He gave me the report I expected. Last surgery successful in that I have the ability to walk and improved range of motion and can get back on the tennis court but still have restrictive knee movement so wants me to come back in a year, allow the healing process more time and then might suggest scar tissue removal surgery.
I have total confidence in him and will do what he recommends.
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Meanwhile, as I have been suggesting and writing, Jeb Bush is gearing up to run and he will run the same campaign in the primary as he will, if nominated, in the general election. What you see is what you will get.
Jeb is talented, was a fine governor but probably has several strikes against him when it comes to the nomination. They are:
a) Last name is Bush and dynasty effect.
b) Moderate on immigration.
c) Favors Common Core (See 1 below.)
If Hillary runs, and I think she would like to but health remains an issue, she would eliminate the dynasty effect. (See 1a below.)
Jeb probably knocks out Rubio running and the contrast between him and Cruz and Rand is stark. The other governors from Ohio, Wisconsin, New Jersey fall somewhere in between as does Huckabee.
The SIRC President Day Speaker on Feb. 16, is John Podhoretz, Editor of Commentary Magazine and I am sure he will discuss Republican prospects in 2016 among other topics.
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Sowell on 'harsh investigation and those "tortured" Democrats! And, Bret has no regret! (See 2
and 2a Below.)
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Religion teaches obedience and respect. Religion also under girds our respect for the law.
Harvard Professor, Clay Christensen, discusses Religious Freedom.
Only 90-seconds. Don’t miss it!!
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Israel suffers from the same malady that afflicts our nation - Jurists who legislate from the bench! (See 3 below.)
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Advisor to Abbas' says play waiting game and Western pressure will build and Israel will fall into Palestinian hands! (See 4, 4a and 4b below.)
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Dinesh D'Souza: Racism Is Not The Cause Of Black Failure
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1) Common Core Doesn't Make the Grade
By Edwin J. Feulner
It’s one thing to experience “buyer’s remorse” when the product is something you can return easily, from new clothes to a set of high-end speakers. It’s another when you’re talking about your state’s educational standards.
Yet more and more states are finding that there’s simply no living with Common Core. Parents, teachers, students and lawmakers have become increasingly vocal in their criticism of the federally backed standards – and more and more of them are taking action.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, for example, once backed Common Core, saying in 2012 that he expected it to “raise expectations for every child.” By this summer, however, he was pulling his state out of the program. He insisted it was sold falsely to states as voluntary standards and that he was the victim of a “bait and switch.”
That is the crux of the criticism against Common Core – that the federal government got recession-strapped states to sign on by offering more than $4 billion in grants and waivers under the Race to the Top program. Many lawmakers were eager to sign on – at first. Now they are worried about losing those waivers if they drop Common Core.
That concern even led Sen. David Vitter, Louisiana Republican, to propose legislation that would “prohibit the federal government from mandating, incentivizing or coercing states to adopt the Common Core state standards or any other specific academic standards, instructional content, curricula, assessments, or programs of instruction.”
So far, 19 states have made significant efforts to push back against Common Core. Indiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Louisiana have exited the standards, and others appear poised to do likewise.
Who can blame them? The more teachers and parents see of Common Core, the less they like it.
Math problems that used to be solved in two or three easy steps now take a dozen or more, and with no discernible advantage – unless the point is to make things more complex. “In the real world,” one engineer father said of the mathematics homework his son brought home, “simplification is valued over complication.”
When it comes to reading, Common Core inexplicably junks many of the classic works of fiction that have long prepared students to think critically. In their place are “informational texts” that will cause college readiness to decrease, said professor Sandra Stotsky, former senior associate commissioner at the Massachusetts Department of Education.
The main problem is that Common Core exemplifies a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach that is toxic in the world of education. No matter how well-meaning some bureaucrats in Washington may be, they can’t prescribe standards that will work perfectly in every school of every district of every state. What works in Peoria, Illinois, may not work in Portland, Oregon.
“Adopting Common Core national standards and tests surrenders control of the content taught in local schools to distant national organizations and bureaucrats in Washington,” education researcher Lindsey Burke writes. “It is the antithesis of reform that would put control of education in the hands of those closest to students: local school leaders and parents.”
That, in fact, is the solution. What’s needed here is parent-directed education. We need school choice, which allows families to select the academic setting that’s right for them. That might be the local public school, a nearby private school or home school.
Such an approach is understandably appealing to frustrated families, many of whom have embraced school choice programs. The number taking advantage of options such as vouchers, tuition tax credit programs and education savings accounts has gone from fewer than 50,000 in 2000 to more than 300,000 today.
We don’t need questionable universal standards handed down to us from Mount Olympus. Choice in education should be our standard. Common Core restricts choice and simply doesn’t make the grade.
1a) Axelrod: Jeb Bush Would Be 'Formidable' Opponent to Hillary
Former Florida Republican Gov. Jeb Bush could be a "formidable candidate" for president in 2016 in a matchup against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Democratic strategist David Axelrod told MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
"If Jeb Bush can get through a Republican primary without trimming his sails on the issues ... he will be a very formidable general election candidate.
