REMINDER! THIS PROGRAM WILL TAKE PLACE TONIGHT (THURSDAY) AND WE HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE!
Dr. Mordechai Kedar
Of all the regions in the world, the Middle East is arguably the most influential in determining the future course of world events. It is a combination of sacred history that is critical to the major religions, immense critical oil reserves, a restless young population that causes internal political churn, and violent religious extremism. Add to that the tribal rivalries that simmer around the edges, occasionally boiling over, and look to the center to find Israel, a stable, pro-Western state that feels threatened by its neighbors (with justification) and which therefore takes very aggressive policies in hopes of reducing that threat. Mix in the Palestinian refugees who have lived for 65 years unassimilated by the Arab states or living under Israeli rule, and you have a political, economic, and human rights stew that has defied resolution.
Dr. Mordechai Kedar will talk about Israel's challenges and opportunities. Is there a path that will facilitate enabling Israel to live in peace with its neighbors, and what must Israel and the U.S. and the Arab countries do to get us on that path? Dr. Kedar is well qualified to address these questions, including both the Israeli and Arab perspectives. He is currently a lecturer on Arabic and Islamic Studies at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Israel, where he received both his BA and Ph.D. degrees. He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Military Intelligence Unit of the Israel Defense Force for 25 years specializing in Islamic groups, the political discourse of Arab countries, the Arabic press and mass media, and the Syrian domestic arena. He is fluent in Hebrew, Arabic and English. Dr. Kedar has published numerous articles on a wide range of Arab-centered topics and appeared on many discussion panels and TV interviews.
Sponsors of this Month’s Program - Judge Realty and Georgia Southern University
Judge Realty is a locally-owned and operated boutique brokerage that is uniquely invested in our community and honors first and foremost the needs of its clients. It is a full-service agency that can help find the home of your dreams, sell the house you have, or fulfill all of your property management needs. They will place you in that picture-perfect storefront or help you upgrade office space to suit your business needs.
The Savannah Council on World Affairs is grateful for Judge Realty's support.
Georgia Southern University has also provided generous support for this visit and we greatly appreciate their participation. |
Telling the truth becomes a confusing matter for Obama. (See 1 below.)
The CBO revelations have caused some angst at The White House so their new theory is that working less gives employees more time with family. I guess that way their location and behaviour is easier to track by The NSA. (See 1a and 1b below.)
In five years we have gone from a work ethos to a stay at home and collect from the stuckees ethos. Just amazing!
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No way out? Kerry bludgeons Israel to give up land, security etc. to those sworn to destroy and not recognize them. With friends like that Israel already has enough enemies.(See 2 below.)
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Hillary not a shoo in for the nomination? (See 3 below.)
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What The Pentagon needs to block China. Would Obama allow them to have their wish list?
He has allowed our Navy to shrink to a level that will not support our foreign policy. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)Obama's IRS 'Confusion'
New evidence undercuts White House claims about IRS motivation
House committees are still digging into the IRS political targeting scandal, and based on a hearing Wednesday there's more to learn. The day produced more evidence blowing apart President Obama's claims that there was "not even a smidgen of corruption" or political motivation in the IRS handling of groups applying for tax-exempt status.
Mr. Obama wants Americans to believe that the targeting resulted from the confusing tax law governing nonprofits, which he says was "difficult" to interpret and resulted in mere "bureaucratic" mistakes. This is also the Administration's justification for issuing new regulations governing 501(c)(4)s that would effectively silence White House opponents this election year. Published in the Federal Register in November, the new rules cite the "lack of a clear and concise" regulation as reason for the rewrite.
House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp blew up this fairy tale at Wednesday's hearing with new IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. Mr. Camp unveiled a June 14, 2012 email from Treasury career attorney Ruth Madrigal to key IRS officials in the tax-exempt department, including former director Lois Lerner.
