Based on former Sec. Gate's new book, Obama sees everything through a political prism and will make any sacrifice to gain a political advantage, apparently even American casualties. (See 1 below.)
===
The Durban Conference has always been a U.N. sponsored launching pad for lies and attacks on Israel. Finally a breath of fresh air, truth and courage? (See 2 below.)
===
One of my very closest friends has made this suggestion to supplant minimum wage legislation.
He went to Yale. I went to Wharton. Obviously he never learned to divide at Yale! 000's have a way of causing one to miscalculate.(See 3 below.)
===
Presidents’ Day Annual Banquet Set for Monday, February 17, 2014
Tables are filling up fast towards a possible sellout, so get your reservations in soon to hear our featured speaker Star Parker. She is the president of, the Center for Urban Renewal & Education (CURE), a non-profit think tank that promotes market-based public policy to fight poverty.
She also spoke at the 1996 Republican National Convention and ran for Congress as a Republican in California’s liberal 37th District. She’s debated Jesse Jackson, fought for school choice on Larry King Live, and defended welfare reform on the Oprah Winfrey Show. She also confronted Michael Moore on healthcare reform on The View with host Barbara Walters. She is the author of three books: Pimps, Whores & Welfare Brats; Uncle Sam's Plantation; and White Ghetto, and is currently working on a fourth: How the Poor Get Rich.
The banquet begins with a member bar at 6:00pm followed by a 7:00pm gourmet dinner including wine. Dress: semi-formal (jacket & tie). Ticket prices are $125 per person. For an extra $25 you can attend the 530pm reception for Star Parker. Checks (payable to SIRC) should be mailed or tubed to Mary Ann Senkowski at 8 Mainsail Crossing, Savannah, GA 31411. For reservations, contact Tom Osborn at 598-1799 or tomosborn@bellsouth.net.
===
More sexist humor:
This blonde decides one day that she is sick and tired of all these blonde jokes and how all blondes are perceived as stupid, so she decides to show her husband that blondes really are smart. While her husband is off at work, she decides that she is going to paint a couple of rooms in the house. The next day, right after her husband leaves for work, she gets down to the task at hand.
Her husband arrives home at 5:30 and smells the distinctive smell of paint. He walks into the living room and finds his wife lying on the floor in a pool of sweat. He notices that she is wearing a ski jacket and a fur coat at the same time. He goes over and asks her if she is ok. She replies yes. He asks what she is doing. She replies that she wanted to prove to him that not all blonde women are dumb and she wanted to do it by painting the house.
He then asks her why she has a ski jacket over her fur coat. She replies that she was reading the directions on the paint can and they said to achieve best results, put on two coats.
===
Kerry and the returning Palestinians, and their continued teaching of hate and venom. (See 4 and 4a below.)
===
Kerry and the returning Palestinians, and their continued teaching of hate and venom. (See 4 and 4a below.)
===
Dick
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pressuring Israel through the framework agreement is just what a weakened Obama needs to regain the adulation of his supporters
Dysfunctional. Rocky. Frosty. There are a variety of terms pundits have used to describe the relationship between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama over the past five years. Though the atmospherics improved somewhat after Obama’s 2013 trip to Israel, the relationship has chilled again in the wake of the nuclear deal with Iran.And it’s about to get a lot worse.Only five years ago, Obama was a political and cultural phenomenon, a transformative leader who millions of young Americans expected to usher in age of domestic unity and international cooperation. Famous singers turned campaign speeches into songs. His photograph became an iconic piece of pop art. Health care would become affordable and painless, supporters dreamed, America’s erstwhile enemies would sit down and find common ground with this new president, oceans would stop rising. The expectations even came complete with a Nobel Prize, which the award committee voted on only 12 days after he took office.But five years is an eternity in politics, and things look very different in Obama’s second term. The rollout of the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature domestic achievement, has been an unmitigated disaster. A Democratic senator recently warned of a “complete meltdown” in the program. Obama’s approval ratings have dropped below much-reviled predecessor George W. Bush’s at this stage of his presidency, with 42% approving of his job performance in the latest poll, against 54% disapproving. The numbers were reversed a year ago.Outside of America’s borders, the situation isn’t much better. The Arab sheikhs and kings in the Persian Gulf no longer trust Obama after he suddenly backed off a strike on Syria and cut a nuclear deal with Iran.“There’s no confidence in the Obama administration doing the right thing with Iran,” said a Saudi royal, as another prince announced a “major shift” away from America.After the US tried to prevent the military from toppling the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, then suspended key military aid, Cairo turned toward Russia, giving Moscow influence again in a country that expelled the Soviets four decades ago.And in Europe, the continent where 200,000 people gathered in 2008 to listen to candidate Obama deliver a speech in Berlin, leaders are furious at the president. The man who lambasted Bush for his national security policies was, it turns out, presiding over a spying program targeting European citizens and leaders. Allies who had embraced Obama’s multilateralism turned on him in an instant. “We need trust among allies and partners,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel, one of the NSA’s targets. “Such trust now has to be built anew.” Sweden’s prime minister said the spying was “completely unacceptable,” while his Dutch counterpart called the charges “exceptionally serious.”And with the 2014 midterm elections fast approaching, things don’t look good for the Democrats right now. Polls show Republicans beating Democrats for control of both the House and Senate on generic ballots, with independent voters breaking strongly Republican.Obama needs a gamechanger. Something historic, an achievement that will justify that Nobel prize and the expectations of his legions of followers. A move that will turn him into a hero again in the eyes of American editorial boards and in the corridors of European parliaments. A move that would rescue his legacy.