The more the government gives me the less I have. With friends like the government , you know the rest.
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What I am going to write may be deemed heretical but as I look over the landscape and assess the results of the recent election it becomes evident the Hispanic vote continues to be a growing and influential force to be reckoned with and, as I have often written, Republicans must eventually resolve the issue of immigration in a manner that is compatible with their deep convictions about awarding illegality and the on ground realities and practicalities, if they wish to win future elections at the national level.. (See 1 below.)
The second issue is that the Spanish vote makes the Liberal Jewish vote less relevant for Democrats except for its fund raising aspect. As the influence of the Hispanic vote grows within the Democrat Party it could result in a decline in the influence of the Jewish vote and particularly if Democrats continue to downgrade their affinity for a relationship with Israel as evidenced by their last Convention.
I suspect, as Republicans learn from their defeats and make modifications in the prominence they give to certain social issues thereby downplaying issues offensive to Jews, more Jews will find compatibility with Republican views - fiscal conservatism and support for Israel are two things Jews actually have in common with Republicans.
This possible political shift will not come quickly but I suspect, over time, more Jews will find a home in the Republican Party. Why? Because , as the economic survival of our Republic becomes more pressing and realistic matters pertaining to abortion etc, should have less vote appeal as primal issues.
As always, time will tell and more times than I would like to admit my off the wall ideas do not always hold water.
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Another reason why our society is threatened. (See 2 below.)
And if that is not enough, as Ed McMahon would say, here comes "Obamascare." (See 2a below.)
Finally this from a dear disheartened friend:If this guy had been giving advice to Mitt Romney-- we'll my best guess is that we would have a new President, and in clear an unambiguous words we would know why. Spend 15 minutes and reflect what could have been. If only Mitt had realized that going into the four corners was not a path to victory, but perhaps a path to defeat. It wasn't Romney's wealth, or his vision, it was his failure to stand up and not be ashamed of who he is. We are in for a a rough four years, but i agree with Bill Whittle, we were not prepared to do what was necessary to win. When you run the four corners, you usually win- ask Dean Smith. But if you run against a team like Duke. with less talent but are better coached, more highly motivated and understand there is no I in team- you will win. We were playing against Duke, and instead of blowing Obama out of the water, Romney failed to go for the jugular. It was a fatal mistake. The results will impact generations. But we must learn from our mistakes, and speak honestly and candidly for what we believe in(and no that does not mean put morons like Aiken and Murdoch up as senators)- what it does mean is to open the tent, realize that being conservative doesn't mean you are mean, rich and bigoted. It means you understand that running the greatest country on earth is a Major Responsibility. You can't do that by being cool. We will find out that the price for four more years of Obama will be a financial, military and societal disaster. But, since we can't afford to quit, we have to start now learning from the mistakes made and get ready for 2016 to take our country back. This is a must listen to. : (See 2b below and click on:Bill Whittle gives a great speech…..
http://blip.tv/davidhorowitztv/bill-whittle-6444929"
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An outdated article worth re-reading.
On a different note, once again Israel was leaned upon to pull Hamas' chestnut out of the fire for the benefit of the world ,Obama and Egypt.
Consequently, in my humble opinion, Israel was the victor in terms of damage to Hamas but the loser overall and once again the terrorist can was allowed to be kicked down the desert dunes of Gaza. (See 3 and 3a and 3b below.)
And then:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNNhG0zDtA8&feature=em-subs_digest&noredirect=1
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Obama and Morsi. What next? More feely touchy nonsense (See 4 below.)
Dick
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1)Pressure building for immigration amnesty: Leaders from various evangelical organizations have sent letters to the president and members of Congress demanding action for the millions of illegal immigrants who have taken up residence in the U.S..
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2)
Redefining Marriage Sign of a Lost Society
One significant development in the recent election was votes in four states approving same sex marriage initiatives. Until now, all previous state referenda to approve same sex marriage – 32 of them - failed.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page – a place where conservatives usually turn for intellectual capital – saw this as cause for celebration.
According to the Journal, marriage definition should come from voters, not from court orders. Americans, they argue, have “shown themselves more than capable of changing their views on gay marriage the democratic way.”
In other words, our definition of marriage should follow process, not principle. Let voters decide.
“As views on gay marriage change, and a growing number of Americans support it, politics will follow. This is how it’s supposed to work.”
I’d guess if I asked the Wall Street Journal editors if the American constitution should be viewed as a “living document” – if our understanding of its words and what they mean should be open to change to reflect attitudes of the moment – they would say “no.”
Liberals think the constitution should be re-engineered every few years like an iPad.
So it is not surprising when liberals, for whom tradition is meaningless, trash once sacred institutions in favor of impulses of the moment.
But it does surprise me when those whose politics are supposedly right-of-center, who view America’s founding documents as sacrosanct and give the highest priority to preserving their integrity, are cavalier regarding the integrity of an institution thousands of years older than our constitution.
But it’s a point of view not uncommon.
In the 1850’s, Stephen Douglas proposed solving the dilemma of whether slavery should be permitted in new states by suggesting that they should just vote. What could be more American than submitting the question of slavery to the democratic process of each state?
To this Abraham Lincoln observed: “God did not place good and evil before man telling him to make his choice. On the contrary, He did tell him there was one tree, of the fruit of which he should not eat, upon pain of certain death….I should scarcely wish so strong a prohibition against slavery in Nebraska.”
Lincoln’s rejoinder to the idea of “popular sovereignty” – that states should vote to determine if slavery would be legal – was that there are core truths – truths that define right and wrong, good and evil - that precede the democratic process.
To reject this premise is to buy into moral chaos. Which is what we are approaching today.
The claim that somehow it is a sign of a healthy, free society that by way of the vote we can re-write our language, our dictionary, our oldest, time-tested traditions is a sign of how lost we are.
