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Outstanding and timely speech by Newt: https://www.youtube.
and then listen to Sharyl Attkinsson's lecture:, "Investigative Journalism and the Obama Administration,"
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Putting things in perspective. (See 1 below.)
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Iran, unafraid and undeterred. (See 2, 2a and 2b below.)
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These are not terrorists. They are shoppers out for a death stroll! (See 3 below.)
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I believe if Gov. Walker gets more exposure and he will gain traction. (See 4 below.)
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Hagel now free to speak his mind. (See 5 below.)
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Welfare pays! (See 6 below.)
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Dick
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1)Matti Friedman’s Amazing Speech on January 26, 2015
Posted By Ruth King
How is that the Middle East’s sole democracy prompts so much angst, loathing, and condemnation? As a veteran news service correspondent explains, when an IDF soldier’s offensive T-shirt is deemed newsworthy and neo-Nazi rallies at Palestinian universities are not, there’s your answer.
The speech below was delivered by reporter Matti Friedman before the Britain Israel Communication & Research Centre in London on January 26:
One night several years ago, I came out of Bethlehem after a reporting assignment and crossed through the Israeli military checkpoint between that city and its neighbor, Jerusalem, where I live. With me were perhaps a dozen Palestinian men, mostly in their thirties – my age. No soldiers were visible at the entrance to the checkpoint, a precaution against suicide bombers. We saw only steel and concrete. I followed the other men through a metal detector into a stark corridor and followed instructions barked from a loudspeaker – Remove your belt! Lift up your shirt! The voice belonged to a soldier watching us on a closed-circuit camera. Exiting the checkpoint, adjusting my belt and clothing with the others, I felt like a being less than entirely human and understood, not for the first time, how a feeling like that would provoke someone to violence.
Consumers of news will recognize this scene as belonging to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which keeps the 2.5 million Palestinians in that territory under military rule, and has since 1967. The facts of this situation aren’t much in question. This should be an issue of concern to Israelis, whose democracy, military, and society are corroded by the inequality in the West Bank. This, too, isn’t much in question.
The question we must ask, as observers of the world, is why this conflict has come over time to draw more attention than any other, and why it is presented as it is. How have the doings in a country that constitutes 0.01 percent of the world’s surface become the focus of angst, loathing, and condemnation more than any other? We must ask how Israelis and Palestinians have become the stylized symbol of conflict, of strong and weak, the parallel bars upon which the intellectual Olympians of the West perform their tricks – not Turks and Kurds, not Han Chinese and Tibetans, not British soldiers and Iraqi Muslims, not Iraqi Muslims and Iraqi Christians, not Saudi sheikhs and Saudi women, not Indians and Kashmiris, not drug cartel thugs and Mexican villagers. Questioning why this is the case is in no way an attempt to evade or obscure reality, which is why I opened with the checkpoint leading from Bethlehem. On the contrary – anyone seeking a full understanding of reality can’t avoid this question. My experiences as a journalist provide part of the answer, and also raise pressing questions that go beyond the practice of journalism.
I have been writing from and about Israel for most of the past 20 years, since I moved there from Toronto at age 17. During the five and a half years I spent as part of the international press corps as a reporter for the American news agency The Associated Press, between 2006 and 2011, I gradually began to be aware of certain malfunctions in the coverage of the Israel story – recurring omissions, recurring inflations, decisions made according to considerations that were not journalistic but political, all in the context of a story staffed and reported more than any other international story on earth. When I worked in the AP’s Jerusalem bureau, the Israel story was covered by more AP news staff than China, or India, or all of the fifty-odd countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. This is representative of the industry as a whole.
In early 2009, to give one fairly routine example of an editorial decision of the kind I mean, I was instructed by my superiors to report a second-hand story taken from an Israeli newspaper about offensive T-shirts supposedly worn by Israeli soldiers. We had no confirmation of our own of the story’s veracity, and one doesn’t see much coverage of things US Marines or British infantrymen have tattooed on their chests or arms. And yet T-shirts worn by Israeli soldiers were newsworthy in the eyes of one of the world’s most powerful news organizations. This was because we sought to hint or say outright that Israeli soldiers were war criminals, and every detail supporting that portrayal was to be seized upon.
Much of the international press corps covered the T-shirt story. At around the same time, several Israeli soldiers were quoted anonymously in a school newsletter speaking of abuses they had supposedly witnessed while fighting in Gaza; we wrote no fewer than three separate stories about this, although the use of sources whose identity isn’t known to reporters is banned for good reason by the AP’s own in-house rules. This story, too, was very much one that we wanted to tell. By the time the soldiers came forward to say they hadn’t actually witnessed the events they supposedly described, and were trying to make a point to young students about the horrors and moral challenges of warfare, it was, of course, too late.
Also in those same months, in early 2009, two reporters in our bureau obtained details of a peace offer made by the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, to the Palestinians several months before, and deemed by the Palestinians to be insufficient. The offer proposed a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in a shared Jerusalem. This should have been one of the year’s biggest stories. But an Israeli peace offer and its rejection by the Palestinians didn’t suit OUR story. The bureau chief ordered both reporters to ignore the Olmert offer, and they did, despite a furious protest from one of them, who later termed this decision “the biggest fiasco I’ve seen in 50 years of journalism.” But it was very much in keeping not only with the practice at the AP, but in the press corps in general. Soldiers’ vile t-shirts were worth a story. Anonymous and unverifiable testimonies of abuses were worth three. A peace proposal from the Israeli prime minister to the Palestinian president was not to be reported at all.
Vandalism of Palestinian property is a story. Neo-Nazi rallies at Palestinian universities or in Palestinian cities are not — I saw images of such rallies suppressed on more than one occasion. Jewish hatred of Arabs is a story. Arab hatred of Jews is not. Our policy, for example, was not to mention the assertion in the Hamas founding charter that Jews were responsible for engineering both world wars and the Russian and French revolutions, despite the obvious insight this provides into the thinking of one of the most influential actors in the conflict.
