No hope for Israeli-Palestinian peace
Experienced American diplomat says hostility between Israelis and Palestinians has reached new levels and gaps are deeper than ever.
By Sever Plocker
It was a depressing meeting. The man we spoke to, who is one of a handful of American diplomats who have been trying for years to find the golden key to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, didn't leave a glimmer of hope.
As our conversation extended into the late evening hours, the feeling of an impasse grew stronger. "There seems to be zero chance of reaching any agreement between Israel and the Palestinians right now," the man summed up his impression from many years of full and partial diplomatic service.
"Whose fault is it?" we asked. "It's your fault, it's their fault, and it's our – the Americans' – fault," he said.
He started off with America: The current administration in the White House has adopted the approach that the Israeli construction in the settlements is the mother of all sins. Factually, that's incorrect.
Nearly the entire construction, apart from symbolic exceptions, takes place within blocs that will remain under Israel's sovereignty as part of a land swap.
But the advisors and experts roaming the White House and State Department corridors these days are fixated on the conception of the settlements as the only obstacle to an agreement. They deny reality and avoid dealing in any way with other disputed issues, such as Jerusalem, refugees, normalization and stalemated initiatives.
"Why get in trouble," he asked ironically, "bring up latent issues and anger friendly Arab regimes?"
The political left in Israel is waiting in vain for American pressure, he clarified. US President Barack Obama has washed his hands off the conflict, apart from occasionally reprimanding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He has decided to hand the hot potato of the conflict to the next president. In addition, in the past six months the Islamic State has been added to the list of urgent targets as far as Washington is concerned.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. 'Both sides are failing to internalize the ramifications of the bi-national state option' (Photo: AFP)
And the Palestinians, we asked, what about them? "Mahmoud Abbas is good for nothing," responded our converser, who is also a frequent and distinguished guest of the Palestinian Authority. "He is not interested in any shift which may force him to make decisions, and is hanging on to any reason, real or fictitious, to avoid negotiating with you. He often contradicts himself in speeches and appearances."
Abbas, our interlocutor summed up the Palestinian chapter, is the big loser of Operation Protective Edge, and as long as he holds on to the title of Palestine's president, there will be no progress. And after him? After him the deluge.
Finally, we reached Netanyahu. "Your prime minister," the man from America said, "is troubled by two issues: Iran and the coalition or the coalition and Iran. The makeup doesn’t change. Only the order changes, in accordance with the local and international state of mind."
Recently, he went on, the coalition has been his top priority. But if the nuclear talks with Iran end up in nothing – which is definitely a possibility in our interlocutor's opinion – the nuclear issue will become the top priority again.
"However," he noted, "your military threats about Iran have lost a lot of their credibility. They are less and less taken into account by the world powers."
As an example of the priority given to coalition considerations, the American mentioned – again – the construction in the territories. In practice, he noted, Bibi only builds where he is allowed to, but he won't admit it. He won't jeopardize his coalition with a public admission about an actual construction freeze outside of the settlement blocs, and is therefore intentionally creating an impression of an overall construction boom.
In his list of priorities, his government's fate overrides the fate of Israel's relations with Washington and Ramallah. Like Abbas, Netanyahu likes the stalemate and is convinced that initiatives to change it will increase the risks – including, the man said bitterly, the risks to their personal status.
"So what do you think will happen here?" we asked as we bid farewell.
"Both the Palestinian Authority and Israel believe that time is on their side," he replied, "and are failing to internalize the ramifications of the bi-national state option. The intensity of the hostility between the two people has reached new levels, and the gaps between you and them are deeper than during all the years I have worked for peace.
"But I don't want to ruin your mood," he immediately apologized.
2b)
| Israelis more likely to blame Obama, not Netanyahu, for 'crisis' in ties with US |
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Ties with the Obama administration might indeed be lacking, but Israeli-US relations go far beyond the administration and extend to the Pentagon, Congress, the business sector and the public. |
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You can only cry wolf for so long, critics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu frequently complain regarding his constant warning that Iran is on the cusp of a nuclear bomb, before those cries lose their impact.
The same is true of a “crisis” in US-Israel ties.
Every other week, it seems, someone out there is bewailing that the US-Israel relationship is in trouble. This week was Finance Minister Yair Lapid’s turn, saying Saturday that as a result of the high-profile White House snub of Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, “there is a crisis with the US and we should treat it as a crisis.”
This “crisis” followed by just a couple of weeks another “crisis” when the White House spokesman slammed Israel in particularly harsh terms for announcing plans to develop Givat Hamatos and for moving Jewish families into the predominantly Arab east Jerusalem neighborhood Silwan. Netanyahu only deepened the “crisis” when he responded that he was “baffled” by the response.
And that followed numerous other “crises” during Operation Protective Edge, including when Netanyahu told US Ambassador Dan Shapiro not to second-guess him on Hamas, and the US slammed Israel for slamming Secretary of State John Kerry for his clumsy handling of initial cease-fire efforts.
And on and on and on, going back months to Kerry’s comments about Israel being isolated and his warning of a third intifada.
Ya’alon himself was at the center of a couple of these crises, having spoken in undiplomatic terms about Kerry – saying he was obsessed with the Middle East and had a “messianic” syndrome – words that seemed to knock the world’s mightiest power somewhat off kilter.