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------He needs to find a problem the world takes a serious interest in, involving a country the administration still feels it has leverage over.Thank God for Israel.The president, like many officials in Europe, still sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a root cause of the Middle East’s troubles, with the settlements perched firmly at the heart of the problem. And given Netanyahu’s current isolation over his opposition to the Iranian nuclear pact, he is a prime target for US pressure.And, right on schedule, Kerry will present the administration’s framework agreement to the two sides sometime in the next month.The development, first brought to light by Meretz MK Zehava Gal-on, who said the US would be transitioning to “active intervention,” should raise warning flags in Jerusalem. Active intervention means quickly resorting to pressure if need be, and if the past half-decade and recent administration statements about settlements are any indication, the preponderance of that pressure will fall on Israel.Kerry himself has already tried to force Israel’s hand by setting it up for blame if (it’s almost certainly when) talks fail in the spring.“I mean does Israel want a third Intifada?” he asked during a November interview with Channel 2. “Israel says, ‘Oh we feel safe today, we have the wall. We’re not in a day to day conflict’,” said Kerry. “I’ve got news for you. Today’s status quo will not be tomorrow’s…” Israel’s neighbors, he warned, will “begin to push in a different way.”The secretary went on: “If we do not resolve the issues between Palestinians and Israelis, if we do not find a way to find peace, there will be an increasing isolation of Israel, there will be an increasing campaign of delegitimization of Israel that’s been taking place on an international basis.”Kerry’s predictions themselves aren’t what make the statement so troubling, as Israel doesn’t need the US secretary of state’s prognostications for its intelligence assessments. It is rather the fact that when the Palestinians finally make enough new demands that Israel gives up on the talks, and violence subsequently rises, Israel will already be set up as the guilty party. Israel was warned, observers will say, and its stubbornness had led to the deaths on both sides.And the peace talks, a White House initiative on which, out of the all the world’s problems, Obama has decided to exert concerted effort, have already begun to bear their bitter fruit for Israel. Since talks started in July, violence has risen steadily every month, climbing from 87 attacks in July to 167 in November.What’s more, Israeli experts are expecting another spike in violence in April, when the talks are slated to end, most likely with no tangible agreement.As Israel faces concerted pressure, lethal violence and international opprobrium because of the failure of US-generated talks that themselves have brought violence, the Jewish state can perhaps take some solace that at least one neighbor understands their predicament — their new kindred spirits in the Saudi royal family.“He’s so wounded,” said influential Saudi Prince Alaweed bin Talal, referring to Obama. “It’s very scary. Look, the 2014 elections are going to begin. Within two months they’re going to start campaigning. Thirty-nine members of his own party in the House have already moved away from him on Obamacare. That’s scary for him.”Not only for him, your Highness.
2)These are the words of Simon Deng, once a Sudanese slave. He is addressing the Durban Conference in NY.
I want to thank the organizers of this conference, The Perils of Global Intolerance. It is a great honor for me and it is a privilege really to be among today's distinguished speakers.
I came here as a friend of the State of Israel and the Jewish people. I came to protest this Durban conference which is based on a set of lies. It is organized by nations who are themselves are guilty of the worst kind of oppression.
It will not help the victims of racism. It will only isolate and target the Jewish state. It is a tool of the enemies of Israel .
The UN has itself become a tool against Israel . For over 50 years, 82 percent of the UN General Assembly emergency meetings have been about condemning one state - Israel . Hitler couldn't have been made happier!
The Durban Conference is an outrage. All decent people will know that.
But friends, I come here today with a radical idea. I come to tell you that there are peoples who suffer from the UN's anti-Israelism even more than the Israelis. I belong to one of those people.
Please hear me out.
By exaggerating Palestinian suffering, and by blaming the Jews for it, the UN has muffled the cries of those who suffer on a far larger scale.
For over fifty years the indigenous black population of Sudan -- Christians and Muslims alike --- have been the victims of the brutal, racist Arab Muslim regimes in Khartoum .
In South Sudan , my homeland, about 4 million innocent men, women and children were slaughtered from 1955 to 2005. Seven million were ethnically cleansed and they became the largest refugee group since World War II.
The UN is concerned about the so-called Palestinian refugees. They dedicated a separate agency for them, and they are treated with a special privilege.
Meanwhile, my people, ethnically cleansed, murdered and enslaved, are relatively ignored. The UN refuses to tell the world the truth about the real causes of Sudan 's conflicts. Who knows really what is happening in Darfur ? It is not a "tribal conflict."
It is a conflict rooted in Arab colonialism well known in north Africa. In Darfur, a region in the Western Sudan , everybody is Muslim. Everybody is Muslim because the Arabs invaded the North of Africa and converted the indigenous people to Islam. In the eyes of the Islamists in Khartoum , the Darfuris are not Muslim enough. And the Darfuris do not want to be Arabized.
They love their own African languages and dress and customs. The Arab response is genocide! But nobody at the UN tells the truth about Darfur .