1a) Axelrod: Jeb Bush Would Be 'Formidable' Opponent to Hillary
Former Florida Republican Gov. Jeb Bush could be a "formidable candidate" for president in 2016 in a matchup against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Democratic strategist David Axelrod told MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
"If Jeb Bush can get through a Republican primary without trimming his sails on the issues ... he will be a very formidable general election candidate.
"The problem is, in order to get the nomination, [previous candidates] had to make Faustian bargains on issues that towed them to the right," Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, said Tuesday.
"If Jeb sticks to his guns on these issues, he's got tremendous appeal to the Hispanic community," he said.
Bush posted the latest indicator that he is eyeing a run for the White House in 2016 on Facebook on Tuesday, stating that his family discussed the idea during the Thanksgiving holiday.
In addition to eating and watching football, Bush wrote, "we also talked about the future of our nation. As a result of these conversations and thoughtful consideration of the kind of strong leadership I think America needs, I have decided to actively explore the possibility of running for President of the United States."
He also wrote that in January he would "establish a Leadership PAC that will help me facilitate conversations with citizens across America to discuss the most critical challenges facing our exceptional nation."
Should Bush decide to enter the race, Axelrod said, it wouldn't change the strategy for Clinton, but maintained that recent statements by Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren that were critical of Wall Street could make a difference.
He said that Warren was more likely trying to sway Clinton than indicate she was thinking about entering the presidential race herself.
"My suspicion is that what she's doing is trying to influence how Hillary frames her candidacy and the issues she focuses on," he said. "I think Elizabeth knows she's got maximum leverage by still being in the conversation.
"I'd be surprised if she runs."
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2)
Critics and defenders of the harsh interrogation methods applied to captured terrorists can argue forever over whether those methods were "torture." But any serious discussion of a serious issue -- and surely terrorism qualifies as serious -- has to move beyond semantics and confront the ultimate question: "Compared to what alternative?"
If you knew that there was a hidden nuclear time bomb planted somewhere in New York City -- set to go off today -- and you had a captured terrorist who knew where and when, would you not do anything whatever to make him tell you where and when? Would you pause to look up the definition of "torture"? Would you even care what the definition of "torture" was, when the alternative was seeing millions of innocent people murdered?
Senator Dianne Feinstein's recent release of a massive report on the CIA's severe interrogation methods, used against captured Islamic terrorists, has set off a firestorm of controversy. It is hard to see what benefit the United States of America gains from releasing that report. But it is painfully obvious what lasting damage has been done to the security of Americans.
One of the most obscene acts of the Obama administration, when it first took office, was to launch a criminal investigation of CIA agents who had used harsh interrogation methods against captured terrorists in the wake of the devastating September 11, 2001 aerial attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Right after those terrorist attacks, when there were desperate fears of what might be coming next, these CIA agents were trying to spare fellow Americans another attack that could take thousands more lives, or perhaps millions more. To turn on these agents, years later, after they did what they were urged to do, as a patriotic duty in a time of crisis, is both a betrayal of those who acted in the past and a disincentive to those in the future who are charged with safeguarding the nation.
Other nations, whose cooperation we need, in order to disrupt international terrorist networks, see how their involvement has now been revealed to the whole world -- including terrorists -- because supposedly responsible American officials, in the Congress of the United States, cannot keep their mouths shut.
The public's "right to know" has often been invoked to justify publicizing confidential information. But is there any evidence that the American public was clamoring to learn state secrets, which every government has? I don't know where our nuclear weapons are located and I don't want to know, certainly not at the cost of letting our enemies know.
The ease with which politicians are willing to pull the rug out from under people whose job is to safeguard our lives -- whether they are CIA agents, the police or the military -- is not only a betrayal of those people but a danger to us all.
People who are constantly denouncing the police, including with demonstrable lies, may think they are showing solidarity with people in the ghettos. But, when police hesitate to go beyond "kinder and gentler" policing, that leaves decent people in black communities at the mercy of hoodlums and thugs who have no mercy.
When conscientious young people, of any race, who would like to help maintain peace and order see that being a policeman means having race hustlers constantly whipping up mob hostility against you -- and having opportunistic politicians and the media joining the race hustlers -- those young people may well decide that some other line of work would be better for them.
High crime areas need not only the most, but the best, police they can get. Taking cheap shots at cops is not the way to get the people who are needed.
When people who volunteer to put their lives on the line in the military to defend this country, at home and abroad, see their buddies killed on the battlefield, and sometimes themselves come back minus an arm or a leg, or with severe physical and mental damage that they may never get over -- and then see some headstrong politician in the White House throw away everything they fought for, and see enemy forces take back places for which Americans shed their blood, that can be galling to them and a deterrent to others who might otherwise take their place in the future.