For much of the past six years, since Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama began their terms in office – one “crisis” has followed the other in US-Israel ties to the point where the word has lost much of its meaning.
Following Ya’alon’s criticism of Kerry, last week’s snub by the White House should not really have come as any surprise. Is it good that the defense minister can’t get a meeting in the White House though he did get one at the Pentagon? Obviously not. Is this the level of communication you want with your greatest ally at a time when the region is in flames and Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear threshold state? Obviously not.
But are relations actually in a crisis? Ties with the Obama administration might indeed be lacking, but Israeli-US relations go far beyond the administration and extend to the Pentagon, Congress, the business sector and the public. And those ties are not in a crisis. Not at all.
Still, Lapid says they are, and Lapid, the country’s finance minister, must know of what he speaks. Or, perhaps Lapid – like seemingly everyone else in the land – is getting a whiff of new elections and looking for an issue to run on in the next campaign.
One of those issues might be improving ties with the US. If they are indeed in trouble, as Lapid maintains, then someone is to blame, and that someone must be Netanyahu. So get rid of Netanyahu and restore the relationship that everyone realizes is so critical to Israel’s strategic health.
Before choosing this as a marquee issue, however, Lapid would do well to look back at 2012 when Tzipi Livni ran on a similar platform against Netanyahu.
Much of Livni’s campaign revolved around her claim that the prime minister was poisoning ties with Washington. The electorate, however, didn’t buy it. Or if they did agree that relations with the US were not exactly what they should be, they didn’t necessarily blame Netanyahu (perhaps they blamed Obama), and Livni ended up with a very disappointing six Knesset seats.
Likewise, the Obama administration should take note. As the polls have consistently borne out during the six years Obama and Netanyahu have been forced to work together, when the two lock horns the Israeli public rallies around its leader, not the US president.
Since the breakdown of Israeli-Palestinian talks some six months ago, various administration officials have left the distinct impression that they view a change of government in Israel as one way to break the diplomatic logjam. Fueling a “crisis” atmosphere might be one way to achieve that goal.
But they should be cautious. In a fight between Washington and Jerusalem, there is no guarantee the voters will blame Netanyahu and Ya’alon, to the benefit of a Lipid or Livni, more than they will Obama and Kerry.
2c)
NETANYAHU: ISRAEL WILL NOT GIVE INTO PRESSURE – NO CONCESSIONS WITHOUT SECURITY GUARANTEES
 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday at the opening of the winter session of the Knesset that no external or internal pressure would force him into making concessions that would put Israel's security at risk.
The prime minster charged that only Israel was under duress to give in at the negotiation table, adding that the Palestinians were making demands for statehood without giving guarantees for peace.
“I don't see pressure on the Palestinians. I see only pressure on Israel to make more and more concessions, without anything in exchange or security,” he said. “I want to make it perfectly clear – no pressure, at home or abroad, will work.”
“Israel will not lose hope for peace, but neither will it cling to false hope,” Netanyahu added.
Netanyahu opened his speech by declaring that Israel would continue to stand up straight and proud of its people and its army. He added that Israel needed to show strength, unity and determination within the legal system, as well, to contend with those who attempt to dictate conditions that would endanger Israel's security and distance Israel from the peace it strives for.
“The Palestinians are demanding of us establish a Palestinian state – without peace and without security,” he said. “They demand withdrawal to the 1967 lines, admitting refugees and dividing Jerusalem – and after all these exaggerated demands they are not prepared to agree to the basic condition for peace between two peoples – mutual recognition.” He noted that the Palestinians “refuse to recognize the national character of our state.” He stressed that “peace would be obtained only through negotiations between the sides, and any other way will undermine stability.”
The prime minister also discussed building over the Green Line in Jerusalem. He said there was a broad public consensus that Israel had the full right to build in Jerusalem neighborhoods.
“It's a consensus, or at least I thought so,” he said. “All Israeli governments have done so – it is also clear to the Palestinians that these territories will remain within Israel's borders in any deal.”
“For some there is a never a convenient time to build homes in Jerusalem, and if it had depended on them, we would never have built one home during the last 60 years because it was never the appropriate time,” he said.
Before the session opened, Netanyahu speculated during a Likud faction meeting that his party might surprise the country with stable governance, continued security and sustained economic growth. “Israeli citizens are interested in all these things, and only we are capable of providing it to them,” he said.
Netanyahu added that the challenges are doubly hard at this juncture. “We have a mission to pass a budget and important legislation and to maintain stable government in Israel,” he said. “We also have a challenge all around us. The Middle East is becoming very angry and stormy. Israel is an island of security and economic growth in this chaos.”
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3)
Sharyl Attkisson is an unreasonable woman. Important people have told her so.
When the longtime CBS reporter asked for details about reinforcements sent to the Benghazi compound during the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack, White House national security spokesman Tommy Vietor replied, “I give up, Sharyl . . . I’ll work with more reasonable folks that follow up, I guess.”
Another White House flack, Eric Schultz, didn’t like being pressed for answers about the Fast and Furious scandal in which American agents directed guns into the arms of Mexican drug lords. “Goddammit, Sharyl!” he screamed at her. “The Washington Post is reasonable, the LA Times is reasonable, The New York Times is reasonable. You’re the only one who’s not reasonable!”
Two of her former bosses, CBS Evening News executive producers Jim Murphy and Rick Kaplan, called her a “pit bull.”
That was when Sharyl was being nice.
Now that she’s no longer on the CBS payroll, this pit bull is off the leash and tearing flesh off the behinds of senior media and government officials. In her new memoir/exposé “Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington” (Harper), Attkisson unloads on her colleagues in big-time TV news for their cowardice and cheerleading for the Obama administration while unmasking the corruption, misdirection and outright lying of today’s Washington political machine.
‘Not until the stock split’
Calling herself “politically agnostic,” Attkisson, a five-time Emmy winner, says she simply follows the story, and the money, wherever it leads her.
In nearly 20 years at CBS News, she has done many stories attacking Republicans and corporate America, and she points out that TV news, being reluctant to offend its advertisers, has become more and more skittish about, for instance, stories questioning pharmaceutical companies or car manufacturers.
Working on a piece that raised questions about the American Red Cross disaster response, she says a boss told her, “We must do nothing to upset our corporate partners . . . until the stock splits.” (Parent company Viacom and CBS split in 2006).
Often [network executives] dream up stories beforehand and turn the reporters into “casting agents”
Meanwhile, she notes, “CBS This Morning” is airing blatant advertorials such as a three-minute segment pushing TGI Fridays’ all-you-can-eat appetizer promotion or four minutes plugging a Doritos taco shell sold at Taco Bell.
Reporters on the ground aren’t necessarily ideological, Attkisson says, but the major network news decisions get made by a handful of New York execs who read the same papers and think the same thoughts.
Often they dream up stories beforehand and turn the reporters into “casting agents,” told “we need to find someone who will say . . .” that a given policy is good or bad. “We’re asked to create a reality that fits their New York image of what they believe,” she writes.
Reporting on the many green-energy firms such as Solyndra that went belly-up after burning through hundreds of millions in Washington handouts, Attkisson ran into increasing difficulty getting her stories on the air. A colleague told her about the following exchange: “[The stories] are pretty significant,” said a news exec. “Maybe we should be airing some of them on the ‘Evening News?’ ” Replied the program’s chief Pat Shevlin, “What’s the matter, don’t you support green energy?”
Says Attkisson: That’s like saying you’re anti-medicine if you point out pharmaceutical company fraud.
A piece she did about how subsidies ended up at a Korean green-energy firm — your tax dollars sent to Korea! — at first had her bosses excited but then was kept off the air and buried on the CBS News Web site. Producer Laura Strickler told her Shevlin “hated the whole thing.”
‘Let’s not pile on’
Attkisson mischievously cites what she calls the “Substitution Game”: She likes to imagine how a story about today’s administration would have been handled if it made Republicans look bad.
In green energy, for instance: “Imagine a parallel scenario in which President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney personally appeared at groundbreakings for, and used billions of tax dollars to support, multiple giant corporate ventures whose investors were sometimes major campaign bundlers, only to have one (or two, or three) go bankrupt . . . when they knew in advance the companies’ credit ratings were junk.”
Attkisson continued her dogged reporting through the launch of ObamaCare: She’s the reporter who brought the public’s attention to the absurdly small number — six — who managed to sign up for it on day one.
One of her bosses had a rule that conservative analysts must always be labeled conservatives, but liberal analysts were simply “analysts.”
“Many in the media,” she writes, “are wrestling with their own souls: They know that ObamaCare is in serious trouble, but they’re conflicted about reporting that. Some worry that the news coverage will hurt a cause that they personally believe in. They’re all too eager to dismiss damaging documentary evidence while embracing, sometimes unquestioningly, the Obama administration’s ever-evolving and unproven explanations.”
One of her bosses had a rule that conservative analysts must always be labeled conservatives, but liberal analysts were simply “analysts.” “And if a conservative analyst’s opinion really rubbed the supervisor the wrong way,” says Attkisson, “she might rewrite the script to label him a ‘right-wing’ analyst.”
In mid-October 2012, with the presidential election coming up, Attkisson says CBS suddenly lost interest in airing her reporting on the Benghazi attacks. “The light switch turns off,” she writes. “Most of my Benghazi stories from that point on would be reported not on television, but on the Web.”
Two expressions that became especially popular with CBS News brass, she says, were “incremental” and “piling on.” These are code for “excuses for stories they really don’t want, even as we observe that developments on stories they like are aired in the tiniest of increments.”
Hey, kids, we found two more Americans who say they like their ObamaCare! Let’s do a lengthy segment.
Friends in high places
When the White House didn’t like her reporting, it would make clear where the real power lay. A flack would send a blistering e-mail to her boss, David Rhodes, CBS News’ president — and Rhodes’s brother Ben, a top national security advisor to President Obama.
The administration, with the full cooperation of the media, has successfully turned “Benghazi” into a word associated with nutters, like “Roswell” or “grassy knoll,” but Attkisson notes that “the truth is that most of the damaging information came from Obama administration insiders. From government documents. From sources who were outraged by their own government’s behavior and what they viewed as a coverup.”
Similarly, though the major media can’t mention the Fast and Furious scandal without a world-weary eyeroll, Attkisson points out that the story led to the resignation of a US attorney and the head of the ATF and led President Obama to invoke for the first time “executive privilege” to stanch the flow of damaging information.
Attkisson, who received an Emmy and the Edward R. Murrow award for her trailblazing work on the story, says she made top CBS brass “incensed” when she appeared on Laura Ingraham’s radio show and mentioned that Obama administration officials called her up to literally scream at her while she was working the story.
One angry CBS exec called to tell Attkisson that Ingraham is “extremely, extremely far right” and that Attkisson shouldn’t appear on her show anymore. Attkisson was puzzled, noting that CBS reporters aren’t barred from appearing on lefty MSNBC shows.
She was turning up leads tying the Fast and Furious scandal (which involved so many guns that ATF officials initially worried that a firearm used in the Tucson shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords might have been one of them) to an ever-expanding network of cases when she got an e-mail from Katie Couric asking if it was OK for Couric to interview Eric Holder, whom Couric knew socially, about the scandal. Sure, replied Attkisson.
No interview with Holder aired but “after that weekend e-mail exchange, nothing is the same at work,” Attkisson writes. “The Evening News” began killing her stories on Fast and Furious, with one producer telling Attkisson, “You’ve reported everything. There’s really nothing left to say.”
Readers are left to wonder whether Holder told Couric to stand down on the story.
No investigations
Attkisson left CBS News in frustration earlier this year. In the book she cites the complete loss of interest in investigative stories at “CBS Evening News” under new host Scott Pelley and new executive producer Shevlin.
She notes that the program, which under previous hosts Dan Rather, Katie Couric and Bob Schieffer largely gave her free rein, became so hostile to real reporting that investigative journalist Armen Keteyian and his producer Keith Summa asked for their unit to be taken off the program’s budget (so they could pitch stories to other CBS News programs), then Summa left the network entirely.
When Attkisson had an exclusive, on-camera interview lined up with Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the YouTube filmmaker Hillary Clinton blamed for the Benghazi attacks, CBS News president Rhodes nixed the idea: “That’s kind of old news, isn’t it?” he said.
Attkisson is a born whistleblower, but CBS lost interest in the noise she was making.
Sensing the political waters had become too treacherous, Attkisson did what she thought was an easy sell on a school-lunch fraud story that “CBS This Morning” “enthusiastically accepted,” she says, and was racing to get on air, when suddenly “the light switch went off . . . we couldn’t figure out what they saw as a political angle to this story.”
The story had nothing to do with Michelle Obama, but Attkisson figures that the first lady’s association with school lunches, and/or her friendship with “CBS This Morning” host Gayle King, might have had something to do with execs now telling her the story “wasn’t interesting to their audience, after all.”
A story on waste at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, planned for the CBS Weekend News, was watered down and turned into a “bland non-story” before airing: An exec she doesn’t identify who was Shevlin’s “number two,” she says, “reacted as if the story had disparaged his best friend. As if his best friend were Mr. Federal Government. ‘Well, this is all the states’ fault!’ . . . he sputtered.”
Meanwhile, she says, though no one confronted her directly, a “whisper campaign” began; “If I offered a story on pretty much any legitimate controversy involving government, instead of being considered a good journalistic watchdog, I was anti-Obama.”
Yet it was Attkisson who broke the story that the Bush administration had once run a gun-walking program similar to Fast and Furious, called Wide Receiver. She did dozens of tough-minded stories on Bush’s FDA, the TARP program and contractors such as Halliburton. She once inspired a seven-minute segment on “The Rachel Maddow Show” with her reporting on the suspicious charity of a Republican congressman, Steve Buyer.
Attkisson is a born whistleblower, but CBS lost interest in the noise she was making.
‘They’ll sacrifice you’
Ignoring Attkisson proved damaging to CBS in other ways. When a senior producer she doesn’t identify came to her in 2004 bubbling about documents that supposedly showed then-President George W. Bush shirked his duties during the Vietnam War, she took one look at the documents and said, “They looked like they were typed by my daughter on a computer yesterday.”
Asked to do a followup story on the documents, she flatly refused, citing an ethics clause in her contract. “And if you make me, I’ll have to call my lawyer,” she said. “Nobody ever said another word” to her about reporting on the documents, which turned out to be unverifiable and probably fake.
After Pelley and Shevlin aired a report that wrongly tarnished reports by Attkisson (and Jonathan Karl of ABC News) on how the administration scrubbed its talking points of references to terrorism after Benghazi, and did so without mentioning that the author of some of the talking points, Ben Rhodes, was the brother of the president of CBS News, she says a colleague told her, “[CBS] is selling you down the river. They’ll gladly sacrifice your reputation to save their own. If you don’t stand up for yourself, nobody will.”
After reading the book, you won’t question whether CBS News or Attkisson is more trustworthy.
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4) Why Are Democrats So Afraid?
If you want to understand race politics a good place to start is with Frederick Douglass and his memoir of his life as a slave. He tells about how he was rented out to a couple in Baltimore. Things went well; the mistress of the house was kind towards him. But her husband was afraid. He insisted on maltreating his rented slave to keep him cowed and subservient.
The same sort of attitude obtained in the sugar island of St. Croix where my man Alexander Hamilton grew up in the mid-18th century. Every white man was enrolled in the militia against the risk of a slave revolt.
That's how to understand Jim Crow. After its defeat in the Civil War, the white South was terrified that the former slaves would rise up and kill everyone in their beds.
Let's generalize on this notion. If you are a ruling class running an exploitative and oppressive regime you naturally fear that the serfs will one day rise up and slaughter you in your beds. So you crank up the exploitation and the oppression -- the terror -- just in case.
Of course, in the end the worst fears of the South weren't realized. The great-grandsons of the 19th century Northern abolitionists descended on the South in the 1950s and broke up Jim Crow and segregation. The nation held its breath, and nothing happened.
All that fear and loathing and brutal oppression was for nothing! After sweeping away the laws and the symbols of segregation, the world went on as if nothing had happened, except for the fact that African Americans in a few cities rioted and burned down their neighborhoods – in the North.
Now let's take a look at today's fear and loathing. We have an administration ginning up killings of young blacks just before elections: in 2012 and 2014. Now what would that be all about? Here's the incomparable Heather MacDonald writing about the mainstreaming of the career racist Reverend Al Sharpton, now the president's BFF. Why would elite Democrats be mixing it up with a man like Al Sharpton?
Ever since Judis and Teixeira and The Emerging Democratic Majority liberals have been telling us that they own the future. If that's the case then what's the hurry? Why was it necessary to jam through ObamaCare on a partisan vote? Why is it necessary to terrify blacks about a return to Jim Crow, or counterattack against a “Republican War on Women?” Why is it necessary to gin up the Hispanics with threats about immigration reform? Why do you have to gin up the IRS against Tea Party groups? Why does Harry Reid need to frighten Republican contributors with his war on the Koch Brothers?
Maybe the Democrats don't own the future. Maybe the Democratic advantage among women, minorities, and youth is a mile wide and an inch deep, a result of teacher indoctrination, media indoctrination, and left-wing activism. But things aren't going well for the Obama army in 2014, exhausted and retreating after six years on the march with nothing to show for it. Like any retreating army, the Democratic generals need tough military discipline, battle-hardened sergeants and “file-closers” putting the fear of God into their soldiers to keep them in line and to prevent a rout. Is that what we are experiencing this election season?
Maybe the African American and women voters are right to be afraid. Any African American that works in a bureaucracy in America has to worry: what would happen to me if Affirmative Action and diversity ended tomorrow? How far would I sink without an Obama and a Democratic Party that's “Got My Back?”
Maybe women voters are right to be afraid too. Not about their contraception, but about their jobs. Women are “overrepresented” in jobs like teacher, nurse, social worker. Guess what would happen to jobs like that if Republicans ever got into power and started doing education reform, health care reform, and welfare reform?
So history comes full circle. People that used to be on the outside looking in are now the insiders looking out at the angry faces pressed against the window. And they are afraid, just like the Southerners of the Jim Crow era. But to give up their benefits and their privileges? That would be unthinkable.
That's the downside of putting your faith in political power. All politics is a road to injustice, and the fear of what will happen if the rubes get restless. You can't go back, and you know you can't go on much longer. So what do you do? You lash out in fear and loathing until somebody puts you out of your misery.
Hey Democrats! Don't forget there's nothing to fear but fear itself!
Facing GOP victories, they send out fliers that depict a lynching.
This year is shaping up to be a great one for conservatives. Real Clear Politics projects that Republicans are on track to pick up seven Senate seats, and there’s a real possibility that come January 2015, they’ll hold a 54 or 55-seat majority.
This has left Democrats utterly panicked as they scramble to motivate their base at a time when President Obama’s approval rating has stalled at 39 percent. They have turned to an old hat — race-baiting — in hopes of scaring African-American voters to the polls.
Color of Change, a PAC established by 9/11 truther and failed CNN talk-show host Van Jones, has dropped fliers in the mailboxes of voters in Arkansas, a state where freshman Republican congressman Tom Cotton leads twelve-year-incumbent and political scion Mark Pryor in the race for the U.S. Senate. It reads:
Black people are voting at record levels. And we can’t let up now. This election, our votes can stop the greed, brutality, and abuses of power that are threatening our families. When we stand together, we win. It starts with voting on November 4th.
For those keeping score, the Color of Change flier shamelessly fabricates three ways Republicans mean to disenfranchise African Americans. It warns that the GOP intends to ruthlessly target black children: “The people we elect on November 4th will be in charge of our police departments. If we want to end senseless killings, like Michael Brown’s in Ferguson, Missouri, we need to vote.” Next, it claims that Republicans aim to strip African Americans of their rights: “Conservatives hijacked the Supreme Court and struck down key protections in the Voting Rights Act. And now Republicans are passing laws, trying to silence us by making it harder to vote.” Finally, it offers that oft-repeated lie that the GOP plans to impeach President Obama: “Don’t let Republicans and conservative leaders waste our tax dollars by suing President Obama and trying to impeach him.”
In the Peach State, the Democratic party of Georgia is circulating its own flier that connects its hotly contested elections with the August 2014 police altercation that resulted in the death of Missouri teenager Michael Brown. The document — which prominently features sad-eyed African-American children sheepishly holding Hands up, Don’t Shoot cardboard signs, complete with their own handprints and a man on his knees in the middle of the street with his arms in the air – explains: If You Want to Prevent Another Ferguson in Their Future, Vote. It’s up to you to make it happen. The mailer goes into great detail about the racial composition of the Ferguson, Mo., city council and its police force, insinuating that black people in these communities are at greater risk because their government — which they elect — is largely run by Caucasians.
Last week, the Fayetteville Observer reported that churchgoers in North Carolina returned to their cars after Sunday services to find a particularly graphic campaign flier on their windshields. The mailer, paid for by the Concerned Citizens of Cumberland County, portrayed the lynching of an African-American man by white people. The headline reads: “Kay Hagan doesn’t win! Obama’s impeachment will begin! Vote in 2014.”
Did the flier go too far? Not according to Fayetteville, N.C., NAACP chapter president Jimmy Buxton, who shrugs off the race-based fear-mongering, simply saying, “That what the community feels.”
In Louisiana, Patriot Majority USA, a super PAC that has already spent $8.5 million this year to elect Democrats, mailed a flier declaring that Republican congressman Bill Cassidy — who is enjoying a healthy lead over 18-year-incumbent Democrat Mary Landrieu in the race for the Senate — suggested turning historically black institutions Southern University in New Orleans and Grambling State University into prisons. The Advocate contends that’s not “really the full story.”
In 1991, Cassidy, a medical doctor in Baton Rouge, penned a letter to the editor in the now-defunct Sunday-Times. In it, he articulated a complaint that many Louisianans share to this day: The state has too many small public colleges and universities that taxpayers are stuck paying to keep open for little return on their investment.
“Let’s close some of them,” he wrote. “Spare university buildings can be used for junior colleges, minimum-security prisons, research facilities for private industry, turned over to local school boards, or anything else that will benefit the state.”
Cassidy does propose closing SUNO (which in 2009 graduated only 8 percent of its seniors) due to its proximity to other higher-education institutions in the Greater New Orleans area. But he never specifically advocates for the closure of Grambling State University. He does, however, list Louisiana State University at Eunice and Louisiana State University at Alexandria, both of which have predominantly whitestudent bodies, as schools to shutter.
So, did Dr. Cassidy actually intend to hurt black people not only by taking away their schools, but also, as the mailer insinuates, by throwing more of them in prison? Actually, quite the opposite. The 23-year-old-letter continues: “The money saved from these and other closures could improve the remaining schools. Without an increase in overall state expenditures, their funding could be raised toward levels needed for first-class institutions. . . . By closing redundant educational facilities, Louisiana can have better universities without more taxes or state debt.”
But the facts apparently do not matter to each of these groups. They seem to be willing to do whatever it takes, no matter how despicable, to turn out African Americans in a midterm-election year, given the historical pattern that Democrats have struggled in midterms to inspire their voters to show up at the polls. The electoral demographics indicate that, in the face of tough odds, black voters are vital to the Democratic party.
In Arkansas, Pryor has the support of only 30 percent of white voters; 77 percent of black voters back him, though. In Georgia, Democratic candidate Michelle Nunn has the support of only 23 percent of white voters; among African Americans, she leads her Republican opponent 84 percent to 6 percent. In North Carolina, Hagan pulls a whopping 87 percent of black voters; meanwhile, she’s getting only 30 percent of the white vote. In Louisiana, only 20 percent of white voters back Landrieu; 65 percent of African Americans support her, and a staggering 22 percent of black voters are unsure (3 percent higher than the number of white voters undecided).
These frantic efforts to woo African Americans not only demonstrate how much Democrats rely on their votes, but they also serve as an unpleasant reminder to the GOP of its apparent and growing deficit among voters in those communities. If Republicans exerted meaningful effort in this and other minority constituencies, it could significantly chip away the Democrats’ overwhelming dominance in places such as Little Rock, Atlanta, Charlotte, and New Orleans, and thus, take Southern swing states out of contention. With solid majorities among Caucasian voters, moving the dial even slightly with minority voters would secure a near-permanent Republican majority at every level of government.
Of course, in order to do so, Republicans must push back confidently against unfounded charges of racism at every turn.
— Ellen Carmichael is a political consultant in Washington, D.C. She has served as a senior communications adviser and spokeswoman for a Republican presidential campaign, members of Congress, and statewide elected officials. Follow her on Twitter @ellencarmichael.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5) RE: Israeli envoy to U.S.: Ambassador Ron Dermer's View of Abbas as peacemaker is 'an embarrassment'
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Here is my speech at Pastor Hagee's annual night to honor Israel:
Now Pastor Hagee, I thought we were friends. So how do you put a nice Jewish boy from Miami Beach in front of 5,000 Spurs fans?
Truth is, standing at this podium, a Miami Heat fan feels like he’s in hostile territory. But an Israeli Ambassador feels right at home.
Pastor Hagee, this is a night you honor Israel. But this should also be a night for Israel to honor you.
The bible tells us there is no prophet in his home town. So I came here to let the people of San Antonio know how much the people of Israel appreciate your unwavering support.
And ladies and gentlemen, Israel needs that support more than ever because
we face a gathering storm.
That storm is the march of militant Islam. Its dark clouds loom over the entire Middle East, casting a shadow over Libya and Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and nearly everywhere else in the region.
But militant Islam is not simply a threat to Israel and Jews alone.
Ancient Christian communities in the Middle East have been decimated as survivors flee for their lives. Kurds and Yezidis are hunted down and sold into slavery.
Militant Sunni and Militant Shia massacre each other and even their own, if their subjects do not heed their unforgiving creed. That is why the most numerous victims of militant Islam are Muslims themselves.
But the clouds of militant Islam are not confined to the Middle East. There are beheadings not just in Iraq but in Oklahoma. Brutal murders not just in Sinai and Benghazi, but in Ottawa and Fort Hood.
Still, the murder and mayhem we are witnessing today would pale in comparison to the horrific hurricane that would be upon us if the forces of militant Islam are ever permitted to develop nuclear weapons.
It’s one thing to have these fanatics armed with axes, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. It’s another thing to have them armed with nuclear weapons.
That danger is getting closer as the world closes in on a nuclear deal with Iran.
Folks, I don’t know if there will be a deal on Iran’s nuclear program next month. But Israel is very concerned.
We’re concerned because a year ago some hoped that the tough sanctions regime on Iran would be dismantled only if Iran’s nuclear weapons program were dismantled.
Today, the international community is prepared to make a deal that would suspend and ultimately lift the sanctions.
But no one is talking about dismantling Iran’s nuclear weapons program anymore.
You don’t have to be a nuclear expert to understand that reducing pressure on the world’s most dangerous regime and leaving it on the threshold of developing the world’s most dangerous weapons is not a good deal.
The international community is prepared to leave Iran with thousands of centrifuges to enrich uranium – when Iran doesn’t even need a single centrifuge to have peaceful nuclear energy.
We’re told not to worry, that UN inspectors will prevent Iran from breaking out or sneaking out to build the bomb.
Well, I’m sure you all feel as safe as I do knowing that a few Inspector Clouseaus at the UN is all that stands between fanatic Ayatollahs and nuclear bombs.
Some people are also trying to calm us by telling us that there’s a new Iranian Sheriff in town. He’s a moderate, they say, whose name is President Rouhani.
Well let me tell you about Sheriff Rouhani. He’s about as powerful in Iran Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltraine is in Hazzard County.
The real power in Iran is another man, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
And make no mistake about it, he’s no Boss Hogg. He’s not just a corrupt official looking to line his own pockets.
He’s a wild eyed fanatic looking to rule the world.
He presides over rallies in which tens of thousands chant Death to America.
You owe it to your children and your grandchildren to see these chants with your own eyes.
This video is not from 1979. It’s not from 1989, 1999, or even 2009. It’s from March of this past year.
So when Iran tries to dress up like a moderate, responsible country this Halloween, remember the monster behind the mask.
That monster is not a friend. He’s not a partner. He’s an enemy – of America, of Israel, of Christians, of Jews, of freedom, of tolerance, of everything that we cherish.
And if we are to safeguard our common future, America and Israel must never let this evil man and his evil regime get nuclear weapons.
I know that people are deeply concerned about Israel’s future. They worry about a nuclear Iran.
They worry that the world is ganging up on Israel to try to force it to make concessions that will endanger its security. They worry about a rising tide of anti-Semitism across the world.
But while there is plenty to worry about, I am supremely confident of Israel’s future.
I’m confident for many reasons:
Because of the strength and leadership of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Because of the brave men and women of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Because of the resolve of the Israeli people, who have withstood thousands of rockets, hundreds of suicide bombers, and decades of war and terrorism.
Because of the genius of Israeli innovators, who have made Israel a global leader in technology and science, water and agriculture, medicine and cyber.
I’m confident because of all these things.
But also because of something that Eric Hoffer pointed out a half-century ago.
You may have heard of him. He was a long-shoreman who was a self-taught man, a philosopher.
In an interview in 1967, he said that the birth of Israel gave meaning to history.
And he said that Israel cannot perish because history must have meaning.
I believe in Israel’s future because I believe that history has meaning.
I see that meaning in the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.
We who are privileged to witness the miracle of this restoration should understand how rare it truly is.
Israel is 66 years old, but the Jewish people are nearly 4,000 years old.
And yet Jews have been a sovereign people for only a small fraction of that time.
The first period of Jewish sovereignty lasted for some eight centuries. You can read all about it in a book you’ll find inside the nightstand drawer of almost every hotel room in America.
You can read about Joshua leading the people of Israel across the Jordan.
You can read about judges and warriors like Gideon and Samson.
You can read about the first kings of Israel, Saul and David, and the last King of Judea, Zedekiah.
The first period of Jewish sovereignty ended in 586 BC when the King of Babylon, Nebucadnezzer, destroyed the city of Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon.
The Jewish people would have to wait over 400 years until the second century BC to regain sovereignty in our homeland.
The spark that led to independence began when a father and his five sons stood their ground against religious persecution in the village of Modiin.
The father’s name was Mattityahu, and his son Judah Maccabee courageously lead his brothers and his nation into a revolt against Hellenistic Greece.
They faced impossible odds that pitted few against many. But they won their freedom and restored our national independence – a restoration that Jews celebrate each year on the holiday of Chanukah.
That second period of Jewish sovereignty lasted until 63 BC when the Roman General Pompey laid siege and conquered Jerusalem.
