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Hard enough for an informed person to avoid being manipulated but for the unwashed it is hopeless. (See 2 below.)
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Krauthammer: UN play pen of dictators. (See 3 below.)
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Obama, the open and shut administration. (See 4 below.)
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The Jewish media and Israel - not supportive at all. In fact most of the time they go out of their way to be critical. (See 5 below.)
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My dear and bright long standing friend and fellow memo reader offers his thinking on Government spending as a % of GDP.
He makes the same argument I have been making. The government takes far too much from the private sector. (See 6 below.)
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As a foreign policy expert, Susan Rice has a history of being a disaster. Perhaps Biden has made more mistakes. (See 7 below.)
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Dick
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1)
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Egypt and the Strategic Balance
StratforBy George Friedman
Founder and Chief Executive OfficerImmediately following the declaration of acease-fire in Gaza, Egypt was plunged into a massive domestic crisis. Mohammed Morsi, elected in the first presidential election after the fall of Hosni Mubarak, passed a decree that would essentially neuter the independent judiciary by placing his executive powers above the high court and proposed changes to the constitution that would institutionalize the Muslim Brotherhood's power. Following the decree, Morsi's political opponents launched massive demonstrations that threw Egypt into domestic instability and uncertainty.In the case of most countries, this would not be a matter of international note. But Egypt is not just another country. It is the largest Arab country and one that has been the traditional center of the Arab world. Equally important, if Egypt's domestic changes translate into shifts in its foreign policy, it could affect the regional balance of power for decades to come.Morsi's Challenge to the Nasserite Model
The Arab Spring was seen by some observers to be a largely secular movement aimed at establishing constitutional democracy. The problem with this theory was that while the demonstrators might have had the strength to force an election, it was not certain that the secular constitutionalists would win it. They didn't. Morsi is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and while there were numerous claims that he was a moderate member, it was simply not understood that he was a man of conviction and honor and that his membership in the Brotherhood was not casual or frivolous. His intention was to strengthen the role of Islam in Egypt and the control of the Muslim Brotherhood over the various arms of state. His rhetoric, speed and degree of Islamism might have been less extreme than others, but his intent was clear.The move on the judiciary signaled his intent to begin consolidating power. It galvanized opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood, which included secular constitutionalists, Copts and other groups who formed a coalition that was prepared to take to the streets to oppose his move. What it did not include, or at least did not visibly include through this point, was the Egyptian military, which refused to be drawn in on either side.The Egyptian military, led by a young army officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser,founded the modern Egyptian state when it overthrew the British-supported monarchy in the 1950s. It created a state that was then secular, authoritarian and socialist. It aligned Egypt with the Soviet Union and against the United States through the 1970s. After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who was later assassinated by Islamists, shifted Egypt into an alliance with the United States and signed a peace treaty with Israel.This treaty was the foundation of the regional balance of power until now. The decision to end the state of war with Israel and use Sinai as a demilitarized buffer between the two countries eliminated the threat of nation-to-nation war between Arabs and Israel. Egypt was the most powerful Arab country and its hostility to Israel represented Israel's greatest threat. By withdrawing from confrontation, the threat to Israel declined dramatically. Jordan, Syria and Lebanon did not represent a significant threat to Israel and could not launch a war that threatened Israel's survival.Egypt's decision to align with the United States and make peace with Israel shaped the regional balance of power in other ways. Syria could no longer depend on Egypt, and ultimately turned to Iran for support. The Arab monarchies that had been under political and at times military pressure from Egypt were relieved of the threat, and the Soviets lost the Egyptian bases that had given them a foothold in the Mediterranean.The fundamental question in Egypt is whether the election of Morsi represented the end of the regime founded by Nasser or was simply a passing event, with power still in the hands of the military. Morsi has made a move designed to demonstrate his power and to change the way the Egyptian judiciary works. The uprising against this move, while significant, did not seem to have the weight needed either to force Morsi to do more than modify his tactics a bit or to threaten his government. Therefore, it all hangs on whether the military is capable of or interested in intervening.It is ironic that the demands of the liberals in Egypt should depend on military intervention, and it is unlikely that they will get what they want from the military if it does intervene. But what is clear is that the Muslim Brotherhood is the dominant force in Egypt, that Morsi is very much a member of the Brotherhood and while his tactics might be more deliberate and circumspect than more radical members might want, it is still headed in the same direction.For the moment, the protesters in the streets do not appear able to force Morsi's hand, and the military doesn't seem likely to intervene. If that is true, then Egypt has entered a new domestic era with a range of open foreign policy issues. The first is the future of the treaty with Israel. The issue is not the treaty per se, but the maintenance of Sinai as a buffer. One of the consequences of Mubarak's ouster has been the partial remilitarization of Sinai by Egypt, with Israel's uneasy support. Sinai has become a zone in which Islamist radicals are active and launch operations against Israel. The Egyptian military has moved into Sinai to suppress them, which Israel obviously supports. But the Egyptians have also established the principle that while Sinai may be a notional buffer zone, in practice the Egyptian military can be present in and responsible for it. The intent might be one that Israel supports but the outcome could be a Sinai remilitarized by the Egyptians.A remilitarized Sinai would change the strategic balance, but it would only be the beginning. The Egyptian army uses American equipment and depends on the United States for spare parts, maintenance and training. Its equipment is relatively old and it has not been tested in combat for nearly 40 years. Even if the Egyptian military was in Sinai, it would not pose a significant conventional military threat to Israel in its current form. These things can change, however. The transformation of the Egyptian army between 1967 and 1973 was impressive. The difference is that Egypt had a patron in the Soviet Union then that was prepared to underwrite the cost of the transformation. Today, there is no global power, except the United States, that would be capable of dramatically and systematically upgrading the Egyptian military and financially supporting the country overall. Still, if the Morsi government succeeds in institutionalizing its power and uses that power to change the dynamic of the Sinai buffer, Israel will lose several layers of security.A New Regional Alignment?