In the Nuba Mountains , another region of Sudan , genocide is taking place as I speak. The Islamist regime in Khartoum is targeting the black Africans - Muslims and Christians. Nobody at the UN has told the truth about the Nuba Mountains .
Do you hear the UN condemn Arab racism against blacks?
What you find on the pages of the New York Times, or in the record of the UN condemnations is “Israeli crimes” and Palestinian suffering.
My people have been driven off the front pages because of the exaggerations about Palestinian suffering.
What Israel does is portrayed as a Western sin. But the truth is that the real sin happens when the West abandons us: the victims of Arab/Islamic apartheid.
Chattel slavery was practiced for centuries in Sudan . It was revived as a tool of war in the early 90s.
Khartoum declared jihad against my people and this legitimized taking slaves as war booty.
Arab militias were sent to destroy Southern villages and were encouraged to take African women and children as slaves.
We believe that up to 200,000 were kidnapped, brought to the North and sold into slavery.
I am a living proof of this crime against humanity!
I don't like talking about my experience as a slave, but I do it because it is important for the world to know that slavery exists even today.
I was only nine years old when an Arab neighbor named Abdullahi tricked me into following him to a boat. The boat wound up in Northern Sudan where he gave me as a gift to his family. For three and a half years I was their slave going through something that no child should ever go through: brutal beatings and humiliations; working around the clock; sleeping on the ground with animals; eating the family’s left-overs. During those three years I was unable to say the word “no”.
All I could say was “yes,” “yes,” “yes.”
The United Nations knew about the enslavement of South Sudanese by the Arabs. Their own staff reported it. It took UNICEF – under pressure from the Jewish –led American Anti-Slavery Group -- sixteen years to acknowledge what was happening. I want to publicly thank my friend Dr. Charles Jacobs for leading the anti-slavery fight.
But the Sudanese government and the Arab League pressured UNICEF, and UNICEF backtracked, and started to criticize those who worked to liberate Sudanese slaves. In 1998, Dr. Gaspar Biro, the courageous UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Sudan who reported on slavery, resigned in protest of the UN's actions.
My friends, today, tens of thousands of black South Sudanese still serve their masters in the North and the UN is silent about that. It would offend the OIC and the Arab League.
As a former slave and a victim of the worst sort of racism, allow me to explain why I think calling Israel a racist state is absolutely absurd and immoral.
I have been to Israel five times visiting the Sudanese refugees. Let me tell you how they ended up there. These are Sudanese who fled Arab racism, hoping to find shelter in Egypt . They were wrong. When Egyptian security forces slaughtered twenty six black refugees in Cairo who were protesting Egyptian racism, the Sudanese realized that the Arab racism is the same in Khartoum or Cairo . They needed shelter and they found it in Israel . Dodging the bullets of the Egyptian border patrols and walking for very long distances, the refugees' only hope was to reach Israel 's side of the fence, where they knew they would be safe.
Black Muslims from Darfur chose Israel above all the other Arab-Muslim states of the area. Do you know what this means!!!?? And the Arabs say Israel is racist!!!?
In Israel , black Sudanese, Christian and Muslim were welcomed and treated like human beings. Just go and ask them, like I have done. They told me that compared to the situation in Egypt , Israel is "heaven."
Is Israel a racist state? To my people, the people who know racism – the answer is absolutely not. Israel is a state of people who are the colors of the rainbow. Jews themselves come in all colors, even black. I met with Ethiopian Jews in Israel .
Beautiful black Jews.
So, yes … I came here today to tell you that the people who suffer most from the UN anti-Israel policy are not the Israelis but all those people who the UN ignores in order to tell its big lie against Israel: we, the victims of Arab/Muslim abuse: women, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, homosexuals, in the Arab/Muslim world. These are the biggest victims of UN Israel hatred.
Look at the situation of the Copts in Egypt , the Christians in Iraq , and Nigeria , and Iran , the Hindus and Bahais who suffer from Islamic oppression. The Sikhs. We -- a rainbow coalition of victims and targets of Jihadis -- all suffer. We are ignored, we are abandoned. So that the big lie against the Jews can go forward.
In 2005, I visited one of the refugee camps in South Sudan . I met a twelve year old girl who told me about her dream.
In a dream she wanted to go to school to become a doctor. And then, she wanted to visit Israel . I was shocked.
How could this refugee girl who spent most of her life in the North know about Israel ? When I asked why she wanted to visit Israel , she said: "This is our people." I was never able to find an answer to my question.
On January 9 of 2011 South Sudan became an independent state. For South Sudanese, that means continuation of oppression, brutalization, demonization, Islamization, Arabization and enslavement.
In a similar manner, the Arabs continue denying Jews their right for sovereignty in their homeland and the Durban III conference continues denying Israelâ's legitimacy.
As a friend of Israel, I bring you the news that my President, the President of the Republic of South Sudan, Salva Kiir -- publicly stated that the South Sudan Embassy in Israel will be built--- not in Tel Aviv, but in Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people.
I also want to assure you that my own new nation, and all of its peoples, will oppose racist forums like the Durban III. We will oppose it by simply continuing to tell the truth! Our truth!
My Jewish friends taught me something that I now want to say with you.
AM YISROEL CHAI !
The people of Israel lives!