If we cannot see beyond the moment today, we will pay dearly tomorrow and in many more tomorrows.
2a)
I Am Not Sorry the CIA Waterboarded
Dick Cheney says he would “do it again in a minute.” He’s right.
I am not sorry Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times. KSM also murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl in 2002. He boasted about it: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew,” he said after his capture.
I am sorry KSM remains alive nearly 12 years after his capture. He has been let off far too lightly. As for his waterboarding, it never would have happened if he had been truthful with his captors. It stopped as soon as he became cooperative. As far as I’m concerned, he waterboarded himself.
I am not sorry the CIA went to the edge of the law in the aftermath of 9/11 to prevent further mass-casualty attacks on the U.S. I am not sorry that going to the edge meant, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein put it in 2002, doing “some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves.” I don’t suppose she was talking about removing our shoes at airport security.
I am sorry we weren’t willing to do those “things” before 3,000 people had their lives unnaturally ended on Sept. 11, 2001.
I am not sorry Osama bin Laden died by an American bullet. John Brennan , the CIA director, delivered a master class in rhetorical obfuscation masquerading as epistemology when he waffled last week about the quality of intelligence yielded by the interrogations of KSM and other high-value detainees. But several former directors and deputy directors of the CIA have all attested to the link between KSM’s interrogation and the identification of bin Laden’s courier.
I am sorry that the Feinstein Report, which failed to interview those directors and thus has the credibility of a Rolling Stone article, seeks to deny this. Maybe Sabrina Rubin Erdely, author of the discredited University of Virginia gang-rape story and a pro at failing to interview key witnesses, will find a new career in Sen. Feinstein’s office.
I am not sorry that President Obama has ordered drone strikes on hundreds of terrorist suspects hiding in Pakistan, Yemen and other places. I am not sorry he has done so despite the fact that the strikes inevitably have killed hundreds and perhaps thousands of their associates, many of whom were either innocent of wrongdoing or had committed no crime deserving of death from 30,000 feet. This is the nature of war.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, in an undated photo. ASSOCIATED PRESS
I am sorry that we are now having a national convulsion over the fact that the CIA captured, detained, interrogated and in at least two cases accidentally killed two detainees. This is undoubtedly wrong and merits apology and compensation. But how this is any worse than what Mr. Obama routinely brags about doing with drones is beyond me.
I am not sorry that Dick Cheney told NBC’s Chuck Todd this Sunday that, in the matter of enhanced interrogation techniques, he would “do it again in a minute.” The former vice president seems to feel none of the need for the easy moral preening that is the characteristic political reflex of our age.
I am sorry that Mr. Cheney, and every other supporter of enhanced interrogation techniques, has to defend the practices as if they were torture. They are not. Waterboarding is part of the military’s standard course in Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE. Tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen have gone through it. To describe this as “torture” is to strip the word of its meaning.
I am not sorry that Google makes it easy to recall what the political class had to say about KSM in the immediate aftermath of his capture. Here is a noteworthy exchange between Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, and CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on March 2, 2003:
Blitzer: “There has been speculation, Sen. Rockefeller, in the press that U.S. authorities, given the restrictions on torture, might hand over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his colleagues to a third country, a friendly Arab state, Jordan, Egypt, some country like that, where the restrictions against torture are not in existence.”
Rockefeller: “I don’t know that. I can’t comment on that. And if I did know it, I wouldn’t comment on it. [Laughter.] But I wouldn’t rule it out. I wouldn’t take anything off the table where he is concerned, because this is the man who has killed hundreds and hundreds of Americans over the last 10 years.”
I am sorry that Sen. Rockefeller saw nothing amiss with the idea of handing over KSM to the Cairo Cattle-Prod Crew. This is rightly known as torture-by-proxy. It is wrong.
I am not sorry that Sen. Feinstein went ahead and released her report. In its partisanship, its certitudes, its omissions of reportage and recommendation, and its attempt to seem authoritative merely by being verbose, it has reopened a necessary debate that was nearly closed—and nearly lost. Eventually we will have another mass-casualty attack on U.S. soil. We’ll need better than Ms. Feinstein’s insipid shibboleths to answer it.
And for that, I am sorry—for all of us.
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3)
Behind Israel’s Jewish ‘State’ Uproar
Many democracies also explicitly embrace their ethnic identity. The U.S. is unusual in not doing it.
The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has fallen apart and new elections are scheduled for March. One of the main controversies that cracked the government coalition was a proposed law to designate Israel the “Nation-State of the Jewish People.” The bill’s opponents have denounced it as antidemocratic, saying that it would turn non-Jews into second-class citizens. That criticism is based on a misunderstanding of the bill and of the nature of democratic nation-states.
I was one of the bill’s originators. All of us are passionately committed to liberal democracy of the type that Israel has worked to build since its birth in 1948. The proposed law does not have anything to do with religious practices. Not one of us favors theocracy, and none would want to live in a country that lacked full democratic rights for everyone, including freedom of religion.