Same sex marriage advocates argue that their efforts will save the embattled institution of marriage. But this takes a symptom of the disease and calls it a cure.
As American society has become more self-centered and materialistic, family and marriage have been imploding.
According to the Pew Research Center, in 1960 72 percent of American adults were married. This dropped to 51% in 2011.
Marriage and family is the pillar of any healthy society. It is the institution through which children are born and raised and through which time-tested truths and values are transmitted from one generation to the next.
To deal with the crisis of the collapse of family and marriage by redefining what they are is the sign of a society losing its way.
Fortunately, America is still a free country. Individuals can make their own choices about how they choose to live.
But taking personal choices to deviate from our social standards of right and wrong, true and false, and decide to change those truths and standards, so that nothing is any longer considered deviant, is a bridge to nowhere.
2a)Obamacare Meets Reality. Reality Wins.
Another Adventure In Cargo Cult Economics
streiff (Diary)
For years the Democrat party has derided the GOP’s view of economics. Our view, essentially, is that your money is yours, not the government’s, and the decisions you make on how to spend it will inevitably be more lucid than anything the government comes up with. The corollary to this is that income redistribution is nothing more or less than theft which characterizes garden variety covetousness as fairness. They call this “trickle down” economics.
The Democrats have their own operating principle: Cargo cult economics. It has many facets but the basis idea is that if the government creates something that is associated with a vibrant middle class then a vibrant middle class will spring from that program as inevitably as Athena sprang from the forehead of Zeus.
Though the term has been around for a while, I first encountered it while riding with a good friend through a dystopic steel town outside Pittsburgh where right in the middle of boarded up store fronts some governmental agency had plopped down an “arts center.” The idea being that somehow funding an arts center in a mostly deserted downtown would revive the downtown area because affluent downtowns all have arts centers.
Over the past months, we’ve chronicled the Obama regime’s slavish devotion to cargo cult economics (here | here | here | here | here | here). Now the slow motion implementation of Obamacare is giving us a rich laboratory for observing cargo cult economics in full flower.
What Obamacare has done is create a series of perverse incentives that encourage businesses to stop providing health insurance. As a business you have the choice of providing a rather gaudy health care plan to your employees or paying a tax. I say gaudy because the the basic requirements of the package, providing enough birth control pills to satisfy Sandra Fluke’s appetites, for instance, adds cost on to the plan. Contrary to what a lot of people seem to believe the health care plan provided by your employer is not YOUR health plan, it is your employer’s.
So by paying a tax, a business can avoid the human resources head ache of managing a health plan and reduce costs. What option do you think many businesses will choose.
But wait there is more.
An employer only has to provide a health plan for full time employees. There is no penalty for not providing health coverage to part-time workers. And there are no penalties if you employ fewer than 50 persons (by person I mean full-time equivalents: if you have part time workers and your average number of hours worked exceed 50 x 120 (4 weeks x 30hr/week). You can read more on the nuances of calculating what is a full time equivalent worker courtesy of RedState member jayp.
Faced with the prospect of paying as much as $40,000/year some employers are reducing both full time positions and total number of employees.
Companies as diverse as Papa John’s, St Jude’s Hospital, and Murray Energy have all announced layoffs that are linked to Obamacare.
What Obamacare has done in the name of providing universal health care is to make it advantageous to employers to provide no health care whatsoever. This isn’t necessarily bad, in my view one of the major shortfalls of our current system is that the policy is owned by the employer rather than the employee, but what is bad is when such a sea change occurs when the actual operational concept was to expand the scope of coverage provided by employers.
By gold plating the minimum policy, employers are encouraged to carry no policy at all. To avoid the fines associated with not providing coverage employers have an incentive to reduce a vast majority of employees to working less than 30 hours per week. If you are a waiter, your employer now has an incentive to reduce your tip income to avoid health care costs:
Bob McAdam, Spokesperson for Darden, parent company of Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants, stated that they were still in a test stage back in October. The company had made plans to reduce hours and require tip-sharing from waitstaff to the remainder of employees, which would eliminate the owners from having to provide tip-credit*. (*A set hourly pay amount for waitstaff established by the local government and is divided into two parts. If the waiter doesn’t earn tips then they receive the whole amount of both parts. If the waiter does receive tips then they only receive half of the hourly amount.)On the subject of employers wanting to reduce the incomes of waitstaff for his own benefit, it certainly isn’t going to encourage staff members to purchase food at his restaurant.One issue that concerns career waiters is that they choose the field because they can earn up to $200 per day in tips, having to share their income with remaining employees reduces their own income.When is a waiter responsible for paying for the wages of his co-workers? For that matter why is the paying consumer responsible for paying for the wages of a business above and beyond the price of his meal? The tip has always been a gratuity, a thank you, an appreciation, not meant as a subsidy for business owners to underpay their employees.Since the government assumes that the waiter is earning at least 8 percent in tips figured on his gross sales for the day; reporting less could trigger audits.
In the view of Obama and his minions companies are in business to provide free stuff to their employees (so his view on economics parallels his view on governance) and since a vibrant middle class has health care provided by their employer if the government merely mandated this to happen we would suddenly be prosperous.
Now the demographic Obamacare sought to help is finding itself not only without health coverage, it is also required to work two jobs to make ends meet. Well played, President Obama.
2b)WE NEED TO STOP ELECTION FRAUD...VOTER ID HAS TO BE MADE THE LAW OF THE LAND. THIS IS HOW THE DEMOCRATS ARE ABLE TO CHANGE THIS NATION FOR THE WORST!
I am incredibly steamed this Thanksgiving Holiday over what the Democrats are doing to my country.