Thank you
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)
$680-800 million on healthcare.gov ……..give all 300 million citizens $2 million and put them into free enterprise
$860 million in QE1 for xx,xxx jobs at million per job. (Or, another $2M each citizen)
$916 billion on welfare for 100M people (or $9,000 for each)
and now we are at $4,009,000 per person in need ...... and smaller government
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4)
Of course the morally compromised world opinion would consider that if Israel declared its justified rejection of the Two-State-Solution, such a statement of the truth would be considered inflammatory and guaranteed to provoke another Palestinian Arab outburst of violence and bloodletting (dignified by the Arabic term intifada). But isn’t that what is happening on the roads of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) with almost daily outrages committed by Arab thugs against Jewish civilians?
The over 3,000 year old Hebrew and biblical names, Yehuda and Shomron, (Judea and Samaria), are given to the heartland of the modern reborn Jewish homeland. But a malevolent world prefers to call the territory the West Bank; the mere 19 year old Jordanian name applied to the land after it and much of Jerusalem was illegally occupied by Jordan from 1948 until 1967.
The Jordanian Arab Legion after invading and occupying the territory immediately began desecrating Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives, using the headstones to build latrines for their troops, destroying 57 ancient synagogues and holy sites, and forcibly expelling Jewish residents from their villages and their ancient homes in Jerusalem’s Old City.
As a good friend, Robert Vincent, has written in an open letter to Israelis: “The world must be told that Jordan - a country named after a river, not a people - is the true Palestinian state, with her Palestinian Arab majority. The world must be told that only through democratic reforms in Jordan can the Palestinian Arabs be true masters of their fate in a home of their own worth living in. The world must be told that if Palestinian Arabs insist on living in Judea/Samaria, that is fine from a human rights perspective, they can do so, but only under Israeli law and sovereignty. If they prefer to live in a “Palestinian state”...then they can move next door.”
In other words, all who know history know that Jordan sits on four fifths of what was until 1922 the entire Palestine Mandate. The Arabs who call themselves Palestinians already possess, de facto, a state on the east bank of the River Jordan, which in size dwarfs tiny Israel. There already has thus been a Two-State-Solution in existence now for some 91 years.
According to Israel National News, “The peace talks between Israel and the PA broke down in 2010, but not because of Israel. The talks broke down because PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas refused to negotiate with Israel even though it agreed to his precondition and froze construction in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem for 10 months. Instead, he has continued to impose preconditions on talks with Israel, including a demand that Israel release terrorists who were jailed before 1993, freeze construction for a second time and even present a map of the future Palestinian state before any negotiations take place.” But the reality is that Abbas does not want a state side by side with Israel: he wants a state in place of Israel. That is why breathtakingly generous – nay, suicidal Israeli offers – are always rejected.
Kerry has now regurgitated the shameful and deeply unjust demand that “Israel freeze construction east of the 1949 armistice line so the talks can resume.” Prime Minister Netanyahu has not responded to that suggestion, nor should he. After all, the Arabs continuously smother the land with illegal buildings and the world remains deathly quiet. Only when an Israeli family dares to add a room on their tiny home or some new apartments are built within the ancestral homeland or in Israel’s capital city, Jerusalem, does the same world scream bloody murder!
Secretary Kerry even suggests giving an immediate $4 billion of U.S. taxpayer’s money to the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians but as Yoram Ettinger, retired Israeli ambassador and leading demographer, has written:
“Kerry overlooks the impact of the $400 million in annual US aid which has fueled an all-time-high Palestinian corruption (Mahoud Abbas’ nickname is “Mr. 20%), hate education, terrorism, anti-US incitement, oppression, in general, and discrimination against Christians, in particular, and the Palestinian affinity toward America’s enemies and adversaries: Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. The PA follows in the footsteps of previous Arab leaders who sided with the Nazis, the Communist Bloc and Khomeini.
“Why don’t the Arab oil-producing countries provide $4 billion to the PA, which they could easily afford in view of their robust $100 per barrel economy?”
Some time ago I wrote an article titled, Joseph Trumpeldor’s Message. In it I recounted the history of one of the towering figures in the Zionist cause; Zionism being the self-determination of the Jewish people and their national liberation movement.
Born in 1880, Joseph Trumpeldor grew up in the small town of Piatigorsk in the Caucasus region of Russia. Young Joseph’s father was forcibly conscripted into the Czarist army for 25 years. This was the cruel policy implemented by a succession of Czars who hoped that the length of time away from home and family would erase any Jewish identity in the hapless soldiers. But Joseph Trumpeldor’s father remained firm in his faith and love of his Jewish ancestry. This proved to be a major influence on young Joseph.
In 1920, Trumpeldor, whose military prowess and heroism during the Russo-Japanese War in which he lost an arm had made him a legendary figure, arrived at a tiny embattled outpost in upper Galilee. The place was called Tel Hai, which translated from the Hebrew means Hill of Life. Tel Hai had been under severe assault for some time by large numbers of attackers from the nearby Arab settlement of Hulsa. Trumpeldor himself arrived under fire and immediately set about organizing Tel Hai’s defense.
Confronted with a relentless barrage of superior firepower and frequent waves of attacks, the defenders fell one by one. And on a Galilean spring day in early March, Trumpeldor himself fell mortally wounded, fighting to the end.
