===
Harry Reid, fearing he would be defeated, announced he is resigning.
Great positive for America.
That said, Democrats could snatch this positive away by appointing Sen. Schumer to the post Reid occupied. Schumer is a typical politician, very partisan and slimy. (See 2 below.)
===
Senate seems in agreement for once! (See 3 below.)
Meanwhile, though Obama wants to choke Sen. Menendez for opposing his actions regarding Iran, the Senator refuses to keep quiet. (See 3a below.)
===
There are those who are delighted with the fact the Saudis are now doing the fighting with Iran and may soon be joined by Egyptian forces.
However,Obama seems to have placed us on both sides and thus, so called, former allies no longer believe they can trust us and our ability to direct events in the Middle East has about disappeared. If this is what one wants to call a successful foreign policy in order to protect Obama from criticism, I understand where they are coming from.
The Bergdahl matter also seems to have backfired. Ms. Rice praised his service, Obama gave this alleged deserter's folks a special White House welcome as his father greeted him in some Arabic dialect but Obama has done nothing to recognize the families of those whose sons lost their lives trying to rescue Bergdahl.
Obama's sense of propriety is all based on political staging and leaves me in a state of disgust.
Everything this buffoon of a president does turns out to be either a disaster, embarrassment or dangerous for America. That about sums up what I see and how I feel.
And one more thought. Let's go extreme and accept Iran's lie they are developing nuclear power for civilian use I find it fascinating, Obama approves nuclear development by a terrorist nation in The Middle East, but opposes it in America. Perhaps some Green can explain.
===
Another Obama squeeze against Bibi in the offing? (See 4 below.)
Why does Obama obsess over Israel? (See 4a and 4b below.)
Explaining what motivates self-haters? (See 4c below.)
===
Bill Kristol on Iran going nuclear! (See 5 below.)
===
Kim writes about how freedom of speech is being denied by liberals on America's liberal campuses.
When you go behind what is happening on America's campuses you will find, as Kim has, liberals are using our law to defile the Constitutional Freedom of open dialogue.
Liberals hate having their precious warped ideas challenged so they respond by punishing those who believe freedom of expression is a good thing and is what America is all about.(See 6 below.)
===
Have a peaceful weekend because Monday The Middle East could be in flames and Obama could be on both sides of the conflict. Amazing how successful he is!
===
Dick
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)
Prof: United States Losing Its Superpower Influence
by CLAY NEELY
The inability of the current administration to effectively negotiate with countries like Iran is signalling the downfall of the United States as an effective superpower, according to Dr. Robert Friedman.
Friedman, a professor emeritus at Georgia State University and published author whose work focuses on community policing, terrorism and crime analysis, was the featured speaker during Thursday’s meeting of the White Oak Golden K.
“A superpower who doesn’t behave like one will lose that title,” Friedman said. “People are disgusted how the U.S. is letting itself go. We are treating enemies like allies and allies as enemies.”
Friedman believes that as Iran aspires to have nuclear weapons, Israel would then serve as the canary in the mineshaft. “If they fall, then so does Europe,” he stated.
“They want to topple the countries in the Fertile Crescent so they can then take Europe,” Friedman said. “Ten percent of the French population is Muslim and some of the most radical groups are based in London. If Israel falls, it’s easy.”
Friedman continued to hammer out the current administration’s failure to effectively negotiate with Iran, citing that tightening the screws on sanctions would have sent a very clear message.
“This country does not know how to negotiate. You don’t give anything free and in the Middle East, haggling and negotiating is part of the DNA.” Friedman said. “When you’re dealing with the best hagglers in the Middle East, you don’t send a JV team to negotiate.”
“In what I know about nuclear negotiations, we are being taken to the cleaners and singing hallelujah all the way.”
The current crisis in the Middle East is difficult to compare to previous struggles such as World War II, he said, stating that “the United States did not want to get into a war with Germany or Japan, and in order to make a six year war very short, did the right thing at a terrible cost.”
However, one variable that existed which kept the use of atomic weapons in check was the deterrent factor of the USSR.
“But now we’re dealing with people who think in millenia,” Friedman said. “If Iran drops an atomic bomb in the Middle East and kills a few million Muslims in the process, what’s the big deal? Iranians have sent 40,000 teenagers through minefields so their infantry could clear it.
“Anyone who could do that would not hesitate to drop a bomb on who would involuntarily become martyrs,” he continued. “They wait 50 years for the fallout to clear and go back into Jerusalem as the conquerors.”
Friedman also discredited the possibility of the United States taking an isolationist approach to the increased tension, citing that the stage of the world is smaller than ever and there is “no real choice.”
“The question is how to behave in a world that is becoming increasingly hostile,” Friedman said. “Iran says they don’t want a signed agreement. They want a ‘verbal understanding.’ I’m not optimistic about where things are going.”
The relationship between Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama was also addressed. When asked why the president has treated Netanyahu in such a dismissive fashion, Friedman hypothesized that Obama feels his legacy is at stake.
“Aside from the Affordable Care Act, Obama has no legacy at this point and feels that a deal with Iran is imperative,” Friedman said. “If he doesn’t get that, he will have nothing to show.”
When asked if he saw any comparisons between Neville Chamberlain and the current administration, Friedman chuckled.
“To be honest, I would choose Chamberlain,” Friedman said. “In this case, we have the history and we aren’t learning from it.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)Senate Dem Leader Harry Reid Will Not Seek Re-Election
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said on Friday he will not seek re-election next year, leaving Congress after 30 years and complicating Democrats' efforts to retake control of the Senate in 2016.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said on Friday he will not seek re-election next year, leaving Congress after 30 years and complicating Democrats' efforts to retake control of the Senate in 2016.
Reid, who represents Nevada, said in a video message his decision to retire was not due to a recent exercise accident or his party's loss of control of the chamber in the November congressional elections.
"The job of minority leader of the United States Senate is just as important as being the majority leader," Reid, 75, said in the video, posted to YouTube. "It gives you so much opportunity to do good things for this country. And that's what I am focused on."
Repbulicans shed no tears on the retirement of their long-time adversary. The National Republican Senatorial Committee issued this statement, according to The Weekly Standard:
“On the verge of losing his own election and after losing the majority, Senator Harry Reid has decided to hang up his rusty spurs. Not only does Reid instantly become irrelevant and a lame duck, his retirement signals that there is no hope for the Democrats to regain control of the Senate. With the exception of Reid, every elected statewide official in Nevada is Republican and this race is the top pickup opportunity for the GOP.”
Story continues below video.
In January, an accident while exercising left him with broken ribs and facial bones. Despite surgery, he said soon afterward that his 2016 re-election plans were "off and running."
On Friday, Reid said while it had nothing to do with his decision to leave, the accident gave him time to ponder Democrats' future.
"We have to make sure that the Democrats take control of the Senate again," he said in the video, adding re-election resources can now be used instead on other Senate Democrats.