A look at the rest of the region shows that Egypt is by no means the only country of concern for Israel. Syria, for example, has an uprising that, in simple terms, largely consists of Sunnis, many of which are Islamists. That in itself represents a threat to Israel, particularly if the relationship between Syria and Egypt were revived. There is an ideological kinship, and just as Nasserism had an evangelical dimension, wanting to spread pan-Arab ideology throughout the region, the Muslim Brotherhood has one too. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood is also the most organized and coherent opposition group in Syria. As Morsi consolidates his power in Egypt, his willingness to engage in foreign adventures, or at least covert support, for like-minded insurgents and regimes could very well increase. At a minimum Israel would have to take this seriously. Similarly, where Gaza was contained not only by Israel but also by pre-Morsi Egypt, Morsi might choose to dramatically change Egypt's Gaza policy.Morsi's rise opens other possibilities as well. Turkey's Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party is also engaged in a careful process of reintroducing Islam into a state that was militantly secular. There are fundamental differences between Egypt and Turkey, but there is also much in common. Turkey and Egypt are now engaged in parallel processes designed to create modern countries that recognize their Islamic roots. A Turkish-Egyptian relationship would both undergird the Egyptian regime and create a regional force that could shape the Eastern Mediterranean.This would, of course, affect American strategy, which as we have said in the past, is now rapidly moving away from excessive involvement in the Middle East. It is not clear how far Morsi would go in breaking with the United States or whether the military would or could draw a line at that point. Egypt is barely skirting economic disaster at the moment because it is receiving a broad range of financial aid from the West. Moving away from the United States would presumably go well beyond military aid and affect these other types of economic assistance.The fact is that as Egypt gradually evolves, its relationship with the United States might also change. The United States' relationship with Turkey has changed but has not broken since the Justice and Development Party came to power, with Turkey following a more independent direction. If a similar process occurred in Egypt, the United States would find itself in a very different position in the Eastern Mediterranean, one in which its only ally was Israel, and its relationship with Israel might alienate the critical Turkey-Egypt bloc.Prior to 1967, the United States was careful not be become overly involved in protecting Israel, leaving that to France. Assuming that this speculation about a shift in Egypt's strategic posture came to pass, Israel would not be in serious military danger for quite a while, and the United States could view its support to Israel as flexible. The United States could conceivably choose to distance itself from Israel in order to maintain its relationships with Egypt and Turkey. A strategy of selective disengagement and redefined engagement, which appears to be under way in the United States now, could alter relations with Israel.From an Israeli point of view -- it should be remembered that Israel is the dominant power in the region -- a shift in Egypt would create significant uncertainty on its frontier. It would now face uncertainty in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, and while unlikely, the possibility of uncertainty in Jordan. Where previously it faced hostile powers with substantial military capabilities, it would now face weaker powers that are less predictable. However, in an age when Israel's primary concern is with terrorist actions and uprisings in Gaza and the West Bank, this band of uncertainty would be an incubator of such actions.The worst-case scenario is the re-emergence of confrontational states on its border, armed with conventional weapons and capable of challenging the Israeli military. That is not an inconceivable evolution but it is not a threat in the near term. The next-worst-case scenario would be the creation of multiple states on Israel's border prepared to sponsor or at least tolerate Islamist attacks on Israel from their territory and to underwrite uprisings among the Palestinians. The effect would be an extended, wearying test of Israel's ability to deal with unremitting low-intensity threats from multiple directions.Conventional war is hard to imagine. It is less difficult to imagine a shift in Egyptian policy that creates a sustained low-intensity conflict not only south of Israel, but also along the entire Israeli periphery as Egypt's influence is felt. It is fairly clear that Israel has not absorbed the significance of this change or how it will respond. It may well not have a response. But if that were the case, then Israel's conventional dominance would no longer define the balance of power. And the United States is entering a period of unpredictability in its foreign policy. The entire region becomes unpredictable.It is not clear that any of this will come to pass. Morsi might not be able to impose his will in the country. He may not survive politically. The Egyptian military might intervene directly or indirectly. There are several hurdles for Morsi to overcome before he controls the country, and his timeline might be extended for implementing changes. But for the moment, Morsi appears in charge, he seems to be weathering the challenges and the army has not moved. Therefore, considering the strategic consequences is appropriate, and those strategic consequences appear substantial.
2)
ZERO-SUM HISTORIOGRAPHY:
THE PALESTINIAN ASSAULT UPON HISTORY
Paul Merkley
A key to understanding the duel that is going on today between the State of Israel and its local enemy the “Palestinians” is to be found in the motto that governed Lewis Carroll’s “Wonderland” – that words can mean anything you want them to.
To begin with: we note the universal use of the term “President” or “President of Palestine” or “President of the Palestine Authority” ahead of the name Mahmoud Abbas. Yet Mahmoud Abbas himself has absolutely no right under the Basic Law of Palestine to refer to himself as President of anything. The term of office to which he was elected by democratic vote ran out over four years ago. The office is vacant, and if constitutionality meant anything in Palestinian circles he should be judged a usurper; and if legitimacy meant anything in our media or in the minds of our own rulers, he should have been shown the door long ago. It is exactly as though Paul Martin were still strutting around as Prime Minister of Canada or George W. Bush as President of the United States.