His dying words were in Hebrew: Ein davar. Tov lamut be’ad artzenu. Translated into English: “Never mind. It is good to die for our country.”
Joseph Trumpeldor’s grave lies near Tel Hai, now a commemorative site adjoining Kfar Giladi. Not long after his heroic death a Jewish village was reborn at the foot of Mount Gilboa where 3,000 years earlier other Jewish military heroes, King Saul and his son, Jonathan, so beloved of his friend David, fell fighting an ancient enemy. That village is named in Trumpeldor’s honor: Tel Yosef.
So what would Trumpeldor’s message be today to the embattled Jewish state? It would probably be this: Fight, fight and fight again. Self-restraint never works in the face of an implacable foe. Build, build and build again throughout the ancestral homeland.
Indulging in self-imposed building freezes to placate enemies, and so-called friends alike, while the Arab enemy constructs thousands of illegal buildings with impunity, is insanity.
Defend Israel, for to lose the precious homeland again and return to the horrors of exile is beyond imagining.
Similarly, Yigal Alon writing in the October, 1976 edition of Foreign Affairs titled, Israel: The case for defensible borders, exposed the critical defects in the armistice lines existing on June 4, 1967 - the same lines with minor adjustments that John Kerry would have the Jewish state shrink to. Such a withdrawal contradicts the very meaning of U.N. Resolution 242. As Alon wrote, …”For Israel, a military defeat would mean the physical extinction of a large part of its population and the elimination of the Jewish state. To lose a single war is to lose everything.”
Without retaining the hill country, that runs like a spine north and south through Judea and Samaria, Israel’s pitifully narrow 9 mile wide coastal plain, which includes Netanya, Ben Gurion airport and Tel Aviv, will be at the mercy of the Palestinian Arab thugocracy just as southern Israeli towns and villages endure relentless aggression from the Hamas occupied Gaza Strip. That is why the Two-State-Solution peddled by the EU, the UN, the Obama Administration and much of the world will usher in a new Final Solution.
John Kerry works at the pleasure of President Barack Hussein Obama whose outreach to the Muslim world has been an unmitigated disaster for the West, the Free World and particularly for the State of Israel. Obama has more than likely prevented Israel for the last five years from effectively nullifying the existential nuclear threat that the genocidal Iranian regime poses to the Jewish state. Kerry’s boss has allowed one red line after another to disappear like invisible ink.
But it is the fraudulent Palestinian narrative that the world has fallen for that is the most pernicious to Israel’s image. It allows an uninformed world to embrace the falsehoods of an Arab people who call themselves Palestinians and creates an atmosphere where the embattled Jewish state is unjustly and grotesquely demonized, allowing such foul anti-Israel movements as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) organization to continue its dirty work.
That the conflict is not territorial but based upon the Muslim refusal to accept a Jewish state, whatever its borders, in territory once conquered and occupied under the banner of Islam is lost on the functionaries who inhabit the international corridors of power. And sadly too many Israeli leaders refuse to accept the obvious, preferring to believe that the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians can ever be anything but serial Jew haters. Most diplomats, with few exceptions, still harbor the illusion that territorial compromise will satisfy the Arab and Muslim world. So again and again the discredited corpse known as the Two-State-Solution is exhumed and presented as the fall back default plan.
And this is the same suicidal plan for Israel that the current Secretary of State, at the behest of President Obama, is bringing for the fifth time.
It was Albert Einstein who said: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer with articles and essays published in FrontPageMag.com, Townhall.com, Outpost, The Jewish Press, American Thinker, Renew America, Israel News Daily, Family Security Matters, Jewish Voice & Opinion, Page One Daily, The Jerusalem Connection, Israel National News and many other publications. He is also the author of Volumes One & Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish State and The Blue Hour and Other Strange Tales.
(JTA) – A few observations about the Israeli election results:
Right-left split changes, but not a game changer: From an outsider’s perspective, Israel would seem to a very politically unstable place. The biggest party in the previous Knesset, Kadima, crashed from 28 seats to 2. The No. 3 party, Yisrael Beiteinu, hitched its wagon to the ruling party, Likud, but their combinedlist lost about a quarter of its seats, down to 31 from 42. Meanwhile, a party that didn’t exist until a few months ago, Yesh Atid, emerged as the 120-seat Knesset’s second largest with 19 seats.
Yet despite the swapping of party labels, not much has changed in the right-left power split. Yes, the right wing lost a little ground – from 65 seats in the last Knesset to 60 seats in the new one. But within the rightists' camp, votes moved rightward from the more moderate Likud to the Jewish Home party. Also, it would be a mistake to lump together all the centrist and left-wing parties. The biggest winner of the centre, Yesh Atid, espouses positions on Palestinian-related issues that in many respects are not dissimilar to Likud's: Both favournegotiations with the Palestinians (though skeptics say Likud's position is more rhetorical than genuine) and retaining the large Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank while opposing any division of Jerusalem. Most notably, Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid has made clear that he wants to join a coalition with Likud, which is led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Even if centrist parties such as Yesh Atid are massed with the leftists, they constitute a minority of fewer than 50 seats; the balance goes to the Arab parties.