The Democrats hold 44 seats in the Senate. Republicans hold 54 seats and independents two.
However, Reid's decision could complicate Democrats' efforts to retake control of the U.S. Senate in 2016 elections. He had a tough re-election fight in 2010.
Democrats who might seek to replace Reid as their party leader in the Senate could include Illinois Senator Dick Durbin New York Senator Chuck Schumer, who currently hold the No. 2 and No. 3 leadership positions. Other senior Democrats, such as Senator Patty Murray of Washington, could also be in contention.
"He's so respected by our caucus for his strength, his legislative acumen, his honesty and his determination," Schumer said in a statement.
Reid won the job of majority leader in 2007, serving as Democratic President Barack Obama's point man in the Senate, helping to secure congressional passage of Obama's 2010 signature healthcare law despite fierce Republican opposition.
His leadership was re-examined after Democrats lost the Senate. Senate Democrats voted in January to keep Reid as their leader but some voiced frustration at his tactics and Senate gridlock. The party expanded the leadership to include Senator Elizabeth Warren to bolster its appeal to liberals and the middle class.
Reid Friday warned Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, that he did not intend to spend his remaining time quietly: "My friend Senator McConnell, don't be too elated."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Senate Agrees Iranian Regime Must Be Accountable If It Cheats on Nuclear Agreements
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) today celebrated the Senate’s unanimous 100-to-0 vote to pass his bipartisan budget amendment to impose sanctions on Iran. Kirk Amendment #545 to the Senate Budget Resolution (S. Con. Res. 11) supports the Kirk-Menendez principle of immediately re-imposing waived sanctions and imposing new sanctions if Iran cheats on the interim nuclear deal or a final nuclear deal. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Ranking Member of the Senate Banking Committee, co-sponsored the Kirk amendment, which draws language directly from the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2015 (S. 269), co-authored by Senators Kirk and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.).
“By passing the bipartisan Kirk-Brown amendment to impose sanctions on Iran, the Senate voted for the security of the United States and Israel and against making dangerous nuclear concessions to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The unanimous vote for the Kirk-Brown amendment signals the Senate's strong support for the Kirk-Menendez Iran sanctions bill, which stands ready now for a full Senate vote,” said Senator Kirk.
Additional Background:
- The bipartisan and uncontroversial principle of imposing sanctions on Iran if it cheats on nuclear deals is embodied in Section 208 of the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2015, a bipartisan bill co-authored by Senators Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.).
- Section 208 of the Kirk-Menendez Iran legislation would immediately re-impose waived sanctions and impose new sanctions on Iran if the president cannot certify to Congress that Iran is full compliance with nuclear agreements with the United States and its negotiating partners.
- On January 29, 2015, the Senate Banking Committee passed the Kirk-Menendez Iran legislation in a strong bipartisan 18-to-4 vote, in which the Committee carried all 12 Republicans and 6 out of 10 Democrats.
- Twelve Democratic Senators wrote a letter to President Obama on January 26th in support of the Kirk-Menendez legislation, vowing: “After March 24, we will only vote for this legislation on the Senate floor if Iran fails to reach agreement on a political framework that addresses all parameters of a comprehensive agreement.”
- As of March 25, 2015, Iran has failed “to reach agreement on a political framework that addresses all parameters of a comprehensive agreement.”
- Iran is a theocratic dictatorship that sponsors and exports terrorism, egregiously violates human rights, has worked with terrorists to kill more Americans than the Islamic State, and now has a decades-long record of cheating to get nuclear weapons-making capability.
By Brideget Johnson
A leading Democratic skeptic of the White House’s nuclear negotiations with Iran, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), said the latest report out of talks in Switzerland indicates “we are not inching closer to Iran’s negotiating position, but leaping toward it with both feet.”
The Associated Press cited officials saying the United States “is considering letting Tehran run hundreds of centrifuges at a once-secret, fortified underground bunker in exchange for limits on centrifuge work and research and development at other sites.”
“The trade-off would allow Iran to run several hundred of the devices at its Fordo facility, although the Iranians would not be allowed to do work that could lead to an atomic bomb and the site would be subject to international inspections, according to Western officials familiar with details of negotiations now underway,” said the AP report. “In return, Iran would be required to scale back the number of centrifuges it runs at its Natanz facility and accept other restrictions on nuclear-related work.”
Menendez, whose Iran sanctions legislation and bipartisan bill have drawn veto threats from the Obama administration, has previously accused the White House of moving the goalposts to tempt Iran into a deal.
“We have pivoted away from demanding the closure of Fordow when the negotiations began, to considering its conversion into a research facility, to now allowing hundreds of centrifuges to spin at this underground bunker site where centrifuges could be quickly repurposed for illicit nuclear enrichment purposes,” he said in a statement moments ago. “My fear is that we are no longer guided by the principle that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal,’ but instead we are negotiating ‘any deal for a deal’s sake’.”
“An undue amount of trust and faith is being placed in a negotiating partner that has spent decades deceiving the international community; denying the International Atomic Energy Agency access to its facilities; refusing to answer questions about its nuclear-related military activities; and all the while, actively destabilizing the region from Lebanon to Syria to Iraq to Yemen,” Menendez continued.
“A good deal must meet our primary negotiating objective – curtailing Iran’s current and future ability to achieve nuclear weapons capability. If the best deal Iran will give us does not achieve this goal, it is not a good deal for the United States or its partners. A good deal won’t leave Iran as a nuclear threshold state.”
Menendez, the target of what many have noted is a conveniently timed Justice Department investigation, also sent a letter to President Obama asking what he plans to do about Bashar al-Assad’s latest use of chemical weapons — a deadly chlorine gas attack.
Last week, the towns of Sarmin and Qmenas were hit with chlorine bombs by Assad forces, video reviewed and confirmed by human rights groups. The Syrian Coalition said six were killed, including three children, and about 70 were injured, 13 seriously. Assad has been using chlorine since crossing Obama’s “red line” with other chemical agents.
“Bashar al-Assad and those forces backing his regime, including the government of Iran and its proxy force, Hezbollah, are once again challenging the world and testing the boundaries of the will of the international community to respond. As the Syrian civil war enters its fifth year, I urge you to reenergize the broad international coalition that is committed to a Syria without Assad. This includes exposing and targeting the tools of Russian and Iranian support for Assad’s bloody regime, and working with like-minded partners to increase pressure on him and his allies,” Menendez wrote.
“…Only a month ago, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2209 by a vote of 14-1 with the agreement of all permanent members including Russia. The resolution states that the use of chlorine gas is a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and any future use would result in the imposition of Chapter VII measures. UN Chapter VII punishments could include additional sanctions and the use of force to prevent future attacks.”
The senator stressed that Obama’s deal to dispose of Assad’s declared chemical weapons stockpiles “has not prevented the use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, nor has international pressure changed Assad’s calculus with respect to murdering his own people.”
