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We bought Dagny a castle blow up tent for her birthday and now she wants to sleep in it.===
Israel's submarine fleet has all been purchased from Germany, are silent and diesel. (See 1 below.)
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Today, Dirty Harry was given an opportunity to recant and/or apologize for his knowing lie accusing Romney of not paying taxes for ten years. He refused and when asked why he said: ' Romney lost didn't he.'
I mention this because it validates two things I have maintained:
a) Dirty Harry is a lowlife politician and has no conscience and his apparent successor, Schumer, will prove he is no better.
I have yet to hear, nor do I expect to hear, any rebuke of Dirty Harry from his colleagues because they are all cowardly weasels.
and
b) Confirms what I have always said about Democrats - "they want to win above anything else and will stoop to any level to do so" whereas, Republicans are all too patrician and don't know how to respond to lies.
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Sowell: We seem never to learn between etiquette and annihilation. (See 2 and 2a below.)
Netanyahu concurs. Yet, the world is not listening. (See 2b below.)
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Jason Riley is black and discusses the frayed relationship that has evolved between blacks and Jews. (See 3 below.)
Jewish liberals , as I have noted before, will have blood on their hands as a result of their undying support of Obama but they seem not to care because they are too ideologically committed to being liberal at any cost, even if it means their own people's survival. How sad indeed to be so blind to reality and allow emotion to trump their brains. (See 3a and 3b below.)
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Dick
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2)Etiquette Versus Annihilation
By Thomas Sowell
Recent statements from United Nations officials, that Iran is already blocking their existing efforts to keep track of what is going on in their nuclear program, should tell anyone who does not already know it that any agreement with Iran will be utterly worthless in practice. It doesn't matter what the terms of the agreement are, if Iran can cheat.
It is amazing -- indeed, staggering -- that so few Americans are talking about what it would mean for the world's biggest sponsor of international terrorism, Iran, to have nuclear bombs, and to be developing intercontinental missiles that can deliver them far beyond the Middle East.
Back during the years of the nuclear stand-off between the Soviet Union and the United States, contemplating what a nuclear war would be like was called "thinking the unthinkable." But surely the Nazi Holocaust during World War II should tell us that what is beyond the imagination of decent people is by no means impossible for people who, as Churchill warned of Hitler before the war, had "currents of hatred so intense as to sear the souls of those who swim upon them."
Have we not already seen that kind of hatred in the Middle East? Have we not seen it in suicide bombings there and in suicide attacks against America by people willing to sacrifice their own lives by flying planes into massive buildings, to vent their unbridled hatred?
The Soviet Union was never suicidal, so the fact that we could annihilate their cities if they attacked ours was a sufficient deterrent to a nuclear attack from them. But will that deter fanatics with an apocalyptic vision? Should we bet the lives of millions of Americans on our ability to deter nuclear war with Iran?
It is now nearly 70 years since nuclear bombs were used in war. Long periods of safety in that respect have apparently led many to feel as if the danger is not real. But the dangers are even greater now and the nuclear bombs more devastating.
Clearing the way for Iran to get nuclear bombs may -- probably will -- be the most catastrophic decision in human history. And it can certainly change human history, irrevocably, for the worse.
Against that grim background, it is almost incomprehensible how some people can be preoccupied with the question whether having Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu address Congress, warning against the proposed agreement, without the prior approval of President Obama, was a breach of protocol.
Against the background of the Obama administration's negotiating what can turn out to be the most catastrophic international agreement in the nation's history, to complain about protocol is to put questions of etiquette above questions of annihilation.
Why is Barack Obama so anxious to have an international agreement that will have no legal standing under the Constitution just two years from now, since it will be just a presidential agreement, rather than a treaty requiring the "advice and consent" of the Senate?
There are at least two reasons. One reason is that such an agreement will serve as a fig leaf to cover his failure to do anything that has any serious chance of stopping Iran from going nuclear. Such an agreement will protect Obama politically, despite however much it exposes the American people to unprecedented dangers.