It was not Abbas’s party (Fatah) but Hamas that won the mandate of January, 2006, after which the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was appointed Prime Minister of the Palestine Authority by the President (February, 2006.) But the ensuing round of assassinations of Hamas figures by Fatah figures and vice versa led Hamas’ leaders to conclude that more could be gained by quitting Ramallah, the administrative capital pro tem of Palestine, seizing all of Gaza, liquidating the leading Fatah figures there, and proclaiming themselves to be the rightful rulers of Palestine. Haniyeh continues to call himself Prime Minister of Palestine although much of our media is under the impression that Gaza is a sovereign entity or at least a Province and that Haniyeh is Prime Minister (or something) of that. He has no more right to any of his titles than Abbas has to the title of President, as the tenure of the Parliament elected in 2006 has also run out.
This embarrassing truth is never hinted at by our governments – not by the government of Canada, not by the Government of the United States, and, most incongruously of all, not by the government of Israel. Our elected politicians go on wining and dining “President Abbas” out of a Machiavellian calculation that if anything is ever to be rescued from the long-collapsed Peace Process we have to pretend to have a “Partner for Peace” that once got himself elected. It is all one patronizing fantasy – this notion of an emergent Palestinian democracy, embodied in the courageous, beleaguered leadership of the Palestine Authority. It is Orwellian double-think, kept alive by the agreement among media, politicians and opinion-elites that titles can have whatever meaning it is convenient to give to them so long as the cause of achieving peace through democracy is served.
In pretending not to notice the illegitimacy of the Abbas regime we are stooping to acceptance of the congenital contempt for historical fact that has bedeviled the political history of Islam since Muhammad proclaimed his message nearly fourteen centuries ago.
On September 13, 1993, a splendid ceremony was heldon the White House Lawn to praise the government of Israel and the leaders of the terrorist group, Palestine Liberation Organization, as heroic peacemakers, worthy of inclusion among history’s noblest spirits. To meet the needs of this unprecedented occasion, the records of Yasir Arafat and the records of his closest companions had to be moved off the shelves, their origins as terrorists quickly forgotten. If the past was to be referred to at all, the emphasis was to be on redemption. For example, the freedom fighter, Abu Mazen, who coordinated fund-raising for the Munich Olypmic massacre, was henceforth to be referred to by us (but not by the Palestinians themselves) by a civilian name, Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas was quickly redesigned as a family man, dedicated from his beginnings to diplomacy, a serious, benign scholarly gentleman, whose greatest love was the study of history. Abbas, does, indeed, hold an advanced degree in History. He earned it at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, designed by the Soviet Union for the advanced training of foreign revolutionaries. (Since 1992, this University has been called the People’s Friendship University of Russia.)
While at PLU, Mahmoud Abbas wrote a doctoral thesis, The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement, later published (but only in Arabic) by a Jordanian publisher under a title that (we are told) would read in English: The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism. Mazen’s book presents a deconstructionist understanding of the Holocaust, beginning with challenge of the generally accepted numbers of victims. “Many scholars,” notes Dr. Abbas, “have debated the figure of six million figure of victims of the Holocaust and reached stunning conclusions fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand… It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure [to six million] … in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism.” There were, in any case, no gas chambers.
This demonstration of vagueness and obfuscation about matters long settled by scholarship tells us everything we need to know about Abbas’s qualification to be called an historian. Yet, the official BCC News Profile describes Abbas as “A highly intellectual man, Abbas studied law in Egypt before doing a Ph.D. in Moscow. He is the author of several books,” while the New York Times has described him as “a lawyer and historian.”
Nowadays, Abbas’s scholarly and polemical skills go to vilification of Israelis and Jews. He sets his sheepskin up front as token of his scholarly soundness while he belittles the history of Israel and the Jews and demonstrates that nobody ever really intended there to be a Jewish state. As diplomacy dedicated to the Peace Process has gone into deep freeze, Abbas has all the time in the world to badmouth Israel, its undeserved reputation for liberalism, for education, for research for science. Mahmoud Abbas and other principal figures in the Palestine Authority use the prestige of their titles to pursue in international media and at the UN a two-sided campaign of aggrandizement of Palestine and belittlement of Israel. Abbas’s scholarly labours have led him to the conclusion that the so-called State of Israel is not fit to be a neighbour of Palestine.
The latest breakthrough in the PA’s propaganda offensive has been its success in establishing in the minds of our scholars, our leaders of opinion and, with truly resounding success, our churchmen the counter-factual theorem that Palestine is a ancient and distinguished while Israel is a fraud.
Here is the syllogism:
To begin with: we note the universal use of the term “President” or “President of Palestine” or “President of the Palestine Authority” ahead of the name Mahmoud Abbas. Yet Mahmoud Abbas himself has absolutely no right under the Basic Law of Palestine to refer to himself as President of anything. The term of office to which he was elected by democratic vote ran out over four years ago. The office is vacant, and if constitutionality meant anything in Palestinian circles he should be judged a usurper; and if legitimacy meant anything in our media or in the minds of our own rulers, he should have been shown the door long ago. It is exactly as though Paul Martin were still strutting around as Prime Minister of Canada or George W. Bush as President of the United States.