“Worse, Assad’s supporters, including the Iranian regime, the Russian government, and Hezbollah have actually increased their support for the regime as these attacks have continued and increased in nature and scope.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4) THE NEXT CRISIS? UNITED STATES MIGHT LIMIT AID TO ISRAEL BY AMOUNT IT SPENDS ON SETTLEMENTS
Author: David Daoud
The State Department might be attempting to limit the loan guarantees Israel receives from the United States, based on Israel’s expenditures on West Bank settlements, according to an Israeli media report published on Tuesday.
Israel’s Walla news said that the State Department will be submitting a brief to Congress detailing Israel’s investment in settlements over recent years – purportedly in the billions of dollars.
Officials familiar with the report currently being formulated told Walla that after this move in Congress, Israel might remain with a “very limited” amount of financial guarantees. The effect of offsetting the guarantees would only be felt by Israel when it actually seeks to use them, for example when there is an economic or security crisis. The last time Israel sought to use its loan guarantees from the US was a decade ago, in 2005.
US government officials have been debating how to treat the sensitive report. According to Walla, Secretary Kerry and others recommended a delay in its publication so as to not be perceived as attempting to influence the elections in Israel last week. “People were afraid that if the report was leaked before the elections, it would look like an attempt to influence them, though in reality there is no connection between this report and the other crises between Obama and Netanyahu,” claimed an American official who was involved in the process. The official added that “this is a technical matter that was derived from an agreement that was reached during President Bush’s term in office. This has nothing to do with Netanyahu and Obama, but is related to Israel’s general policy to invest in settlements.”
The method of offsetting aid by Israel’s expenditures on settlements is nothing new. In 2003, in the wake of Prime Minister Sharon’s investment in settlements, the Bush Administration announced that it would offset Israel’s loan guarantees by about $300 million. At the time, Israel was in critical need of the guarantees in light of the recession caused by the Second Intifada. And in 2005, the United States and Israel agreed that Israel’s financial guarantees would be reduced by the amount it spent on settlement building.
A US official noted that after the offsetting of funds that the Bush Administration carried out, Israel was left with $3.8 Billion in available funds, saying that, “it is not clear how much of this amount will be deducted now following the State Department’s report. But, as soon as the report is delivered to Congress, it will cause turmoil.”
News of this report comes at a particularly tough time in US-Israel relations, particularly over the United States’ perception of Israel’s lack of a continued commitment to a two-state solution.
Leading commentator on security affairs, David Ignatius, made reference to the State Department report in a recent column and commented that it might be intended by the Administration as a warning to Israel, and to deter Netanyahu from settlement expansion.
4a) Why is Obama so Obsessed with Israel?
Barack Obama is a man with amazingly fixed beliefs, which seem to orbit the White House at some faraway distance in space. After Ferguson, Obama’s feelings of rage against whites and cops are hard to deny. Obama’s Islamophilia and even his jihadophilia are there for all to see, along with this administration’s consistent Chicago-style thuggery.
But these days Obama’s biggest obsession seems to be Israel, which is acting like any other sovereign nation would in the face of deadly enemies.
That simple fact seems to enrage the President of the United States.
The delusional conviction on the Left is that the Israel-Palestinian dispute is the key to peace in the Middle East -- a belief so bizarre and otherworldly that it’s hard to imagine who came up with it. It sounds like the Marxist idea that if you only wiped out every last capitalist, love and harmony would reign on earth. Every faction on the Left has these “wipe out the bad guys” dreams. Some feminists honestly fantasize about a world without men; LGBT’ers dream of a 100% LGBT world.
But if Israel were to disappear tomorrow, all the other wars in the Middle East would just keep boiling over.
So the Sh’ites in Iraq would still be killing the Sunnis and vice versa. The Syria civil war wouldn’t stop, nor the Libyan civil war. Muslim jihadists would still commit atrocities against Christians, Yazidis, and of course, against any Jews who haven’t yet left. The Turks would still hate the Kurds, the Twelver Armageddon cult would still hate less extreme believers, and Boko Haram in Nigeria would still be kidnapping and abusing hundreds of African village women and children to sell in the slave markets. The Sudan would still be trying to wipe out African tribal peoples, and ISIS would still be rampaging and posting snuff films on the internet.
Peace on earth, good will to men?
Not exactly.
But that seems to be Obama’s idea. Just that one little problem to solve, and shazzam! Paradise on earth.
Another Nobel Prize for O, and on to his new career as Secretary General of the United Nations, aka president of the planet.
If you live in a world of incorrigible false beliefs, nothing will ever work. No matter how many enemies you hassle through the IRS, no matter how many Republicans you smear through the lynch mob media, no matter how you rage against the cruelties of capitalism or global warming, nothing is going to get better, because all your premises are false.
False premises lead to false conclusions every single time.
Obama has demanded that Israel must retreat to the ceasefire lines of the 1948 War of Independence, in order to deserve permanent peace with the Arab “Palestinians” whose great-grandparents fled from that war.
When people with common sense take a look at the resulting map they can’t believe the tiny sliver of territory Obama wants to leave for Israel.
Given the fact that Israel has been assaulted by multiple Arab armies four times since it declared independence sixty years ago, and that it is currently under daily genocidal threats from the nuclear-arming Iranians, Obama’s idea looks plain crazy. But it’s obvious that Obama and his inner circle are convinced that having a defensible territory means nothing. All of human history contradicts that idea.
The new Obama proposal that the Iranians will agree to wait ten years before rushing to build their nukes simply means that Israel will have another decade to wait for a genocidal attack. Sovereign nations do not agree to becoming suicidally vulnerable, even after ten years.
And if Obama believes that Israel is actually protected by its own nuclear weapons he understands nothing about nukes, which are only weapons of last resort --- at least for rational nations. Which is why the U.S. and the Soviet Union never came to nuclear blows over a forty-year period. An actual nuclear exchange is a suicide pact, and only the martyrdom cults of Iran and Hamas actually celebrate suicide-killings.
This much should be obvious to any sensible person. The last few decades of massive propaganda and pressure by Eurosocialists, Muslim fascists and people like Obama is therefore just another lefto-cult delusion. The Left lives in some airy-fairy future that never comes, and this is simply another example of that mental disorder. Not so long ago they marched for U.S. disarmament and against American anti-missile defense. When it comes to military reality they are really not sane.
At least one Republican, James Baker III, seems to share the anti-Israel obsession, as shown in his talk to the turncoat group J Street. Baker was there to signal to the anti-Israel Left that Jeb Bush is on their side. Baker is a Texas oil guy, and his anti-Israel rancor presumably goes back to the time forty years ago when every Muslim oil regime had it in for Israel.
But that is simply not true anymore. It’s another false belief.