The proposed law would preserve the current basic laws guaranteeing democratic and civil rights. But in line with the thinking of David Ben-Gurion and Israel’s other founders, it would also reassert that there is nothing inherently inconsistent in the state’s protecting its generally Jewish character and all its citizens’ individual rights.
This notion is under assault from several directions. For decades, progressive activist judges have been increasingly calling into question the fundamental principle that Israel should be a Jewish state as well as a democratic state. Such politically activist judges often legislate from the bench in ways that their critics (I among them) consider to be antidemocratic.
For instance, Israeli law has for many years prohibited political parties from trying to destroy the Jewish or the democratic character of the state, yet some judges have chosen not to disqualify parties—such as the Balad Party—that aim to destroy Israel’s Jewish character by eliminating all the Jewish characteristics of the nation state and making it ethnically neutral.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussing new nationality law in the weekly cabinet meeting in his Jerusalem offices on November 23, 2014. EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak made what he called a “constitutional revolution” in the early 1990s. An important consequence of the revolution was interpreting civil liberties as inconsistent with Israeli government measures to give specific protection to Jewish culture, history and collective peoplehood.
The court has opposed classic Zionist land-use policies—such as the right to build Jewish settlements alongside Arab ones in the upper Galilee and Negev—going back to the founders of the Zionist movement. The court has also weakened the status of Hebrew, the national language of renewal which from the beginning has driven the Zionist enterprise. Justice Barak refers to protecting Israel’s Jewish character as a matter of mere “interest,” not on the level of civil “rights.”
Anti-Zionists and so-called post-Zionists have also been actively campaigning to transform Israel. They argue that it should cease to be the Jewish state and become an ethnically neutral country along the lines of the U.S. or New Zealand. They argue that there’s something inherently non-democratic in Zionism. They are challenging not just Zionism, but the very idea of national self-determination.
Most democracies either have state religions (Britain, Denmark), put religious symbols on their flags (Norway, Switzerland), have ethnically based immigration-law preferences (Ireland, Germany) or otherwise give special protection to a particular ethnic culture (the Baltic states).
Americans may find some aspects of the proposed bill confusing or even threatening, because they commonly assume that democracy requires ethnic neutrality by the government. But many Americans fail to recognize that part of U.S. exceptionalism lies in its status as a rare democracy that isn’t ethnically based.
Most of the more than 60 democracies are built on the ethnic identity of a predominant group, which molds the character of the state while affording minorities full civil and religious rights. In this regard the Jewish state of Israel is a typical democratic country.
Untypically, however, it has been fighting to survive all of its life. Since the Roman Empire expelled them from their homeland 2,000 years ago, the Jews in exile preserved their religion and their identity as a people. The dream of Zionism was to return to the homeland and re-establish sovereignty in a Jewish-majority state that would have equal dignity with all the world’s other nations. The League of Nations endorsed this idea in 1922 by unanimous vote.
While the Arabs would have states of their own throughout the Middle East, the Jews would have one state in part of their ancient homeland. Like many of the states created after World War I, the Jewish state in Palestine would have citizens who were not part of the majority group and their civil and religious rights were to be protected within the Jewish state.
The Zionist dream was realized in 1948 with the creation of Israel. Jews today exist across the globe, but Jewish national history marches forward only in the Jewish state.
The proposed bill codifying Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people grows out of a long and complex history in which the Jewish people and all of Israel’s citizens are thinking through their communal identities—as Jews, Arabs, Palestinians, Christians, Muslims and Israelis. Reasonable people can and do differ about the bill. But its essence is simply to reaffirm the principle of national self-determination—that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state.
Mr. Golovensky is an attorney and the founding president of the Institute for Zionist Strategies in Jerusalem.
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4)Abbas' advisor Mahmoud Al-Habbash:
All of "Palestine" will "return"
to Palestinians through "resistance":
by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik
In his latest sermon, Mahmoud Abbas' advisor on Religious and Islamic Affairs stated that "all our occupied land, all our rights in Palestine... our ancestors' legacy - all of it will return to us even if it takes time." Since the Palestinian Authority claims historical rights to all of Israel, by referring to "our ancestors' legacy" returning, Abbas' advisor Mahmoud Al-Habbash is assuring Palestinians that Israel's demise is assured.
Palestinian Media Watch reported that Al-Habbash gave a speech about the same them in October, when he taught that accepting Israel's existence is "prohibited" under Islamic law:
"The entire land of Palestine (i.e., includes all of Israel) is waqf (an inalienable religious endowment in Islamic law) and is blessed land... It is prohibited to sell, bestow ownership or facilitate the occupation of even a millimeter of it."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Oct. 22, 2014]
In the current sermon, he explained that violence is one of the tools that the PA will use against Israel: "In terms of resistance - all options are on the table."
