Russ Peterson
28 Shellwind Drive
Savannah, GA 31411.
Details below.
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Obama is depending on them for his re-election.
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As I have often said, when you adopt the language of your adversary and his premise you are fighting a losing battle. And so it came to be. Has the 'fourth best presidents' won hands down?
Rove points the way if Republicans are savvy enough to listen..
Obama relishes in creating a dire situation and then projecting the misery on his adversary.
You decide. (See 1,1a and 1b below.)
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The more things change the more they remain as always. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Sowell opts for Gingrich over Romney.(See 3 below.)
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Cliff May pose:" Do Palestinians really support a two-state solution?" (See 4 below.)
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Is the U.S. and Israel drawing closer because of Iran's approaching nuclear bomb? (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)The GOP's Payroll Tax Fiasco
How did Republicans manage to lose the tax issue to Obama?
GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously said a year ago that his main task in the 112th Congress was to make sure that President Obama would not be re-elected. Given how he and House Speaker John Boehner have handled the payroll tax debate, we wonder if they might end up re-electing the President before the 2012 campaign even begins in earnest.
The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.
Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.
House Republicans yesterday voted down the Senate's two-month extension of the two-percentage-point payroll tax holiday to 4.2% from 6.2%. They say the short extension makes no economic sense, but then neither does a one-year extension. No employer is going to hire a worker based on such a small and temporary decrease in employment costs, as this year's tax holiday has demonstrated. The entire exercise is political, but Republicans have thoroughly botched the politics.
Their first mistake was adopting the President's language that he is proposing a tax cut rather than calling it a temporary tax holiday. People will understand the difference—and discount the benefit.
Republicans also failed to put together a unified House and Senate strategy. The House passed a one-year extension last week that included spending cuts to offset the $120 billion or so in lost revenue, such as a one-year freeze on raises for federal employees. Then Mr. McConnell agreed with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the two-month extension financed by higher fees on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (meaning on mortgage borrowers), among other things. It passed with 89 votes and all but seven Republicans.
Senate Republicans say Mr. Boehner had signed off on the two-month extension, but House Members revolted over the weekend and so the Speaker flipped within 24 hours. Mr. Boehner is now demanding that Mr. Reid name conferees for a House-Senate conference on the payroll tax bills. But Mr. Reid and the White House are having too much fun blaming Republicans for "raising taxes on the middle class" as of January 1. Don't be surprised if they stretch this out to the State of the Union, when Mr. Obama will have a national audience to capture the tax issue.
If Republicans didn't want to extend the payroll tax cut on the merits, then they should have put together a strategy and the arguments for defeating it and explained why.
But if they knew they would eventually pass it, as most of them surely believed, then they had one of two choices. Either pass it quickly and at least take some political credit for it.
Or agree on a strategy to get something in return for passing it, which would mean focusing on a couple of popular policies that would put Mr. Obama and Democrats on the political spot. They finally did that last week by attaching a provision that requires Mr. Obama to make a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline within 60 days, and the President grumbled but has agreed to sign it.
But now Republicans are drowning out that victory in the sounds of their circular firing squad. Already four GOP Senators have rejected the House position, and the political rout will only get worse.
One reason for the revolt of House backbenchers is the accumulated frustration over a year of political disappointment. Their high point was the Paul Ryan budget in the spring that set the terms of debate and forced Mr. Obama to adopt at least the rhetoric of budget reform and spending cuts.
But then Messrs. Boehner and McConnell were gulled into going behind closed doors with the President, who dragged out negotiations and later emerged to sandbag them with his blame-the-GOP and soak-the-rich re-election strategy. Any difference between the parties on taxes and spending has been blurred in the interim.
After a year of the tea party House, Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats have had to make no major policy concessions beyond extending the Bush tax rates for two years. Mr. Obama is in a stronger re-election position today than he was a year ago, and the chances of Mr. McConnell becoming Majority Leader in 2013 are declining.