New priorities: With Israelis deeply pessimistic about the chances for imminent peace, a significant number of voters went for parties that made socioeconomic issues, not security, the centrepiece of their campaigns. Yesh Atid ran a campaign about social and economic issues, and Labour leader Shelly Yachimovich, who led the party to 15 seats, up from 8 in the last Knesset, virtually ignored security issues in her campaign. This represents a sea change from the old days, when campaigns were all about security. Tzipi Livni's Hatnuah bucked the trend, emphasizing peace with the Palestinians. The result: 6 seats.
New faces: The 19th Knesset will see a plethora of new members, with more than a quarter of the parliament occupied by first-timers, most of them from Jewish Home and Yesh Atid. Jewish Home is led by a son of American immigrants to Israel, businessman-turned-politician Naftali Bennett, and Yesh Atid is guided by Lapid, a former TV personality and the son of the late politician Yosef (Tommy) Lapid.
Women: The new Knesset will have more women; Yesh Atid leads the way with 8 female representatives. The Likud-Beiteinu list has 7, Labour has 4, Meretz has 3 and Jewish Home has 2. Hatnuah and Hadash each has 1. Among the newcomers will be the body’s first Ethiopian-Israeli woman, Penina Tamnu-Shata of Yesh Atid, an attorney who immigrated to Israel at age 3 during Operation Moses.
The end of Kadima: Twice in its short history, the Kadima leader occupied the prime minister’s office. But in just one election cycle, the party went from Israel’s largest faction to just 2 seats. Various factors doomed Kadima: the rise of Yesh Atid, whose socioeconomic-focused platform and charismatic leader peeled away centrist voters; Livni’s failure to gain adherents for Kadima and subsequent defection to her new party, Hatnuah; and Shaul Mofaz’s decision to join, albeit briefly, the Likud-led ruling coalition. It’s not the end of centrist politics in Israel, but it appears to be nearly the end of the road for the party started by Ariel Sharon as a breakaway from Likud.
Bibi weakened: Netanyahu supporters used to herald him as Bibi, King of Israel. So did Time magazine just a few months ago. But with the combined Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu list falling by a quarter after what was widely panned as a lacklustre campaign, it’s difficult to make the case that Netanyahu’s star is burning brighter. He’s almost sure to capture the premiership again – now comes the horse trading that is Israeli coalition building – but it seems it will be more for lack of an alternative than enthusiasm for Netanyahu.
Hello, Naftali Bennett: If there was any enthusiasm on the right wing this time, it appeared to be for Naftali Bennett, leader of the newly constituted Jewish Home party (itself a successor to the National Religious Party). The party captured 11 seats, up from just three as the NRP in the last Knesset. Bennett, who supports annexation of parts of the West Bank, is likely to apply pressure on Netanyahu to shift further right on security issues.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4)
The Two-State-Solution: A fatal trap
Victor Sharpe
Canada Free Press
The so-called Palestinian Authority to push for a Two-State-Solution is yet another appalling euphemism which in reality will spell out the eventual destruction of the reconstituted Jewish state and the extermination of its people by a Muslim world that will never accept a non-Muslim nation and will wage eternal war against it - the Dar al-Harb - until it is utterly destroyed. This is what Islam requires of its adherents. Remember that other evil euphemism – the Final Solution? There is no difference in what it portends for the Jews. The Nazi’s “Final Solution” served to usher in the Holocaust. The “Two-State-Solution” ushers in the eventual destruction of the Jewish state.Canada Free Press
Of course the morally compromised world opinion would consider that if Israel declared its justified rejection of the Two-State-Solution, such a statement of the truth would be considered inflammatory and guaranteed to provoke another Palestinian Arab outburst of violence and bloodletting (dignified by the Arabic term intifada). But isn’t that what is happening on the roads of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) with almost daily outrages committed by Arab thugs against Jewish civilians?
The over 3,000 year old Hebrew and biblical names, Yehuda and Shomron, (Judea and Samaria), are given to the heartland of the modern reborn Jewish homeland. But a malevolent world prefers to call the territory the West Bank; the mere 19 year old Jordanian name applied to the land after it and much of Jerusalem was illegally occupied by Jordan from 1948 until 1967.
The Jordanian Arab Legion after invading and occupying the territory immediately began desecrating Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives, using the headstones to build latrines for their troops, destroying 57 ancient synagogues and holy sites, and forcibly expelling Jewish residents from their villages and their ancient homes in Jerusalem’s Old City.
As a good friend, Robert Vincent, has written in an open letter to Israelis: “The world must be told that Jordan - a country named after a river, not a people - is the true Palestinian state, with her Palestinian Arab majority. The world must be told that only through democratic reforms in Jordan can the Palestinian Arabs be true masters of their fate in a home of their own worth living in. The world must be told that if Palestinian Arabs insist on living in Judea/Samaria, that is fine from a human rights perspective, they can do so, but only under Israeli law and sovereignty. If they prefer to live in a “Palestinian state”...then they can move next door.”
In other words, all who know history know that Jordan sits on four fifths of what was until 1922 the entire Palestine Mandate. The Arabs who call themselves Palestinians already possess, de facto, a state on the east bank of the River Jordan, which in size dwarfs tiny Israel. There already has thus been a Two-State-Solution in existence now for some 91 years.