The email cites a blog post about the political activity of tax-exempt 501(c)(4) groups and reads: "Don't know who in your organizations [sic] is keeping tabs on c4s, but since we mentioned potentially addressing them (off-plan) in 2013, I've got my radar up and this seemed interesting."
Interesting for sure. The IRS typically puts out a public schedule of coming regulations, and Mr. Camp noted that in this case "off-plan" appears to mean "hidden from the public." He added that committee interviews with IRS officials have found that the new 2013 rules were in the works as early as 2011, meaning the Administration has "fabricated the rationale" for this new regulation.
Mr. Camp added that everything his committee has discovered contradicts the White House argument that the IRS scandal was caused by legal "confusion." The current rules governing 501(c)(4)s have existed, unchanged, since 1959. Prior to 2010 the IRS processed and approved tax-exempt applications in fewer than three months with no apparent befuddlement.
The IRS hyper-scrutiny of conservative groups only began in 2010 amid the Obama Administration's larger political attack on political donors like the Koch brothers, and emails show that IRS officials were acutely aware of this political environment. In February 2010, for example, an IRS screener in Cincinnati flagged an application to his superiors noting: "Recent media attention to this type of organization indicates to me that this is a 'high profile' case."
From then on applications were routed through the offices of Mrs. Lerner and Obama-appointed IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, and long approval delays ensued. Extensive interviews and emails show that neither the initial Cincinnati interest, nor the subsequent Washington delay, was in any way driven by "confusion."
Mr. Koskinen promised in December to restore public trust in the IRS, but he didn't do much of that on Wednesday. He toed the Administration line on the new 501(c)(4) rules, promising to address concerns only "to the extent I have any control" over the process. He refused to say if he'd comply with Mr. Camp's request for IRS and Treasury documents pertaining to the rule-making, fretting instead about low IRS "morale" and lack of funding.
The quickest way Mr. Koskinen could restore public trust in the IRS would be to halt the new politically toxic 501(c)(4) rules until investigations into the original targeting are complete. Meantime, the House should sharply reduce IRS funding until the agency is more responsive.
1b)ObamaCare's New Theory of Employment
The amazing defense of job losses caused by the Affordable Care Act.
The Congressional Budget Office report estimating that ObamaCare will cause the economy to lose the equivalent of 2.5 million workers is remarkable on its own. But the reaction from the left—giddy celebration—is another order of magnitude.
U.S. politics used to have enough of a center that politicians could agree that fewer Americans working and others working less as a result of qualifying for a new taxpayer-funded benefit wasn't desirable. But liberals are now actively glorifying another political incentive not to contribute to U.S. economic life.
The CBO essentially says that because ObamaCare's means-tested subsidies phase out as cash income rises, some people will choose to stay poorer to keep earning benefits. Some of the giddier liberals even extol ObamaCare for "liberating" workers from the adult responsibility of earning a living.
Supposedly this shrinking labor force development is great news because "this is a choice on the part of workers," as White House chief economist Jason Furman put it. If businesses shed jobs in response to ObamaCare, he said, that would be bad because people who wanted work would have a harder time finding it.
But CBO's lost workers are splendid, Mr. Furman argued, because it means they will simply be making a rational decision to drop out or cut back, and "that, in their case, might be a better choice and a better option than what they had before." Liberals cite the 60-year-old who can retire early before qualifying for Medicare or the second-income spouse who quits to spend time with her kids.
It's worth parsing this supply-of-labor reasoning. In the post-recession economy, the unemployment rate has fallen in major part because fewer people are actively seeking work; the labor-force participation rate is the lowest since 1978.
For years liberals have lamented the jobs crisis and underemployment to castigate Republicans as mean-spirited for opposing more "stimulus" and more weeks of unemployment benefits. But if pervasive joblessness is an economic and social scourge, why celebrate a program that is creating more of it?