It was not Abbas’s party (Fatah) but Hamas that won the mandate of January, 2006, after which the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was appointed Prime Minister of the Palestine Authority by the President (February, 2006.) But the ensuing round of assassinations of Hamas figures by Fatah figures and vice versa led Hamas’ leaders to conclude that more could be gained by quitting Ramallah, the administrative capital pro tem of Palestine, seizing all of Gaza, liquidating the leading Fatah figures there, and proclaiming themselves to be the rightful rulers of Palestine. Haniyeh continues to call himself Prime Minister of Palestine although much of our media is under the impression that Gaza is a sovereign entity or at least a Province and that Haniyeh is Prime Minister (or something) of that. He has no more right to any of his titles than Abbas has to the title of President, as the tenure of the Parliament elected in 2006 has also run out.
This embarrassing truth is never hinted at by our governments – not by the government of Canada, not by the Government of the United States, and, most incongruously of all, not by the government of Israel. Our elected politicians go on wining and dining “President Abbas” out of a Machiavellian calculation that if anything is ever to be rescued from the long-collapsed Peace Process we have to pretend to have a “Partner for Peace” that once got himself elected. It is all one patronizing fantasy – this notion of an emergent Palestinian democracy, embodied in the courageous, beleaguered leadership of the Palestine Authority. It is Orwellian double-think, kept alive by the agreement among media, politicians and opinion-elites that titles can have whatever meaning it is convenient to give to them so long as the cause of achieving peace through democracy is served.
In pretending not to notice the illegitimacy of the Abbas regime we are stooping to acceptance of the congenital contempt for historical fact that has bedeviled the political history of Islam since Muhammad proclaimed his message nearly fourteen centuries ago.
On September 13, 1993, a splendid ceremony was heldon the White House Lawn to praise the government of Israel and the leaders of the terrorist group, Palestine Liberation Organization, as heroic peacemakers, worthy of inclusion among history’s noblest spirits. To meet the needs of this unprecedented occasion, the records of Yasir Arafat and the records of his closest companions had to be moved off the shelves, their origins as terrorists quickly forgotten. If the past was to be referred to at all, the emphasis was to be on redemption. For example, the freedom fighter, Abu Mazen, who coordinated fund-raising for the Munich Olypmic massacre, was henceforth to be referred to by us (but not by the Palestinians themselves) by a civilian name, Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas was quickly redesigned as a family man, dedicated from his beginnings to diplomacy, a serious, benign scholarly gentleman, whose greatest love was the study of history. Abbas, does, indeed, hold an advanced degree in History. He earned it at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, designed by the Soviet Union for the advanced training of foreign revolutionaries. (Since 1992, this University has been called the People’s Friendship University of Russia.)
While at PLU, Mahmoud Abbas wrote a doctoral thesis, The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement, later published (but only in Arabic) by a Jordanian publisher under a title that (we are told) would read in English: The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism. Mazen’s book presents a deconstructionist understanding of the Holocaust, beginning with challenge of the generally accepted numbers of victims. “Many scholars,” notes Dr. Abbas, “have debated the figure of six million figure of victims of the Holocaust and reached stunning conclusions fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand… It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure [to six million] … in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism.” There were, in any case, no gas chambers.
This demonstration of vagueness and obfuscation about matters long settled by scholarship tells us everything we need to know about Abbas’s qualification to be called an historian. Yet, the official BCC News Profile describes Abbas as “A highly intellectual man, Abbas studied law in Egypt before doing a Ph.D. in Moscow. He is the author of several books,” while the New York Times has described him as “a lawyer and historian.”
Nowadays, Abbas’s scholarly and polemical skills go to vilification of Israelis and Jews. He sets his sheepskin up front as token of his scholarly soundness while he belittles the history of Israel and the Jews and demonstrates that nobody ever really intended there to be a Jewish state. As diplomacy dedicated to the Peace Process has gone into deep freeze, Abbas has all the time in the world to badmouth Israel, its undeserved reputation for liberalism, for education, for research for science. Mahmoud Abbas and other principal figures in the Palestine Authority use the prestige of their titles to pursue in international media and at the UN a two-sided campaign of aggrandizement of Palestine and belittlement of Israel. Abbas’s scholarly labours have led him to the conclusion that the so-called State of Israel is not fit to be a neighbour of Palestine.
The latest breakthrough in the PA’s propaganda offensive has been its success in establishing in the minds of our scholars, our leaders of opinion and, with truly resounding success, our churchmen the counter-factual theorem that Palestine is a ancient and distinguished while Israel is a fraud.
Here is the syllogism:
· Palestine is real; Palestine has always been here; the Palestinian People have always been here.
· Israel is not real. Israel is an invention of the mid-Twentieth century AD, the product of European imperialism, foisted upon the world by a Zionist conspiracy in control of international diplomacy.
The contempt for Zionism in the company of opinion elites in the West, where all lines of argument that belittle Israel’s right to exist are accepted as authentic without examination, explains the great success that Abbas and his fellow Palestinian statesmen have encountered with this syllogism.
Dr. Abbas recognizes the possibilities for creative minds created by his contempt for history. His hope is to turn the tables on the tedious textbooks, to establish in all minds the politically correct notion that it is Palestine that is ancient, that has the historical pedigree, and Israel that is without pedigree.
For example: Palestinian Authority TV News hews consistently to the PA policy of denying the history of Jewish presence in Jerusalem and in particular the existence at any time of a Jewish Temple. In a report about Israel’s excavations on the Temple Mount exposing part of the Western Wall, PA TV stated:
“There’s [an Israeli] race against the clock to complete the excavations in search of [Jerusalem's] Temple that exists only in the minds of radical organizations ….[The Israelis] falsify historical facts by linking them to Jewish history, the traces of which don’t exist in our land.”