Mahmoud Al-Habbash, the PA Supreme Shari'ah Judge and Mahmoud Abbas' advisor on Religious and Islamic Affairs gave this Friday sermon in the presence Abbas. The following is the selected text:
"All of this land will return to us, all our occupied land, all our rights in Palestine - our state, our people's heritage, our ancestors' legacy - all of it will return to us even if it takes time. Patience is the key to victory, and we are patient. In terms of resistance, all options are on the table, and in terms of diplomacy as well."
[Official PA TV, Dec. 12, 2014
4a)
This week push may come to shove on the long-simmering feud between President Obama and the Israeli government. With the Palestinianspushing for a United Nations Security Council resolution that would unilaterally recognize their independence in the territory won by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, the administration must decide whether it is truly in its interests to facilitate an end run around the peace process it has sponsored by refusing to veto the measure just to demonstrate its pique at Prime Minister Netanyahu and or undermine his chances for reelection in the March elections. But while the stakes here are high for both Israel, whose isolation could be greatly increased by passage of such a resolution, and Netanyahu, the danger to Obama’s foreign policy and U.S. interests from such a vote is high as well. Just as important, the notion that passage of this resolution has anything to do with promoting peace is farcical.
The Palestinian Authority’s motives for seeking to gain a Security Council vote on recognition of their independence are clear. They claim that the peace negotiations promoted by the U.S. over the years has not brought them closer to their declared goal of gaining a state and that only by having the international community force its hand will Israel ever be willing to retreat to the 1967 lines and let Palestinians enjoy sovereignty and self-determination. That is the argument behind the decisions of several European parliaments to adopt resolutions endorsing Palestinian statehood.
But it must be understood that this campaign is about avoiding a negotiated end to the conflict, not finding a shortcut to one. The Palestinians have, after all, been offered statehood in Gaza, almost all of the West Bank, and a share of Jerusalem three times by the Israelis in 2000, 2001, and 2008. Even Netanyahu’s government arrived at the negotiations sponsored by Secretary of State Kerry in the last year prepared to offer another two-state solution with a prominent advocate of this plan, Tzipi Livni, as their negotiator. But PA leader Mahmoud Abbas blew up those talks just as he fled the table in 2008 when Ehud Olmert offered him virtually everything he had asked for. The obstacle wasn’t Israeli settlements or intransigence, but the fact that Abbas knows it would be political suicide for him to sign any deal that would recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one, no matter where its borders were drawn.
What the Palestinians want, in other words, is a way to avoid negotiations that would obligate them in one form or another to end the conflict with Israel as the price of their independence. The problem with negotiations isn’t that the Israelis, even Netanyahu, have been intransigent, but that no matter how much Obama and Kerry tilt the diplomatic playing field in the direction of the Palestinians, a solution must in the end require them to make peace. The UN resolution they want would merely obligate the Israelis to retreat from more territory without any assurances that what happened when they gave up every inch of Gaza in 2005—the creation of a terrorist Hamas state—would not happen again in the more strategic and larger West Bank.
Obama would savor the embarrassment this would cause Netanyahu, whose chances for reelection might be damaged by an open breach with the United States and the country’s increased isolation as the world demanded it give up land without offering it peace. But this would also mean the effective end of a major portion of the president’s foreign-policy focus: the achievement of a Middle East peace agreement. It would also mark the end of U.S. influence over either side to the confrontation as both Israelis and Palestinians would no longer need or have any desire to gravitate to the U.S.
The surge in Palestinian violence and the growing support for their statehood among European governments may cause Obama to feel more pressure to go along with Western European allies. Just as important, he may be dismayed by the thought that another veto that backs up a negotiated path to Palestinian statehood will be interpreted by Israelis as proving that Netanyahu has, contrary to his critics, not destroyed the alliance. The irony that a decision by the prime minister’s bitter American enemy would help undermine arguments for Netanyahu’s replacement has to worry Obama. But he should also be worried by the blowback from a failure to order a veto.
The president’s hard-core left-wing supporters might defend such a decision but it would be widely condemned by most Democrats, who will rightly see it as a cynical betrayal of principle motivated more by personal grudges than the national interest. It might also backfire in Israel since voters there would be entitled to say the non-veto was proof of Obama’s irremediable hostility to the Jewish state and might motivate many to back Netanyahu so as to demonstrate their unwillingness to be intimidated into accepting measures that would undermine their security and rights.
The optimal scenario for Obama is to avoid any vote on Palestinian independence in the Security Council that would destroy the peace process. But if he is in this difficult position, it’s largely the fault of his own efforts. After spending the last few years bending over backwards trying to demonstrate daylight between the positions of Israel and the United States, the Palestinians have come to believe that sooner or later the president will hand them the diplomatic victory they long for without being forced to pay any price for it. Doing so will be as much a blow to U.S. interests as it will be to Israel, but it’s hard to blame either the Palestinians or the Europeans for thinking that this time, Obama will really betray the Israelis simply in order to harm Netanyahu. If he does, it will mark a new low for an administration that has already turned undermining allies into an art form.