The other reason is that, by going to the United Nations for its blessing on his agreement with Iran, he can get a bigger fig leaf to cover his complicity in the nuclear arming of America's most dangerous enemy. In Obama's vision, as a citizen of the world, there may be no reason why Iran should not have nuclear weapons when other nations have them.
Politically, President Obama could not just come right out and say such a thing. But he can get the same end result by pretending to have ended the dangers by reaching an agreement with Iran. There have long been people in the Western democracies who hail every international agreement that claims to reduce the dangers of war.
The road to World War II was strewn with arms control agreements on paper that aggressor nations ignored in practice. But those agreements lulled the democracies into a false sense of security that led them to cut back on military spending while their enemies were building up the military forces to attack them.
2a)Poll: American Support for 2 State Solution in Israel Hits 20 Year Low
BY STEPHEN KRUISER
Support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at nearly a 20-year low among Americans, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Only 39 percent of respondents in the poll expressed support for a two-state solution, down from 58 percent in 2003, according to a Gallup Poll.
It is worth noting that Politico is running a huge picture of a Code Pink anti-Israel protest. That’s a powerful, not-so-subtle attempt to undermine the very news in the post running below the picture.
2b)
2a)Poll: American Support for 2 State Solution in Israel Hits 20 Year Low
BY STEPHEN KRUISER
Support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at nearly a 20-year low among Americans, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Only 39 percent of respondents in the poll expressed support for a two-state solution, down from 58 percent in 2003, according to a Gallup Poll.
It is worth noting that Politico is running a huge picture of a Code Pink anti-Israel protest. That’s a powerful, not-so-subtle attempt to undermine the very news in the post running below the picture.
Also, it’s rather difficult to ascertain if Americans are losing hope, realizing that this is a part of the world that will always be in turmoil.
One thing is certain: the relationship between the United States and Israel is going to need a lot of repair when President Fundamentally Transform finally exits the arena. If he stays around to muck up the works like Jimmy Carter has all these years, things may never be patched up.
2b)
| Netanyahu says 'now is the time for West to stand up and insist on better Iran deal' | ||
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that the West's discussions will give Iran "a path to the [atomic bomb]," a development that Israel finds "unconscionable."
"Yesterday an Iranian official said that Israel's destruction is non-negotiable," Netanyahu said. "However, giving Iran's murderous regime the bomb is negotiable. This is unconscionable."
"Iran is accelerating its campaign of terror and conquest throughout region, most recently in Yemen," the premier said. "The concessions offered to Iran will ensure a bad deal that will endanger" Israel and other countries in the region.
The prime minister said that the "time has come for the international community to insist on a bettter deal that would significantly roll back iran's nuclear infrastructure."
Netanyahu also called on the P5+1 negotiators to insist that any further concessions be linked to "a change in Iran's behavior," specifically "stopping terrorism throughout the world."
"That should be nonnegotiable," he said. "That's the deal that world powers must insist upon. Iran must stop its aggression and its threats to annihilate Israel."
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3) Obama and Black-Jewish Relations
The long road from marching side by side at Selma to today, when the White House is openly clashing with Israel.
By
JASON L. RILEY
President Obama is trying the patience of Jewish Democrats in Congress, a dozen of whom took Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes to the woodshed last week over the president’s continued criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to Politico, the lawmakers complained to Mr. Rhodes that Mr. Obama is behaving as though the Israeli prime minister’s recent comment dismissing the chances for Palestinian statehood is all that is blocking the peace process, when the talks have been moribund for a year. The Democratic congressmen also noted that the president had refrained from criticizing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and had even hinted that he might back United Nations recognition of Palestine.
Of course, the Obama administration’s vindictive digs at Mr. Netanyahu are really about the Persians in Iran, not the Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank. The president is trying to undermine Israeli criticism of U.S. nuclear talks with the mullahs. Mr. Netanyahu says Iran must be prevented from developing a nuclear weapon and is worried that the White House will cut a deal that doesn’t do that. Iranian leaders have said repeatedly that they want to annihilate Israel, which is home to about half of the world’s Jews. Unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Netanyahu takes the Iranians at their word.