100 houses in a West Bank settlement are a story. 100 rockets smuggled into Gaza are not. The Hamas military buildup amid and under the civilian population of Gaza is not a story. But Israeli military action responding to that threat – that is a story, as we all saw this summer. Israel’s responsibility for the deaths of civilians as a result – that’s a story. Hamas’s responsibility for those deaths is not. Any reporter from the international press corps in Israel, whether he or she works for the AP, Reuters, CNN, the BBC, or elsewhere, will recognize the examples I’ve cited here of what is newsworthy and what is not as standard operating procedure.
In my time in the press corps I saw, from the inside, how Israel’s flaws were dissected and magnified, while the flaws of its enemies were purposely erased. I saw how the threats facing Israel were disregarded or even mocked as figments of the Israeli imagination, even as these threats repeatedly materialized. I saw how a fictional image of Israel and of its enemies was manufactured, polished, and propagated to devastating effect by inflating certain details, ignoring others, and presenting the result as an accurate picture of reality. Lest we think this is something that has never happened before, we might remember Orwell’s observation about journalism from the Spanish civil war: “Early in life,” he wrote, “I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which do not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. … I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what had happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.’” That was in 1942.
Over time, I came to understand that the malfunctions I was witnessing, and in which I was playing a part, were not limited to the AP. I saw that they were rather part of a broader problem in the way the press functioned, and in how it saw its job. The international press in Israel had become less an observer of the conflict than a player in it. It had moved away from careful explanation and toward a kind of political character assassination on behalf of the side it identified as being right. It valued a kind of ideological uniformity from which you were not allowed to stray. So having begun with limited criticism of certain editorial decisions, I now found myself with a broad critique of the press.
Eventually, however, I realized that even the press wasn’t the whole story. The press was playing a key role in an intellectual phenomenon taking root in the West, but it wasn’t the cause, or not the only cause – it was both blown on a certain course by the prevailing ideological winds, and causing those winds to blow with greater force. Many journalists would like you to believe that the news is created by a kind of algorithm – that it’s a mechanical, even scientific process in which events are inserted, processed, and presented. But of course the news is an imperfect and entirely human affair, the result of interactions between sources, reporters, and editors, all of whom bear the baggage of their background and who reflect, as we all do to some extent, the prejudices of their peers.
In the aftermath of 2014′s Gaza war, and in light of events in Europe in recent months, it should be clear that something deep and toxic is going on. Understanding what that is, it seems to me, will help us understand something important not only about journalism but about the Western mind and the way it sees the world.
What presents itself as political criticism, as analysis, or as journalism, is coming to sound more and more like a new version of a much older complaint – that Jews are troublemakers, a negative force in world events, and that if these people, as a collective, could somehow be made to vanish, we would all be better off. This is, or should be, a cause for alarm, and not only among people sympathetic to Israel or concerned with Jewish affairs. What is in play right now has less to do with the world of politics than with the worlds of psychology and religion, and less to do with Israel than with those condemning Israel.
The occupation of the West Bank, with which I opened, would seem to be at the heart of the story, the root cause, as it were, of the conflict portrayed as the most important on earth. A few words, then, about this occupation.
The occupation was created in the 1967 Mideast war. The occupation is not the conflict, which of course predates the occupation. It is a symptom of the conflict, a conflict that would remain even if the symptom were somehow solved. If we look at the West Bank, the only Palestinian area currently occupied by Israel, and if we include Jerusalem, we see that the conflict in these areas claimed 60 lives last year – Palestinian and Israeli.
An end to this occupation would free Palestinians from Israeli rule, and free Israelis from ruling people who do not wish to be ruled. Observers of the Middle East in 2015 understand, too, that an end to the occupation will create a power vacuum that will be filled, as all power vacuums in the region have been, not by the forces of democracy and modernity, which in our region range from weak to negligible, but by the powerful and ruthless, by the extremists. This is what we’ve learned from the unraveling of the Middle East in recent years. This is what happened in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Egypt, and before that in Gaza and southern Lebanon. My home in Jerusalem is within an easy day’s drive of both Aleppo and Baghdad. Creating a new playground for these forces will bring the black-masked soldiers of radical Islam within yards of Israeli homes with mortars, rockets, and tunneling implements. Many thousands will die.
Beyond the obvious threat to Palestinian Christians, women, gays, and liberals, who will be the first to suffer, this threatens to render much or all of Israel unlivable, ending the only safe progressive space in the Middle East, the only secure minority refuge in the Middle East, and the only Jewish country on earth. No international investment or guarantees, no Western-backed government or Western-trained military will be able to keep that from happening, as we have just seen in Iraq. The world will greet this outcome with sincere expressions of sympathy. Only several years ago I, like many on the left, might have dismissed this as an apocalyptic scenario. It isn’t. It is the most likely scenario.
People observing this conflict from afar have been led to believe that Israel faces a simple choice between occupation and peace. That choice is fiction. The Palestinian choice, it is said, is between Israeli occupation and an independent democracy. That choice, too, is fiction. Neither side faces a clear choice, or clear outcomes. Here we have a conflict in a region of conflict, with no clear villain, no clear victim, and no clear solution, one of many hundreds or thousands of ethnic, national, and religious disputes on earth.
The only group of people subject to a systematic boycott at present in the Western world is Jews, appearing now under the convenient euphemism “Israelis.” The only country that has its own “apartheid week” on campuses is the Jewish country. Protesters have interfered with the unloading of Israeli shipping on the West Coast of the United States, and there are regular calls for a boycott of anything produced in the Jewish state. No similar tactics are currently employed against any other ethnic group or nationality, no matter how egregious the human rights violations attributed to that group’s country of origin.
Anyone who questions why this is so will be greeted with shouts of “the occupation!”, as if this were explanation enough. It is not. Many who would like to question these phenomena don’t dare, for fear that they will somehow be expressing support for this occupation, which has been inflated from a geopolitical dilemma of modest scope by global standards into the world’s premier violation of human rights.
The human costs of the Middle Eastern adventures of America and Britain in this century have been far higher, and far harder to explain, than anything Israel has ever done. They have involved occupations, and the violence they unleashed continues as I speak here this evening. No one boycotts American or British professors. Turkey is a democracy, and a NATO member, and yet its occupation of northern Cyprus and long conflict with the stateless Kurds – many of whom see themselves as occupied – are viewed with a yawn; there is no “Turkish Apartheid Week.” The world is full of injustice. Billions of people are oppressed. In Congo, 5 million people are dead. The time has come for everyone to admit that the fashionable disgust for Israel among many in the West is not liberal but is selective, disproportionate, and discriminatory.
