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By demanding in that speech Israel accept the idea future peace talks would treat the 1967 lines as the starting point for negotiations without also stating American support for Israel’s retention of Jerusalem and the major settlement blocs (as his predecessor George W. Bush did) or by making any demands on the Palestinians, Obama dramatically tilted the diplomatic playing field to Israel’s disadvantage. Netanyahu faced down Obama and won the applause of Congress for doing so. But even as Obama renewed a campaign of pressure on Israel in the last week, the president was able to go to Jewish donors last night and masquerade as a friend of the Jewish state.
We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. Most liberal Jews are fervently partisan Democrats and still wrongly fear conservative Christians far more than Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and al-Qaeda combined. The standards liberal Jews have adopted on that issue are so low it allows virtually any Democrat, even one with no history of support for Israel (as was the case with Barack Obama in 2008) a pass by merely the uttering of a few catch phrases.
And even though Obama has spent his presidency picking fights with Israel, all he needs to charm Jewish donors is to mouth a few more insincere phrases. But the good news for Israel is (as Netanyahu’s speech to Congress demonstrated), American support for Israel is a consensus issue for the overwhelming majority of Americans. The low standards of liberal Jews on the issue won’t prevent Congress from acting as a brake on Obama’s less than friendly policies toward the Jewish state. As one person who attended the Obama fundraiser told Politico, the number of ovations the president received was not as many as Netanyahu got from Congre
Democrats launch major pro-Obama pushback among Jews
by NEWS SOURCE on JUNE 8, 2011
JTA reports:
President Obama is a stalwart friend of Israel.
That’s the message some top Democratic Jewish figures are promoting to push back against the notion that Obama is out of step with the pro-Israel and Jewish communities.
Within the next two weeks, two figures associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — past AIPAC president Amy Friedkin and board member Howard Green — will be among the hosts for a major fundraising event for the president, charging $25,000 per couple. The target of 40 couples — bringing in $1 million — is close to being met, insiders say. Notably, the organizers have received a nod from the AIPAC board’s inner circle to solicit donations.
Last week, top Jewish Democrats, including Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Democratic National Committee chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), blitzed the media with Op-Eds denying any split with the president in the wake of his call last month to base Palestinian-Israeli negotiations on 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps.
And the White House has taken the unusual step of posting a lengthy defense of Obama’s Israel record on its website.
Jonathan S. Tobin 06.21.2011 - 10:38 AM
There are those who claim there is virtually nothing a Democratic president can do to Israel to cause liberal Jews to abandon his cause. But that is an exaggeration. Were a Democratic president to dramatically shift U.S. Middle East policy to Israel’s disadvantage without at the same time paying lip service to the concept of the U.S.-Israel alliance, there would probably be drastic consequences in terms of liberal Jewish support for that president. But even a president who made it clear from the first day of his administration he would distance the United States from Israel could retain the backing of liberal Jewish activists so long as he still claimed to be the friend of the Jewish state.
That is the only way to explain the willingness of so many Jewish Democrats who profess to be backers of Israel to line up in support of President Barack Obama’s re-election. As accounts of last night’s Barack Obama fundraiser for Jewish donors show, it doesn’t take much for a Democratic leader to seduce the Jewish faithful. As far as Israel is concerned, Barack Obama may be the least friendly resident of the White House since the first president George Bush or even Dwight Eisenhower, but that has not prevented him from raising large amounts of cash in the Jewish community. Nor will it prevent him from winning the majority of Jewish votes next year.
It was less than a month ago that Obama specifically timed a major Middle East policy speech in order to ambush visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By demanding in that speech Israel accept the idea future peace talks would treat the 1967 lines as the starting point for negotiations without also stating American support for Israel’s retention of Jerusalem and the major settlement blocs (as his predecessor George W. Bush did) or by making any demands on the Palestinians, Obama dramatically tilted the diplomatic playing field to Israel’s disadvantage. Netanyahu faced down Obama and won the applause of Congress for doing so. But even as Obama renewed a campaign of pressure on Israel in the last week, the president was able to go to Jewish donors last night and masquerade as a friend of the Jewish state.
We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. Most liberal Jews are fervently partisan Democrats and still wrongly fear conservative Christians far more than Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and al-Qaeda combined. The standards liberal Jews have adopted on that issue are so low it allows virtually any Democrat, even one with no history of support for Israel (as was the case with Barack Obama in 2008) a pass by merely the uttering of a few catch phrases.
And even though Obama has spent his presidency picking fights with Israel, all he needs to charm Jewish donors is to mouth a few more insincere phrases. But the good news for Israel is (as Netanyahu’s speech to Congress demonstrated), American support for Israel is a consensus issue for the overwhelming majority of Americans. The low standards of liberal Jews on the issue won’t prevent Congress from acting as a brake on Obama’s less than friendly policies toward the Jewish state. As one person who attended the Obama fundraiser told Politico, the number of ovations the president received was not as many as Netanyahu got from Congre
Democrats launch major pro-Obama pushback among Jews
by NEWS SOURCE on JUNE 8, 2011
JTA reports:
President Obama is a stalwart friend of Israel.
That’s the message some top Democratic Jewish figures are promoting to push back against the notion that Obama is out of step with the pro-Israel and Jewish communities.
Within the next two weeks, two figures associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — past AIPAC president Amy Friedkin and board member Howard Green — will be among the hosts for a major fundraising event for the president, charging $25,000 per couple. The target of 40 couples — bringing in $1 million — is close to being met, insiders say. Notably, the organizers have received a nod from the AIPAC board’s inner circle to solicit donations.
Last week, top Jewish Democrats, including Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Democratic National Committee chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), blitzed the media with Op-Eds denying any split with the president in the wake of his call last month to base Palestinian-Israeli negotiations on 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps.
And the White House has taken the unusual step of posting a lengthy defense of Obama’s Israel record on its website.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