Israel’s excavations of the Western Wall have nothing to do with any archeological project, PA authorities declaim, but are cover for a plot to destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque from below.
Palestinian “historiography” (if sheer assertion without reference to any documentary or archeological evidence can be dignified by such a term) asserts that until the day before yesterday the Jews, or Israelis, call them what you will, never resided in this area, never had a Kingdom, never had a temple….Among recent lunatic examples are: “Moses was a Muslim who led Muslims in Exodus from Egypt, says a PA university lecturer on PA/ Israel's conquest of the Land of Israel defined as ‘The first Palestinian liberation through armed struggle to liberate Palestine" (April 2, 2012); and "There never was a Temple... for the Jews …. [says PA Mufti.] They [the Jews] want to say or suggest that this place (Temple Mount) was once, according to their claim, a Temple. However, in truth, there never was a Temple in any period, nor was there, at any time, any place of worship for the Jews or others at the Al-Aqsa Mosque site (built on the Temple Mount, 705 CE).” Palestinian TV, Jan. 5, 2012.]
In order to keep this free-floating dogma unsullied, Muslim religious authorities on the Temple Mount have been hauling away to garbage dumps the debris resulting from their building projects on the site. When Israeli scholars find and display artifacts clearly illustrating the presence of the People of Israel or of the Temple of the Jews, Palestinian authorities simply claim them as proofs of “Palestinian” presence.
Keen as they are on siding with the victims of Israeli aggression, our cultural elites and, most distressing of all, our church leaders today indulge these knuckle-dragging assertions about Palestine and Palestine’s history for tactical purposes: they believe that polemical solidarity with the Palestinian victims will make it possible for us to keep Palestine’s “elected leaders” in the great cause of moving towards the Day of Peace.
Why should we care about these assertions about long-gone days? We should care because all this double-think is doing great damage to truth. We know that no historical commentary is ever free of self-serving bias. Bias occurs because of the human weakness of the historians and the sources they deal with. But in our western tradition no party ever justifies or admits distortion of historical fact for political advantage – although it can happen easily enough. On the other side, the Muslim side, distortion of historical fact has always been done boldly and on the grandest scale and always with impunity. This is because the methods of history have never developed on Islamic soil. The Qur’an itself is based upon the most blatant manipulation of history…..
Dr. Abbas recognizes the possibilities for creative minds created by his contempt for history. His hope is to turn the tables on the tedious textbooks, to establish in all minds the politically correct notion that it is Palestine that is ancient, that has the historical pedigree, and Israel that is without pedigree.
For example: Palestinian Authority TV News hews consistently to the PA policy of denying the history of Jewish presence in Jerusalem and in particular the existence at any time of a Jewish Temple. In a report about Israel’s excavations on the Temple Mount exposing part of the Western Wall, PA TV stated:
“There’s [an Israeli] race against the clock to complete the excavations in search of [Jerusalem's] Temple that exists only in the minds of radical organizations ….[The Israelis] falsify historical facts by linking them to Jewish history, the traces of which don’t exist in our land.”
Israel’s excavations of the Western Wall have nothing to do with any archeological project, PA authorities declaim, but are cover for a plot to destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque from below.
Palestinian “historiography” (if sheer assertion without reference to any documentary or archeological evidence can be dignified by such a term) asserts that until the day before yesterday the Jews, or Israelis, call them what you will, never resided in this area, never had a Kingdom, never had a temple….Among recent lunatic examples are: “Moses was a Muslim who led Muslims in Exodus from Egypt, says a PA university lecturer on PA/ Israel's conquest of the Land of Israel defined as ‘The first Palestinian liberation through armed struggle to liberate Palestine" (April 2, 2012); and "There never was a Temple... for the Jews …. [says PA Mufti.] They [the Jews] want to say or suggest that this place (Temple Mount) was once, according to their claim, a Temple. However, in truth, there never was a Temple in any period, nor was there, at any time, any place of worship for the Jews or others at the Al-Aqsa Mosque site (built on the Temple Mount, 705 CE).” Palestinian TV, Jan. 5, 2012.]
In order to keep this free-floating dogma unsullied, Muslim religious authorities on the Temple Mount have been hauling away to garbage dumps the debris resulting from their building projects on the site. When Israeli scholars find and display artifacts clearly illustrating the presence of the People of Israel or of the Temple of the Jews, Palestinian authorities simply claim them as proofs of “Palestinian” presence.
Keen as they are on siding with the victims of Israeli aggression, our cultural elites and, most distressing of all, our church leaders today indulge these knuckle-dragging assertions about Palestine and Palestine’s history for tactical purposes: they believe that polemical solidarity with the Palestinian victims will make it possible for us to keep Palestine’s “elected leaders” in the great cause of moving towards the Day of Peace.
Why should we care about these assertions about long-gone days? We should care because all this double-think is doing great damage to truth. We know that no historical commentary is ever free of self-serving bias. Bias occurs because of the human weakness of the historians and the sources they deal with. But in our western tradition no party ever justifies or admits distortion of historical fact for political advantage – although it can happen easily enough. On the other side, the Muslim side, distortion of historical fact has always been done boldly and on the grandest scale and always with impunity. This is because the methods of history have never developed on Islamic soil. The Qur’an itself is based upon the most blatant manipulation of history…..
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3)Krauthammer: The UN Is A Playpen Of Dictators
By Daled Amos
Charles Krauthammer describes the UN as a playpen of dictators, and I think that phrase captures the essence of the UN today rather well:
”It’s inherently a corrupt organization because it’s a sandbox of dictators. It began as something essentially run by the Western democracies and it ran somewhat efficiently the first decade or so. Then you had decolonization. You ended up with 100, 150 countries, very few of whom are democratic. It is a playpen of dictators. And they run it that way. And the idea that they would use it for anything other than to promote authoritarianism and to attack the West is a fiction.
It will always be this way because it’s a universal organization. The alternative is to form a league of democracies… which over a generation or two would take over the functions and the stature of the U.N”
I imagine some of the current problem was foreseen, and that is the reason for creating permanent membership in the UN Security Council with veto powers.
Obviously, that was not nearly enough.
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4)
- Dana Milbank
- Opinion Writer
The open-and-shut administration
“My administration,” President Obama wrote on his first day in office, “is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government.”
Those were strong and hopeful words. Four years later, it is becoming more and more clear that they were just words.
On Monday afternoon, open-government advocates assembled in a congressional hearing room to ponder what had become of the Obama administration’s lofty vows of transparency.
“It’s been a really tough slog,” said Anne Weismann of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The lack of effective leadership in the White House, in the executive branch, has really made it difficult to have more significant progress.”
“They’ve been reluctant to take positions,” said Hudson Hollister of the Data Transparency Coalition, “and translate that to real action.”
“In the beginning of 2010, [Obama] said he made a significant mistake by abandoning some of his pledges related to transparency,” said Josh Gerstein of Politico, “and that going forward they would do things differently. Seems to me we are forward and it seems to me we’re not doing things any differently.”
It was a more-in-sadness-than-in-anger critique of Obama often heard from the political left, and the moderator, theSunlight Foundation’s Daniel Schuman, was apologetic. “We’re placing a lot of blame at the administration,” he observed. “Or blame isn’t the right word — maybe responsibility.”
No, blame is just fine. The Obama administration’s high level of opacity, though typical of modern presidencies, is troubling precisely because the president was so clear about his determination to do things differently. As recently as early last year, some open-government advocates were still hopeful, presenting Obama with an anti-secrecy award at the White House. But even then, there were signs of trouble: The award presentation wasn’t on his schedule and was closed to reporters.
By certain measures, “overall secrecy has actually increased rather than declined,” said Steven Aftergood, who runs theFederation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “Criminalization of unauthorized disclosures of information to the press has risen sharply, becoming a preferred tactic. Efforts to promote public accountability in controversial aspects of counterterrorism policy such as targeted killing have been blocked by threadbare, hardly credible national security secrecy claims.”
A Washington Post report from this past summer concluded that “by some measures the government is keeping more secrets than before.” Those making Freedom of Information Act requests in 2011 were less likely than in 2010 to get material from 10 of 15 Cabinet agencies, which were more likely to exploit the law’s exemptions.
Also, the National Declassification Center, which Obama established in 2009, had by the summer of 2012 reviewed only 14 percent of the pages it was assigned to review and declassify by the end of 2013.
Now the administration is maintaining silence as lawmakers prepare to pass one of the gravest threats to government transparency in years. A bill passed by the Senate intelligence committee would ban anybody but the top officials and public-relations staff at intelligence agencies from speaking to the media. The proposal, intended to crack down on classified leaks, would significantly set back freedom of the press, thwart whistle-blowers and squelch the airing of dissenting views on intelligence issues. This is part of a broader effort to make it a crime for national security officials to talk to reporters.
The Obama administration has, to its credit, made progress in a few areas: releasing more of the White House visitor logs, disseminating more information about nuclear weapons, disclosing more about intelligence spending, and declassifying more historical records.
But these don’t amount to the “unprecedented level of openness” Obama promised. The few advances that have been made are mostly administrative changes that will end with the Obama administration. “We haven’t seen that many, if any, legislative initiatives from the White House,” Weismann lamented at Monday’s gathering of the open-government advocates.
Consider the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, a bill with bipartisan support that would make it easier to track government spending by requiring agencies to report expenditures in a uniform way online. The legislation is so uncontroversial that it passed the House on a voice vote. But the Obama administration raised objections — and the transparency law has yet to see the light of day.
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5)Murdoch right to ask why Jewish media executives don’t back Israel
“Why is Jewish-owned press so consistently anti-Israel in every crisis?” tweeted News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch, in reaction to the overwhelmingly negative coverage Israel was receiving during its war with Gaza. Many in the left-wing press immediately pounced on Murdoch’s comment, claiming, as a Guardian writer did, that Murdoch had “slipped into an anti-Semitic usage.” A CNN commentator called Murdoch’s tweet “beyond outrageous to offensive, truly offensive … reviving the old canard about Jews controlling the media.”
Anti-Semites do commonly claim that Jews dominate the media out of all proportion to their numbers. But Murdoch, a Christian who heads the world’s largest media company, is no anti-Semite — he is as unabashedly pro-Zionist as they come. Neither are the anti-Semites wrong — Jews do exercise vast influence in the media, as they do in many industries, whether cultural such as fashion and entertainment, financial such as banking and insurance, whether the industries involve computer software or hardware, or retail or real estate. In all these areas and more, Jews often hold commanding positions as owners and managers.
Among newspapers, The New York Times has long been the world’s best-known newspaper and the decider of what constitutes news — the rest of the media often takes its cue from the Times. It has been owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger family since 1896, when the son of a Jewish Bavarian immigrant, Adolph Ochs, took it over.
The Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, also prestigious papers, are owned along with many other papers by Tribune Co., one of America’s largest newspaper groups. It is chaired by Sam Zell, son of Polish Jews who fled to America prior to Hitler’s invasion in 1939.
National Broadcasting Corp., America’s first national broadcast company, had its origins in RCA, and both owed their success to David Sarnoff, a Belarussian Jew who also pioneered the AM radio business. NBC today is owned by Comcast, America’s largest cable company, which was co-founded and then run for 46 years by Ralph Roberts, a Jew, and is now run by his son, Brian Roberts.
NBC’s long-standing rival, Columbia Broadcasting System, was built by William S. Paley, the son of an Ukrainian Jew. CBS is now majority owned by the family of Sumner Murray Redstone (born Sumner Murray Rothstein), also a Jew, who is also CBS’s executive chairman. (Redstone also owns Viacom, MTV and BET.) CBS’s president and CEO is Leslie Moonves, also a Jew.
American Broadcasting Corp., the third major U.S. network, was hived off from the NBC network in the 1940s and is now run by Bob Iger, a Jew, who succeeded Michael Eisner, another Jew.In these and many other media companies, Jews play a dominant role, often an entrepreneurial founding role in creating media empires. It will give anti-Semites no comfort to realize, though, that the Jewish media does not work in concert in a conspiracy to control the world. Jewish-owned firms compete with each other as well as with non-Jewish media companies such as Murdoch’s. Jew or non-Jew, they all play against each other to win, giving no quarter on the basis of religion or ethnicity.
Anti-Semites who believe Jewish ownership leads the press to show favouritism toward Jews haven’t been paying attention. The New York Times during the 1930s and 1940s played down the Nazi atrocities, burying stories of concentration camps and Jewish mass murders in small stories in the paper’s interior. In recent decades, the Times has been consistently anti-Israel.
A current controversy that demonstrates its biased coverage involves New York Timesreporter David Carr, who on Sunday lambasted Israel for bombing a vehicle of journalists working for Al-Aqsa, a Hamas-owned TV station. The article, provocatively titled “Using War as Cover to Target Journalists,” took issue with Israel’s explanation, that the targets, whose vehicle was marked “TV,” were relevant to terror activity. As Carr summed it up for Times readers: “So it has come to this: killing members of the news media can be justified by a phrase as amorphous as ‘relevance to terror activity.’”
Carr could have explained to Times readers that Al-Aqsa TV is designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, that one of the “journalists” was in fact a Hamas commander who headed its military training programs and that another person he refers to as a “journalist” wore a military uniform and was referred to by Hamas as a “mujahid,” i.e., a jihadist. Had Carr been keen to understand Israel’s justification, he might further have realized that a journalist for a terrorist organization was more akin to a propagandist following orders; that under international law, Israel was permitted to target “the installations of broadcasting and television stations of fundamental military importance,” as NATO had when it bombed the Serb Radio and Television headquarters in 1999 during the Kosovo War, killing 16 civilians.
The extent to which the media has distorted the war between Gaza and Israel is mind-boggling. During the eight-day conflict, casual consumers of news could have easily missed that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza only occurred after it had warned Hamas to stop attacking Israeli civilians over a period of months — some 800 Hamas rockets had rained on Israel this year prior to the war. Much of the press rarely if ever mentioned that Hamas, the terrorist group running Gaza, was violating the Geneva Convention by targeting Israeli civilians; that it was also violating the Geneva Convention by using its own civilians as shields; that Israel was going to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza and that Israel’s only reason to invade Gaza — rather than safely from on high bombing the rocket launchers that Hamas had placed in schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings — would have been to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza.
Anti-Semites looking for media coverage sympathetic to Israel would be hard-pressed to find it in the Jewish-led press (Mort Zuckerman’s New York Daily News and U.S. News and World Report being notable exceptions).
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6) Sowell is a genius and one of the few writers who always makes me think -- every article. That is amazing in itself.
But the tax issue is not a real issue. It is about whether we will have the Democrat tax rates (the Clinton tax rates from 1993) or the Republican tax rates (the "temporary" Bush tax rates from 2002). (I wish we would use the term "Clinton tax rates.")
The Clinton tax rates were coupled with the Gingrich-Kasich spending reductions -- spending as a percentage of GDP fell from around 21% of GDP to 18% during the 1990s. The Bush tax cuts were coupled with an increase in spending -- the Republican payback period, when federal spending increased from 19% back to around 21% in 2006. Then, in 2006, the federal spending as a percentage of GDP skyrocketed to 25% and has not been below 22% since. (The economy did grow a bit as the percentage of federal spending started to decline.)
We can handle the Clinton tax rates or the Bush tax rates as long as federal spending as a percentage of GDP is flat or declining. That means the private sector has more room to grow. If there is no control over federal spending, it doesn't really matter whether we have the Clinton tax rates or the Bush tax rates. Growth will be difficult as long as the government is eating more of the private sector.
Taxpayers will adjust to the tax rates. Look at the janitor and the lawyer. The lawyer makes $100,000 per year, the janitor makes $20,000. They both pay a 20% tax rate because the government is spending 20% of the GDP. But the market pays the lawyer 5 times as much as the janitor -- because of skill, education, hours work, commitment -- but essentially the market values the lawyer's work as worth 5 times what the janitor's work is worth. Sorry, I don't make the rules. That's just the way the market works. It could be the other way, but it is not.
Now lower the taxes on the janitor to zero percent and raise the taxes on the lawyer to 50%, with a more progressive tax code. The janitor takes home $20,000, and the lawyer takes home $50,000. But the lawyer still thinks she's entitled to more -- to repay the law school debt, to keep up charitable giving, to maintain the marketing that goes with the profession. So the lawyer has to make more and she raises her rates. Her rates will rise until she is again making the market rate -- 5 times the take home pay of the janitor. The janitor's wages will stay flat, and the lawyer will start making $200,000 per year, taking home 5 times as much as the janitor again. Inflation will come and the janitor will suffer more than the lawyer as a result.
Tax rates will come and go, but the market will make adjustments. In this case, a progressive tax rate will lead to more income inequality. Ever wonder why there is such extreme income inequality in India, with lawyers making millions per year and janitors making hundreds? Take a look at the "progressive" tax code there.
I repeat, the tax issue is not a real issue. The issue is whether spending will come under control. If we adopt sequestration, spending will come under control. That is the best possible outcome. On January 2, the House can vote for the Bush tax rates and Obama can sign that or not. If he does not, then we will be left with the Clinton tax rates. The House can restore funds to the Pentagon if they want and Obama can sign them or not. But the less the government takes of GDP, the more there will be for private sector growth. Very simple. Don't expect any cuts without sequestration.
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7)
Failing Up With Susan Rice
Benghazi was not her first African fiasco
By Bret Stephens
Long before Susan Rice became a household name thanks to her part in the Benghazi fiasco, she was building a career from the ruins of other African fiascoes.
To some of these she merely contributed. Others were of her own making.
Ms. Rice's misadventures in Africa began nearly two decades ago when, as a 28 year-old McKinsey consultant with an Oxford Ph.D. (her dissertation was on Zimbabwe), she joined Bill Clinton's National Security Council. The president, who had been badly burned by the Black Hawk Down episode in October 1993, was eager to avoid further African entanglements.
So when a genocide began in Rwanda the following April, the administration went to great lengths to avoid any involvement—beginning with the refusal to use the word "genocide" at all. Giving voice to that sentiment was none other than Ms. Rice
"At an interagency teleconference in late April [1994]," writes Samantha Power in her book "A Problem From Hell," Ms. Rice "stunned a few officials present when she asked, 'If we use the word "genocide" and are seen as doing nothing, what will the effect be on the November [congressional] election?' Lieutenant Colonel [Tony] Marley remembers the incredulity of his colleagues at the State Department. 'We could believe that people would wonder that,' he says, 'but not that they would actually voice it.' "
Ms. Rice has said she can't remember making the remark, but regrets doing so "if I said it." Some accounts say she was so burned by the Rwanda debacle that she became determined to make amends upon becoming assistant secretary for Africa policy in 1997. To judge by the record, she didn't quite succeed.
The best account of Ms. Rice's time in that office comes from a 2002 article in Current History by Peter Rosenblum of Columbia University. Ms. Rice was the architect of a policy that invested heavily in a new crop of African leaders—Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia; Isaias Afewerki in Eritrea; Yoweri Museveni in Uganda; Paul Kagame in Rwanda—presumed to be more progressive-minded than their predecessors.
In May 1998, Ms. Rice had an opportunity to prove her diplomatic mettle when she was sent to mediate a peace plan between warring Ethiopia and Eritrea.
"What is publicly known," notes Mr. Rosenblum, "is that Rice announced the terms of a plan agreed to by Ethiopia, suggesting that Eritrea would have to accept it, before Isaias had given his approval. He responded angrily, rejecting the plan and heaping abuse on Rice. Soon afterward, Ethiopia bombed the capital of Eritrea, and Eritrea dropped cluster bombs on Ethiopia. . . .
"Susan Rice was summoned back to Washington in early June after the negotiations collapsed. Insiders agree that the secretary of state [Madeleine Albright] was furious. According to one, Rice was essentially 'put on probation,' kept in Washington where the secretary could keep an eye on her. 'Susan had misread the situation completely,' according to one State Department insider who observed the conflict with Albright. 'She came in like a scoutmaster, lecturing them on how to behave and having a public tantrum when they didn't act the way she wanted."
An estimated 100,000 people would perish in the war that Ms. Rice so ineptly failed to end. And the leaders in whom she invested her faith would all become typical African strongmen, with human-rights records to match. Yet that didn't keep Ms. Rice from delivering a heartfelt eulogy for Meles at his funeral three months ago, in which she praised him as "uncommonly wise," "a rare visionary," and a "true friend to me."
A 2011 State Department report offers a different perspective on Meles. It cites his "government's arrest of more than 100 opposition political figures, activists, journalists and bloggers," along with "torture, beating, abuse, and mistreatment of detainees by security forces."
Then there is the Congo. Human-rights groups have long accused the Clinton administration of acquiescing in the efforts by Rwanda and Uganda to topple the Congolese government of Laurent Kabila in 1998, which by some estimates wound up taking more than five million lives. In congressional testimony, Ms. Rice angrily denied any U.S. role in condoning or supporting the intervention.
But Ms. Rice may not have been completely forthcoming. "Museveni and Kagame agree that the basic problem in the Great Lakes is the danger of a resurgence of genocide and they know how to deal with that," Ms. Rice is said to have remarked confidentially after a visit to the region, according to reporter Howard French of the New York Times. "The only thing we [the United States] have to do is look the other way."
Which is what the U.S. did.
There is more to be said about Ms. Rice's skills as a diplomat, particularly during her tenure at the U.N. For now, let's give Prof. Rosenblum the last word on the person who might yet be the next secretary of state:
"Rice proved herself brilliant, over time, in working the machinery of government. But along the way she burned bridges liberally, alienating and often antagonizing many potential allies. . . . Susan Rice seems not to have convinced colleagues that her real interest was Africa, or even foreign policy."
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