Apart from harm to individuals, ObamaCare is also wasting human potential because fewer workers mean a less prosperous, less dynamic economy. Contrary to liberal patronizing, many near-seniors, moms and the rest like their jobs and contribute to productivity. The 2.5 million worker ObamaCare job exodus, CBO estimates, translates into a 1.5% to 2% reduction in the total number of hours worked, which means less growth.
Liberals are also trying to spin the CBO report as an endorsement of ObamaCare's alleged health security. Mr. Furman cited the phenomenon known as "job lock," in which people don't switch employers or start their own business to preserve fringe benefits. But job lock is really about employment flexibility, rather than the government extending subsidies so people don't need or want jobs.
Whether ObamaCare is leading to fewer jobs or fewer workers—we'd argue both—most normal, nonpolitical people probably see either one as negative. We know liberals don't care about tax rates on the rich, but you'd think they'd care about marginal rates so high on the poor that it makes no sense to climb the income ladder. The liberal applause for this "liberation" shows how radical ObamaCare really is.
The Great Deflection
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2)Is there no way out?
February 6, 2014 | Eli E. Hertz
The weight of the evidence of so many scholars, observers, pollsters and monitors make it almost impossible to mitigate, not to mention ignore the enormity of finding a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
When one grasps the duration of the conflict and its roots, when one fully faces the depth of animosity towards Israel and the antisemitism that permeates the Arab world from the political, religious and intellectual elites down to the grass roots, the sheer magnitude of the challenge for peacemakers becomes painfully apparent.
When one admits the implications of Palestinian society’s behavior – the repetitive pattern of over 90 years of rejectionism on the diplomatic front and a penchant for terrorism against civilians, the ‘readiness’ of Arabs for co-existence and the chances of a breakthrough assume their true proportions.
The unwillingness to accept Israel as a legitimate non-Muslim political entity is epitomized by the Palestinians asymmetrical demands for the Right of Return of all Palestinian refugees to the Jewish state coupled with a demand that the West Bank and Gaza be cleansed of all Jews.
So, where do we go from here? Is there no way out?
One cannot artificially narrow the scope of the conflict. One cannot duck the tough issues – whether in the Palestinian camp or the Arab world as a whole. Western leadership that is ‘Staying above the conflict’ out of fear that demanding Arabs to ‘walk the talk’ will jeopardize one’s status as an honest broker has not and will not bring peace.
True peace cannot be based on a lie: There has never been ‘a cycle of violence’. Resorting to such neutral terminology requires the United States to acquiesce to and perpetuate a gross misrepresentation of reality. Putting Israel and its neighbors on the same footing totally ignores the asymmetry of the history of the conflict and something as fundamental as ‘cause and effect’. The truth is – one side has been the aggressor time-after-time. The Arabs have been the initiators of more than five major wars, political and economic boycotts and unbridled incitement. The Palestinians have launched wave-after-wave of terrorism against Israelis and other Jews and made hate the fuel that directs and runs their society. All this began before there was a State of Israel, before there was an ‘occupation’ and it continues unabated to this day.
In response to these onslaughts, Israel has not demanded reparations for the horrific causalities it has sustained in its fight for survival against repeated Arab aggression; it has only asked that it be allowed to live in peace with recognized and defendable borders and to develop according to its own Jewish ethos. This is hardly an excessive demand.
Attempts to cajole the Arabs to seek compromise and failure to put a price on intransigence and intolerable behavior has only perpetuated the conflict; encouraged further bloodshed and hardened Arab demands. It’s time to call a spade a spade and demand some concrete ‘concessions’ from the Arabs, not just Israel.
American leaders need to have the courage to change course – to admit that without reciprocity and responsibility on the part of theentire Arab camp, there can be no genuine peace. It is time to demand that the Arab states own up to their complicity in the conflict and demonstrate in practice that they are dedicated to reconciliation and an end to the conflict. If the Arabs are serious about peace what is needed is deeds, not more words – beginning with an end to state-sponsored incitement and an end to using refugees as a weapon.