Everybody by now knows – or should know – how readily Democrats conduct election fraud, and how determined they are to defend it. James O’Keefe and others have taken videos of paid Democratic operatives encouraging citizens to vote twice. O’Keefe was even able to claim Attorney General Eric Holder’s own ballot at a district polling place by claiming to be him, and then to vote in his place. Democrats have promoted Motor Voter laws and same day registration, and month-long election days to help them mobilize the votes of people who are so unconnected to the political process and so uninterested in the country’s future, and perhaps so incompetent to understand what voting entails that they require keepers to see that they get to the polls and then vote the “right” way. In the election that put Al Franken in the Senate by a few hundred votes, more than a thousand felons voted illegally because of the loose laws that govern the polling booth – laws the Democrats want to make even looser. It is in fact the number one civil rights issue of the NAACP this year to give felons the right to vote. So we know that Democrats have little respect for the election process, and we should assume will attempt to pursue their victories by any means necessary.
But even knowing this, I was not prepared for a conversation I had at Thanksgiving dinner today with my brother-in-law, Henry, who has lived most of his life in a home for the mentally disabled, and though now in his forties has the intelligence level of a six-year-old.
“Obama saved me,” he said to me out of the blue.
“What do you mean?”
“I voted for him for president and now he’s saving me.”
I was taken aback by these words, since Henry had no idea who Obama was, or what a president might be, and would be unable to fill out a registration form let alone get to the polling place by himself. So I asked him how he knew that and how he had registered and cast his vote. In halting, impeded speech he told me that the people who take care of him at the home filled out “the papers” to register him to vote, told him how Obama cared for him, even taught him the Obama chants, and then took him to the polling place to vote. They did the same for all of the mentally disabled patients in their care, approximately sixty in all.
This is so appalling in its contempt for the voting process, which is the very foundation of our democracy, and in its cynical exploitation of my brother-in-law and the other patients in the home, many of whose mental capacities are even more limited than his that I am at a loss for words to express it. I hope poll-watching groups like “True the Vote” will comb the rolls of residents at other homes for the mentally disabled, and attempt to stop this particular abuse. I hope that people who care about our country will make electoral fraud a focus of their political efforts, and work to protect the integrity of the voting process.
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3)My premise is that peace will not come to Israel and she should make no concessions. Ted Belman
The news that George Mitchell is resigning as US special envoy closes a chapter in the greatest international failure of the Obama administration to date. The President’s foreign policy team has some real successes under its belt — the reset with Russia, a marked reduction in global levels of anti-Americanism, steady progress in Iraq, and of course the spectacular Abbottabad raid to name a few — but there is no way to disguise the harsh truth: the White House flopped big time on the Israel-Palestine process.
Administration apologists want to shift the blame for the Middle East failure to Israeli intransigence and Palestinian fecklessness, and while those factors are, as usual, part of the problem, the failure of its peace initiative is one mess the White House owns.
Brimming with self-confidence, the incoming team was sure it could get the job done back in 2009. President Clinton, they argued, had the right idea, but he left it too late. Bush also left it too late, they said, and was both too close to Israel and too diplomatically inept. The Obamans would show us how the job should be done. They would start early with a full court press and, unlike President Obama’s supposedly incompetent predecessors, they wouldn’t be “Israel’s lawyer.” Getting tough on Israel would score points in the Muslim world and bring the peace negotiations to a rapid conclusion.
Brimming with self-confidence, the incoming team was sure it could get the job done back in 2009. President Clinton, they argued, had the right idea, but he left it too late. Bush also left it too late, they said, and was both too close to Israel and too diplomatically inept. The Obamans would show us how the job should be done. They would start early with a full court press and, unlike President Obama’s supposedly incompetent predecessors, they wouldn’t be “Israel’s lawyer.” Getting tough on Israel would score points in the Muslim world and bring the peace negotiations to a rapid conclusion.
Arrogance mixes poorly with inexperience; the US position in the peace process has been on the skids from the new administration’s earliest days, and the unraveling of American diplomacy in the Middle East has significantly damaged both the perception and the reality of American strength in the region.
Let us hope that things change, but the bitter truth is that so far President Obama has the worst Middle East peace policy since US presidents first took a direct interest in the peace process back in the Nixon Administration. No one has tried harder and accomplished less than President Obama. After two years of high profile White House activism neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians think that this President can help them; neither side feels much need to work with Washington at this point.
Worse, there are now questions about the survival of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty negotiated under Jimmy Carter. President Obama may not only be remembered as a president who failed to make any progress towards Middle East peace; he could well be the president who saw thirty years of painful progress collapse on his watch.
The White House failed so badly and so publicly because it never quite grasped the dynamics of the conflict. Two ideas seem to have dominated its approach to the issue: both led to failure.
Don’t Fight With Israel
The first is that the United States should ‘get tough’ on Israel to get an agreement. Like all truly bad ideas, this one has just enough truth in it to make it superficially attractive. Israel is more likely to make concessions in a peace negotiation led by the United States than on its own, and American peace negotiators need to find ways to facilitate Israeli flexibility. It is, therefore, true that at some point in successful negotiations, Americans will need to convince the Israelis to sign onto ideas that they initially don’t like.
There is, however, a large gap between nudging Israel toward a final agreement and trying to improve America’s strength in the negotiating process by distancing ourselves from the Jewish state early on. The Obama team seems to have acted on the assumption that the close US-Israel relationship was a problem for America’s peacemaking efforts.
Wrong. America’s great advantage as a peacemaker flows from our special relationship with Israel. Israel trusts America more than it trusts any other power; as long as that is true it will be more forthcoming in American-led negotiations than in any other forum. America can get Israel to make more concessions than anybody else — but that power derives from the confidence Israel has in our backing. The Arabs value the US because we can get Israel to agree to compromises they can’t get on their own; our special relationship with Israel is not an obstacle to US outreach to Palestinians — it is the key to our ability to work with them. After all, there are plenty of countries in Europe and elsewhere who sympathize with the Palestinians. All of them are worthless as mediators because the Israelis don’t listen to them.