Egypt and Israel are cooperating closely in President Sisi’s war against the Muslim Brotherhood and other terrorists in the Sinai Desert. Israel just signed a four billion dollar deal to supply natural gas to Egypt. The forty-year Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty is holding up. Jordan has a de facto peace with Israel. It is Lebanon’s occupation by Iran’s proxy army Hizb’allah keeps that border unstable. Even Assad’s Syria had a de facto peace with Israel before the bloody civil war.
Right now the Sunnis are scared about Iran’s aggression, which threatens their survival, or in the case of Egypt, they are trying to destroy the Muslim Brotherhood before the MBs destroy the ruling regime.
The Saudis have had contacts with Israel for years, and are consulting closely on the Iranian threat. The reason is obvious: When Iran goes nuclear (with Obama’s active help) there is only one nuclear counterweight in the region, which would be Israel. Now that America has bugged out, and we can’t be trusted to protect the Arab nations against Iran, they are looking for allies anywhere they can. That’s what happens when you destabilize the Muslim Middle East. People get more insecure and scared, not less.
The Iranians have had greedy eyes on the holy cities of Mecca and Medina since 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini tried to overthrow the House of Saud during the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca). But Iran’s Shi’ites see themselves as Mohammed’s true heirs, while the Saudis are the betrayers who wrongly possess Mecca and Medina. This religious warfare has been going on for about 1200 years, and it’s not going to be another quick fix.
There is another amazing fallacy in the Left’s anti-Israel dreams. Hamas and the PLO have locked their genocidal goals against Israel into their founding charters. They have never shown any willingness to change the declared goal of genocide. What’s more, their leaders constantly rage against Israel to out-demagogue their own political competitors. And finally, all their money comes from the hate-Israel campaign at the UN, and they would go broke without it.
But wait! It gets worse.
If the PLO ever publicly recognized Israel’s right to exist, two predictable things would happen:
First, the more extreme factions like Hamas and Islamic Jihad would stage violent rebellions against the PLO. They’ve done it before.
Second, the PLO leadership would be targeted for assassination.
Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel forty years ago and was assassinated by the same Muslim Brotherhood that Obama likes so much.
Career politicians in the PLO don’t forget that. They are survivors, and risking their lives is not in their playbook.
You might think that somebody would have explained the facts of life to Mr. Obama in the last six years. But Obama has a hard time listening to other people, especially if they have different ideas.
Which makes it impossible for him to learn anything.
Bottom line: Obama is enraged because he is stuck in false beliefs about Israel and the Pals. In psychiatry this is called a mental obsession. Obsessions don’t have solutions in the real world, they just keep running, over and over again.
But you can predict who will get the blame…
4b) Managing Obama's war against Israel
By Caroline B. Glick
On Wednesday, the Jerusalem Municipality announced it is shelving plans to build 1,500 apartments in the Har Homa neighborhood. Officials gave no explanation for its sudden move. But none was needed.
Obviously the construction of apartments for Jews in Jerusalem was blocked in the hopes of appeasing US President Barack Obama.
But is there any reason to believe he can be appeased? Today the White House is issuing condemnations of Israel faster than the UN.
To determine how to handle what is happening, we need to understand the nature of what is happening.
First we need to understand that the administration’s hostility has little to do with Israel’s actions.
As Max Boot explained Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, the administration’s animosity toward Israel is a function of Obama’s twin strategic aims, both evident since he entered office: realigning US policy in the Middle East toward Iran and away from its traditional allies Israel and the Sunni Arab states, and ending the US’s strategic alliance with Israel.
Over the past six years we have seen how Obama has consistently, but gradually, taken steps to advance these two goals. Toward Iran, he has demonstrated an unflappable determination to accommodate the terrorism supporting, nuclear proliferating, human rights repressing and empire building mullahs.
Beginning last November, as the deadline for nuclear talks between the US and its partners and Tehran approached, Obama’s attempts to accommodate Tehran escalated steeply.
Obama has thrown caution to the winds in a last-ditch effort to convince Iranian dictator Ali Khamenei to sign a deal with him. Last month the administration published a top secret report on Israel’s nuclear installations. Last week, Obama’s director of national intelligence James Clapper published an annual terrorism threat assessment that failed to mention either Iran or Hezbollah as threats.
And this week, the administration accused Israel of spying on its talks with Iran in order to tell members of Congress the details of the nuclear deal that Obama and his advisers have been trying to hide from them.
In the regional context, the administration has had nothing to say in the face of Iran’s takeover of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden this week. With its Houthi-proxy now in charge of the strategic waterway, and with its own control over the Straits of Hormuz, Iran is poised to exercise naval control over the two choke points of access to Arab oil.
The administration is assisting Iranian Shi’ite proxies in their battle to defeat Islamic State forces in the Iraqi city of Tikrit. It has said nothing about the Shi’ite massacres of Sunnis that come under their control.
Parallel to its endless patience for Tehran, the Obama administration has been treating Israel with bristling and ever-escalating hostility. This hostility has been manifested among other things through strategic leaks of highly classified information, implementing an arms embargo on weapons exports to Israel in time of war, ending a 40-year agreement to provide Israel with fuel in times of emergency, blaming Israel for the absence of peace, expressing tolerance and understanding for Palestinian terrorism, providing indirect support for Europe’s economic war against Israel, and providing indirect support for the BDS movement by constantly accusing Israel of ill intentions and dishonesty.
Then there is the UN. Since he first entered office, Obama has been threatening to withhold support for Israel at the UN. To date, the administration has vetoed one anti-Israel resolution at the UN Security Council and convinced the Palestinians not to submit another one for a vote.
In the months that preceded these actions, the administration exploited Israel’s vulnerability to extort massive concessions to the Palestinians.
Obama forced Benjamin Netanyahu to announce his support for Palestinian statehood in September 2009. He used the UN threat to coerce Netanyahu to agree to negotiations based on the 1949 armistice lines, to deny Jews their property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to release scores of terrorist murderers from prison.
Following the nationalist camp’s victory in last week’s election, Obama brought to a head the crisis in relations he instigated. He has done so for two reasons.
First, next week is the deadline for signing a nuclear agreement with Iran. Obama views Netanyahu as the prospective deal’s most articulate and effective opponent.
As Obama sees it, Netanyahu threatens his nuclear diplomacy with Iran because he has a unique ability to communicate his concerns about the deal to US lawmakers and the American people, and mobilize them to join him in opposing Obama’s actions. The letters sent by 47 senators to the Iranian regime explaining the constitutional limitations on presidential power to conclude treaties without Senate approval, like the letter to Obama from 367 House members expressing grave and urgent concerns about the substance of the deal he seeks to conclude, are evidence of Netanyahu’s success.
The second reason Obama has gone to war against Israel is because he views the results of last week’s election as an opportunity to market his anti-Israel and pro-Iranian positions to the American public.
If Netanyahu can convince Americans to oppose Obama on Iran, Obama believes that by accusing Netanyahu of destroying chances for peace and calling him a racist, Obama will be able to win sufficient public support for his anti-Israel policies to intimidate pro-Israel Democratic lawmakers into accepting his pro-Iranian policies.
To this end, Obama has announced that the threat that he will abandon Israel at the UN has now become a certainty. There is no peace process, Obama says, because Netanyahu had the temerity to point out that there is no way for Israel to risk the transformation of Judea and Samaria into a new terror base. As a consequence, he has all but made it official that he is abandoning the peace process and joining the anti-Israel bandwagon at the UN.
Given Obama’s decision to abandon support for a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians, modes of appeasement aimed at showing Israel’s good faith, such as Jewish building freezes, are no longer relevant. Scrapping plans to build apartments in Jewish neighborhoods like Har Homa will make no difference.
Obama has reached a point in his presidency where he is prepared to give full expression to his plan to end the US’s strategic alliance with Israel.
He thinks that doing so is both an end to itself and a means of succeeding in his bid to achieve a rapprochement with Iran.
Given this dismal reality, Israel needs to develop ways to minimize the damage Obama can cause.
Israel needs to oppose Obama’s policies while preserving its relations with its US supporters, including its Democratic supporters. Doing so will ensure that it is in a position to renew its alliance with the US immediately after Obama leaves office.
With regards to Iran, such a policy requires Israel to act with the US’s spurned Arab allies to check Iran’s expansionism and nuclear progress. It also requires Israel to galvanize strong opposition to Obama’s goal of replacing Israel with Iran as America’s chief ally in the Middle East and enabling it to develop nuclear weapons.
As for the Palestinians, Israel needs to view Obama’s abandonment of the peace process as an opportunity to improve our diplomatic position by resetting our relations with the Palestinians. Since 1993, Israel has been entrapped by the chimerical promise of a “two-state solution.”
By late 2000, the majority of Israelis had recognized that there is no way to achieve the two-state solution. There is no way to make peace with the PLO. But due to successive governments’ aversion to risking a crisis in relations with Washington, no one dared abandon the failed two-state strategy.
Now, with Obama himself declaring the peace process dead and replacing it with a policy of pure hostility toward Israel, Israel has nothing to gain from upholding a policy that blames it for the absence of peace.
No matter how loudly Netanyahu declares his allegiance to the establishment of a Palestinian state in Israel’s heartland, Obama will keep castigating him and Israel as the destroyer of peace.
The prevailing, 23-year-old view among our leadership posits that if we abandon the two-state model, we will lose American support, particularly liberal American support. But the truth is more complicated.
Inspired by the White House and the Israeli Left, pro-Israel Democrats now have difficulty believing Netanyahu’s statements of support for the establishment of a Palestinians state. But those who truly uphold liberal values of human rights can be convinced of the rightness of Israel’s conviction that peace is currently impossible and as a consequence, the two-state model must be put on the back burner.
We can maintain support among Republicans and Democrats alike if we present an alternative policy that makes sense in the absence of an option for the two-state model.
Such a policy is the Israeli sovereignty model. If the government adopts a policy of applying Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria in whole – as I recommend in my book The Israeli Solution: A One- State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, or in part, in Area C, as Economy Minister Naftali Bennett recommends, our leaders will be able to defend their actions before the American people, including pro-Israel Democrats.
Israel must base its policy of sovereignty on two principles. First, this is a liberal policy that will ensure the civil rights of Palestinians and Israelis alike, and improve the Palestinians’ standard of living.
Second, such a policy is not necessarily a longterm or permanent “solution,” but it is a stable equilibrium for now.
Just as Israel’s decision to apply its laws to united Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the past didn’t prevent it from conducting negotiations regarding the possible transfer of control over the areas to the Palestinians and Syrians, respectively, so an administrative decision to apply Israeli law to all or parts of Judea and Samaria will not block the path for negotiations with the Palestinians when regional and internal Palestinian conditions render them practicable.
The sovereignty policy is both liberal and strategically viable. If the government adopts it, the move will rebuild Israel’s credibility and preserve Israel’s standing on both sides of the aisle in Washington.
Never before has Israel had to deal with such an openly hostile US administration. Indeed, until 2009, the very notion that a day would come when an American president would prefer an alliance with Khamenei’s Iran to its traditional alliances with Israel and the Sunni Arab states was never even considered. But here we are.
Our current situation is unpleasant. But it isn’t the end of the world. We aren’t helpless. If we act wisely, we can stem Iran’s nuclear and regional advance. If we act boldly, we can preserve our alliance with the US while adopting a policy toward the Palestinians that for the first time in decades will advance our interests and our liberal values on the world stage.
4c)
Self-Hating Jews, Self-Hating Americans, Self-Hating Whites
In 1970 Lolo Soetero, Barack Obama’s Indonesian stepfather, was hired by Union Oil to work in the company’s government relations division. He was asked occasionally to go to dinner parties with visiting Union Oil executives and American engineers working in Jakarta. It was naturally expected that his wife would accompany him, but Ann Soetero refused to go. Lolo was baffled and angry. Lying in his bedroom, Barry would listen to his parents argue. “These are your people,” his stepfather would plead. “They are not my people!” Ann would shout back.
Writing his memoir two decades later -- or reporting the experience to Bill Ayers -- Obama sympathized with his mother. The women wanted only to complain “about the quality of Indonesian help.” Of course he didn’t know that, nor did Ann, since she turned down the invitations. Some of the wives may have been interested in Balinese puppets or Javanese batiks, some in Mozart’s operas, some in orchids or Lepidoptera. But in his mother’s mind, and his, they were all Ugly Americans, neo-colonialist exploiters.
Lolo, Ann came to feel, was weak and malleable. He admired the West. She began to glamorize, in retrospect, her first husband, Barack Obama, Sr. The marriage had not been very glamorous. Ann left Hawaii soon after Barry was born, moving to Seattle later in August 1961 to begin classes on the 19th. She must have been making plans for some time, in order to have applied to UW by its deadline. What was the problem with the marriage? Ann wouldn’t say, though she did tell a friend that one night, when Barack Sr. didn’t like the meal she’d cooked, he took a full plate of food and hurled it against the wall.
The volatile Kenyan left Hawaii in June 1962, having accepted a scholarship from the economics department at Harvard. (Typically, Obama-Ayers blames the university for the break-up of the marriage: it didn’t offer “enough money to take his new family with him.”) In Cambridge, Barack Sr. met and married another white woman, Ruth Baker. Despite her name, Ruth was Jewish. This was not a happy marriage either. According to their son Mark Obama Ndesanjo, Barack Sr. was abusive.
Like his half-brother, Mark also heard arguments late at night:
When I was abruptly woken up, I would see light streaming in around the sides of the door. There would be thumps and yells, often followed by the sound of my mother screaming in pain or anger. Once I heard a loud crash and rushed to the door of the living room. By the orange light I saw my mother on the floor and my father standing over her, his hands clenched.
When his father returned home after a night of drinking and approached his mother, Mark “would move protectively toward her and clutch her legs, crying. I know now why I mostly remember her legs, not her torso or even her face… Every blow my father gave my mother, I felt.”
A man who beats his wife is likely to have beaten women in the past and will go on to beat future wives and girlfriends. The violence doesn’t depend on the identity of the victim. Thus it’s more than likely Ann Obama was beaten, or threatened, by her husband.
Yet she turned around and held him up as an ideal to son.
This is a familiar syndrome, and on March 8 Karin McQuillan published a provocative article in American Thinker drawing on the way in which victims of abuse or terror blame themselves rather than the perpetrator. They must have been doing something wrong. If only they were better children or wives, the violence would end. Their tormentor is himself a victim, just as he claims.
Self-Hating Jews
McQuillan applies this analysis to American Jews. Though they appear to be doing extraordinarily well, Jews in the U.S. have been deeply traumatized by the Holocaust and are now menaced by a resurgent Arab anti-Semitism of Nazi-like virulence. The incitements to murder Jews from the Quran, repeated in sermons, taught in Salafist madrassas throughout the Middle East -- and in Europe and the U.S. -- are a threat to residents of Jericho, New York as well as of Jerusalem, to Scarsdale and Skokie as well as Tel Aviv. She quotes a philosophy professor, Joshua Halberstam, writing five years before 9/11:
…when I look at my daughters, I’m aware that somewhere on this planet, at this very moment, there are people who want to murder them…. Unfortunately, some of these people have the money, means, and ideological connections that can transform them from… haters to real-life killers
Yet even Jewish organizations whose sole purpose is to expose and combat anti-Semitism have politely ignored Arab calls for the annihilation of Jews. Since 9/11, the Wiesenthal Center has acknowledged anti-Semitism in the Middle East, but on its current home page, on a list of 15 “social action and news events” links, just one is to the Arab world (a book fair in Oman), while two concern Estonia, and one each Lithuania and Iceland. The Anti-Defamation League still prefers to focus on White anti-Semitism, which it continues to equate with opposition to illegal immigration, though the rise of ISIS may be changing this.
McQuillan explains the dynamics: “One of the most common effects of trauma is a psychological mechanism called displacement.” Quoting psychologist Judith Herman, she writes
“(The abused child) tends to displace her anger from the dangerous source and to discharge it unfairly on those who did not provoke it.” Thus, good-hearted liberal Jews are not angry at the Palestinians for their violent, hate-filled actions -- they are angry at Jewish settlers. They project their anger onto “bad Jews” -- the Orthodox, Likud supporters, settlers -- to bolster a sense of their own goodness, and the potential goodness of the abuser.
But there’s something deeper and more troubling going on here. Why should attacking Israelis -- for the “bad Jews” are not confined to Orthodox, Likudniks, and settlers -- be so rewarding? Why should “displacement” bolster self-esteem? The abused child or wife perversely blames herself for the abuse as a way of empowerment. If she’s responsible, she can do something about it. But this costly strategy is not socially approved. The victim gets no support from friends, family, or counselors for her misrepresentation of the problem.
This is not the case with Jews who condemn Israel. Books published by Jewish scholars denying Israel’s right to exist receive glowing reviews, the authors are lionized at conferences, interviewed by the BBC, NPR, etc. There’s a long list of these academics. Edward Alexander has a forthcoming book devoted to them. Thousands more hold the same views, and express them in their classrooms, on panels, etc.
McQuillan begins her article by describing an encounter with one such individual. Following a book talk at Brandeis by James Carroll, author of Constantine’s Sword, a history of anti-Semitism, Professor Arthur Green, a rabbi and specialist on Jewish mysticism, astonished McQuillan by blaming the Jews for the hatred directed against them:
it was Judaism which taught the Catholics to practice religious oppression, through the concept of the chosen people. Moreover, Jews exploit the victim role and enjoy feeling “moral righteousness.” He then falsely declared that rabbinic Judaism limits “noble ethical proclamations to one’s fellow-Jews rather than extending them to all humanity.”
Green attacked Israel for having besmirched the good name of the Jewish people by “many words and deeds.” In a publication in 2002 not cited by McQuillan, Green worried about Israel becoming “a barbaric Middle Eastern superstate,” and proposed a daring solution to Palestinian terrorism (the second Intifada was then raging): “we need to restore hope.” The “root cause” of suicide bombing was -- guess what? -- “the degradation and humiliation of the Palestinian people… How can we not expect them not to be frustrated and angry?”
This is, of course, delusional. The rabbi was writing nine years after the Oslo agreement, itself a striking example of Jewish mysticism in practice. Another Boston psychotherapist, with a Ph.D. in history as well, Kenneth Levin, has taken a sobering look at the illusions held and fostered by Israel’s ruling Labor Party that led to the most disastrous political decision in the country’s history. Prof. Green was also writing two years after the failure of the Camp David Summit, where Arafat rejected the offer of all of Gaza and 92% of the West Bank, and made no counter-offer. He insisted on “the right of return” -- i.e. the elimination of Israel. The wave of terrorism followed. This should not have been surprising: the Oslo Accords had installed a terrorist in power. But Green sympathized with Arab anger at the humiliations and inconveniences imposed on them by their commitment to terrorism.
Despite this article’s title, the term “self-hating Jew” is inappropriate. Such Jews think very well of themselves. It’s gratifying to occupy the moral high ground. It’s also usually a safe and comfortable place. As Anthony Julius puts it in his long book on British anti-Semitism, “The anti-Zionist Jew is not just a Jew like other Jews; his dissent from normative Zionist loyalties makes him a better Jew. He restores Judaism’s good name.”
Let’s not underestimate the importance of self-esteem. It was responsible for the election of Barack Obama. The nation twice managed to perform the remarkable feat of slitting its wrists while collectively patting itself on the back.
So while McQuillan acknowledges the importance of the prevailing Weltanschauung in defining psychopathologies, mentioning Freud’s unwillingness to acknowledge child abuse in fin de siècle Vienna, her article raises an important question: why should Jews who deny the right of Israel to exist receive such a warm response in the 21st century? What has changed in American public opinion -- that is, the opinion of the country’s political and cultural elites -- since the 1950s, when such a position would have been unthinkable?
Self-Hating Americans
Zionism is Jewish nationalism, and to understand the enthusiastic response to Israel’s Jewish detractors, we need to look at our American nomenklatura’s opinion of nationalism.
On March 3 of this year, the Associated Students of UC Irvine, the student council, passed a resolution banning the flag from the administration building where the council meets. The bill, R50-70, was as incoherent as Michelle Obama’s senior thesis at Princeton: “flags construct paradigms of conformity and sets [sic] homogenized standards for others to obtain [sic]...” The Stars and Stripes “has been flown in instances of colonialism and imperialism…and can be interpreted as hate speech.”
When the decision was overturned, at least sixty faculty members signed an on-line petition defending the Council’s decision. “The resolution,” the petition claimed, “recognized that nationalism, including U.S. nationalism, often contributes to racism and xenophobia, and that the paraphernalia of nationalism is in fact often used to intimidate. This is a more or less uncontroversial scholarly point.…”
Uncontroversial in departments of English, Comp Lit, Sociology, Education, and the various “Studies,” perhaps, but no professor of European history would sign such a statement, and I saw no signatory who claimed to be an historian.
Of course nationalism is a “construct,” as is any identification of the individual with a group beyond the family. Of course it was carefully nurtured by governments in public schools, in the army, in the subsidized press. Of course national pride, national honor, and national destiny were invoked by Europeans and Americans seeking territory to colonize or govern, and in diplomatic maneuvering. The rights of minorities were not always observed by the new nations created by the treaties of Berlin (1878), Versailles (1919) and Lausanne (1923), though provisions protecting those rights were included in all.
It’s easy to forget, though, that back in the 19th century, nationalism was the ideology of liberals -- in the days when liberals were the limited government guys. In the 20th century, however, nationalists often morphed into socialists, first introducing tariffs, wage and price controls, and then more radical interventions. These have included strict quotas in government jobs and educational institutions for high-achieving minorities.
But American nationalism was exceptional in important ways. Expansion to the Pacific was, in the first place, bitterly contested. The historian Frederick Merk concluded that the doctrine of Manifest Destiny “lacked national, sectional, or party following.... The reason was it did not reflect the national spirit. The thesis that it embodied nationalism, found in much historical writing, is backed by little real supporting evidence.” And what was the consequence of the march westward? A continent that was home to perhaps 2 million (the numbers are highly speculative) living in warring tribal societies was opened to 320 million descendants of people throughout the world, and is providing them a standard of living inconceivable to those who emigrated here.
And whereas throughout the world quotas are in place to limit the opportunities of minorities, “affirmative action” in America, now in its sixth decade, mandates discrimination against the European-American majority.
The student council members and signatories no doubt believe unlimited immigration from Latin America is a great thing. How about the immigration of Europeans in the 18th and 19th and early 20th centuries?
The council and petition-signers also undoubtedly harbor warm feelings for Palestinian “nationalism,” though unlike Greeks, Poles, Italians, Germans, Irish, Ukrainians, Czechs, etc. -- and Jews -- the Palestinians are not a nation, with their own language, culture, and common history. The nationalism that swept across the Third World in the 1950s and ‘60s, one can be pretty sure, also sets their hearts racing. But how do they feel about Jewish nationalism?
Nationalism, in short, is great for non-Westerners. But Americans? They are not my people.
In the Chicago alternative schools that Bill Ayers took over with his Annenberg money, no American flag was displayed and students pledged allegiance to the world. And in his iconic portrait, taken for an article celebrating the publication of his memoir Fugitive Days in August 2001 (bad timing), the unrepentant ex-terrorist is stepping on the American flag.
Self-Hating Whites
Let’s move from March 2015 and the removal of the American flag to April 1994 and the unfurling of a new national flag. This was the banner of the Republic of South Africa, which combined, unaesthetically, the black, green, and yellow of the flag of the terrorist African National Congress with the red, white, and blue of the former flag, and of the Dutch and British flags.
Two things were immediately predictable:
1. The hatred of the left would now be directed exclusively at Israel.
2. South Africa would eventually revert to the continent’s mean. The question was whether it would take one generation or two before it became another corrupt, violent, and repressive African state.
As for point one, as anyone who was a student in the late ‘60s through the ‘70s knows first-hand, the Left is all about anger. Chanting the chants at demonstrations, shouting obscenities at the police, saluting with the clenched fist -- it was all hugely exhilarating. Arriving at Berkeley in 1972, I was gratified to discover it was still not too late to throw rocks at the cops. I’d transferred from Reed, where I had always worn to the barricades the best-selling t-shirt in the college’s bookstore: it featured the Reed seal, a griffin rampant, with “Communism, Atheism, Free Love” around the circumference. Apparently, there wasn’t enough room for “Drugs.” In the bad old days, anger was one of them, a stimulant and intoxicant at one and the same time.
In Ayers’s memoir Fugitive Days, writes Jack Cashill,
“…rage” rules. Ayers tells of how his “rage got started” and how it evolved into an “uncontrollable rage -- a fierce frenzy of fire and lava.” In fact, both Ayers and Obama speak of rage the way Eskimos do of snow -- in so many varieties, so often, that they feel the need to qualify it, as Obama does when he speaks of “impressive rage,” “suppressed rage,” or “coil of rage.”
Like the fury of the abusive husband, the rage of the left moves from target to target. And so with the demise of white rule in South Africa, Israel inevitably became “the apartheid state.”
As for the second assumption, economically, Johannesburg is not yet Detroit. This is hardly surprising: South Africa’s gold, platinum, and diamond mines are the largest in the world. The country owns about half of the world’s gold reserves, and De Beers sells at least 60% of the world’s diamonds. South Africa has a GDP of nearly $600 billion, according to government numbers. But the unemployment rate hovers around 25%, in reality probably closer to 40%, and strikes are frequent and violent. And while undoubtedly more blacks are better off economically since 1994, income distribution is more badly skewed than under the old Afrikaner government.
But guess what? In a recent poll, 80% of the blacks surveyed blame the country’s poverty on previous regime. In reality, with the lifting of sanctions in 1994, foreign investors flocked to the new republic.
But crime and corruption will eventually take a toll. And the crime rate puts the Motor City to shame.
According to official statistics, the murder rate in 2014 was 32.2 per 100,000, about six times the global average, and 1000% higher than the US. Interpol believes the actual rate may be twice as high as the government reports. For white farmers, it’s officially 99 per 100,000, twice as high as for police. In another estimate, of the 50 people murdered per day in the country, at least 20 are whites, who make up less than 9% of the population, almost five times the black rate.
A computer consultant friend returning recently from a stint in J-burg told me that his employer warned him under no circumstances to leave his hotel room at night.
The Medical Research Council reports that 37.4% of men polled admitted to having raped a woman or girl. Even according to government statistics, the rate of rapes, 132.4 per 100,000 people, is the world’s highest. (It’s about 27 per 100,000 in the US.) It’s estimated that 500,000 women are raped per year, though the true number could be over 1,300,000.
And life expectancy, which rose from 51 to 64 between 1960 and 1994, is now back to 53.4 The global average is 70.
In 2012, Genocide Watch, apparently the only NGO interested in crime in South Africa, issued a disturbing report. Dr. Gregory Stanton, its head, implicated the government in the murder of white farmers and warned of “a downward spiral into genocide.” All whites, according to the ANC charter, are “settlers” -- like the Jews who have lived continuously in Hebron for over 3000 years (except when they were expelled by the Crusaders in 1100 and the British in 1929). Their elimination is a matter of time.