There are simply too many voices coming from too many places, expressing themselves in too poisonous a way, for us to conclude that this is a narrow criticism of the occupation. It’s time for the people making these charges to look closely at themselves, and for us to look closely at them.
Naming and understanding this sentiment is important, as it is becoming one of the key intellectual trends of our time. We might think of it as the “Cult of the Occupation.” This belief system, for that it what it is, uses the occupation as a way of talking about other things.
As usual with Western religions, the center of this one is in the Holy Land. The dogma posits that the occupation is not a conflict like any other, but that it is the very symbol of conflict: that the minute state inhabited by a persecuted minority in the Middle East is in fact a symbol of the ills of the West – colonialism, nationalism, militarism, and racism. In the recent riots in Ferguson, Missouri, for example, a sign hoisted by marchers linked the unrest between African Americans and the police to Israeli rule over Palestinians.
The cult’s priesthood can be found among the activists, NGO experts, and ideological journalists who have turned coverage of this conflict into a catalogue of Jewish moral failings, as if Israeli society were different from any other group of people on earth, as if Jews deserve to be mocked for having suffered and failed to be perfect as a result.
Most of my former colleagues in the press corps aren’t full-fledged members of this group. They aren’t true believers. But boycotts of Israel, and only of Israel, which are one of the cult’s most important practices, have significant support in the press, including among editors who were my superiors. Sympathy for Israel’s predicament is highly unpopular in the relevant social circles, and is something to be avoided by anyone wishing to be invited to the right dinner parties, or to be promoted. The cult and its belief system are in control of the narrative, just as the popular kids in a school and those who decide what clothes or music are acceptable. In the social milieu of the reporters, NGO workers, and activists, which is the same social world, these are the correct opinions. This guides the coverage. This explains why the events in Gaza this summer were portrayed not as a complicated war like many others fought in this century, but as a massacre of innocents. And it explains much else.
So prevalent has this kind of thinking become that participating in liberal intellectual life in the West increasingly requires you to subscribe at least outwardly to this dogma, particularly if you’re a Jew and thus suspected of the wrong sympathies. If you’re a Jew from Israel, your participation is increasingly conditional on an abject and public display of self-flagellation. Your participation, indeed, is increasingly unwelcome.
What, exactly, is going on?
Observers of Western history understand that at times of confusion and unhappiness, and of great ideological ferment, negative sentiment tends to coagulate around Jews. Discussions of the great topics of the time often end up as discussions about Jews.
In the late 1800s, for example, French society was riven by the clash between the old France of the church and army, and the new France of liberalism and the rule of law. The French were preoccupied with the question of who is French, and who is not. They were smarting from their military humiliation by the Prussians. All of this sentiment erupted around the figure of a Jew, Alfred Dreyfus, accused of betraying France as a spy for Germany. His accusers knew he was innocent, but that didn’t matter; he was a symbol of everything they wanted to condemn.
To give another example: Germans in the 1920s and ’30s were preoccupied with their humiliation in the Great War. This became a discussion of Jewish traitors who had stabbed Germany in the back. Germans were preoccupied as well with the woes of their economy – this became a discussion of Jewish wealth, and Jewish bankers.
In the years of the rise of Communism and the Cold War, communists concerned with their ideological opponents talked about Jewish capitalists and cosmopolitans, or Jewish doctors plotting against the state. At the very same time, in capitalist societies threatened by communism, people condemned Jewish Bolsheviks.
This is the face of this recurring obsession. As the journalist Charles Maurras wrote, approvingly, in 1911: “Everything seems impossible, or frighteningly difficult, without the providential arrival of anti-Semitism, through which all things fall into place and are simplified.”
The West today is preoccupied with a feeling of guilt about the use of power. That’s why the Jews, in their state, are now held up in the press and elsewhere as the prime example of the abuse of power. That’s why for so many the global villain, as portrayed in newspapers and on TV, is none other than the Jewish soldier, or the Jewish settler. This is not because the Jewish settler or soldier is responsible for more harm than anyone else on earth – no sane person would make that claim. It is rather because these are the heirs to the Jewish banker or Jewish commissar of the past. It is because when moral failure raises its head in the Western imagination, the head tends to wear a skullcap.
One would expect the growing scale and complexity of the conflict in the Middle East over the past decade to have eclipsed the fixation on Israel in the eyes of the press and other observers. Israel is, after all, a sideshow: The death toll in Syria in less than four years far exceeds the toll in the Israel-Arab conflict in a century. The annual death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is a morning in Iraq.
And yet it is precisely in these years that the obsession has grown worse.
This makes little sense, unless we understand that people aren’t fixated on Israel despite everything else going on – but rather because of everything else going on. As Maurras wrote, when you use the Jew as the symbol of what is wrong, “all things fall into place and are simplified.”
The last few decades have brought the West into conflict with the Islamic world. Terrorists have attacked New York, Washington, London, Madrid, and now Paris. America and Britain caused the unraveling of Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of people are dead there. Afghanistan was occupied and thousands of Western soldiers killed, along with countless civilians – but the Taliban are alive and well, undeterred. Ghaddafi was removed, and Libya is no better off. All of this is confusing and discouraging. It causes people to search for answers and explanations, and these are hard to come by. It is in this context that the Cult of the Occupation has caught on. The idea is that the problems in the Middle East have something to do with Jewish arrogance and perfidy, that the sins of one’s own country can be projected upon the Western world’s old blank screen. This is the idea increasingly reflected on campuses, in labor unions, and in the media fixation on Israel. It’s a projection, one whose chief instrument is the press.
As one BBC reporter informed a Jewish interviewee on camera several weeks ago, after a Muslim terrorist murdered four Jewish shoppers at a Paris supermarket, “Many critics of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffered hugely at Jewish hands as well.” Everything, that is, can be linked to the occupation, and Jews can be blamed even for the attacks against them. This isn’t the voice of the perpetrators, but of the enablers. The voice of the enablers is less honest than that of the perpetrators, and more dangerous for being disguised in respectable English. This voice is confident and growing in volume. This is why the year 2015 finds many Jews in Western Europe eyeing their suitcases again.