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At this stage, Republicans would do best to cut their losses and find a way to extend the payroll holiday quickly. Then go home and return in January with a united House-Senate strategy that forces Democrats to make specific policy choices that highlight the differences between the parties on spending, taxes and regulation. Wisconsin freshman Senator Ron Johnson has been floating a useful agenda for such a strategy. The alternative is more chaotic retreat and the return of all-Democratic rule.
1a)The Fourth Best President
Well, maybe second or third best, if Obama can say so himself.
Perhaps President Obama has been taking history lessons at the knee of Newt Gingrich. His recent self-assessment of his tenure rivals any historical analogy that the former Speaker and college professor has come up with, though then again the President is also a faculty member turned politician.
Mr. Obama was recently asked by CBS's Steve Croft on "60 Minutes" to reflect on his Presidency to date, and the outtakes of the interview that aired last Sunday have been posted online. "The issue here is not going be a list of accomplishments," Mr. Obama responded. "As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign-policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president—with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln—just in terms of what we've gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to the economy, we've got a lot more work to do."
You've got to love the "possible" in that sentence about FDR and Lincoln. Perhaps Mr. Obama would have dropped the diminishing modifier if old Abe hadn't taken so darn long to free the slaves or win the Civil War. It's also notable that poor George Washington didn't make the Obama cut. Historians may consider Washington to be America's "indispensable man," but he never did campaign on a promise to lower sea levels.
Ego aside—or super duper ego aside—Mr. Obama's claims are instructive because they explicitly reject any connection between his "accomplishments" and the economy that Americans elected him to fix. Might Mr. Obama's appetites for more government—for more LBJ-style accomplishments—have something to do with the weak recovery?
The New York Times reported in November that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told Mr. Obama shortly after the election in 2008 that "Your legacy is going to be preventing the second Great Depression." Mr. Obama responded, "That's not enough for me."
At this point, we'd settle for Chester A. Arthur or Martin Van Buren.
1b)Obama's Strategy—And How to Fight It
Pretending the past three years' dismal economy is someone else's fault is not likely to fool
By KARL ROVE
This month, during a speech in Osawatomie, Kan., and in an interview on "60 Minutes," President Barack Obama laid out the broad contours of his re-election strategy. Republicans would be wise to examine his words and prepare accordingly.
Mr. Obama will frame this election as a fight for the middle class. He told his Kansas audience that America was once a place where "hard work paid off, and responsibility was rewarded, and anyone could make it if they tried." Now, as he informed "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft, "the rules are rigged" against "middle-class families."
The president's tack is, in part, a reaction to his precarious standing among voters with high-school education or less. In a Gallup poll of Dec. 18, for example, his job approval with these voters—usually described as blue-collar workers—was 40%, down 26 points from January 2009. He can't win if his numbers in this group stay so low.
Mr. Obama will make "fairness" a major theme. He declared in Kansas that his goal was to "restore balance, restore fairness," and he then told Mr. Kroft that a "balanced approach" to the nation's deficit crisis required "everybody to do their fair share."
But resentment is not an effective political appeal. Americans tolerate unequal outcomes if they believe people have equal opportunity. Crude class warfare like Mr. Obama's has never been successful in presidential campaigns (consider candidates Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry). In fact, a Gallup poll of Nov. 28-Dec. 1 shows that fewer Americans (45%) now believe income inequality "represents a problem that needs to be fixed" than believed that in 1998 (52%).
Republicans have an arsenal jammed with rejoinders: Taxes shouldn't be raised while the economy is fragile, most of those targeted for tax increases are small businesses, and, as to fairness, the top 25% of earners paid 86.3% of all federal income taxes in 2008.
Republicans can argue that Democratic class warfare would penalize achievement and diminish prosperity. That Mr. Obama's goal is redistribution, not success. That over the past three years this approach has resulted in persistently high unemployment, anemic growth and economic hardship.