American Jews supported President Obama overwhelmingly in 2008 (with 78% of their votes) and 2012 (69%). Save for Jimmy Carter in 1980, every Democratic presidential candidate has won at least 65% of the Jewish vote for the past half-century. (Mr. Carter could only muster 45% against Ronald Reagan’s 39%.) To the extent that Mr. Obama was seen as the culmination of a decades-long civil-rights effort focused on increasing black political power, Jewish support for the president also makes sense:
Henry Moskowitz, a Jewish immigrant from Romania, co-founded the NAACP in 1909. Jack Greenberg, a Jewish attorney, litigated Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court in the 1950s and succeeded Thurgood Marshall as head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1961. Rabbi Abraham Heschel, a leading Jewish theologian, was a personal friend of Martin Luther King Jr. and marched with him in Selma. Rabbi Uri Miller recited the opening prayer at the March on Washington in 1963, and Rabbi Joachim Prinz spoke just before King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Some Jews made the ultimate sacrifice, as in 1964 when Klansmen murdered Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, along with James Chaney, for promoting black voter registration in Mississippi.
This black-Jewish alliance became strained as the black left’s agenda moved away from equal treatment for everyone and toward special treatment for blacks. Jews who had experienced discrimination in the U.S. and elsewhere yet advanced by dint of individual talent and diligence were wary of group preferences.
When blacks challenge “the systems of testing by which school principals and higher officials in the educational bureaucracy are selected and promoted, they are also challenging the very system under which Jews have done so well,” wrote the sociologist Nathan Glazer in a 1964 Commentary magazine article on black-Jewish relations. “And when they challenge the use of grades as the sole criterion for entry into special high schools and free colleges, they challenge the system which has enabled Jews to dominate these institutions for decades.”
Jews were also put off by the rise in black militancy beginning in the late 1960s, when groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee voted to expel whites—including several Jews—from leadership positions. Later, anti-Jewish black groups like Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam would gain prominence. Martin Luther King Jr. had equated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, but in the 1970s black leaders like Jesse Jackson would openly embrace Yasser Arafatand his Palestine Liberation Organization. In 1984, Mr. Jackson told a black Washington Post reporter that he was being unfairly treated by the “hymies” who controlled the media.
By the 1990s, Al Sharpton was wearing a King medallion around his neck while referring to Jews as “diamond merchants” and “interlopers” in Harlem. “If the Jews want to get it on,” he once told a black crowd, “tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” These days Mr. Sharpton spends a lot of time at Mr. Obama’s house, where he counsels the president on race relations when he’s not lecturing the country on civil discourse from his MSNBC anchor chair.
If you can judge a person by the company he keeps, this is worrisome. America’s relationship with Israel is in tatters, and Jewish Democrats are right to wonder whether Mr. Obama—who spent 20 years marinating in the sermons of a pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who has called the Jewish state “illegal” and “genocidal”—much cares. The historical irony of the first black U.S. president cutting a deal with the ayatollahs that jeopardizes the security of Israel isn’t lost on Jews.
With only hours to go before a self-imposed deadline on the Iran nuclear talks expires, the outcome of the current round of negotiations is still up in the air. The New York Timesclaimed that the negotiators were on the verge of a preliminary accord. But the purpose of such an announcement would be more to boost support for President Obama’s foreign policy than anything else since even the optimists are conceding that several key issues remain unresolved. Either way, the talks will continue until the supposedly hard deadline in June. But no matter what happens today, the willingness of the Obama administration to stick to their strategy of appeasement has made the Iranians the big winners of the talks. By sticking to their refusal to give ground, with or without another interim deal, they have talked the Americans into making a series of devastating concessions that ensure that Iran will be recognized as a threshold nuclear power with the likelihood that, whether by cheating or complying with an agreement, they will get their bomb.