The Obama administration got this exactly wrong. The responsible officials seem to have thought that the United States could force concessions down Israel’s throat. Believing that, the administration made the fatefully foolish decision to make a public demand that Israel freeze all settlement activity in order to advance the new peace process. The hope was that this would so endear us to the Palestinians that they would trust the US more and be more willing to compromise on key demands of their own.
That flopped. President Obama does not and never did have the power to make Israel deliver the total freeze he unwisely commanded. (I happen to believe that such a freeze would be a smart move on Israel’s part — but what I think and you think isn’t the issue. It’s what the Israeli government thinks that counts.) This had an entirely predictable result: once President Obama demanded a full construction freeze the Palestinians could ask for no less. When he inevitably and predictably failed to get the Israelis to accept this unrealistic demand he looked weak and the Palestinians had no real negotiating options left.
The damage to US power and prestige is real and ongoing. There is no percentage for an Israeli Prime Minister in making President Obama look good; now Israel is likely to take a tougher line when the Obama administration asks it for help than it normally would.
That isn’t just a problem for US-Israel relations. An American administration that can’t get concessions from Israel is a worthless mediator from a Palestinian point of view. The White House‘s failure to manage the US-Israel relationship soured rather than sweetened relations with the Palestinian Authority. In trying to reach out to the Arabs by dissing the Israelis, the White House lost ground with both sides.
President Obama’s effort to make peace by pushing Israel forced the Palestinians onto a more radical course. Not only is the PA President Mahmoud Abbas publicly dissing Obama as a weakling and an untrustworthy partner; Fatah has chosen to sign onto a reconciliation agreement with Hamas even as Hamas’ leader in Gaza attacks the US and defends bin Laden. Trying to cozy up to the Palestinians by cold-shouldering Israel got the United States nothing: no affection, cooperation or respect from the Palestinians, and no concessions from Israel.
There are signs that the White House increasingly regrets this error. The increased prominence of longtime negotiator Dennis Ross (once attacked by the ‘realists’ who thought distancing the US from Israel would enhance our position) suggests that President Obama wants to change course. That is a good sign, but valuable time has already been lost and it will take more time to rebuild the kind of relationship with Israel that can make the Obama administration an effective peacemaker.
Forget Northern Ireland
The second big mistake the White House made was symbolized by the appointment of George Mitchell as mediator based on his (well deserved) success in Northern Ireland. The belief that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is in some useful way similar to the Protestant-Catholic dispute in Northern Ireland is widespread in both the American and British establishments. It is a snare and a delusion and it is one of the reasons that so much energy and effort has had so few positive results over so much time.
The Northern Ireland parallel has enormous Establishment appeal. In Northern Ireland there were two radical fringes: Protestant and Catholic. Peacemaking there involved promoting economic growth, moderate policies that removed the greatest grievances of the Catholics while maintaining the safeguards most Protestants wanted and deepening the cooperation between two friendly democratic governments — Britain and Ireland. It was hard and it took a long time, but the path was clear, and with patience and determination peace (still a bit fragile, but real) could take hold.
In Northern Ireland, there was a clearly identifiable, win-win solution that, while it didn’t satisfy all the demands of either community, made just about everybody in both communities better off. The job of the negotiators was to cajole enough of the radicals in both communities into making the necessary compromises to get to win-win.
Unfortunately, the situation in Israel and the Territories is not nearly so promising. Any conceivable peace deal will create too many bitter losers (Palestinians who can’t go ‘home’ to pre-1967 Israel and Israeli settlers who will have to give up their homes and their ‘Greater Israel’ dream) to work as easily and smoothly as the compromise in Northern Ireland. Nobody gave up a home in Northern Ireland; nobody was stuck in a refugee camp.
The concepts and the methods that worked in Northern Ireland won’t work in the Middle East. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and George Mitchell all went into the Middle East with the idea that the Northern Ireland experience could guide them to success; all of them failed.
The similarities between the Northern Irish conflict and the Israel-Palestine fight are superficial; the differences are deep and profound. First, both of the nationalist movements in Israel-Palestine are expansionist and unsatisfied. In Ireland, the Ulster Protestants just wanted to keep what they had; they didn’t want to build new settlements in Dublin and Cork and they didn’t want the restoration of British rule across the whole island. In Israel, there are many people who think that the Zionist task is unfinished until the entire land is redeemed. On the Palestinian side, there are also many people who think the 1949 boundaries are wrong; they want the whole thing back, not just the West Bank and Gaza.
The gap between the two communities is almost infinitely wider in the Middle East than in Northern Ireland, and the status quo is genuinely intolerable to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Those living in refugee camps on the West Bank, almost everyone in Gaza and Palestinians in Lebanon and elsewhere have problems that a two-state solution won’t solve. The Northern Ireland peace process held out the hope for better lives for almost everyone involved; many Palestinians do not see a two state agreement with Israel as something that will make their lives better.
Second, the international community was strongly and unambiguously in favor of peace in Northern Ireland. The Irish weren’t secretly funding radical and rejectionist nationalist terror groups. Iceland and Denmark weren’t funding Irish terrorists to advance their own agendas. France wasn’t encouraging the IRA to fight on as a way of containing Britain. Catholics around the world weren’t demonstrating and raising money for Irish annexation of Ulster; the Pope wasn’t issuing encyclicals affirming the religious duty of Catholics to fight to kick the heretics out. (A few grizzled US-based Irish emigrants raised money for the IRA, but this is nothing compared to what groups like Hamas get from abroad.) The European Union wasn’t condemning British war crimes in Ulster and passing resolutions in favor of Irish grievances.
The EU, the US, Ireland, the Vatican and Britain all wanted the troubles to stop. None of them were willing to help troublemakers. All of them were willing to crack down on terrorist groups. Ireland and Britain both wanted better relations with each other more than they wanted to help either side win an advantage in Northern Ireland. The Irish government thought the IRA was a group of embarrassing throwbacks; the British thought the same thing about the Ulster hardliners.