It would be another 130 years before the Second Temple would be destroyed in 70 AD. But after Pompey, the Jewish state had effectively become a vassal of Rome.
The second period of Jewish sovereignty had ended only a century after it began.
The Jewish people would have to wait 2000 years to see sovereignty restored again.
2,000 years of persecution and massacres, expulsions and crusades, blood libels and pogroms, culminating in the effort by the Nazis to annihilate our people.
Before the Holocaust, there were 18 million Jews in the world. 6 million were murdered. One-third of the Jewish people.
Think about that. One-third of your people. That’s the equivalent of 100 million Americans.
And if 100 million is a hard number for you to wrap your mind around, imagine a 9/11 every day for a century -- that’s what the Holocaust did to the Jewish people.
So if you are looking for meaning in history, imagine that moment of jubilation 66 years ago when the Jewish people emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz to establish the State of Israel and to begin the third period of Jewish sovereignty.
And if you are looking for more meaning in history, see how a sovereign Jewish state has enabled Jews to return to their ancestral homeland from the four corners of the earth.
It enabled tens of thousands of Jewish refugees to leave behind the killing fields of Europe, and hundreds of thousands more refugees to leave the Arab lands from which they were largely expelled.
It enabled us to airlift Ethiopian Jews out of Africa and to welcome a million Jews from the former Soviet Union after the Iron Curtain fell.
And if you still are looking for meaning in history, see how the Jewish people have stood their ground, decade after decade, in the most dangerous region in the world.
Sovereignty was never presented to the Jewish people on a silver platter. It was not handed to us by the Canaanites, conceded to us by the ancient Greeks or given to us by the United Nations.
We had to fight for it – for every inch of it.
And in modern times we’ve had to fight not only on the battlefield but also in the court of public opinion.
We have had to defend the truth in a world of lies.
A world in which Israel, a nation that shows unprecedented compassion against genocidal enemies, is itself shamelessly accused of genocide.
This summer, as thousands of missiles rained down on our cities, Israel surgically targeted terrorists who fired from hospitals and placed rockets in schools and mosques.
Faced with such a callous enemy, we dropped leaflets, made phone calls, sent text messages and broadcast evacuation orders in Arabic to give Palestinian civilians time to get out of harm’s way.
We even continued to treat Gazans in our hospitals, including the daughter of the leader of Hamas.
That’s Israel. What about our enemies?
Hamas’s genocidal charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews worldwide.
Its terrorists deliberately target our civilians by blowing up buses and restaurants, kidnapping and murdering teenagers, and ramming cars into baby strollers - as they did a few days ago in Jerusalem.
That’s Hamas. What about the leader of the Palestinian Authority, President Abbas?
The Palestinian President wrote a dissertation denying the Holocaust, educates Palestinian children to hate Jews, and wants a Palestinian state free of Jews.
Now he has forged a pact with an unreformed Hamas.
In the nearly century long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, about 20,000 people have been killed on both sides.
And since 1967, the population of the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza has increased fourfold to between 3 to 4 million people today.
And yet President Abbas stands before the world at the United Nations and accuses Israel of genocide?
What a disgrace! What an embarrassment that anyone in the world embraces this man as a peacemaker.
Well, we should not be surprised. After all, the same people who embrace Abbas libel the soldiers of the IDF as war criminals.
Despite the fact that no army in history has gone to greater lengths to get the civilians of the other side out of harm’s way.
Despite the fact that we upheld the highest values even as Israel came under massive rocket attack and two-thirds of our population was forced into bomb-shelters.
Pastor Hagee, when I said this summer in Washington at your CUFI conference that the IDF deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, some people didn’t like it. So let me say it again. The soldiers of the IDF deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.
Maybe some people don’t like the notion of an army receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Well, in my view, America’s soldiers should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945.
Because the young men who bravely stormed the beaches of Normandy did more for world peace than all the diplomats of the UN over the last 70 years put together.
And we live in a world where there is another Big Lie that goes unchallenged: The lie that the people of Israel are occupiers in the Land of Israel.
When the people of Israel are in the Land of Israel, we’re not occupiers. We are home.
Before I leave you, I must confess that there is one more thing that gives me confidence in Israel’s future.
It’s not a miracle of the present, but a promise from the past.
Jews will read of that promise this week in synagogues throughout the world.
We will read of how our patriarch Abraham - fired by his faith in one God - left his country, his birthplace, and even his father’s house.
We will read of God’s promise to Abraham that his descendants would become a great nation.
We will read of the land that was promised them.
We will read of an everlasting covenant that was passed on through Abraham’s son Isaac, the father of Jacob, who would later be named Israel.
And we will read of the promise that God would bless those who bless him and curse those who curse him.
Do not despair about Israel and do not lose heart.
Israel is not some 66 year-old dry twig that will blow away in the wind.
Israel is a 4,000 year old oak that will survive any storm.
So when you hear Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and others threaten Israel with annihilation, just ask yourself this:
Where is the Ambassador of Nebukadnezzer’s Babylon? Where is the Ambassador of Ceasar’s Rome? Where is the Ambassador of Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich?
I am privileged to stand before you today as the Ambassador of Israel, the one and only Jewish state.
We in Israel face the coming storm with faith and courage.
And I know that as we do, all of you, and millions like you throughout this great country, stand strong by Israel’s side.
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