In Kansas, Mr. Obama's narrative was that greedy bankers, aided by regulators who "looked the other way," were what "plunged our economy and the world into a crisis." But the GOP can easily counterpunch, noting the leading role that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored enterprises, had in bringing about the financial crisis. Republicans can pound Mr. Obama for having (as a senator) filibustered efforts to rein in these government-sponsored enterprises and (as president) giving them an open draw on the Treasury. That bailout has cost $141 billion so far with no end in sight. This argument must be joined with a substantive, serious agenda to attack crony capitalism and corporate welfare. This is the right position on the merits, as well as politically wise..
As he campaigns, Mr. Obama will loudly offer a laundry list of achievements. In his "60 Minutes" interview, for example, he suggested he'd put his accomplishments up "against any president—with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R. and Lincoln."
This claim is not just staggeringly arrogant. The reality is that voters don't like Mr. Obama's signature accomplishments.
His stimulus didn't produce the results he promised: An Ipsos/Reuters poll of Nov. 4, for example, found 62% of Americans believe the stimulus packages have "just created debt" rather than "helped the economy." His health-care plan, signed into law on March 23, 2010, is the only major piece of modern social legislation to become less popular after it passed. According to Huffington Post's Pollster.com, the average disapproval was 52% then; it is 55.5% now.
Lacking a popular record or constructive agenda, Mr. Obama will resort to ad hominem attacks on Republicans. The president, who in 2008 spoke constantly about healing divisions, seems to relish being an attack dog. So he'll say Republicans don't just disagree with him; they want to harm the nation. He'll label any dissent as unpatriotic. He told Mr. Kroft that by opposing tax increases, Republicans refused to "put country ahead of party."
Dividing Americans along class lines and pretending the last three years are someone else's responsibility may be therapeutic for the president and his liberal followers. But it's hard to see it working.
America is not a nation of amnesiacs: Republicans can use the president's own words and actions to constantly remind swing voters (who still like him personally) of his disappointing policies. And like Ronald Reagan, the GOP nominee can reassure voters that, unlike the incumbent, he is up to the job by offering far-reaching reforms to jump-start the economy.
Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions, 2010).
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2)Hitler admired in PLO youth magazine because he murdered Jews
Hitler tells a Palestinian girl in her dream:
"I killed them [the Jews] so you would all know that they are a nation
which spreads destruction all over the world."
by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik
The following is an excerpt from Deception: Betraying the Peace Process, chapter 14, section 1:
The Palestinian Authority funds a monthly educational magazine for children called Zayzafuna. The magazine is made up of material written by the magazine's staff and also includes essays and poems written by children. Accordingly, Zayzafuna both represents the values of the educators and serves as a window into the minds of the participating Palestinian children. The magazine is published with the sponsorship of the PLO's Palestinian National Committee for Education, Culture and Sciences.
Most of the content in Zayzafuna is positive and educational. It promotes family values, encourages children to read and to participate in building a modern, democratic society. However, these positive messages are directed at Palestinian society, Muslims, Christians and Druze. When it comes to portraying Israel and Jews, Zayzafuna changes its tone and includes items glorifying Jihad against Israel and praising Martyrdom death for Allah, and the Martyrs themselves.
The most extreme expression of demonization of Jews is the inclusion of an essay submitted by a teenage girl in which Hitler is presented as a positive figure to be admired because he killed Jews in order to benefit the world.
The girl in her dream asks Hitler: "You're the one who killed the Jews?" Hitler responds: "Yes. I killed them so you would all know that they are a nation which spreads destruction all over the world." Like the other hate messages, this appears in a story with positive messages by other admired figures, including a Muslim Nobel Prize recipient and a math scholar. See the full text below.