The Jews of the Middle East are outnumbered by the Arabs of the Middle East 60 to 1, and by the world’s Muslims 200 to 1. Half of the Jews in Israel are there because their families were forced from their homes in the 20th century not by Christians in Europe, but by Muslims in the Middle East. Israel currently has Hezbollah on its northern border, al-Qaeda on its northeastern and southern borders, and Hamas in Gaza. None of these groups seek an end to the occupation, but rather openly wish to destroy Israel. But it is naïve to point out these facts. The facts don’t matter: We are in the world of symbols. In this world, Israel has become a symbol of what is wrong – not Hamas, not Hezbollah, not Great Britain, not America, not Russia.
I believe it’s important to recognize the pathologies at play in order to make sense of things. In this context it’s worth pointing out that I’m hardly the first to identify a problem – Jewish communities like this one, and particularly organizations like Bicom, identified a problem long ago, and have been expending immense efforts to correct it. I wish this wasn’t necessary, and it shouldn’t be necessary, but it undoubtedly is necessary, and becoming more so, and I have great respect for these efforts. Many people, particularly young people, are having trouble maintaining their balance amid this ideological onslaught, which is successfully disguised as journalism or analysis, and is phrased in the language of progressive politics. I would like to help them keep their bearings.
I don’t believe, however, that anyone should make a feeling of persecution the center of their identity, of their Judaism, or of their relationship with Israel. The obsession is a fact, but it isn’t a new fact, and it shouldn’t immobilize us in anger, or force us into a defensive crouch. It shouldn’t make us less willing to seek to improve our situation, to behave with compassion to our neighbors, or to continue building the model society that Israel’s founders had in mind.
I was in Tel Aviv not long ago, on Rothschild Boulevard. The city was humming with life. Signs of prosperity were everywhere, in the renovated Bauhaus buildings, in the clothes, the stores. I watched the people go by: Kids with old bikes and tattoos, businesspeople, men with women, women with women, men with men, all speaking the language of the Bible and Jewish prayer. The summer’s Hamas rockets were already a memory, just a few months old but subsumed in the frantic, irrepressible life of the country. There were cranes everywhere, raising new buildings. There were schoolchildren with oversize knapsacks, and parents with strollers. I heard Arabic, Russian, and French, and the country went about its business with a potent cheer and determination that you miss if all you see are threats and hatred. There have always been threats and hatred, and it has never stopped us. We have enemies, and we have friends. The dogs bark, as the saying goes, and the convoy rolls by.
One of the questions presented to us by the wars of the modern age is what now constitutes victory. In the 21st century, when a battlefield is no longer conquered or lost, when land isn’t changing hands and no one ever surrenders, what does it mean to win?
The answer is that victory is no longer determined on the battlefield. It’s determined in the center, in the society itself. Who has built a better society? Who has provided better lives for people? Where is there the most optimism? Where can the most happy people be found? One report on world happiness ranked Israel as the 11th happiest country on earth. The UK was 22nd.
Israel’s intellectual opponents can rant about the moral failings of the Jews, obscuring their obsession in whatever sophisticated way they choose. The gunmen of Hamas and their allies can stand on heaps of rubble and declare victory. They can fire rockets, and shoot up supermarkets. But if you look at Tel Aviv, or at any thriving neighborhood in Jerusalem, Netanya, Rishon Letzion, or Haifa, you understand that this is victory. This is where we’ve won, and where we win every day.
Matti Friedman worked for the Associated Press in Jerusalem between 2006 and 2011
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2)
Iran — Unafraid and Undeterred
Friday, January 30th, 2015
Israel’s reported strike January 18 on a joint Iranian-Hezbollah convoy driving on the Syrian Golan Heights was one of the most strategically significant events to have occurred in Israel’s neighborhood in recent months. Its significance lies both in what it accomplished operationally and what it exposed.
From what been published to date about the identities of those killed in the strike, it is clear that in one fell swoop the air force decapitated the Iranian and Hezbollah operational command in Syria.
The head of Hezbollah’s operations in Syria, the head of its liaison with Iran, and Jihad Mughniyeh, the son of Hezbollah’s longtime operational commander Imad Mughniyeh who was killed by Israel in Damascus in 2008, were killed. The younger Mughniyeh reportedly served as commander of Hezbollah forces along the Syrian-Israeli border.
According to a report by Brig.-Gen. (res.) Shimon Shapira, a Hezbollah expert from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the Iranian losses included three generals. Brig.- Gen. Mohammed Alladadi was the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps liaison officer to Hezbollah and to Syrian intelligence. He was also in charge of weapons shipments from Iran to Hezbollah. Gen. Ali Tabatabai was the IRGC commander in the Golan Heights and, according to Shapira, an additional general, known only as Assadi, “was, in all likelihood, the commander of Iranian expeditionary forces in Lebanon.”
The fact that the men were willing to risk exposure by traveling together along the border with Israel indicates how critical the front is for the regime in Tehran. It also indicates that in all likelihood, they were planning an imminent attack against Israel.
According to Ehud Yaari, Channel 2’s Arab Affairs commentator, Iran and Hezbollah seek to widen Hezbollah’s front against Israel from Lebanon to Syria. They wish to establish missile bases on the northern Hermon, and are expanding Hezbollah’s strategic depth from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to the outskirts of Damascus.
On Wednesday night, Yaari reported that the Syrian military has ceased to function south of Damascus. In areas not held by the al-Qaida-aligned Nusra Front and other regime opponents, the IRGC and Hezbollah have taken control, using the Syrian militia they have trained since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011.
The effectiveness of Hezbollah’s control of its expanded front was on display on Wednesday morning. Almost at the same time that Hezbollah forces shot at least five advanced Kornet antitank missiles at an IDF convoy along Mount Dov, killing two soldiers and wounding seven, Hezbollah forces on the Golan shot off mortars at the Hermon area.
While these forces are effective, they are also vulnerable. Yaari noted that today, three-quarters of Hezbollah’s total forces are fighting in Syria. Their twofold task is to defend the Assad regime and to build the Iranian-controlled front against Israel along the Golan Heights. Most of the forces are in known, unfortified, above ground positions, vulnerable to Israeli air strikes.
THE IDENTITIES of the Iranian and Lebanese personnel killed in the Israeli strike indicate the high value Iran and Hezbollah place on developing a new front against Israel in Syria.
The fact that they are in control over large swathes of the border area and are willing to risk exposure in order to ready the front for operations exposes Iran’s strategic goal of encircling Israel on the ground and the risks it is willing to take to achieve that goal.
But Iran’s willingness to expose its forces and Hezbollah forces also indicates something else. It indicates that they believe that there is a force deterring Israel from attacking them.
And this brings us to another strategic revelation exposed by the January 18 operation.
Earlier this week, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdolahian told Iran’s IRNA news agency that the regime had told its American interlocutors to tell Israel that it intended to strike Israel in retribution for the attack. The State Department did not deny that Iran had communicated the message, although it claims that it never relayed the message.
While the Obama administration did perhaps refuse to serve as Iran’s messenger, it has worked to deter Israel from striking Hezbollah and Iranian targets in Syria. Whereas Israel has a policy of never acknowledging responsibility for its military operations in Syria, in order to give President Bashar Assad an excuse to not retaliate, the US administration has repeatedly informed the media of Israeli attacks and so increased the risk that such Israeli operations will lead to counterattacks against Israel.
The US has also refused to acknowledge Iran’s control over the Syrian regime, and so denied the basic fact that through its proxies, Iran is developing a conventional threat against Israel. For instance, earlier this month, Der Spiegel reported that Iran has been building a secret nuclear facility in Syria. When questioned about the report, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf sought to downplay its significance. When a reporter asked if the administration would raise the report in its nuclear negotiations with Iran, Harf replied, “No, the upcoming talks are about the Iranian nuclear program.”
Until this month, the White House continued to pay lip service to the strategic goal of removing Assad – and by inference Iran, which controls and protects him – from power in Syria. Lip service aside, it has been clear at least since September 2013, when President Barack Obama refused to enforce his own redline and take action against the Assad regime after it used chemical weapons against its opponents, that he had no intention of forcing Assad from power. But this month the administration crossed a new Rubicon when Secretary of State John Kerry failed to call for Assad to be removed to power in talks with the UN envoy in Syria Staffan de Mistura. Right before he met with his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, Kerry told Mistura, “It is time for President Assad, the Assad regime, to put their people first and to think about the consequences of their actions, which are attracting more and more terrorists to Syria, basically because of their efforts to remove Assad.”
IRAN’S PRESENCE on the Golan Heights is of course just one of the many strategic advances it has made in expanding its territorial reach. Over the past two weeks, Iranian-controlled Houthi militias have consolidated their control over Yemen, with their overthrow of the US-allied government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.
Rather than defend the elected government that has fought side-by-side with US special forces in their Yemen-based operations against al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the administration is pretending that little has changed. It pretends it will still be able to gather the intelligence necessary to carry out drone strikes against al-Qaida terrorists even though its allies have now lost power.
The post-Houthi-conquest goal of the administration’s policy in Yemen is to seek a national dialogue that will include everyone from Iran’s proxy government to al-Qaida. The idea is that everyone will work together to write a new constitution.
It is impossible to understate the delusion at the heart of this plan.
With the conquest of Yemen, Iran now controls the Gulf of Aden. Together with the Straits of Hormuz, Iran now controls the region’s two maritime outlets to the open sea.
Far beyond the region, Iran expands its capacity to destabilize foreign countries and so advance its interests. Last week, Lee Smith raised the reasonable prospect that it was Iran that assassinated Argentinean prosecutor Alberto Nisman two weeks ago. Nisman was murdered the night before he was scheduled to make public the findings of his 10-year investigation into the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center and the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires. According to Smith, Nisman had proof that Iran had carried out the terrorist attacks to retaliate against Argentina for abrogating its nuclear cooperation with Tehran.
From the Golan Heights to Gaza, from Yemen and Iraq to Latin America to Nantanz and Arak, Iran is boldly advancing its nuclear and imperialist agenda. As Charles Krauthammer noted last Friday, the nations of the Middle East allied with the US are sounding the alarm.
Earlier this week, during Obama’s visit with the new Saudi King Salman, he got an earful from the monarch regarding the need to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But it seemed to have no impact on his nuclear diplomacy with Teheran. The administration believes that Iran and Saudi Arabia will be able to kiss and make up and bury a thousand- year rivalry between Sunni and Shi’ite Islam because they both oppose the Islamic State. This too is utter fantasy.
Israel’s January 18 strike on Iranian and Hezbollah commanders in Syria showed Israel’s strategy wisdom and independent capacity. Israel can and will take measures to defend its critical security interests. It has the intelligence gathering capacity to identify and strike at targets in real time.
But it also showed the constraints Israel is forced to operate under in its increasingly complex and dangerous strategic environment.
Due to the US administration’s commitment to turning a blind eye to Iran’s advances and the destabilizing role it plays everywhere it gains power, Israel can do little more than carry out precision attacks against high value targets. The flipside of the administration’s refusal to see the dangers, and so enable Iran’s territorial expansion and its nuclear progress, is its determination to ensure that Israel does nothing to prevent those dangers from growing – whether along its borders or at Iran’s nuclear facilities.
2a) A nuclear Iran threatening vital US interests
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, "Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
"Israel Hayom”, January 30, 2015, http://bit.ly/1CT0V9o
"Israel Hayom”, January 30, 2015, http://bit.ly/1CT0V9o
Irrespective of Israel's policies and existence, Iran's pursuit of mega-capability (nuclear) aims at removing the mega-obstacle (the US power projection), which would enable the Ayatollahs to attain their mega-goal: the domination of the Persian Gulf as a prelude to the domination of the Muslim World and then the entire globe.
According to the fact-driven "Guilty until proven innocent school of thought"– and in contrast to the hope-driven, fact-dismissing "Innocent until proven guilty school of thought” - a nuclear Iran would compound the clear, present and lethal threat posed by a conventional Iran to critical American and Western interests, to the survival of Israel, Saudi Arabia and other pro-US Arab oil-producers and to global sanity.
Moreover, the Ayatollahs' track record (e.g., sacrificing 500,000 of its own youth on the altar of clearing minefields during the 1980-88 war against Iraq) suggests that a nuclear, apocalyptic Iran would not be contained, while tolerating Iran as a threshold nuclear power could trigger a nuclear world war.
The track record of a conventional Iran highlights the following:
*Iran annually celebrates November 4 as "Death to America Day,” commemorating the 1979 seizure of the US Embassy, featuring a burning of the American flag.
*Iran intensifies radical Shiite ideology, emphasizing the submission of humanity to the Prophet Muhammad; the submission of the "infidel” the Sharia' laws; the duty to conduct a "holy war” (Jihad) on behalf of Islam; the divinely-ordained Islamic title to land (Waqf)); the duty to expand Dar al-Islam (the residence of the "believers”) into the Dar al-Harb (the residence of the "disbelievers,” who are doomed by the sword); and the art of doubletalk and deception-based agreements, aimed at shielding the "believers” from the "disbelievers” (Taqiyyah), to be abrogated once conditions are ripe.
*Taqiyya is employed by Iran's President, Rouhani, who was Iran's chief negotiator with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), systematically misleading and violating commitments. In September, 2002, Rouhani stated: "When we sign international treaties, it means that we are not pursuing nuclear weapons, chemical weapons or biological weapons.” He was a planner of the 1994 "AMIA terrorism,” causing the murder of 85 civilians in Buenos Aires.
*Iran is the leading sponsor of global Islamic terrorism, including hundreds of sleeper cells in the US.
*Iran intensifies cooperation with North Korea, including the joint development of a long-range missile, capable of carrying nuclear warheads, which could reach the US.
*Iran collaborates with the anti-US regimes in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Cuba, is expanding ties with Argentina and seeking enhanced ties with Mexico.
*Iran fuels Shiite subversion and terrorism in the Persian Gulf – especially in Bahrain and the Al-Hasa oil region of Saudi Arabia - in order to topple "apostate” regimes. Hence, the unprecedented homeland security cooperation between Israel and Arab Gulf States.
*Iran's Revolutionary Guard, weapons, training and money catapulted the anti-Saudi Shiite Houthi minority to the helm in Yemen, aiming to topple the House of Saud, as was attempted in the 1960s by Egyptian President Nasser. A stronghold in Yemen would provide the Ayatollahs with control of Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the strategic link between the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean for oil tankers and other vessels. It would generate subversion and terrorism in the neighboring pro-US Oman, which jointly (with Iran) controls the Strait of Hormuz, the only outlet for oil tankers from the Persian Gulf to the open sea.
*Iran dominates much of Iraq, threatens the survival of the pro-US regimes of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and has expanded anti-US Iraqi terrorism, as it has done in Afghanistan.
*Iran is the key supporter of Syria' Assad regime and Hezbollah, which has terrorized Lebanon , targeting Americans, as demonstrated by the two 1983 car bombs, that claimed the lives of 300 US Marines at the US Embassy and Marines headquarters in Beirut.
*The number of executions in Iran has increased during Rouhani's presidency - 721 in 2014, 665 in 2013 and 522 in 2012 – which prohibits freedom of religion, speech, press, association and expression.
Notwithstanding such a ruthless track record, the "hope-driven, fact-dismissing school of thought” considers the Ayatollahs a partner for an agreement (rather than imposition), in a region where intra-Muslim agreements are usually signed on ice, not carved in stone. In fact, the nature of the Iranian regime, on the one hand, and compliance with agreements, on the other hand, constitute a classic oxymoron.
Furthermore, the long term goal of denying Iran nuclear capabilities – which may require deterrence-maximizing unilateral American action - could be undermined by short-term eagerness to conclude an agreement through the ineffective deterrence-minimizing multilateral action. The overt eagerness strengthens the hand of Iran and increases the price to be paid by the West.
Recent precedents suggest that the diplomatic option is applicable to rogue regimes that abandon violence, while a credible military option should be highlighted during negotiation with rogue regimes that adhere to violence. For instance, it was the 1988 intensification of the US bombing of Iranian targets, which led Ayatollah Khomeini to reluctantly evacuate Iraqi territory and sign a ceasefire agreement with Iraq. In 2003, Gaddafi's dismantling his nuclear infrastructure, and Iran's suspending nuclear development, were triggered by the US military devastation of Saddam Hussein. However, lowering the profile of the US military option has convinced Iran that it could get away with terror and nuclear.
Will the US learn from recent history by avoiding, or repeating, past mistakes?!
Are the Ayatollahs amenable to policy-change, or do they require a regime-change?
Senior Israeli officials reiterate president would let Iran keep 7,000 centrifuges spinning, as Jerusalem-Washington dispute escalates further
The bitter argument between Jerusalem and Washington over the terms of a possible deal with Iran escalated another notch on Saturday night, with a new batch of anonymous quotes from each side castigating and accusing the other of disseminating inaccurate information.
On Friday, two Israeli television stations quoted unnamed Jerusalem officials saying the Obama Administration was ready to agree to a deal that would leave Iran with thousands of centrifuges spinning — 6,500, according to Channel 2; over 7,000, according to Channel 10 — and thus capable of breaking out to a nuclear bomb within months.
On Saturday night, Channel 10 quoted “a very senior American official” saying the information was “nonsense, unfounded, not true.”
This American assertion, however, was immediately rejected by “very senior” sources in the Israeli government, who reiterated that the Obama administration has given in to “80% of Iran’s demands,” including by agreeing to let Iran keep 7,000 of its 9,000 centrifuges operational, and thus leaving Iran “only months from a breakout to enough [enriched] material for a bomb.”
Israel’s Channel 10 news said Friday that the deal taking shape between the P5+1 countries and Tehran would allow Iran to continue enriching uranium in “over 7,000″ centrifuges. It quoted unnamed Jerusalem sources saying the terms of the deal would leave Iran “closer than was thought” to nuclear weapons, “mere months from producing enough material for a bomb,” and that the US has agreed to 80% of Iran’s demands.
A similar report on Channel 2 news Friday said the US was ready for Iran to keep enriching uranium in 6,500 of its 9,000 centrifuges. It also said that the US was proposing “a time limit” on the deal — possibly of 10 or 15 years — after which “Iran will be free to continue a nuclear industry.”
Netanyahu was said to have indicated to confidants that he feels he has “no choice” but to speak out against the imminent deal, including on March 3 to Congress, Channel 10 said. Netanyahu does not intend to speak against Obama, or to give a partisan address, or to focus overly on sanctions, but rather to talk strongly against the deal, the report said.
Warned that his March 3 visit and Congress appearance may harm Congressional efforts to prevent a poor deal with Iran, Netanyahu was said to be unmoved, the Channel 10 report claimed.
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3)
WH: Taliban Is Not a Terror Group
The White House today said that the Taliban is not a terror group, but rather an “armed insurgency.”
Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz responded to a question about whether Jordan’s plan to make a prisoner trade with ISIS was similar to the U.S. swapping five Taliban members for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
First, Schultz said that the U.S. doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. Then he said, “I don’t think that the Taliban … the Taliban is an armed insurgency.”
“It slits throats, it attacks buses, it drives car bombs into markets, and it’s not a terrorist group. Look, you can’t parody this administration,” Charles Krauthammer said this evening on “Special Report.”
This comes at the same time as Al Jazeera English’s directives not to use words like terrorist, extremist, Islamist or jihad.
A Fox News poll found that 56 percent believe we are at war with radical Islam, and 47 percent think President Barack Obama underestimates the threat. The poll also revealed that 84 percent think terrorists will try to launch an attack on U.S. soil soon.
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4)
Scott Walker and the art of winning
By Matt K. Lewis
General Patton famously declared that "Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser." He was right. And as we look to the 2016 presidential race, I think Taegan Goddard put his finger on something very true with this tweet:
In American politics, winning often isn't enough. You have to win on your own terms, too.
Conservatives have very obviously had enough of politicians who cave. That hold-the-line, never-give-in attitude has burned at the heart of the Tea Party for years. Less noticed, but equally important, is the fact that we have plenty of conservative lawmakers whose reputations are built on their adherence to principle, their total commitment to never cave — and who inevitably lose. They may make excuses and point fingers to try and claim that losing is winning — but they are still losers.
It's pretty clear when someone tries and fails: They try to oust the speaker of the House, but he's still here! They try to defund ObamaCare, but somehow it doesn't end!
We have squishes who win and stalwarts who lose. What we really crave is a conservative winner who doesn't cave. And Scott Walker is very arguably that guy.
He won in 2010. He picked a fight with Big Labor and won. He survived a recall. And he won again in 2014 — by almost the same margin as he did in 2010. That's three wins in four years for a man who governed as a conservative reformer in a state that the Republican presidential nominee hasn't carried since 1984. As Taegan said, Walker is a winner who doesn't cave.
Other conservative "fighters" may try to frame fighting the good fight (and losing) as the highest virtue, but fighting and winning is vastly superior. And on that count, Scott Walker took on the unions — and won.
Winning covers a multitude of sins. As Dave Weigel noted recently, part of the reason the conservative base gave George W. Bush a pass, and doesn't seem to be giving Jeb one, is that early polling showed Bush defeating Al Gore (no such polling shows Jeb — or anyone — beating Hillary Clinton). After eight years of Barack Obama, Republicans are anxious to back a winner, and time and again, Walker has pulled rabbits out of his hat. At some point, we want to believe in magic.
I'm still skeptical Walker has the requisite rock star charisma to make it all the way to the top, but I do buy the notion that he's the one guy that every faction of the GOP could unite behind. And — if one is to buy the argument that the base is looking for someone who a) doesn't cave, and b) actually wins, then he's in a class all his own.
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5) Chuck Hagel: White House Pressured Me on Gitmo Prisoner Releases
Outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel says he was under pressure from the White House to quicken the pace of releases of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
In a startling and blunt interview with CNN correspondent Barbara Starr, aired Friday on "The Situation Room," Hagel said despite the heat, he held his ground.
"Not everyone at the White House agreed with me … on the pace of the releases," Hagel said, adding that it didn't bother him.
"Because I have the responsibility and I play my own game here," he said. "And that is because, by law, I am the one official in government charged with certification of release of detainees. I take that responsibility very seriously."
- Pressed by Starr whether he was under pressure, Hagel replied: "We've had a lot of conversations."
"With the White House?" Starr asked.
"Yes," said Hagel. "And Congress. And the press."
"If you're not prepared to deal with pressure, every day, in the job you're in, coming from a lot of different directions, then you shouldn't be in the job," he told CNN. "It's just part of the process, part of any job I think."
Still, Hagel told CNN, he was confident the swap of five Taliban detainees at Gitmo in return for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl last May was the right move.
"Absolutely it was the right decision," he told CNN. "It was the right decision ... because we don't leave our troops behind."
"It was a prisoner of war exchange and I'm absolutely as committed to that decision today as when the decision was made." he added. "It was the right decision."
The remarks come amid reports one of the five Taliban terrorists is trying to get back onto the battlefield, making contact with suspected Taliban associates in Afghanistan, CNN reports. The Obama administration has quickened the pace of prisoner releases to eventually close Guantanamo.
The White House said the released terrorist isn't back on the battlefield.
"What I can say with confidence is this individual has not returned to the battlefield, this individual is not allowed to travel outside Qatar, and this individual has not engaged in any physical violence," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday, The Blaze reports.
Sen. Lindsey Graham confirmed the freed Taliban detainees have been in touch with members of the al-Qaida-linked Haqqani network, even though all five still are being monitored in Qatar.
The South Carolina Republican, who recently visited Qatar, told the Associated Press he was concerned one of the detainees had left, but was assured during his visit all five senior Taliban officials remain in the tiny nation on the Arabian Peninsula.
Nevertheless, Graham said, the swap was a "dangerous decision."
"The likelihood of these five going back to the battle is almost as certain as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west," Graham declared, however, adding "the leaders of the Taliban, collaborated with al-Qaida to plan attacks on our homeland and [President Barack Obama] is looking for any reason he can find to release people from Guantanamo Bay to fulfill his campaign promise to close the place.