No such consensus exists in the Middle East. Radical factions among the Palestinians can count on political, economic and military support from many outside powers who want to keep this dispute on the boil for reasons of their own.
Third, the conflict in Ireland was contained by a network of effective governments and strong institutions. In the Republic of Ireland the Irish had a well functioning state with two generations of successful independence behind it. The Irish government was not worried about its ability to maintain power in the event of a political or military challenge from radical factions in Sinn Fein. It could make and enforce decisions based on the consent of its people through a democratic process. Ditto on the Ulster side, where Great Britain, despite its difficulties, never lost the ability to contain the violence of the Protestant side.
The Palestinians are more deeply divided over their best course of action than the Irish ever were — and they lack the institutions and experience that allowed the Republic of Ireland both to accept the partition of the island and to enforce peace on the radical minority who wanted to continue the ancient struggle with Britain for a united, republican Eire.
Finally, those who think the Israeli-Palestinian struggle mirrors the Irish problem believe that the moderate middle on both sides is strong enough to bring about and defend a compromise peace. There must, many negotiators believe, be some way to draw the boundaries and set the terms for a two state solution that will win the support of enough people on both sides so that the peace agreement takes hold. The split-the-difference negotiating strategy that we have tried for so long with so little success logically follows from this belief.
Unfortunately, this hasn’t been true for 100 years in the Middle East and it isn’t true today. Hamas isn’t rejecting the two state solution and the legitimacy of Israel because Hamas is blind to Palestinian sentiment. Hamas understands that its hawkish position is vital to its political support in Gaza. On the West Bank, Palestinians are divided. Some are refugees and dream only of a return to their ancestral homes in contemporary Israel. But many others have always lived on the West Bank and still live on the farms and in the homes where their families have lived for generations.
In Gaza, just about everyone is a refugee. A two state solution that leaves them in refugee camps in the desert doesn’t feel like a constructive, win-win compromise. It feels like bitter and total defeat.
Arafat and Fatah began to lose support in Gaza as soon as public opinion realized that Arafat was exploring the option of a settlement with Israel that gave up the right of return. Even today, Palestinian negotiators who understand perfectly well that at most a very small number of Palestinians will ever regain lost property in Israel cannot publicly admit what they know.
It’s All About Refugees
No matter what pieces of paper Palestinian negotiators sign, many Palestinians will reject a two state solution that doesn’t offer a full right of return. Those Palestinians will enjoy financial and political support from countries like Iran, and radical factions and governments throughout the world who see an advantage in keeping this dispute alive.
In Northern Ireland the radical minority that wants to continue fighting is small, isolated and easily marginalized. In the Middle East the radicals are more numerous and better connected. Violence against Israel will continue no matter how many agreements are signed and how many photo ops are held on the White House lawn.
This doesn’t mean that the US should give up on the peace process. But it means that to succeed we have to accept that peace is still far away. There will be no peace in the Middle East until a workable solution is found for the human problems of the Palestinian people. Part of this involves an independent Palestinian state including the West Bank and Gaza; part of it includes compensation for Palestinian refugees (and for Jews forced out of their homes throughout the Arab world by mob violence and government decree after 1948); part of it includes the resettlement of Gazans and stateless Palestinian refugees from countries like Lebanon, Syria and beyond where even today Palestinians lack passports and full legal rights. Part of it will involve the increasing isolation and marginalization of the shrinking minority of Palestinians who reject terms that the rest of the world (including more and more Muslims) recognizes as reasonably just. Part of it will come from pressure on governments (Syria and Iran for example) who consciously try to block peace: too many foreign powers and political groups feed on Palestinian misery and anger.
None of this means turning on Israel. The refugee problem in the Middle East is not solely or even primarily Israel’s fault, and Israel can’t solve it. No amount of pressure on Israel can solve the Palestinian refugee problem; Israel cannot and will not take them back and this has been clear for sixty years.
If anybody is to blame for the refugee mess, it is the United Nations and the ‘world community’. When the British gave up their League of Nations mandate over Palestine and returned it to UN jurisdiction, the UN failed in its duty to protect both Arabs and Jews. The war that broke out between Palestinians and Israelis and that created the refugee problem was a consequence of the UN’s failure to ensure an orderly implementation of the partition plan it approved. Had the Arabs won the war there would have been a massive Jewish refugee problem as desperate Jews fled from or were expelled by advancing Arab armies; when the Israelis won the war it was the Arabs who fled and/or were expelled.
We cannot have peace in the Middle East without a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem. It may be that the refugees (and their descendants: it has been more than 60 years since the Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes) will not accept any settlement that the world is willing or able to make. If they don’t, however, the conflict will not come to an end.
So far, there is no sign that the Obama administration is ready to face this painful truth. Israel is 63 years old; for two thirds of that time (since Henry Kissinger initiated ‘shuttle diplomacy’ after the 1973 war) the US has been trying to make peace without coming to grips with the refugee issue. After forty years of failure, perhaps it is time to try something new
3a)Hamas's Victory: How Muslims See It
By Harold Rhode
The loser has no say in the terms; only the victor has. The current agreement emboldens Israel's and America's enemies.
Do Americans understand the Muslim view of war? Throughout the Muslim world, there were celebrations with people singing and dancing and giving each other sweets, celebrating Hamas's victory over the Israelis. Hamas suffered serious losses. As Ehud Barak, Israel's Defense Minister, stated at the news conference in which he announced the ceasefire, many Hamas leaders were eliminated and their military capabilities were sharply degraded.
But Hamas was not defeated. It will clearly be able to rain down rockets on the Israeli civilian population again when it chooses.
What we call terror is a legitimate tactic of Muslim warfare -- terror is how the Muslim prophet Muhammad subdued his enemies. He struck fear into their hearts, coercing them to surrender. Hamas is doing nothing more than following Muhammad's guidance.
Ironically, at the same time as Barak was proudly announcing the ceasefire -- and his colleagues Prime Minister Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Lieberman were chiming in -- Israeli radio could be heard interrupting their speeches with Code Red alerts to the people of the south to run to their shelters: Hamas and its cohorts had continued firing rockets at Israel.
Why did Hamas fire these rockets during the ceasefire announcement? The last day of the Israel-Hamas fight was the most violent: Hamas apparently wanted to prove it had the upper hand going towards a cease fire, and that it could impose a cease fire on Israel on Hamas's terms. That would erase the perception that Israel was trying to create of a Hamas crawling for dear life to the finish line, saved by the bell. To drive this point home, Hamas therefore fired rockets after the ceasefire to get the last shots, to thereby prove that Israel gave in to Hamas. For Hamas, this was all about managing perceptions as to which side needed the ceasefire more than the other. Moreover, this does not even touch on the additional point that Hamas is making that Israel did not launch a ground offensive because it was too afraid, concerned about the cost of doing so.
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How would ibn Hazm, the great Muslim theorist on war, understand the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas? He probably would have believed -- as, most likely, do his modern day co-religionists -- that the Israelis were afraid to destroy Hamas's leadership.
Ibn Hazm wrote: "When at war, show your enemy no mercy, but when you have him at your mercy, you must give him breathing room but you dictate the terms." The loser has no say in the terms; only the victor has.
The terms of this agreement allow Hamas to live another day, re-arm and fight again. To the Muslims, this is a sign that Israel does not have either the ability or the will to make them surrender. Israel and its allies have thus proven to the Arabs, Turks, Iranians, and other Muslims, that Israel is weak and, for whatever reason, is incapable or unwilling to do what is necessary to subdue its enemies.
The current agreement emboldens Israel's and America's enemies. It gives them the emotional fortitude to fight on. Unless Israel destroys Hamas's leadership once and for all, it can expect many more years of terrorists showering death and destruction on its population. These Islamic terrorists are consequently inspired to think that America and other Western allies are easier targets for more Islamic fundamentalist terror.
Where does America fit into this picture? Muslims have a deep belief that all non-Muslims are united against the Muslims; people are either Muslims or non-Muslims. According to a classic Arabo-Islamic principle: "Unbelief is one nation". That means that all Muslims belong to one "nation" and all non-Muslims belong to another, united against the Muslims. Many Muslims therefore have difficulty making a distinction between Americans and Israelis, both members of the same non-Muslim people.
Many Muslims also believe that America pressured Israel to accept this ceasefire. In Muslim eyes, this means that non-Muslim America did not stand by its natural non-Muslim ally, Israel. America as an ally is therefore unreliable. If America would not even support its fellow non-Muslim ally, how can Muslims, such as, say, the Sunni Saudis, rely on the US to protect them from their existential enemy, Shi'ite Iran? The Saudis can only conclude that they have no alternative other than to seek different, less feckless, allies such as China or Russia to protect them from the Iranian regime. America, they likely recall, refused to support its ally, the Shah, against Khomeini, and thus America lost Iran as a great ally. It also quickly abandoned its ally Egyptian President Mubarak. Will America lose the Saudis as well?
It hard to imagine that at least some of Israel's leaders do not understand this Muslim mindset. That notion makes it even more difficult to understand why Israel stopped short of victory, unless Israel might possibly have decided to weaken Iran's ally, Hamas, to such an extent that it could then address the Iranian problem without worrying about an attack from Gaza.
Until the early 1970s, the Israelis seem to have understood their enemy's view of war; do they now? Being farther away, the Americans have had less of a need to do so. Will America ever understand the Muslim world they way it sees itself and make policy decisions more appropriate to, and in line with, that view? If America and Israel choose not to, they embolden their enemies, but do so at their peril.
3b)Some Tentative Achievements Israel Scored with Pillar of Defense
By Dov FischerRead more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/some_tentative_achievements_israel_scored_with_pillar_of_defense.html#ixzz2DLTNH8UL
There is room for doubt regarding the "ceasefire" that has been announced in Israel's effort to eradicate the Hamas terrorist infrastructure. Israel may well have been better-served to have continued doing what it was doing, and the depiction of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as peacemakers, while murderers dance in the streets of Gaza, is no cause for joy. On the other hand, an Israeli ground incursion would have added peril for many of her boys, and we have no right sitting in America to criticize Israel for choosing not to imperil her boys. Furthermore, the question -- whose
honest answer we never will know -- is: "What were Israel's military objectives in this battle?"
If the objective was to put Hamas out of business once and for all, then this operation was a failure for Israel. Likewise, if the goal was to make it impossible for Hamas to continuing to launch rockets into Southern Israel, then this operation would seem to have been pointless. Hamas will continue shooting rockets into Sderot. They still are doing so, albeit sporadically, even at the time of this writing. However, if Israel had other objectives, under a smokescreen of putting Hamas out of business, then Israel may have achieved its goals effectively. To wit:
Israel may have succeeded in completely knocking out all long-range Fajr-5 missiles, capable of reaching Tel Aviv, that Hamas had smuggled in from Iran these past few years. This would reduce the number of Israelis subject to missile fire from 3.5 million people to under 1 million. It also would protect the nation's most vital infrastructure from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.
Israel may have succeeded completely in testing the effectiveness of her Iron Dome defensive batteries in actual wartime conditions for the purpose of upgrading perceived flaws, thereby better understanding how to protect cities in her south like Ashkelon and Ashdod and points north to Jerusalem. In addition, Israel may have used this real-time combat testing to influence and augment how she further develops the "Chetz" ("Arrow") and "David's Sling" defense systems she now is refining and constructing to defend against middle-range and long-range rockets. These systems parallel the Iron Dome's efforts aimed at defending against shorter-range rockets.