Though much was made of today’s deadline, the tension about the outcome is entirely artificial. There was never any doubt that the United States would walk away from the talks no matter what Iran did. By reneging on previous indications that they would allow their stockpile of enriched uranium to be shipped out of the country, the Iranians gambled that even something like this—which effectively dispels any hope they can be stopped from building a bomb if they wanted to—would not force the president to recognize that he was being taken to the cleaners. The same applies to their refusal to allow United Nations inspectors access to information about their military research, their successful efforts to force the West to allow the Islamist regime to keep hundreds of centrifuges operating inside their impregnable mountainside bunker at Fordow, and a sunset clause that will end all restrictions on their program in as soon as ten years. Any further delays in the negotiations will merely give more time for Iran to push the U.S. for even more concessions.
Yet as it has done since it began negotiating away its economic and political leverage over Iran in 2013, the United States simply backed down whenever it was challenged. Throughout this long process, the Iranians have never given in on any serious point that could actually put an end to their nuclear ambitions. Instead, the administration rationalized each concession it made as inevitable and necessary until we are now at the point where the president’s 2012 campaign promises about dismantling Iran’s nuclear program have been shoved down the memory hole. President Obama’s pursuit of Iran detente has reversed the dynamic in which sanctions had forced Iran’s economy to its knees and isolated a regime that is the leading state sponsor of terrorism on the planet. As the clock ticked down on the talks in Lausanne, it was the representatives of the ayatollahs who held the whip hand and they have not been shy about exercising that advantage. An interim accord will be represented as a triumph for an administration that is desperate for good news from abroad. We will be told that cutbacks in the number of centrifuges and the supposed freeze on Iran’s nuclear program will make the U.S. and its allies safer than we are today. But any celebration of this as a victory for American diplomacy will be entirely misplaced. The deal on the table will not stop Iran from building a bomb if it wants to do so since it will retain its nuclear infrastructure. Nor is there any assurance that the so-called “breakout” period by which it could build a weapon is as long as one year and even less certainty that such activity could be detected or that action could be taken in time. A deal or even a delay that will send the talks into yet another overtime period will be a function of Iran’s stubborn tactics and the Americans’ zeal for a deal at any price. Secure in the knowledge that nothing they demand will force an end to the negotiations and that there is no topic, no matter how crucial to monitoring their nuclear program, that Obama won’t concede, Tehran has emerged from this process with its nuclear dreams intact and the prospect of an end to sanctions that will inject new life into their economy. President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry repeatedly said that no deal with Iran would be better than a bad deal. But their eagerness for an agreement at any price has made it obvious that their real goal in these negotiations was to initiate a new détente with the Iranian regime more than it was to limit its nuclear ambitions. The president may believe that cooperating with Iran is better for America than isolating it, but in practice that will mean that a stronger, more prosperous Islamist government is going to be an even greater danger to its Arab neighbors and Israel and the West will have no leverage at all to deter those threats. That’s a colossal defeat for U.S. security. If, as some say, these talks are an attempt by President Obama to build his legacy, what he is doing is ensuring that along with his place in history as our first African-American president, he will also be remembered as the man who enabled an aggressive, anti-Semitic, terror-supporting Islamist state to become a regional superpower with an American seal of approval. 3b) An Agreement Worse than Munich; American Jews Serve as Enablers
by Jonathan Rosenblum
Mishpacha Magazine I don't worry that the Iranians would immediately employ a nuclear weapon. My concern (following Bret Stephens) is that if the theocrats in Teheran ever sensed that power was ebbing from their grasp, they would not go as quietly into the night as the Shah did. Being believers, after all, they might well decide that the time to earn their world-to-come had arrived, just as Hitler, ym"sh, a different kind of messianist, diverted crucial resources from the doomed German war effort to pursue his "final solution."The other night I woke up around 4:00 a.m. in a cold sweat thinking about the Iran nuclear deal that the P5+1 is prepared to sign, if only Iran will agree. As Prime Minister Netanyahu put it in his speech to Congress, the sunset provisions of the proposed accord ensure that Iran will attain nuclear arms capability even if they do not violate the terms of the agreement. And I for one take Iran's leaders seriously when they speak of the necessity of removing Israel from the map.