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THE WORK ETHIC WE INHERITED GROWING UP HAS FALLEN PREY TO THE 'WELFARE' SYSTEM
The Cato Institute released an updated 2014 study (original study in
1955) showing that welfare benefits pay more than a minimum wage job
in 33 states and the District of Columbia.
Even worse, welfare pays more than $15 per hour in 13 states.
According to the study, welfare benefits have increased faster than
minimum wage.
The Cato Institute released an updated 2014 study (original study in
1955) showing that welfare benefits pay more than a minimum wage job
in 33 states and the District of Columbia.
Even worse, welfare pays more than $15 per hour in 13 states.
According to the study, welfare benefits have increased faster than
minimum wage.
It’s now more profitable to sit at home and watch TV than it is to
earn an honest day’s pay.
Hawaii is the biggest offender, where welfare recipients earn $29.13 per hour,
or a $60,590 yearly salary, all for doing nothing.
Here is the list of the states where the pre-tax equivalent “salary”
that welfare recipients receive is higher
than having a job:
1. Hawaii : $60,590
2. District of Columbia : $50,820
3. Massachusetts : $50,540
4. Connecticut : $44,370
5. New York : $43,700
6. New Jersey : $43,450
7. Rhode Island : $43,330
8. Vermont : $42,350
9. New Hampshire : $39,750
10. Maryland : $38,160
11. California : $37,160
12. Oregon : $34,300
13. Wyoming : $32,620
14. Nevada : $29,820
15. Minnesota : $29,350
16. Delaware : $29,220
17. Washington : $28,840
18. North Dakota : $28,830
19. Pennsylvania : $28,670
20. New Mexico : $27,900
21. Montana : $26,930
22. South Dakota : $26,610
23. Kansas: $26,490
24. Michigan : $26,430
25. Alaska : $26,400
26. Ohio : $26,200
27. North Carolina : $25,760
28. West Virginia : $24,900
29. Alabama : $23,310
30. Indiana : $22,900
31. Missouri : $22,800
32. Oklahoma : $22,480
33. Louisiana : $22,250
34. South Carolina :$21,910
As a point of reference the average Middle Class annual income today
is $50,000, down from $54,000 at the beginning of the Great Recession.
Hawaii, DC, and Massachusetts pay more in welfare than the average
working folks earn there.
Is it any wonder that they stay home rather than look for a job.
Time for a drastic change.
America is virtually bankrupt.
Note that California is $18.50 an hour.
Are we Nuts or what? How do we un-do this type of stupidity … This is crazy!
Salary of retired United States Presidents $180,000 FOR LIFE
Salary of House/Senate....$174,000 FOR LIFE
This is beyond stupid !!!!!!!
Salary of Speaker of the House ....$223,500 FOR LIFE!
This is really stupid.
Salary of Majority/Minority Leader $193,400 FOR LIFE!
Ditto last line.
Average Salary of a teacher ... $40,065
Average Salary of Soldier DEPLOYED IN AFGHANISTAN .. $38,000
Think about
this !!!!!
Nancy Pelosi will retire as a Congress Person at $174,000 Dollars a
year for LIFE.
earn an honest day’s pay.
Hawaii is the biggest offender, where welfare recipients earn $29.13 per hour,
or a $60,590 yearly salary, all for doing nothing.
Here is the list of the states where the pre-tax equivalent “salary”
that welfare recipients receive is higher
than having a job:
1. Hawaii : $60,590
2. District of Columbia : $50,820
3. Massachusetts : $50,540
4. Connecticut : $44,370
5. New York : $43,700
6. New Jersey : $43,450
7. Rhode Island : $43,330
8. Vermont : $42,350
9. New Hampshire : $39,750
10. Maryland : $38,160
11. California : $37,160
12. Oregon : $34,300
13. Wyoming : $32,620
14. Nevada : $29,820
15. Minnesota : $29,350
16. Delaware : $29,220
17. Washington : $28,840
18. North Dakota : $28,830
19. Pennsylvania : $28,670
20. New Mexico : $27,900
21. Montana : $26,930
22. South Dakota : $26,610
23. Kansas: $26,490
24. Michigan : $26,430
25. Alaska : $26,400
26. Ohio : $26,200
27. North Carolina : $25,760
28. West Virginia : $24,900
29. Alabama : $23,310
30. Indiana : $22,900
31. Missouri : $22,800
32. Oklahoma : $22,480
33. Louisiana : $22,250
34. South Carolina :$21,910
As a point of reference the average Middle Class annual income today
is $50,000, down from $54,000 at the beginning of the Great Recession.
Hawaii, DC, and Massachusetts pay more in welfare than the average
working folks earn there.
Is it any wonder that they stay home rather than look for a job.
Time for a drastic change.
America is virtually bankrupt.
Note that California is $18.50 an hour.
Are we Nuts or what? How do we un-do this type of stupidity … This is crazy!
Salary of retired United States Presidents $180,000 FOR LIFE
Salary of House/Senate....$174,000 FOR LIFE
This is beyond stupid !!!!!!!
Salary of Speaker of the House ....$223,500 FOR LIFE!
This is really stupid.
Salary of Majority/Minority Leader $193,400 FOR LIFE!
Ditto last line.
Average Salary of a teacher ... $40,065
Average Salary of Soldier DEPLOYED IN AFGHANISTAN .. $38,000
Think about
this !!!!!
Nancy Pelosi will retire as a Congress Person at $174,000 Dollars a
year for LIFE.
She has retired as SPEAKER at $223,500 a year.
PLUS she will receive an additional $193,400 a year as Minority
Leader, the fact that she has become rich while in office
notwithstanding.
Leader, the fact that she has become rich while in office
notwithstanding.
That's $803,700 Dollars a year for LIFE including FREE medical which
is not available to us .... the taxpayers
is not available to us .... the taxpayers
She is just one of the hundreds of Senators and Congress that float in
and out every year!
I think we found where the cuts should be made!
Wake UP America ! Unless you really don’t care that your country is
bankrupt at the likes of these people !
and out every year!
I think we found where the cuts should be made!
Wake UP America ! Unless you really don’t care that your country is
bankrupt at the likes of these people !
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