Minimizing the Conflict Doesn’t Work. One of the historic flaws of past peace-making efforts is that they have been artificially limited in scope. Only a few decades ago attempts at ending the Arab Israeli conflict focused on bringing the Arab states to the negotiating table, assuming the Arab states could then dictate realities to the Palestinians. Then came Oslo. It took the oppositeapproach – assuming that the Palestinians hold the key to peace in the Middle East – that if an accommodation between Jews and Arabs in Israel, and the Territories can be reached, everything else will fall into place. Both paths artificially reduce the conflict to ‘manageable size’, while true peace hinges on a comprehensive settlement both in terms of the parties and the issues.
For a real peace to evolved, it must encompass the entire Arab world, not just Palestinians vs. Israel. Comprehensive means one cannot leave rejectionists and extremists – be they Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia or Hezbollah and Hamas – free to follow their own anti-Israel agendas and call it ‘peace.’ Moderate Arab states do not have to embrace Israel as a bosom buddy, but comprehensive peace does mean squarely facing a host of unsettled issues peacemakers prefer to turn a blind eye to as long as there is no open warfare. Among the substantive issues that can no longer be ignored:
· Arab countries of the Middle East – the ‘outer rim’ and close neighbors continue to arm themselves with weapons designed to destroy Israel – including weapons of mass destruction.
· The Arab world remains a global hub for antisemitism and a hotbed of vicious incitement and demonization of Israel. Even those with peace treaties with Israel continue to reject Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state or pursue polities that will ensure Israel remains a Jewish state.
· Arab countries presumably at peace with Israel have increasingly crossed the line between a ‘cold peace’ and unacceptable behavior. Using Palestinians as a ‘proxy,’ and encouraging Palestinian terrorism and impractical demands of Israel, can hardly pass for ‘peace.’
Sweeping Tough Problems Under the Carpet or ‘Saving them for Later’ Breeds Dangerous Illusions. A comprehensive peace must avoid the pitfall of Oslo, Wye, Mitchell, Tenet, Zuni, Camp David II, and the Road Map, accords that suffered from the ultimate of anomalies. More than a decade of negotiations and interim agreements ‘drained the peace process of content’ while at the same time ‘gaining momentum.’ A momentum that resulted in an unprecedented wave of terrorism with over 1,500 Israelis murdered.
How does it work? Time-and-again the tough issues – the ‘land mines’ on the road to peace with the Palestinians, have been ‘conveniently overlooked.’ Every time an issue of substance has resurfaced, the parties have pass over the loaded ‘land mine’ to prevent an impasse that would bring down the peace process … carefully reburying these time bombs ‘down the road.’
Thus, the peace process ‘went forward,’ interim agreement after interim agreement, until all the land mines, such as Jerusalem and the Right of Return, came to rest – ready and waiting to explode ‘on the threshold of peace.’ The folly was assuming that the so-called momentum created by the ‘process’ would ultimately allow the parties to jump over these barriers in the last minute of the game at Camp David when Arafat and Barak came to hammer out a final status agreement in July 2000. That did not happen, could not happen, because objectively, in terms of substance , for seven years, the process of conflict resolution between Palestinians and Jews has been confined to small increments and a host of issues of marginal importance.
Illusion of process and progress. This has been the core essence of Oslo: the peace process’ most lasting legacy has been the creation of an illusion of ‘process’. The illusion of ‘progress’ has not merely left Washington and Jerusalem disappointed. It was responsible for raising the ‘Return’ expectations among Palestinians to a fever pitch.
This mistake should not be repeated. Yet, today other forms of ‘removing the land mines and burying them further down the road’ continue to surface: One is the road map which makes a Palestinian state a forgone conclusion, independent of solving the refugee problem and final borders – one of the latest ‘creative solutions’ being floated in the marketplace of ideas. A road maps for further strife down the road, not reconciliation. The ten year Oslo experiment in limited Palestinian autonomy under the Palestinian Authority has produced but another Arab dictatorial polity rift with civil rights violations that is as much a danger to its people as its neighbors; an independent Palestinian state will create just the kind of rogue state that the United States is in the process of eliminating elsewhere.
Peace-makers must deal with the fundamentals – including the substantive issues that concern both Israelis and Palestinians and those that concern the Arab world as a whole. A world that has been left in abeyance or swept under the carpet. If these substantive issues cannot be solved, one must accept this reality – not call it peace.
· The barrier to peace is not borders or territory. It is the refusal of the Arabs to accept the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state and the right of Israel to resist solutions that are designed to compromise its ‘Jewish nature.’
· The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the core of a much larger conflict between Israel and the Arab world. One cannot settle for less than an integrated solution – one that spans the entire Arab world of which the Palestinians are only a part. The objective of peacemakers cannot be less than a genuine ‘just and lasting peace,’ not cosmetic stop-gap measure that require Israel to make concessions while leaving explosive issues ready to flare up in the future.
· Israel did not start this conflict nor does it perpetrate it, unless one accepts the premise that Jews have no right to be in their ancient homeland and should all go back to Poland and Baghdad. Incitement must end. Hatred can’t be left to fester while pretending to ‘cement a peace.’ Resolution of both Arab and Israeli refugee problem must be a pillar of any genuine peace process.
Israelis accept that there must be a compromise. They seek ‘accommodation’ although they are deeply divided over the extent of concessions and risk-taking Israel should agree to. Palestinians, on the other hand, do not seek accommodation but ‘justice’ – a quality which they frame in absolute terms, refusing to even consider that their adversaries – the Israelis – might also have ‘just rights’ that need to be addressed.
Arab states must accept a solution to the conflict that do not undermine Israel’s right to live as a Jewish state. Acceptance of Israel’s Jewishness requires the Arab states play an active and positive role in resettling the Arab refugees they helped to create – resettling them within the vast area of the Middle East.
What has stymied a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict is the unwillingness of Arabs as a whole and Palestinians in particular to recognize the legitimacy of Jewish claims and rights, along side Arab claims and rights – a breakthrough without which there can be no talk of ending the conflict.
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3) Hillary's question: not if, but how
Let’s be clear about this much: no matter what the soothsayers on cable TV tell you, Hillary Clinton is no more likely to clear the Democratic field and avoid a primary in 2016 than Dennis Rodman is to become her secretary of state. Walter Mondale couldn’t pull that off in 1984, and Al Gore couldn’t do it in 2000, and the conditions for Washington-anointed frontrunners have only gotten exponentially harder since then.
Somewhere out there is a guy you’ve barely heard of – name of O’Malley or Schweitzer or Hickenlooper – whose idea of fun is spending every night of the month on a different couch in Iowa. At this point in 2002, remember, most people thought Howard Dean was a brand of sausage.
The good news for Clinton is that if she decides to run (and I’m inclined to believe she hasn’t yet), she’ll start out with a huge national fundraising apparatus and the loyalty of party regulars. The bad news, of course, is that this is exactly the kind of thing that makes her vulnerable to another grassroots rebellion. In modern presidential politics, every day is Bastille Day.
So if you’re Clinton, the question you have to be asking isn’t whether to run so much as how. How do you run against the status quo you personify – or, at the very least, make yourself something more than the default choice of the establishment?
Part of this conundrum is tactical; Clinton is now a celebrated stateswoman, and it’s not clear how you preserve that stature while still running a less conventional kind of campaign in the early primary states. (The last former secretary of state to run for president was Alexander Haig in 1988, and it’s safe to say he isn’t the model Clinton wakes up emulating.) But the deeper question, if you’re Hillary Clinton, is less about the atmospherics of a campaign than about its animating idea.