4b) IS OBAMA SECRETLY WORKING TO REPLACE NETANYAHU?
Author: Aaron Klein
Nurtured in the Saul Alinsky-style, ACORN-esque tactics of organizing revolution under the banner of “social change,” Barack Obama, as a young community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s understood early on the importance of a crisis and how to ride the waves of an emergency to effect the fundamental transformation of society.
As the nation’s chief executive, President Obama has demonstrated a particular specialty in the use and perpetuation of crises to push through policies that the public otherwise might not willingly accept, including the wildly unpopular healthcare law, immigration reform, and the first-term “stimulus” legislation. It is therefore unsurprising to detect the international export of the Obama’s “crisis” game plan to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A dispassionate look at the sequence of events shows that the Obama administration has generated an unprecedented crisis in US-Israeli relations, a crisis utilized at every twist and turn by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political rivals, most notably those within his coalition, to try to shake up the country’s leadership. There is more than a hint of White House interference in helping to agitate the coalition drama that provoked Netanyahu’s hesitant decision last Tuesday to dissolve parliament and schedule early elections that could potentially see the prime minister unseated.
Before divining the Obama administration’s fingerprints on the events that led to Netanyahu’s predicament, the immediate question is just what about the Israeli premier makes him so problematic for this White House. The answer is fraught with policy implications that cut to the very heart of Obama’s dangerously myopic, academic view of the world and America’s place among friend and foe.
Unforgivable to the US president is Bibi’s stubborn refusal to acquiesce to the concept of a sweeping, final deal with Iran that many experts believe will leave the mullahs perpetually within months of a nuclear weapon. Never mind that Iran has numerous times threatened to wipe Israel off the map and is a main state sponsor of the Palestinian terrorist organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Obama is more than annoyed at Netanyahu’s Congressional activism of lobbying for tougher sanctions on Tehran at precisely the same time the US administration is working with European allies to extend sanctions relief until next June 30, as the deadline for nuclear talks was yet again postponed until that date. Netanyahu has repeatedly accused Iran of using the drawn-out negotiations as a smokescreen to develop an illicit nuclear infrastructure.
Also problematic for the White House is the breakdown of Israeli-Palestinian “peace” talks, with rhetoric from the Obama administration indicating that the US largely blames Netanyahu for the collapse of the negotiations. In the Alice's looking-glass lens through which Obama views the Middle East, the sturdy legs of the bargaining table broke because of Netanyahu’s decision to build Jewish homes in sections of Jerusalem that will most likely remain under Israeli sovereignty in any future deal. Also, like every other prime minister before him who engaged in these kinds of negotiations, Netanyahu had dared to insist that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, an understanding that Israelis see as central to peaceful co-existence.
Never mind that Netanyahu took the unprecedented step of freezing Jewish construction in the West Bank and sections of Jerusalem and even released Palestinian terrorists as “good will gestures” to help jumpstart talks with an intransigent Palestinian leadership.
Using a different lens on Palestinian complacency, the White House is blind to such infractions as Abbas’s decision to walk away from the talks and instead seek unilateral recognition at the United Nations; the near daily anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement in the official Palestinian media; the role of Abbas’s Fatah organization in helping to guide riots currently rocking Jerusalem; the question of whether or not Abbas, amid Hamas gains in Gaza and the West Bank, even represents the Palestinian people; and of course the Palestinians' long history of walking away from every other major international attempt to broker peace.
The White House has singled out Netanyahu as standing in the way of Obama's utopian vision for a new Middle East and Persian Gulf. What better way to bypass this obstacle than aiding in Netanyahu’s removal from office?
Let’s look at the clues. Netanyahu’s decision last week to disband his coalition came when he dismissed his finance minister, Yair Lapid, and his justice minister, Tzipi Livni, both of whom have not disguised their ambitions for the country’s highest office. Tellingly, both took advantage of the steady stream of US criticism toward Netanyahu by leading an escalating public campaign in which they repeatedly accused Netanyahu of causing this dangerous rift in relations with Israel’s most important ally.
Case in point. In October, Israel’s Ynet news website reported that a request by Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon to meet with US Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry and National Security Adviser Susan Rice during his visit to Washington had been denied by the White House. This reported move is highly unusual, and was a nearly unprecedented snub of Netanyahu’s government. It helped to set off a firestorm against Netanyahu in Israel, particularly among the center and the left, with Livni and Lapid leading the charge.
Also in October, in what can only be viewed as an orchestrated campaign, the US espoused uncharacteristically harsh language to oppose a plan for Israel to build 2,610 new homes on empty lots in Givat Hamatos, a Jerusalem neighborhood in the eastern section of the city where Palestinians want to build a future state.
Immediately following a meeting between Netanyahu and President Obama in October, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki and White House spokesman Josh Earnest took the Israeli leader’s delegation by surprise when they released nearly identical statements slamming the Jerusalem construction. They warned the housing plans could distance Israel from its “closest allies,” a clear euphemism for the US, and questioned whether Netanyahu was interested in peace. Netanyahu for his part said at the time that he was “baffled” by the US criticism, stating the American position “doesn’t really reflect American values.”
As if on queue, Lapid and Livni raced to endorse the US condemnation and accuse Netanyahu once again of damaging US-Israeli relations. That month, Lapid took further issue with Netanyahu’s plan to build roughly 400 homes in Har Homa and about 600 in Ramat Shlomo. “This plan will lead to a serious crisis in Israel-US relations and will harm Israel’s standing in the world,” Lapid said.
In another seemingly orchestrated development, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in October described relations between the US and Israel as a “full-blown crisis” and reported that senior Obama administration officials had called Netanyahu “chickenshit” on matters related to the so-called peace process. Goldberg gratuitously added that Bibi is a “coward” on the issue of Iran’s nuclear threat.
This level of speech in a diplomatic confrontation between putative allies is close to unprecedented. The Atlantic published a comically ruder exchange, but it was between enemies.
Lapid jumped on the puerile and vulgar remarks to release a vaguely nuanced criticism of Netanyahu: “I said only a few days ago that there is a real crisis in the relations and it needs to be dealt with responsibly,” he said, while faux-lecturing US and Israeli officials on the “need to tackle the crisis behind the scenes.”
Adding more fuel to the anti-Bibi firestorm, Ha'aretz reported last week the Obama administration had held a classified discussion a few weeks earlier about possibly taking more proactive measures against the “settlements,” including mulling sanctions or punishing Israel at the United Nations. While the State Department dismissed the claims as “unfounded and completely without merit,” the Ha'aretz article is already providing more fodder to target Bibi.
Here’s the kicker. In March, an informed diplomatic source in Jerusalem told me that representatives of the Obama administration held meetings with Lapid to check him out politically and to discuss the kind of prime minister he would make if he won elections in the future. The diplomatic source said the Obama administration identified Lapid as a moderate who would support Israeli-Palestinian talks. While the alleged meeting might have been as innocent as getting to know the powerful finance minister, the claim does fuel the perception of Obama administration tentacles working surreptitiously to change the political order in the Jewish state.
At the end of the day, this political interference could backfire monumentally. Obama’s support among the Israeli populace is dismal. Just last week, The Jerusalem Post reported on a poll that showed the number of Israelis who believe Obama had either a “positive” or a “neutral” view of Israel has fallen sharply. Israelis largely see Iran as their single greatest existential threat and seem to react positively to Netanyahu’s tough stance against the US-led negotiations. And remarkably, Netanyahu has the quiet support of the Egyptian and Saudi governments for his regional policies. It remains to be seen if Israelis are ready to entrust their security to a relative political newcomer like Lapid or the perpetually evolving Livni in the face of mounting threats that even now engulf the Jewish state in all directions.
A dispassionate look at the sequence of events shows that the Obama administration has generated an unprecedented crisis in US-Israeli relations, a crisis utilized at every twist and turn by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political rivals, most notably those within his coalition, to try to shake up the country’s leadership. There is more than a hint of White House interference in helping to agitate the coalition drama that provoked Netanyahu’s hesitant decision last Tuesday to dissolve parliament and schedule early elections that could potentially see the prime minister unseated.
Before divining the Obama administration’s fingerprints on the events that led to Netanyahu’s predicament, the immediate question is just what about the Israeli premier makes him so problematic for this White House. The answer is fraught with policy implications that cut to the very heart of Obama’s dangerously myopic, academic view of the world and America’s place among friend and foe.
Unforgivable to the US president is Bibi’s stubborn refusal to acquiesce to the concept of a sweeping, final deal with Iran that many experts believe will leave the mullahs perpetually within months of a nuclear weapon. Never mind that Iran has numerous times threatened to wipe Israel off the map and is a main state sponsor of the Palestinian terrorist organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Obama is more than annoyed at Netanyahu’s Congressional activism of lobbying for tougher sanctions on Tehran at precisely the same time the US administration is working with European allies to extend sanctions relief until next June 30, as the deadline for nuclear talks was yet again postponed until that date. Netanyahu has repeatedly accused Iran of using the drawn-out negotiations as a smokescreen to develop an illicit nuclear infrastructure.
Also problematic for the White House is the breakdown of Israeli-Palestinian “peace” talks, with rhetoric from the Obama administration indicating that the US largely blames Netanyahu for the collapse of the negotiations. In the Alice's looking-glass lens through which Obama views the Middle East, the sturdy legs of the bargaining table broke because of Netanyahu’s decision to build Jewish homes in sections of Jerusalem that will most likely remain under Israeli sovereignty in any future deal. Also, like every other prime minister before him who engaged in these kinds of negotiations, Netanyahu had dared to insist that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, an understanding that Israelis see as central to peaceful co-existence.
Never mind that Netanyahu took the unprecedented step of freezing Jewish construction in the West Bank and sections of Jerusalem and even released Palestinian terrorists as “good will gestures” to help jumpstart talks with an intransigent Palestinian leadership.