Given the number of restive ethnic minorities in Iran today and the alienation of most of the population from the mullahs, that moment when the regime teeters might not be that far off.
Whether or not the Iranians ever employed their nukes, their mere possession would serve as an umbrella for Iran's highly aggressive foreign policy, in particular against Israel. Already today Iran is actively seeking to surround Israel from all sides – Lebanon, the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, and most recently the Syrian Golan – with its well-armed proxies. Every lessening of the sanctions regime against Iran leaves Teheran with more money in its coffers for making mischief abroad.
The Obama administration's explicit decision to decouple nuclear negotiations with Iran from its aggressive support of terrorists around the globe, including playing host to numerous Al Qaeda operatives, observes Walter Russell Mead, is incoherent. That is the second great defect of the agreement now on the table.
The final irony of the deal, if it goes through, is that President Obama, who came into office committed to dramatically reducing nuclear arms, will have triggered the most rapid explosion of nuclear states in history, in the world's most unstable region. Saudi Arabia has already paid for off-the-shelf nuclear weapons from Pakistan, and Turkey and Egypt would almost certainly follow suit. None of these regimes are so stable that conjuring up those weapons falling into the hands of radical Islamists is difficult.
French foreign minister Laurent Fabius, speaking recently to the French Foreign Affairs committee is reported by France's leading political weekly Le Canard Enchaine to have made clear his deep distrust ("contempt really," according to one member of parliament) for both John Kerry and Barack Obama, and their nuclear naivete. "The United States was really ready to sign just about anything with the Iranians," another member of parliament reported Fabius as saying. What concerns the French most, reports Anne-Elisabeth Moutet of the Gatestone Institute, is the terrifying prospect that if the Saudis, Turks or Egyptians obtain nuclear weapons an irresponsible leader might use them or they might fall into the hands of a terrorist group.
I WOULD ARGUE THAT THE PROPOSED IRAN DEAL is worse than that Britain and France entered into with Hitler at Munich for two reasons. Neville Chamberlain knew that Britain was not prepared to confront Germany militarily when he signed at Munich. By contrast, the United States enjoys overwhelming military superiority over Iran and could easily destroy its present nuclear facilities. Yet Obama treats military action as unthinkable.
True, Iran would likely respond by unleashing its terrorist networks around the globe, but it would have plenty of other inviting targets for American bombers to deter it from proceeding too far down that lane.
But the even more distressing aspect of the comparison to Munich is that American Jewry has served as Obama's enabler on the path to legitimizing a nuclear Iran and placing six million Jews in Israel under mortal threat by twice voting for him in very high percentages.
That Obama has no great affinity for Israel was clear from the beginning. His 2008 foreign policy team leaned heavily to the "realist" side – i.e., those who view the Palestinian problem as the crux of all that ails the Middle East. That view has been conclusively refuted by the unraveling of the region since Arab Spring, though the news has yet to reach Foggy Bottom or the White House.
Two of those early advisors were so toxic that they had to be dropped from the campaign lest American Jews get suspicious. One was Samantha Powers, who once called for American troops to defend Palestinians from murderous Israelis. The other was Robert Malley, whose father, one of the founders of the Egyptian Communist Party, counted Yasir Arafat as a friend. Malley was the only member of the U.S. team at Camp David, including President Clinton himself, not to blame Arafat for the breakdown of the talks by walking out without making so much as a counter-offer. Powers has now resurfaced as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and Malley as the head of the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.
Early in his presidency, Obama told a group of American Jewish leaders that he intended to put distance between the United States and Israel. And he wasted no time. He and Secretary of State Clinton pretended that President Bush's commitment to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that any peace settlement would have to take into account the new reality on the ground of large settlement blocks was irrelevant, even though Bush's letter was the quid pro quo for the total Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Instead the administration treated Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem built since 1967 as no different than the most farflung settlement. (Iran take note of the binding force of executive agreements.)
At the outset of his second term, Obama made his disdain for Israel even clearer, just in case anyone had missed the point. He chose former senator Chuck Hagel, a man of no discernible qualifications, as Secretary of Defense. While in the Senate, Hagel had a well-earned reputation as the senator most hostile to Israel. At the time of his appointment, Hagel was a regular speaker on the American Muslim banquet circuit, lamenting the undue Jewish influence over American foreign policy. And even more ominously, he was closely connected to the Iranian lobby.
As CIA director, Obama appointed John Brennan, a long-time apostle of the moderation of both the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is an affiliate) and Hezbollah. In his previous task, as Obama's counter-terrorism director, Brennan devoted much of his energies to purging all references to Islam from the government's counter-terrorism manuals.
All Obama's hostility came rushing to the fore last week in his childish and vindictive response to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's election victory. When Obama could finally bring himself to speak to the prime minister on the phone, it was only to admonish him for his electioneering comments. When Netanyahu attempted to walk back his comment that there would be no Palestinian state while he was prime minister, Obama was having none of it. The typical diplomatic response would have been: We are pleased that Prime Minister has clarified his remark and reaffirmed his commitment to a two-state solution.
Instead Obama insisted that Netanyahu's one remark was definitive and necessitated a complete reassessment of American support for Israel at the UN and elsewhere. He chose to ignore that Netanyahu spoke in the context of a long explanation of why no two-state agreement is on the horizon – every point of which is beyond cavil.
When, one wonders, did Obama ever speak in a similar fashion to Mahmoud Abbas or with such heat about any world despot? Did he ever tell Abbas that his failure to respond to Israel's unprecedented nine-month settlement freeze necessitated an American reassessment? Or that the Palestinian Authority by pressing its statehood bid at the UN, in direct contravention of Secretary of State Kerry's request, had made it impossible for the U.S. to continue acting as a middleman? Has the president ever suggested that the continual incitement against Israel and Jews in the Palestinian media and the glorification of arch-terrorists by naming schools, summer camps, town squares after them, from Oslo until today, calls into question the PA's commitment to a two-state solution? Has he ever pointed out that by remaining in office for seven years beyond the expiration of his term, Abbas has raised serious questions about the PA's readiness for statehood?
To Ayatollah Ali Khameini's repeated calls for "Death to America," Assad's killing of 200,000 Syrians and displacement of millions more, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, all we get is No Drama Obama. Only Prime Minister Netanyahu gets his viscera going. And yet, I'd wager that if elections were held today, American Jews would still support Obama in higher percentages than any group other than blacks.
AS DEPRESSING AS THIS MIGHT BE, I'm not going to let it ruin my Pesach. Just the opposite, I expect Pesach to lift my spirits. Because sippur yetzias Mitzrayim reminds us that things have been worse, lots worse. In Egypt, we were slaves to a nation from which no slave
had ever escaped, much less 600,000.
Our ancestors were so downtrodden and broken in spirit by their prolonged servitude that Hashem recognized that they would flee at the first sound of battle, and therefore did not let the bnei Yisrael go out the shortest route through the land of the Philistines. At the first sign of adversity, the generation of servitude immediately expressed its longing for the fleshpots of Egypt and the food that the Egyptian slave masters provided.
It would take a new generation, not raised in slavery, to conquer the Land.
Even in the death camps, Jews risked their lives and gave up their daily rations to acquire a few wheat kernels in order to bake precious matzah. Why? Because the memory of how Hashem took us out from Egypt b'cheref ayin,gave them hope that they too would survive the death camps, and that just as Hashem took out a slave people, who could do nothing for themselves, with a "strong arm," so could He save them.
We are no longer slaves. We have been ennobled by the Torah as free men for well over three millennia.
But one thing remains the same: the same G-d Who took us out from Egypt continues to reveal Himself to the world through His people today. And He can protect us from any enemy.
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