Israel may have succeeded completely, in advance of a possible future attack against Iranian nuclear capabilities, in testing theories that (i) for all its bluster, Egypt will not join a military conflagration that could result in military disaster for Egypt and thereby in an outraged and humiliated Egyptian Army leadership conducting a coup to seize political control from the Muslim Brotherhood civilian leadership that supplanted them; and (ii) for all its bluster, Hezb'allah may not be poised presently to attack Israel.
Israel may have succeeded completely in sending a message to Iran that Israel is capable of striking and ready to strike at Iran's nuclear facilities if necessary, and -- at least for the next two years -- Iran no longer can rely on Hamas and Egypt on Israel's western front to step up with sufficient support in a military conflict with Iran that would divert Israeli air power and defenses from focusing on Iran.
Israel may have cut a deal secretly with Clinton and Obama that includes our country now gaining access to strategic military lessons learned by Israel from this conflagration, and Israel gaining significant new funding towards (i) placing several more Iron Dome batteries into operation to blanket Israel's skies more thoroughly, (ii) enhancing the research and development of "Chetz" and "David's Sling," and possibly (iii) offsetting some or much of Israel's costs in prosecuting this eight-day "weed-cutting" operation, including the $50,000 that each Iron Dome surface-to-air interceptor missile costs.
By striking swiftly at some 1,500 pre-planned strategic targets and avoiding a subsequent extended ground incursion, thereby limiting Gaza "civilian" casualties and achieving some valuable goals before the anti-Israel lobby could gather political steam, Israel may have deterred certain European Union countries from voting in the United Nations at this time in favor of upgrading "Palestinian" status in the U.N. There may have been a secret quid-pro-quo to the effect that Israel cease fire and the EU stand down. Maybe. What is certain is that, for the first time in decades, Israel has prosecuted a major weed-cutting operation before the political left could mount an international counter-propaganda effort aimed at delegitimizing Israel's right to protect her citizens and national existence from murderers. Hamas are based among a population that freely elected these murderers to lead them and be their surrogates, while stockpiling weapons and stationing rockets and launchers in hospitals, mosques, school buildings and playgrounds, and residential apartment buildings. Despite the left's knee-jerk tradition of siding with terrorists and murderers against civilized societies that fight back to protect themselves from annihilation, Israel eviscerated hundreds of strategic targets before the left could mobilize its haters to act.
The Netanyahu government may have succeeded completely in sending a message to those within Israel, and outside, who want to see Israel accept a "Two-State Solution" that would see an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria (the so-called "West Bank") that would parallel Israel's prior withdrawals from Gaza and southern Lebanon. The eight-day Operation Pillar of Defense has demonstrated that any Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria will transform Tel Aviv and Jerusalem forevermore from exciting Western cities and repositories of culture and civilization to the equivalent of targets in a shooting arcade. Thus, this operation may have proven that old political slogans and equations no longer make any sense, and that it no longer is conceivable for Israel to withdraw from post-1967 Judea and Samaria -- even as it is unfathomable and utterly impracticable to uproot 350,000 Jews and more from their homes.
So maybe, in the final analysis, this was a successful, purposeful operation for Israel.
Dov Fischer, a legal affairs consultant and adjunct professor of the law of civil procedure and advanced torts, is rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County. He was formerly chief articles editor of UCLA Law Review and writes extensively on political, cultural, and religious issues.
3b)Hamas' sense of empowerment is justified
By Sheera Frenkel
UN envoy to Middle East admits to 'quiet engagements' with terrorist group for 'years'
The United Nations envoy to the Middle East acknowledged Sunday that he has maintained quiet contacts with the Islamist group Hamas for "years," despite the international community's policy to isolate the group.
In an interview with McClatchy, Robert Serry described his office's contacts with Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007, as "quiet engagements" and said his office was now "hoping to help the parties get to a more durable solution".
"Because we are on the ground we have our informal contacts with Hamas. How could we not?" he said. "We also have our quiet engagements with Hamas to work for a calm. In the last years I have been working to pass on messages to Hamas."
An Israeli official who is not authorized to discuss the matter publicly but spoke on the condition of anonymity said that as far as Israel was concerned, Hamas would continue to face widespread isolation unless it renounced violence and formally accepted the State of Israel's right to exist, among other steps.
"I am surprised to hear the UN and other international groups are considering various levels of dialogue considering this is a terror group which has never shown itself to be anything else," the official said.
Serry, a Dutch career diplomat, visited the Gaza Strip and southern Israel this weekend to survey the damage from the latest round of hostilities between Israel and militants in Gaza. At least 163 Palestinians and six Israelis were killed in the violence, which included aerial and naval bombardment of Gaza by the Israelis and the targeting of Israeli cities by Gaza militants firing hundreds of rockets.
Officially, the international community has no direct contact with Hamas. The U.N., the United States and other Western governments renounced any dialogue with Hamas after the Islamist group, which has never acknowledged Israel's right to exist, won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006.
In a statement that year, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said the international community would accept Hamas only if it showed "a commitment to the principles of nonviolence, recognition of Israel and the acceptance of previous agreements and obligations."
Israel has consistently pressed for a complete isolation of Hamas, which it and the United States call a terrorist group. In addition to the freeze on all diplomatic and political contacts, Israel has enforced a blockade that includes controlling the movement of goods into Gaza.
But after the Arab Spring turmoil in which Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown and the election of a former member of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood to succeed him, Hamas' isolation has been easing. Egypt has talked of opening its border with Gaza and facilitating trade, and last month, Bahrain and Qatar became the first two countries to send their heads of state to visit Gaza. Other Arab nations promised to quickly do the same.
Last week's cease-fire, which called for Israel to ease its blockade of Gaza, raised questions about whether the isolation of Hamas can continue.