Using a different lens on Palestinian complacency, the White House is blind to such infractions as Abbas’s decision to walk away from the talks and instead seek unilateral recognition at the United Nations; the near daily anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement in the official Palestinian media; the role of Abbas’s Fatah organization in helping to guide riots currently rocking Jerusalem; the question of whether or not Abbas, amid Hamas gains in Gaza and the West Bank, even represents the Palestinian people; and of course the Palestinians' long history of walking away from every other major international attempt to broker peace.
The White House has singled out Netanyahu as standing in the way of Obama's utopian vision for a new Middle East and Persian Gulf. What better way to bypass this obstacle than aiding in Netanyahu’s removal from office?
Let’s look at the clues. Netanyahu’s decision last week to disband his coalition came when he dismissed his finance minister, Yair Lapid, and his justice minister, Tzipi Livni, both of whom have not disguised their ambitions for the country’s highest office. Tellingly, both took advantage of the steady stream of US criticism toward Netanyahu by leading an escalating public campaign in which they repeatedly accused Netanyahu of causing this dangerous rift in relations with Israel’s most important ally.
Case in point. In October, Israel’s Ynet news website reported that a request by Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon to meet with US Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry and National Security Adviser Susan Rice during his visit to Washington had been denied by the White House. This reported move is highly unusual, and was a nearly unprecedented snub of Netanyahu’s government. It helped to set off a firestorm against Netanyahu in Israel, particularly among the center and the left, with Livni and Lapid leading the charge.
Also in October, in what can only be viewed as an orchestrated campaign, the US espoused uncharacteristically harsh language to oppose a plan for Israel to build 2,610 new homes on empty lots in Givat Hamatos, a Jerusalem neighborhood in the eastern section of the city where Palestinians want to build a future state.
Immediately following a meeting between Netanyahu and President Obama in October, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki and White House spokesman Josh Earnest took the Israeli leader’s delegation by surprise when they released nearly identical statements slamming the Jerusalem construction. They warned the housing plans could distance Israel from its “closest allies,” a clear euphemism for the US, and questioned whether Netanyahu was interested in peace. Netanyahu for his part said at the time that he was “baffled” by the US criticism, stating the American position “doesn’t really reflect American values.”
As if on queue, Lapid and Livni raced to endorse the US condemnation and accuse Netanyahu once again of damaging US-Israeli relations. That month, Lapid took further issue with Netanyahu’s plan to build roughly 400 homes in Har Homa and about 600 in Ramat Shlomo. “This plan will lead to a serious crisis in Israel-US relations and will harm Israel’s standing in the world,” Lapid said.
In another seemingly orchestrated development, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in October described relations between the US and Israel as a “full-blown crisis” and reported that senior Obama administration officials had called Netanyahu “chickenshit” on matters related to the so-called peace process. Goldberg gratuitously added that Bibi is a “coward” on the issue of Iran’s nuclear threat.
This level of speech in a diplomatic confrontation between putative allies is close to unprecedented. The Atlantic published a comically ruder exchange, but it was between enemies.
Lapid jumped on the puerile and vulgar remarks to release a vaguely nuanced criticism of Netanyahu: “I said only a few days ago that there is a real crisis in the relations and it needs to be dealt with responsibly,” he said, while faux-lecturing US and Israeli officials on the “need to tackle the crisis behind the scenes.”
Adding more fuel to the anti-Bibi firestorm, Ha'aretz reported last week the Obama administration had held a classified discussion a few weeks earlier about possibly taking more proactive measures against the “settlements,” including mulling sanctions or punishing Israel at the United Nations. While the State Department dismissed the claims as “unfounded and completely without merit,” the Ha'aretz article is already providing more fodder to target Bibi.
Here’s the kicker. In March, an informed diplomatic source in Jerusalem told me that representatives of the Obama administration held meetings with Lapid to check him out politically and to discuss the kind of prime minister he would make if he won elections in the future. The diplomatic source said the Obama administration identified Lapid as a moderate who would support Israeli-Palestinian talks. While the alleged meeting might have been as innocent as getting to know the powerful finance minister, the claim does fuel the perception of Obama administration tentacles working surreptitiously to change the political order in the Jewish state.
At the end of the day, this political interference could backfire monumentally. Obama’s support among the Israeli populace is dismal. Just last week, The Jerusalem Post reported on a poll that showed the number of Israelis who believe Obama had either a “positive” or a “neutral” view of Israel has fallen sharply. Israelis largely see Iran as their single greatest existential threat and seem to react positively to Netanyahu’s tough stance against the US-led negotiations. And remarkably, Netanyahu has the quiet support of the Egyptian and Saudi governments for his regional policies. It remains to be seen if Israelis are ready to entrust their security to a relative political newcomer like Lapid or the perpetually evolving Livni in the face of mounting threats that even now engulf the Jewish state in all directions.
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