According to Israel National News, “The peace talks between Israel and the PA broke down in 2010, but not because of Israel. The talks broke down because PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas refused to negotiate with Israel even though it agreed to his precondition and froze construction in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem for 10 months. Instead, he has continued to impose preconditions on talks with Israel, including a demand that Israel release terrorists who were jailed before 1993, freeze construction for a second time and even present a map of the future Palestinian state before any negotiations take place.” But the reality is that Abbas does not want a state side by side with Israel: he wants a state in place of Israel. That is why breathtakingly generous – nay, suicidal Israeli offers – are always rejected.
Kerry has now regurgitated the shameful and deeply unjust demand that “Israel freeze construction east of the 1949 armistice line so the talks can resume.” Prime Minister Netanyahu has not responded to that suggestion, nor should he. After all, the Arabs continuously smother the land with illegal buildings and the world remains deathly quiet. Only when an Israeli family dares to add a room on their tiny home or some new apartments are built within the ancestral homeland or in Israel’s capital city, Jerusalem, does the same world scream bloody murder!
Secretary Kerry even suggests giving an immediate $4 billion of U.S. taxpayer’s money to the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians but as Yoram Ettinger, retired Israeli ambassador and leading demographer, has written:
“Kerry overlooks the impact of the $400 million in annual US aid which has fueled an all-time-high Palestinian corruption (Mahoud Abbas’ nickname is “Mr. 20%), hate education, terrorism, anti-US incitement, oppression, in general, and discrimination against Christians, in particular, and the Palestinian affinity toward America’s enemies and adversaries: Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. The PA follows in the footsteps of previous Arab leaders who sided with the Nazis, the Communist Bloc and Khomeini.
“Why don’t the Arab oil-producing countries provide $4 billion to the PA, which they could easily afford in view of their robust $100 per barrel economy?”
Some time ago I wrote an article titled, Joseph Trumpeldor’s Message. In it I recounted the history of one of the towering figures in the Zionist cause; Zionism being the self-determination of the Jewish people and their national liberation movement.
Born in 1880, Joseph Trumpeldor grew up in the small town of Piatigorsk in the Caucasus region of Russia. Young Joseph’s father was forcibly conscripted into the Czarist army for 25 years. This was the cruel policy implemented by a succession of Czars who hoped that the length of time away from home and family would erase any Jewish identity in the hapless soldiers. But Joseph Trumpeldor’s father remained firm in his faith and love of his Jewish ancestry. This proved to be a major influence on young Joseph.
In 1920, Trumpeldor, whose military prowess and heroism during the Russo-Japanese War in which he lost an arm had made him a legendary figure, arrived at a tiny embattled outpost in upper Galilee. The place was called Tel Hai, which translated from the Hebrew means Hill of Life. Tel Hai had been under severe assault for some time by large numbers of attackers from the nearby Arab settlement of Hulsa. Trumpeldor himself arrived under fire and immediately set about organizing Tel Hai’s defense.
Confronted with a relentless barrage of superior firepower and frequent waves of attacks, the defenders fell one by one. And on a Galilean spring day in early March, Trumpeldor himself fell mortally wounded, fighting to the end.
His dying words were in Hebrew: Ein davar. Tov lamut be’ad artzenu. Translated into English: “Never mind. It is good to die for our country.”
Joseph Trumpeldor’s grave lies near Tel Hai, now a commemorative site adjoining Kfar Giladi. Not long after his heroic death a Jewish village was reborn at the foot of Mount Gilboa where 3,000 years earlier other Jewish military heroes, King Saul and his son, Jonathan, so beloved of his friend David, fell fighting an ancient enemy. That village is named in Trumpeldor’s honor: Tel Yosef.
So what would Trumpeldor’s message be today to the embattled Jewish state? It would probably be this: Fight, fight and fight again. Self-restraint never works in the face of an implacable foe. Build, build and build again throughout the ancestral homeland.
Indulging in self-imposed building freezes to placate enemies, and so-called friends alike, while the Arab enemy constructs thousands of illegal buildings with impunity, is insanity.
Defend Israel, for to lose the precious homeland again and return to the horrors of exile is beyond imagining.
Similarly, Yigal Alon writing in the October, 1976 edition of Foreign Affairs titled, Israel: The case for defensible borders, exposed the critical defects in the armistice lines existing on June 4, 1967 - the same lines with minor adjustments that John Kerry would have the Jewish state shrink to. Such a withdrawal contradicts the very meaning of U.N. Resolution 242. As Alon wrote, …”For Israel, a military defeat would mean the physical extinction of a large part of its population and the elimination of the Jewish state. To lose a single war is to lose everything.”
Without retaining the hill country, that runs like a spine north and south through Judea and Samaria, Israel’s pitifully narrow 9 mile wide coastal plain, which includes Netanya, Ben Gurion airport and Tel Aviv, will be at the mercy of the Palestinian Arab thugocracy just as southern Israeli towns and villages endure relentless aggression from the Hamas occupied Gaza Strip. That is why the Two-State-Solution peddled by the EU, the UN, the Obama Administration and much of the world will usher in a new Final Solution.
John Kerry works at the pleasure of President Barack Hussein Obama whose outreach to the Muslim world has been an unmitigated disaster for the West, the Free World and particularly for the State of Israel. Obama has more than likely prevented Israel for the last five years from effectively nullifying the existential nuclear threat that the genocidal Iranian regime poses to the Jewish state. Kerry’s boss has allowed one red line after another to disappear like invisible ink.