In addition, the magazine portrays a world where "Palestine" has replaced Israel by referring to Israeli cities such as Haifa and Jaffa as places in "Palestine" or as "occupied" cites. It denies Israel's right to exist by saying that Israel is on "stolen" or "occupied" land, and demonizes Israel and Jews. Approximately one fourth of the children's submissions are on nationalistic topics, and among them are expressions of hatred and delegitimization against Jews and Israel that mirror the messages transmitted by the PA leadership through official media, PA education and other structures under their control.
It is specifically because this is not a hate magazine, but in general a positive publication promoting good values, that the hatred expressed towards Israel and Jews is so damaging. All the positive messages about coexistence and peace, which abound throughout the magazine, apply to everyone but Israelis and Jews. The message of Zayzafuna concerning Israelis and Jews is that they are in a unique category separated from other peoples and religious groups: For others - peace, cooperation and coexistence; for Israelis and Jews - hatred, confrontation and Jihad.
Hitler admired because he murdered Jews
The Zayzafuna magazine chose to publish an essay written by a girl in 10th grade in which Hitler is admired because he killed the Jews - an act that is presented as a positive accomplishment for the benefit of humanity. The girl describes a dream in which she meets four historical figures, all of whom are presented as admired role models, and each one's special accomplishment is the topic of a short conversation with the girl. Three of them are the ninth-century Muslim mathematician Al-Khwarizmi; Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz; and Saladin, the Muslim leader who defeated the Christian Crusaders and conquered Jerusalem in the 12th century. The fourth and only non-Muslim role model in the dream is Adolf Hitler.
All four are presented as positive figures and each one offers advice to the young girl, which she accepts. Hitler is admired because he killed the Jews "so you would all know that they are a nation which spreads destruction all over the world." Hitler advises the girl to "be resilient and patient" in facing the suffering the Jews are causing. The girl thanks Hitler for his advice.
Significantly, Zayzafuna's editors chose to include this submission in the magazine, without dissociating themselves from the admiration of Hitler. They found it an acceptable message to have Hitler appear with other role models for Palestinian children.
The following is the essay in Zayzafuna presenting Hitler with other positive role models.
"One hot day, I was very tired after a hard day... and suddenly I saw four white doors in front of me. I opened them in no particular order.
I opened the f irst door and saw a beautiful place full of f lowers. I was surprised to see a man there. I asked him, 'Who are you?'He said, 'I am Al-Khwarizmi.' [Ninth century Persian mathematician who lived in Baghdad, known for his contribution to the development of algebra.]
I said: 'You're the one who invented mathematics and arithmetic?' He said: 'Yes. What's your situation like today?'
I said: 'The Arabs and Muslims are in a deep sleep; they can't do anything. They have moved away from all the sciences.'
He [Al-Khwarizmi] said: 'Yes, I know that. The day will come when the Arabs will return to their glory. And you - you have a great duty, which is to take an interest in the Islamic sciences and to protect them from being forgotten.'
I said, 'I promise,' and left the door.
I turned to the next door; there Hitler awaited me. I said, 'You're the one who killed the Jews?'
He [Hitler] said: 'Yes. I killed them so you would all know that they are a nation which spreads destruction all over the world. And what I ask of you is to be resilient and patient, concerning the suffering that Palestine is experiencing at their hands.'
I said [to Hitler]: 'Thanks for the advice.'
Then I turned to the third door, and met Naguib Mahfouz [Nobel Prize- winning Egyptian author], who was the one who knew best the value of time and how to use it.
He said: 'People's pastime, these days, has become killing time and wasting it, as though they are punishing themselves. So strive to use your time in the best way.'
At the fourth door I meet Saladin Al-Ayoubi [Muslim leader who defeated the Christian crusaders and conquered Jerusalem in the twelfth century]. He said: 'I am Saladin.'
I said: 'You were the one who liberated Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa [Mosque].' He answered: 'Yes.'
I said: 'Return, oh Saladin, for Jerusalem and Palestine cry out and no one answers.'
He [Saladin] said: 'I know, but every time has its men, and the right man to liberate Jerusalem is still to come.'
And before I could finish my dream, the alarm clock rang and I woke up. It was seven in the morning, and I needed to go to school early, because I had promised Naguib Mahfouz that I would use time well."[Zayzafuna, February 2011]
Although repugnant, a Palestinian teenager's admiration for Hitler because he killed Jews, alongside other Muslim role models, is not unexpected. As PMW documents, Palestinian children are brought up with the teaching that killing Israelis and Jews is heroic. The PA has named streets, schools, sporting events and more after Palestinian terrorists who have killed hundreds of Israeli civilians. In Palestinian cultural, educational and social events, every Palestinian child is exposed to repeated glorification of terrorists who have killed Jews. Palestinian children have participated in summer camps named after Dalal Mughrabi who led a bus hijacking in which 37 civilians were killed, and played in football tournaments named after Abd Al-Basset Odeh, a suicide bomber who killed 31 Israelis at a Passover dinner. It is not surprising that a Palestinian child who has been educated to see those who have murdered Jews as heroes and role models will conclude that Hitler, the one who murdered the most Jews in history, is likewise worthy of admiration.
About the publishers and advisory staff of Zayzafuna:
The magazine is published by the Zayzafuna Association for Development of Children's Culture, and sponsored by the PLO's Palestinian National Committee for Education, Culture and Sciences.
The magazine's advisory board is comprised of Palestinian Authority officials and educators, including PA Deputy Minister of Education Jihad Zakarneh, and former PA Minister for Women's Affairs Zuheira Kamal. [Zayzafuna, February 2011]
The Zayzafuna magazine is part of a larger education program funded by the Palestinian Authority which contributed 90,000 Shekel ($24,370) in 2010 and 10,000 Shekel ($2,700) a month in 2011.
Since August 2011, the magazine is also sponsored by UNESCO and the MDG Achievement Fund (MDG-F), a UN humanitarian foundation funded by the Spanish government. [Zayzafuna, August 2011.] In the October 2011 issue a note appears: "Opinions expressed in this magazine don't necessarily express UNESCO's views."
Deputy Chairman of the Zayzafuna organization Abd Al-Karim Ziyada has explained the following about the funding of Zayzafuna:
"The magazine has advertisements, which cover some of the costs. For the year 2010-2011 we have subscriptions by students and schools, and that also helps [funding the magazine]. We are fortunate in that the Palestinian Authority and the Prime Minister [Salam Fayyad] have helped us this year with aid in the amount of 90,000 Shekel ($24,370) to cover the magazine and organization costs, and that has given us a push forward. Allah be praised, there is a new agreement for a monthly [PA] payment of 10,000 Shekel ($2,700) to cover the magazine [costs]."[PA TV (Fatah), May 9 and 13, 2011]
This excerpt above is from a chapter in the book Deception: Betraying the Peace Process, recently published by PMW. The book includes a longer analysis of the other material as well found in issues of Zayzafuna from May 2010 through August 2011, focusing on messages relating to Israelis and Jews. A short summary of the positive messages in Zayzafuna and that are unconnected to Israel, is also included.
2a)How UNESCO Funds 'Hitlerism'
By Giulio Meotti
When the United Nations celebrated its 50th anniversary, Unesco refused to mention the Shoah - the Holocaust - in its World War II resolution, intentionally ignoring Israel’s request to include a reference to the destruction of European Jewry.
Since then, the UN’s cultural body has passed from ignoring the Jewish requests to an obsessive promotion of Hitlerism in the Arab world.
The latest number of Zayzafuna, the Palestinian Authority magazine for children, included an essay submitted by a teenage girl in which Adolf Hitler is presented as a positive figure to be admired because he killed Jews in order to benefit the world.
The story, revealed by the Palestinian Media Watch, shows a girl in her dream asking Hitler: “You’re the one who killed the Jews?”. Hitler responds: “Yes. I killed them so you would all know that they are a nation which spreads destruction all over the world”.
The case is not just another example of Palestinian incitement to hatred. Since August 2011, the magazine is financed by Unesco and the MDG Achievement Fund, another UN foundation funded by the Spanish government.
After the Palestinians were accepted as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s 195th member in late October, they can now apply for World Heritage classification for cultural sites they deem exclusively theirs, such as Hevron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, Rachel Tomb and Jerusalem’s “holy basin”. Such sites would be protected by the UN and could receive funding from Unesco for restoration.
When the Palestinian National Authority came into being in 1993, it pledged to junk its controversial textbooks, some of which date as far back as the ‘40s, and replace them with updated versions, purged of the anti-Jew racism and incitement that permeate the texts imported from Arab countries, many of which are reportedly still in use in Jordan.
In 1994, Palestinian officials launched a textbook-replacement program, with the financing and help of Unesco. The problem is that the Palestinian textbooks were not amended so as to be rid of the anti-Jewish remarks.
According to a recent report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, the Palestinian textbooks funded by Unesco and the European Union are still inciting against Israel:
“Palestine” is shown to encompass all the Jewish State, the Jewish holy sites (such as the Temple Mount) have been erased, and Arab “martyrdom” is praised. In these texts, Jews are described as “cunning”, “locusts” and “wild animals”.
Unesco, in 2003, financed the renovation of the Alexandria library, where a copy of the anti-Semitic booklet “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was soon prominently displayed.
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3)Economist and conservative author Thomas Sowell says voters should disregard Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s “baggage” and support the former House speaker because defeating President Obama in 2012 is crucial to America’s future.
Sowell cites Gingrich’s solid record of “concrete accomplishments,” which he argues makes him a stronger candidate than former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who pushed through one of the liberal healthcare programs in the nation.
Sowell, one of the nation’s most respected conservative columnists and a senior fellow on public policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, writes in his nationally syndicated column: “What the media call Gingrich’s ‘baggage’ concerns largely his personal life and the fact that he made a lot of money running a consulting firm after he left Congress.
“But how much weight should we give to this stuff when we are talking about the future of the nation?”
Sowell points to Obama’s economic policies, which have taken the country down a path that has “led Western European nations to the brink of financial disaster.”
He also cites a foreign policy that has “pulled the rug” out from under America’s allies while seeking to “cozy up” to our enemies, and says the failure to deter Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons development could have consequences “beyond our worst imagining.”
“Against this background, how much does Newt Gingrich’s personal life matter?” Sowell asks.
Voters should recognize Gingrich’s “concrete accomplishments” when he was House speaker — the first Republican takeover of the House in 40 years, welfare reform, and the first balanced budget in 40 years, Sowell says.
The real question, he observes, is whether Gingrich is better than Obama — and better than “smooth talker” Mitt Romney.
He concludes: “Those who want to concentrate on the baggage in Newt Gingrich’s past, rather than on the nation’s future, should remember what Winston Churchill said: ‘If the past sits in judgment on the present, the future will be lost.’ If that means a second term for Barack Obama, then it means we’ve lost, big time.
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4)The Case for Palestinian Nationalism
Do Palestinians really support a two-state solution?
By Cliff May
The region we now call the Middle East is an elaborate mosaic. Among its peoples are the Arabs, denizens of the desert who became great conquerors and colonists. The Persians possessed a mighty empire in antiquity — and will again if Iran’s current rulers have their way. The most vibrant city of the Turks is Istanbul, the Christian capital known as Constantinople until it fell to Sultan Mehmed II in the 15th century. The Middle East also is home to such ethno-religious groups as Maronites, Druze, and Alawites; to powerful clans such as the Hashemites and the House of Sa’ud; to Kurds, a nation without a state, and to Jews, reestablished as a nation in their ancient homeland.
The other day, Newt Gingrich waded into this historical labyrinth, setting off a minor brouhaha by noting that only recently did Arabs on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean claim to constitute a distinct nation called “Palestine” — the name given to the area by Imperial Rome. On this basis, he referred to Palestinians as an “invented” people.
The accuracy of his statement is beyond dispute. In the wake of the Second World War, when the United Nations recommended partitioning Palestine into two states, it did not use the term “Palestinian” to refer to Arab-speaking residents. At that time, pan-Arabism, the idea of forming a single, united Arab nation, was far more compelling than any parochial identification. The question was how to divide what, for 400 years, had been a corner of the Ottoman Empire between the Arabs of Palestine and the Jews of Palestine. Of the two, the latter were, at that time, more commonly referred to as Palestinians. Their newspaper was the Palestine Post (now the Jerusalem Post), their contributions to the performing arts included the Palestine Orchestra (now the Israel Philharmonic), and their American-based charitable organization was the United Palestine Appeal.
From 1948 until 1967, Gaza and the West Bank were under Egyptian and Jordanian control respectively. No serious demands for a Palestinian state were heard. Only after Israel took possession of those territories in a defensive war against Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab states did Palestinian nationhood become the central issue in what had been, until then, the Arab- Israeli conflict.
Gingrich was attacked from many quarters, among them the New York Times, where foreign-affairs columnist H. D. S. Greenway acknowledged that the former Speaker “is right that there has never been a state called Palestine” and that “Palestinian nationalism grew up as a mirror image of Israeli nationalism.” So what’s the problem? Greenway charges that Gingrich intended to “imply that the Palestinians are not worthy of a country of their own.”
Gingrich insists he meant no such thing. Anyone familiar with his thinking would not doubt that. After all, Americans are an invented people. Can you imagine Gingrich arguing that makes Americans less worthy of nationhood than, say, the Japanese?
Like most of us, Gingrich favors a two-state solution similar to the one the Palestinians were offered in 1948 and at Camp David in 2000. In these and other instances, the Palestinians said no. What does that imply? Perhaps that Palestinians — or at least those who lead them — are themselves insufficiently nationalistic.
That’s indisputably true of Hamas, the Iranian-backed Muslim Brotherhood group that rules Gaza. The Hamas Covenant invokes “the best nation that hath been raised up unto mankind.” But that nation is not Palestine. It is the Islamic nation which is to be revived as a caliphate, an empire of which Palestine would be only a province.
The Hamas Covenant asserts without equivocation that “the Palestinian problem is a religious problem,” adding that there can be “no solution . . . except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.” As for Israel, the Covenant minces no words: “Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
Okay, but what about Hamas’s rival, Fatah, and the Palestinian Authority? In recent years, Western diplomats have placed much hope in Palestinian Authority prime minister Salaam Fayyad, who, I think it fair to say, has made a serious attempt to build institutional and economic foundations upon which an independent and viable Palestinian state might rest.
But as my colleague Jonathan Schanzer last week pointed out in Foreign Policy magazine, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has been methodically undercutting and marginalizing Fayyad. And Washington, Schanzer observes, instead of providing Fayyad “the support he needs to weather the storm, has chosen to stand on the sidelines.”
It gets worse. Abbas has been refusing to meet with Israelis until and unless they make major concessions in advance. Over the weekend, Khaled Abu Toameh, the distinguished Israeli (and Arab and Muslim) journalist reported that, in addition, “Abbas’s Fatah faction has declared war on all informal meetings between Israelis and Palestinians.” The Abbas/Fatah objection to such meetings, Toameh reports, is that they promote “the culture of peace” and are designed to “‘normalize’ relations between Israelis and Palestinians.”
Despite all this, there are many people who persist in the belief that the main obstacle to settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is Israeli intransigence, the unwillingness of Israeli leaders to “take risks for peace.” Such delusions are perhaps unavoidable when a “peace process” is predicated not on verifiable history and observable reality but on myth, wishful thinking, and willful blindness.
What would be an alternative? To say straightforwardly to the Palestinians: “If you want to develop as a nation and live in a state of your own, we will help you. But our support is not unconditional: You must be willing to compromise. You must be willing to make peace with the Israelis, who will be your neighbors. If, however, it is not Palestine to which you are committed but to a new anti-Western caliphate, and if building a Palestinian state is less important to you than ‘obliterating’ the State of Israel, we’re going to leave you on your own.”
What happens after that would be for Palestinians to decide and history to record.
— Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
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5)Iran starts building a nuclear weapon: US and Israel tighten cooperation
Iran has embarked on "activities related to possible weaponization," said American sources Thursday, Dec. 22, thereby accounting for the dramatic reversal of the Obama administration's wait-and-see attitude on attacking Iran. The change was articulated this week by US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint US Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey.
Washington sources report that the Islamic Republic crossed the red line President Barack Obama had set for the United States, i.e., when Tehran begins using the technologies and fissile materials (enriched uranium) it has amassed for assembling a bomb or missile warheads. This marks the moment that Iran goes nuclear and only a short time remains before it has an operational nuclear weapon.
Washington has always claimed that when the order to build a weapon was given in Tehran, the United States would know about it within a short time.
The US stealth drone RQ-170 was sent into Iranian airspace for the first time to find evidence to support this suspicion. On Dec. 4 the Iranians downed the unmanned reconnaissance craft by intelligence or cyber means not yet fully clarified. The US - and most probably Israel too - then turned to other intelligence resources to find out what Iran was up to. According to DEBKAfile's military and intelligence sources, they found evidence that Iran has in fact begun putting together components of a nuclear bomb or warhead.
This discovery prompted the latest statements by Mr. Panetta and Gen. Dempsey.
The defense secretary put it into words when he said Tuesday, Dec.: “Despite the efforts to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program, the Iranians have reached a point where they can assemble a bomb in a year or potentially less.”
The next day, Gen. Dempsey said, “My biggest worry is they will miscalculate our resolve. Any miscalculation could mean that we are drawn into conflict, and that would be a tragedy for the region and the world.”
Dennis Ross, until last month President Obama’s senior Middle East adviser, and key architect of White House policies on the Iranian nuclear program and understandings with Israel on this issue, said Israel has four causes for concern about uranium enrichment in the underground nuclear facility at Fordo near Qom and other developments:
1. Iran’s accumulation of low-enriched uranium, its decision to enrich to nearly 20 percent “when there is no justification for it.”
2. The "hardening" of Iranian nuclear sites, largely by moving facilities underground.
3. Other activities related to possible weaponization.
4. Israel suspects that Fordo is not Iran's only buried facility and that nuclear "weaponization" is ongoing surreptitiously at additional underground locations. “I would not isolate Qom and say this alone is the Israeli red line to spur a military response.”
Military sources report all these developments were covered in the short and epic conversation between President Barack Obama and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak at the Gaylord Hotel in Maryland on Dec. 16. It ended with accord on the US and Israeli responses to the new situation arising in Iran.The White House has since accepted the Israeli assessment of Iran's nuclear bomb time table and endorses the conviction that unless Iran retreats from its decision to build a nuclear bomb and steps back from the process it set in train this month, the only option remaining will be a military strike to disable its nuclear program.
Following the Maryland encounter, a procession of prominent US officials visiting Israel to tighten coordination between the US and Israel on their next moves. Lt. Gen. Frank Gorenc, commander of the US’s Third air Force, was one of those visitors. He came to organize the biggest joint military exercise ever held by the US and Israel, as part of the shared response to Iran's steps.
Tuesday, Dec. 20, saw the arrival of Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s right-hand, together with Robert Einhorn, a State Department special adviser on nonproliferation. The two came to tie up the diplomatic ends of the decisions reached by President Obama and Defense Minister Barak at their Maryland meeting.
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