Western governments, including the United States, have remained adamant that they have no direct contact with Hamas.
In a briefing in Washington last week, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the United States was aware of other parties who were visiting Gaza and engaging in dialogue there as a way of advancing a truce between the Gaza Strip and Israel. But she said there was no change contemplated in U.S. policy toward Hamas.
"You know what our conditions for contact with Hamas have been," she said. "They have not changed; they will not change in this circumstance. They need to recognize Israel's right to exist. They need to renounce violence and take those other measures that we've always called for."
Serry noted that Hamas has still not met the U.N.'s demands that it recognize Israel and renounce violence. But he said that Hamas officials have recently made statements suggesting that they were willing to moderate their position on some key points.
In an interview over the weekend with CNN, Hamas political head Khaled Mashaal said his group was willing to accept a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders, "or 22 percent of 'historical Palestine.' "
He also suggested that his group would be willing to recognize Israel once progress was made toward the establishment of an independent Palestinian State
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4)Obama and the Morsi Dictatorship
By Jonathan Tobin
A president who says he wants peace and democracy in the Middle East is now acting as if the Islamists that run Turkey and Egypt are his new best friends while continuing to treat the head of the only democracy in the region as a nuisance
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has had quite a week. He helped broker a cease-fire between his Hamas ally and Israel to the acclaim of the international community as well as the United States and his new friend President Obama. He followed that triumph up by issuing new decrees that effectively give him dictatorial powers over Egypt. In less than year in office, Morsi has amassed as much power as Hosni Mubarak had in his time in office as the country's strongman and he has done it while getting closer to the United States rather than having his Islamist regime being condemned or isolated by Washington.
The full implications of Morsi's ascendency are not yet apparent. But we can draw a few rather obvious conclusions from these events. The first is this makes the region a much more dangerous place and peace even more unlikely. the second is that the much ballyhooed Arab Spring turned out to be an Islamist triumph, not an opening for democracy. And third, and perhaps most disconcerting for Americans, it looks like the Obama administration has shown itself again to be a band of hopeless amateurs when it comes to the Middle East. While President Obama shouldn't be blamed for toppling Mubarak, this episode is more proof of the gap between his foreign policy instincts and a rational defense of American interests.
The first point to be made about the cheering for Morsi's role in brokering the cease-fire is misplaced. It cannot be emphasized too much that the reason why Hamas felt so confident about picking a fight with Israel that it could not possibly win militarily is the fact that Egypt and fellow regional power Turkey were treating it as an ally rather than as terrorist regime that needed to be isolated and controlled. While Morsi has sought to exercise some influence over Gaza by keeping the border crossings to Sinai closed (more as a result of concern over the violence spilling over into Egyptian territory than a desire to restrain terrorism), the support for the legitimacy of the illegal Hamas regime on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood government has been a game changer.
More than ever before, Hamas now has the whip hand over the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority. That makes the already nearly non-existent chances of peace between Palestinians and Israelis even smaller. Though it can be argued that the ability of Hamas to preserve its rule over Gaza following the last bout of fighting with Israel in January 2009 already made it clear that it was a force to be reckoned with, the backing of Egypt and Turkey and the tacit approval of the United States in the cease-fire means there can be no doubt that Hamas truly is the face of Palestinian nationalism these days as well as the owners of an independent Palestinian state in all but name. With Cairo and Ankara backing them up and Iranian missiles in their arsenal, Hamas's strength makes the standard liberal talking point about it being necessary for Israel to make more concessions to Fatah even more absurd than ever.
If the blockade of Gaza is now to be weakened even further to allow "construction materials" as well as the food and medicine that has never ceased flowing into the area from Israel, then it must be acknowledged that Hamas is more powerful than ever and well placed to make mischief in the region whenever it likes. Rather than applauding Morsi's role in the cease-fire, Americans should be asking why the administration has acquiesced to having one of their nation's primary aid recipients being an ally of Hamas. They should also be wondering about what exactly it is that passed between Obama and Morsi during their phone conversations and what promises, if any, were made by the United States about future pressure on Israel.
Morsi's consolidation of dictatorial power also should not have taken Washington by surprise, as it seems to have done. For several months, the State Department has been acting as if it bought the argument that the Muslim Brotherhood government was basically moderate in nature and more interested in economic development than pursuing ideological goals. But Morsi's actions, in which he has sidelined every competing power base that might have acted as a check on his ambitions, makes it apparent that his real purpose is to make his movement's control of the country permanent. Any hope that democracy was coming to Egypt or the rest of the Arab and Muslim world was misplaced. And any idea that the United States can bribe Morsi or any other Islamist into playing ball is sheer folly.
That leads us to the final point about the administration's utter lack of skill in dealing with the realities of the Middle East.
Even if we were to concede that the president's motives were pure and that he wanted nothing more than to bring peace to the region and democracy to Arab nations that have never known it, virtually everything that the administration has done has made the achievement of these goals even less likely than before.
The president isn't personally responsible for the collapse of an unsustainable Mubarak dictatorship. But he did nothing to aid the cause of the few Egyptian liberals who actually want democracy. Worse than that, he undercut the efforts of the Egyptian military to act as a brake on the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead of seeking to use the billions that Egypt gets from the U.S. as a lever with which he could restrain Cairo from backing Hamas and the Brotherhood from seizing more power, Washington has embraced Morsi. That emboldened Hamas and led to the recent fighting. Though the president said all the right things about backing Israel's right to self-defense, his diplomatic maneuvering not only helped set the stage for more violence but made it more difficult for Israel to exercise that right.
A president who says he wants peace and democracy in the Middle East is now acting as if the Islamists that run Turkey and Egypt are his new best friends while continuing to treat the head of the only democracy in the region as a nuisance. In doing so, President Obama has helped make the world a lot more dangerous that it might otherwise have been.
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