The mainstream of the party has now veered back toward its more populist and pacifist instincts, venting its suspicion of the emerging military-digital complex, along with outright contempt for the wealthy and for conservatives generally. That’s not where Clinton is. She maintains close relationships on Wall Street, where executives are not so secretly pining for her return to the arena, and she’s advocated a firmer American hand around the world, most recently in Syria. Her worldview reflects the governing establishment of both parties more faithfully than it does the Democratic base.
This is exactly what most analysts think tripped her up last time, and there will be pressure for Clinton not to make the same mistake twice. The easiest way to break free of the status quo label and avoid a serious challenge, some Democrats will tell her, is to become something more like this cycle’s Barack Obama – to break from her allies inside the big banks and the Pentagon and to channel the fury that’s been building since the Bush years.
If anyone could get away with this kind of ideological feint, it would be Clinton. Wall Street is so desperate for a champion in power right now that the executives who support her would probably stand by and applaud while Clinton burned them in effigy, just so long as it got her to the White House. No Democrat in Washington is going to mind terribly if Clinton puts on a John Edwards mask and starts railing against the rich, if that’s what she thinks she needs to do.
Except that isn’t necessarily what she needs to do. For one thing, Democrats have a different set of complaints about Washington than they had six years ago, and it isn’t only about populism. Back then, they hoped that a younger, less embattled voice, emanating from a charismatic new protagonist, could shake the system free from paralyzing partisanship. Increasingly, though, they seem to have concluded that while Obama has their best interests at heart, he simply doesn’t know how to leverage power and has never really mastered Washington. (As I wrote last week, Obama’s aides did little to change that perception when they basically admitted, in the run up to his State of the Union address, that he had mostly given up on legislating altogether.)
In other words, the party (and, to a large extent, the country) may now be coming back around to Clinton’s rationale in 2008, which sounded pretty tinny at the time – that only a seasoned veteran of Washington’s dysfunction could hope reform it.
And as Mitt Romney could surely tell you, ideology really isn’t the currency of modern campaigns; authenticity is. Nothing screams “status quo” more loudly than a candidate who will say whatever she has to. This was Clinton’s real downfall in 2008. Her very first bumper sticker proclaimed that she was “in it to win it,” as if simply getting Democrats back to the White House was a compelling end in itself. It wasn’t.
Should she ultimately run again, Clinton might actually do herself a greater service by holding her ground. When we talked about Clinton, David Axelrod, the strategist who spent a career running campaigns against the establishment before guiding Obama to the White House, told me: “The quickest way to authenticate yourself, and the hardest thing to do, is to be willing to put yourself at risk by standing up for things you believe, even if it means taking positions every once in a while that people don’t see as the smart political move.” Which could mean that the real way to prove you’re not just a projection of the status quo isn’t necessarily to mouth tired condemnations of the establishment, but rather to speak hard truth to the partisans who indict it.
Clinton could tell the Democratic voters of Iowa and New Hampshire that, yes, inequality is a defining problem for the society, and yes, American risks becoming a surveillance state resented around the world. But the answers don’t lie in demonizing her financiers or the intelligence agencies she knows well, or even in ridding the earth of Republicans. The answers lie in tossing out the outdated orthodoxies of the last century and wrestling more thoughtfully with the technological moment, as Bill Clinton started to do in 1992.
As Joe Trippi, who was the architect of Dean’s antiestablishment insurgency, puts it: “She’s almost the perfect person who can argue that both ideologies are obsolete and that you need someone who understands the old system to put forward some ideas that are new.”
Cautious Clinton advisers will say that the political moment is sure to shift before 2016, so she doesn’t have to figure any of this out now. And that would probably be true for another candidate. But like it or not, Clinton is already at the center of a fast-cohering machine, much of it directed by people who barely know her. By the times she gets into the race, if she does, she will inherit a disorderly army of fundraisers, self-proclaimed strategists and professional climbers. It will be too late, then, to consider what the rationale for her campaign ought to be, beyond keeping a lot of powerful Democrats in power a bit longer.
If you’re Hillary Clinton, you’ve already been down that path. You know where it ends.
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