But it is the fraudulent Palestinian narrative that the world has fallen for that is the most pernicious to Israel’s image. It allows an uninformed world to embrace the falsehoods of an Arab people who call themselves Palestinians and creates an atmosphere where the embattled Jewish state is unjustly and grotesquely demonized, allowing such foul anti-Israel movements as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) organization to continue its dirty work.
That the conflict is not territorial but based upon the Muslim refusal to accept a Jewish state, whatever its borders, in territory once conquered and occupied under the banner of Islam is lost on the functionaries who inhabit the international corridors of power. And sadly too many Israeli leaders refuse to accept the obvious, preferring to believe that the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians can ever be anything but serial Jew haters. Most diplomats, with few exceptions, still harbor the illusion that territorial compromise will satisfy the Arab and Muslim world. So again and again the discredited corpse known as the Two-State-Solution is exhumed and presented as the fall back default plan.
And this is the same suicidal plan for Israel that the current Secretary of State, at the behest of President Obama, is bringing for the fifth time.
It was Albert Einstein who said: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer with articles and essays published in FrontPageMag.com, Townhall.com, Outpost, The Jewish Press, American Thinker, Renew America, Israel News Daily, Family Security Matters, Jewish Voice & Opinion, Page One Daily, The Jerusalem Connection, Israel National News and many other publications. He is also the author of Volumes One & Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish State and The Blue Hour and Other Strange Tales.
4a)
The consequences of Israel's vote
Uriel Heilman
The Jewish Tribune
The Jewish Tribune
(JTA) – A few observations about the Israeli election results:
Right-left split changes, but not a game changer: From an outsider’s perspective, Israel would seem to a very politically unstable place. The biggest party in the previous Knesset, Kadima, crashed from 28 seats to 2. The No. 3 party, Yisrael Beiteinu, hitched its wagon to the ruling party, Likud, but their combined
Yet despite the swapping of party labels, not much has changed in the right-left power split. Yes, the right wing lost a little ground – from 65 seats in the last Knesset to 60 seats in the new one. But within the rightists' camp, votes moved rightward from the more moderate Likud to the Jewish Home party. Also, it would be a mistake to lump together all the centrist and left-wing parties. The biggest winner of the centre, Yesh Atid, espouses positions on Palestinian-related issues that in many respects are not dissimilar to Likud's: Both favour
Even if centrist parties such as Yesh Atid are massed with the leftists, they constitute a minority of fewer than 50 seats; the balance goes to the Arab parties.
New priorities: With Israelis deeply pessimistic about the chances for imminent peace, a significant number of voters went for parties that made socioeconomic issues, not security, the centrepiece of their campaigns. Yesh Atid ran a campaign about social and economic issues, and Labour leader Shelly Yachimovich, who led the party to 15 seats, up from 8 in the last Knesset, virtually ignored security issues in her campaign. This represents a sea change from the old days, when campaigns were all about security. Tzipi Livni's Hatnuah bucked the trend, emphasizing peace with the Palestinians. The result: 6 seats.
New faces: The 19th Knesset will see a plethora of new members, with more than a quarter of the parliament occupied by first-timers, most of them from Jewish Home and Yesh Atid. Jewish Home is led by a son of American immigrants to Israel, businessman-turned-politician Naftali Bennett, and Yesh Atid is guided by Lapid, a former TV personality and the son of the late politician Yosef (Tommy) Lapid.
Women: The new Knesset will have more women; Yesh Atid leads the way with 8 female representatives. The Likud-Beiteinu list has 7, Labour has 4, Meretz has 3 and Jewish Home has 2. Hatnuah and Hadash each has 1. Among the newcomers will be the body’s first Ethiopian-Israeli woman, Penina Tamnu-Shata of Yesh Atid, an attorney who immigrated to Israel at age 3 during Operation Moses.
The end of Kadima: Twice in its short history, the Kadima leader occupied the prime minister’s office. But in just one election cycle, the party went from Israel’s largest faction to just 2 seats. Various factors doomed Kadima: the rise of Yesh Atid, whose socioeconomic-focused platform and charismatic leader peeled away centrist voters; Livni’s failure to gain adherents for Kadima and subsequent defection to her new party, Hatnuah; and Shaul Mofaz’s decision to join, albeit briefly, the Likud-led ruling coalition. It’s not the end of centrist politics in Israel, but it appears to be nearly the end of the road for the party started by Ariel Sharon as a breakaway from Likud.
Bibi weakened: Netanyahu supporters used to herald him as Bibi, King of Israel. So did Time magazine just a few months ago. But with the combined Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu list falling by a quarter after what was widely panned as a lacklustre campaign, it’s difficult to make the case that Netanyahu’s star is burning brighter. He’s almost sure to capture the premiership again – now comes the horse trading that is Israeli coalition building – but it seems it will be more for lack of an alternative than enthusiasm for Netanyahu.
Hello, Naftali Bennett: If there was any enthusiasm on the right wing this time, it appeared to be for Naftali Bennett, leader of the newly constituted Jewish Home party (itself a successor to the National Religious Party). The party captured 11 seats, up from just three as the NRP in the last Knesset. Bennett, who supports annexation of parts of the West Bank, is likely to apply pressure on Netanyahu to shift further right on security issues.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment