Subject: Daylight: The Story of Obama and Israel - The Must See Video on What is at Stake

This video needs to be viewed by every American, and every American Jew especially.  Please forward it.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wbH5KVPrPo

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As the debate continues over the current Republican candidates, whenever there are multiple candidates, voters see something in each they like and don't like. This time, perhaps, the candidate differences are a bit sharper and thus the ability to make a clear cut decision is more difficult.


The key is the answer to these two questions:

1) Which candidate is most able to appeal to the most voters so the prospect of winning is high?

2) Assuming this candidate were to win, would he be the best to govern in the direction we need to go?

No doubt Newt would be the most likely to effectively debate Obama, to highlight, in language people can fathom, the blunders and misguided policies of the current president. Newt also has an extraordinary record of achievements when the odds were great and no one believed they could be accomplished. Newt's personal life reflects moral chaos at best.

Romney has a personal and family record that is unassailable. The fact that in every public service he has undertaken he has done so without compensation speaks both to his wealth but more importantly to his decency and moral public spirit. Everything Romney has been asked to do he has done so by achieving credible results. That said, his campaign skills are sub-par though they may be getting better.

My personal preference remains Romney and Gingrich remains along shot.

Santorum and Paul are off the charts in terms of where I am coming from and four more years of Obama would be the last nail in our nation's coffin. Therefore, I remain posed with an interesting political conundrum as are many other voters! (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Why all this focus on Israel. Rosner explains.

Rosner fails to mention what happens with Israel could be the basis of WW 4 (Norman Podhoretz wrote a book, which I previewed in a previous memo,  entitled "WW 4." He concluded WW 3 was The Cold War.)  (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1)Obama Talks of Diplomacy as He Stands Tough on Iran

President Obama said he views diplomacy and sanctions as the West’s best hope for getting Iran to stop short of pursuing a nuclear weapon.
By HELENE COOPER


WASHINGTON — President Obama gave a forceful defense of his administration’s commitment to Israel’s security on Sunday, using a speech to a pro-Israel lobbying group to take on critics on the Republican presidential campaign trail who have called for a harder American line to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
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Mr. Obama, speaking before a conference of the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee, declared that he would not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran and would act — militarily, if necessary — to prevent that from happening.

“I do not have a policy of containment,” Mr. Obama said, to applause from the huge crowd in the cavernous hall at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. “I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I’ve made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”

But the president also made clear that he considers diplomacy, and the policy of sanctions set in motion by the United States and Europe, as the West’s best hope for getting Iran to stop short of pursuing a nuclear weapon. “Already, there is too much loose talk of war,” Mr. Obama said on Sunday. “For the sake of Israel’s security, America’s security, and the peace and security of the world, now is not the time for bluster.”

He has said repeatedly that he does not think a military strike, either by Israel or the United States, would do more than delay any Iranian nuclear program.

In a rare detour to discuss domestic politics in what was billed as a foreign policy speech, Mr. Obama chided “partisan politics,” which he said had no place in national security debates. He issued a lengthy defense of actions he has taken as president to protect Israel, including military aid; support for Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defense system; and his decision, to great criticism around the world, to throw the weight of the United States directly in the path of the Arab democracy movement last fall when he opposed the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood through the United Nations Security Council.

On Sunday, he issued a pre-emptive challenge to the roster of Republican presidential candidates and Congressional representatives who will be speaking to the group on Monday and Tuesday. “You can expect that over the next few days, you will hear many fine words from elected officials describing their commitment to the U.S.-Israel relationship,” Mr. Obama said.

“But as you examine my commitment, you don’t just have to count on my words,” he said. “You can look at my deeds.”

Mr. Obama declared, to applause: “There should not be a shred of doubt by now: when the chips are down, I have Israel’s back.” He added: “So if during this political season you hear some question my administration’s support for Israel, remember that it’s not backed up by the facts.”

It was at times a defensive speech, delivered by a president who came into office and was initially criticized for pushing Israel too hard to make concessions for peace with the Palestinians. Over three years, Mr. Obama’s relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has deteriorated as Mr. Netanyahu balked at American demands. Mr. Obama himself has retreated, largely putting aside the Palestinian issue.

But Mr. Obama has nonetheless been dogged by Republican criticism that he has not backed Israel enough, with the Iran nuclear issue now front and center as the most obvious means for Mr. Obama and the Republican candidates vying to replace him to demonstrate support for Israel, which views a nuclear Iran as an existential threat.

At this year’s conference, it often has seemed as if the Palestinian question — which dominated the gathering in 2011 has bedeviled American, Arab and Israeli peace negotiators for decades — no longer existed. The bulk of the talk has been about Iran and how far Israel and its American backers will go to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear bomb.

“As the president said, all options are on the table,” said President Shimon Peres of Israel, who appeared before the group just before Mr. Obama spoke. ‘There is no space between us.”

But demonstrating the wariness among American intelligence and foreign policy officials about repeating the mistakes of the Iraq war, Mr. Obama made a reference to the assessments that continue to say that there is no evidence that Iran has made a final decision to pursue a nuclear weapon. Recent assessments by American spy agencies have reaffirmed intelligence findings in 2007 and 2010 that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program.

He called for increased diplomatic pressure aimed at persuading the Iranian government that it should abandon any nuclear program.

“As president and commander in chief, I have a deeply held preference for peace over war,” Mr. Obama said. “I have sent men and women into harm’s way. I have seen the consequences of those decisions in the eyes of those I meet who have come back gravely wounded, and the absence of those who don’t make it home.”

Mr. Obama is to meet with Mr. Netanyahu on Monday at the White House, where the prime minister is expected to continue the effort to pressure the United States to take a harder line on Iran. Specifically, Mr. Netanyahu wants Mr. Obama to be more explicit about the circumstances under which the United States itself would carry out a strike.

Israeli officials are demanding that Iran agree to halt all enrichment of uranium, and that such a suspension be verified by United Nations inspectors, before the West resumes negotiations with Tehran on its nuclear program.

The White House has rejected that demand, and argues that Iran would never agree to a blanket ban upfront, and to insist on it would doom negotiations before they began. The administration insists that Mr. Obama will stick to his policy, which is focused on using economic sanctions to force the Iranian government to give up its nuclear ambitions, with military action as a last resort.

Mr. Obama called the image of wounded American soldiers “the most searing of my presidency.”

“For this reason,” he said, “as part of my solemn obligation to the American people, I only use force when the time and circumstances demand it. And I know that Israeli leaders also know all too well the costs and consequences of war, even as they recognize their obligation to defend their country.”


1a)Leo Rennert Comments:

Subject: OBAMA'S AIPAC SPEECH -- RIGHT MUSIC, RIGHT WORDS, YET MARRED BY A WORRISOME NOTE
President Obama pulled out all the stops in his AIPAC address to assure his audience that, as he put it, “when the chips are down, I have Israel’s back.”

The president unfurled a lengthy list of his administration’s Israel-support moves – politically, diplomatically, and security-wise.

On the most important issue, Iran’s nuclear program, he pledged to use all elements of American power, including a military component, to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.  He warned that this wasn’t just in Israel’s interest, but also very much in America’s interest and in the interest of the entire world.  A nuclear-armed Iran, he declared, could funnel nuclear weapons to terrorist groups and trigger a nuclear arms race in the world’s most volatile region.

All well said.  And yet, Obama’s speech still left one wondering about his far-from-smooth relations with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.  If the U.S. and Israel are on the same strategic path in countering Iran, as Obama claims, why did he fail to say anything nice about Netanyahu?  Not one single laudatory word – only he looked forward to welcoming Bibi to the White House and that he also understood the weight of Iran’s nuclear threat on the shoulders of the prime minister and other Israeli leaders.

The absence of any laudatory words about Netanyahu conspicuously contrasted with Obama’s lengthy, fulsome praise of Israeli President Shimon Peres, who has turned his traditional ceremonial office into a one-man political and policy-making base that often is not exactly in sync with Netanyahu’s agenda.  In Israeli politics, Peres carries a more dovish banner than the prime minister.

Thus, when Obama spent a good part of his speech in effusive admiration of Peres’s lifetime of public service and capping it with an announcement that Peres soon will return to the Whtie House to receive America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one was left to wonder whether Obama ultimately prefers Peres’ views to Bibi’s.

Peres fully deserved Obama’s hearty praise.  But since Netanyahu is set to meet with Obama at the White House on Monday – their ninth such encounter – one would have expected that the president would use the AIPAC podium to say at least one nice world, even a routing compliment, about Bibi.  He didn’t.
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2)America's Israel Obsession
Why are Americans so preoccupied with my country?

BY SHMUEL ROSNER

In mid-December of last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "with all due respect," declined a request to write an op-ed for the New York Times. In his rejection letter, Netanyahu's senior advisor, Ron Dermer, claimed to have counted up Times (and International Herald Tribune) articles and concluded that of the 20 articles related to Israel published between September and November 2011, 19 portrayed Israel in a negative light. It would seem, he wrote, "as if the surest way to get an op-ed published in the New York Times these days, no matter how obscure the writer or the viewpoint, is to attack Israel."

If one puts aside for a moment the question of pro- or anti-Israel bias, it does seem that the surest way to get an op-ed published anywhere in the United States is to write something about Israel. Since I received a request to write this article for Foreign Policy, I've visited the FP site daily and counted the articles on different topics and countries. You can try it yourself using the search engine: Israel was written about more than Britain, Germany, Greece, India, or Russia. And next week it will be written about even more, as Netanyahu comes to Washington to make yet another speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and meet with U.S. President Barack Obama to discuss Iran strategy and other matters.

Counting mentions of Israel in various American forums is an old habit of mine. Four years ago, in the run-up to the 2008 U.S. presidential election, I begged the candidates to "resist the temptation" to constantly talk about Israel or express their profound love for the Jewish state. I wrote then:

Last week in the vice-presidential debate, Israel's name was mentioned 17 times. China was mentioned twice, Europe just once. Russia didn't come up at all. Nor Britain, France, or Germany.

Needless to say, my advice has not been heeded. In December 2011, I listened to the Republican presidential candidates compete to prove their friendship with Israel at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition. (Mitt Romney promised to visit Israel before visiting any other country; Newt Gingrich said that he would move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on the first day of his presidency.) In early January, like many other journalists from many other foreign countries, I traveled to Iowa to cover the Republican caucuses and had to wonder again about writers from other countries:

Do they not feel neglected amid all this talk about my country? In the more than one dozen campaign events I attended, I didn't hear one word about Japan or Russia or Germany or France or Italy. Europe was mentioned occasionally, as in, "President Obama wants the United States to become like Europe, and we have to stop him." China was mentioned sporadically; Brazil, maybe once. Israel? Every time.

There's more than one reason that Israel became a topic of such constant conversation among American writers, opinion-makers, politicians, and policy wonks. Undeniably, Israel is interesting. It is conveniently located in an area that is continuously a producer of dramatic news, a place to which journalists can easily travel and from which they can easily write -- the one country in the Middle East that doesn't violently prevent the media from doing its job. Then there's the "special relationship" factor: Israel is a U.S. ally, and a strong and vocal lobby of both Jews and Christians is working to preserve the two countries' ties. It is a place for which many Americans have special affinity for religious reasons, meaning that any story on Israel is likely to generate both pageviews and impassioned comments. There's also the politics: Israel is a tool with which candidates for office hammer one another. That's to say nothing of the fact that American Jews, while a tiny minority of the U.S. population, are well represented among journalists.

This makes Israel not just a topic of constant conversation, but can also make the conversation itself quite bizarre to the untrained eye. News sites, blogs, and busy writers can dedicate their time to arguing about the content of some tweets of the new New York Times Jerusalem correspondent; weeks of enraged debate can be wasted on foolish comments made by left-leaning think-tank bloggers. Don't get me wrong: In both cases I'm with those thinking the tweets and the comments were outrageous. But I also must admit that this level of scrutiny and never-ending discussion is rarely given to other countries and that most readers without a high level of interest in Israel-related matters would probably quickly get bored and lost in the petty details of these debates and others.

Israel is to American writers what football is to the general public: Everybody seems to be an expert, or at least believe he or she is one. It's not just the number of mentions and articles written about my country that is perplexing; it's also the number of uninformed comments and unworthy observations. One notable case -- the one that seemed to have irked the prime minister -- was a New York Times op-ed claiming that Israel is only interested in promoting gay rights as a way of "pinkwashing" away its sins against the Palestinians. Another example, by columnist Eric Alterman writing in the Forward, made the ludicrous claim that Israel is becoming a "theocracy."

There's of course the old journalistic saw that "if it bleeds it leads," and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has spilled more than enough blood. But far bloodier conflicts around the world get only a fraction of the coverage that the smallest developments in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process garner. More consequential issues can't possibly compete with the hype and the controversy following every trivial "progress" or "setback" in this ongoing, never-ending story. Take a quick look at the list of the bloodiest world conflicts, and compare the coverage they are getting with the coverage that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict receives in almost every American publication. How much have you read in the New York Times about violence in Honduras recently? How much did you hear about Syria's autocratic regime before the latest eruption of murderous infighting? Have you gotten the proper coverage and analysis of the recent growing tensions in the South Caucasus?

This raises the question of whether all the attention showered on Israel and the Palestinians has brought them one inch closer to resolution of the conflict. Or did it make a complicated situation even worse, by giving the sides more reasons to invest much of their energy on spin and public manipulation, instead of solving the real problems?

Naturally, Israeli leaders would prefer less attention be paid to the conflict with the Palestinians and more to feel-good "start-up nation" kinds of stories. Then there are other issues on which attention is both a blessing and a curse at the same time -- notably Iran.

Israel's policy on Iran is built around pushing the world toward action (be it sanctions or attack), and it depends upon the attention the story is getting from the media. Click-bait headlines like "Will Israel Attack Iran?" ensure that the issue stays front and center in the minds of U.S. policymakers.

On the other hand, the more attention the "Israeli" angle of this story gets, the more it appears that Iran's nuclear program is really just a local concern and not the global threat that the Israeli leadership wants to portray it as. The more Iran's nuclear program is perceived as an "Israeli" issue, the greater the risk that Israel will be blamed for the negative consequences of the tension, such as higher oil prices. There's also the very real danger that, should it come to war, Americans will view the destruction of Iran's nuclear capability as something Israel should handle on its own, rather than supporting an international coalition that would have a much better chance of neutralizing the threat.

The overrepresentation of Israel in the American public square is at times a headache and at times a cause for celebration. Some might argue that the high level of U.S. support for Israel couldn't survive without it. In any event, keeping a low profile -- often a necessity for effective diplomacy -- is impossible for Israel. And it will be all the more so next week when both Obama and Netanyahu speak before 10,000 cheering AIPAC delegates -- a crowd that never tires of discussing Israel and its troubles.
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