This is scary stuff. But as Bob Dole used to repeat so plaintively, “Where’s the outrage?” That useful construct, the Man from Mars, would be asking himself why Europeans and their descendants in other parts of the world would be indifferent to the fate of Europeans on the continent of Africa. The Dutch began farming in Cape Town in the middle of the 17th century, only a generation after the first Europeans came to North America, and before the arrival of many Bantu tribes.
But for Americans, these are not my people.
In the ‘80s, Afrikaners became Hollywood’s favorite villains -- they were the bad guys in Lethal Weapon 2, Hard Target, and other thrillers. The typecasting didn’t stop with the end of apartheid. The Sum of All Fears (2002), The Manchurian Candidate (2004), and Red (2010) -- three movies that sound like they must be about the President -- feature baddies with crude Afrikaner accents.
They may be glowering on the silver screen, but Afrikaners are MIA on newscasts and in the paper of record. The descent of the “Rainbow Nation” into barbarism is not fit to print. When Matti Friedman was working for the AP’s Jerusalem bureau between 2006 and 2011, the news agency had 40 staffers in Israel and the Palestinian territories, more than in China, Russia, and India, and more than the combined total in the 50 nations of Africa. If Israel should disappear, they and their colleagues will all pack their bags. Palestinians and Africans are victims; that’s the story. What happens after “liberation” is not news. Google “violence in South Africa New York Times” and the first story is about attacks on black lesbians. There are two stories about attacks on foreign Africans, and a reminiscence about casualties among reporters during the fighting in the run-up to 1994, for which the government is blamed, though the killings were a result of a brutal war between the ANC and the Zulus. Google “attacks on whites in South Africa New York Times,” and the most recent of three stories is from 1993.
Back in the USSA:
When did liberalism go off the rails? Some will say 2011, when the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others by a schizophrenic with no known political beliefs except that he was pro-abortion was blamed on Sarah Palin -- a delusion as unhinged as any that haunted Jared Loughner. But a better date is 2007, the year of “the Jena Six.” These “youths” had punched, kicked, and stomped a white student until he was unconscious. After one of the assailants was charged with attempted second-degree murder, the howling of the enragés of the left reverberated through the media. Across the country, the legions of the righteous signed petitions, marched, and listened raptly to harangues from the usual haranguers. Three nooses had been hung on campus six months earlier as a prank against members of the rodeo team. The students who hung them were unaware of any racial connotations, but were suspended for six weeks. The attack on Justin Baker had no connection with this, nor had he made any kind of racial comment, which would of course have justified his being beaten into a bloody pulp.
Mychal Bell, with two previous convictions for battery, became a martyr. Of course he was still alive and had not retained the services of Ben Crump and Ryan Julison, so he did not achieve the apotheosis of St. Trayvon and St. Michael.
Ordinary European-Americans rallied to the causes of the Ferguson cop and the Sanford neighborhood watchman. (By the way, as far I know, it is perfectly legal to question someone in your neighborhood who you don’t know and who is acting suspiciously.) But these folks were not among the People Who Count, our bi-coastal betters.
George Zimmerman? Darren Wilson?
Not my people.
Both events received wall-to-wall coverage 24/7 for weeks. But it did not occur to any reporter in the Zimmerman case to phone the national HQ of 7-Eleven in Dallas and ask what the videotape of Trayvon Martin revealed. I know because I did. And the director of public relations expressed her surprise that I was the first reporter (OK, I lied) to contact her. And so American Thinker became the first news outlet to reveal that Martin had left the store between 6 and 6:30. The 7-Eleven is about a 15 minute walk from Brandy Green’s apartment, and so when spotted by Zimmerman, who called 911 at 7:09, St. Skittles, an accomplished burglar, had probably been loitering around the apartment complex for 20 to 50 minutes.
If the media had no interest in what Martin had been up to before Zimmerman reported him, they had, and have, even less interest in letting you know why the “White-Hispanic” vigilante, along with Darren Wilson and the President’s grandma Madelyn Dunham, might have been a tad wary of a young black male acting suspiciously. According to a 30-year study of homicides by the Justice Department, spanning 1976 to 2005, African-Americans, currently 13.2% of the population, committed 52.2% of all murders. They were 7 times more likely to kill than whites. For the most recent year for which arrest records by race are available, 2012, blacks committed 49.4% of murders, 32.5% of rapes, 54.9% of robberies, 30.8% of burglaries, and comprised 43.8% of prostitution and “commercialized vice” arrests. Since the percentages don’t include crimes not reported or where a suspect was not apprehended, a lot of gang-related violence is unaccounted for. Victim surveys discredit the idea that the arrest records are skewed by police bias.
This reality is not part of the narrative. Murders, assaults, and rapes committed by African-Americans against European-Americans are strictly local news. When committed against other African-Americans, they are often not news at all. Those who want to keep up to date on nation-wide black mayhem each weekend and holiday need to consult Colin Flaherty’s tours d’horizons at American Thinker.
And so the psychopathology of Jews is writ large in America. Thugs are celebrated, victims denounced. (“Thuggery” by the way, the practice of murdering travelers by Thugees, followers of the goddess Kali, was eliminated from India by the evil British colonialists. Some 30-40,000 were killed each year by the cultists, making commerce a bit risky.) America is vilified, European-Americans are vilified. The “Other” -- to use an indispensible bit of leftist jargon -- is celebrated.
And like the abuser who represents himself as the victim, and is seconded in this misrepresentation by the actual, traumatized victim, so the practitioners and defenders of violent and aggressive behavior here and in the Middle East claim that they are the oppressed. Concessions are instantly forgotten and new demands issued. Racial preferences have been in place since 1965. Untold millions of European-Americans have been denied admission to colleges and universities and been rejected for jobs because of their skin color. In the Middle East, territory over three times the size of Israel has been given up merely for the promise of peace and an end to terrorism. Never in modern European history has contiguous territory conquered in war been returned to the defeated nation or empire without concessions elsewhere. But there has been no real peace; there has been no end to terrorism. And there has hardly been a flicker of gratitude for the concessions, any more than for Affirmative Action.
A couple of final thoughts.
1. I’ve used the term European-American throughout this article, except in the title. I don’t like hyphens any more than the next guy, but for defenders of people of no color, “White” has no future. Whites wanting representation on any campus in this country will have to present themselves under the aegis of their nationality. Even the student council at UC Irvine would be hard-pressed to turn down an application for an Italian-American Club, an Irish-American Society, or an Association of Polish-American Students. Ask for a “White” club and you’ll be charged with hate speech. In any case, “whiteness” was historically not part of any European identity. If surveyed, most Europeans for a millennium before 1800 would have identified themselves as Christians, and mentioned their family, their village, and their province, county, duchy, or principality.
2. The anti-Semitism of the left is ineradicable. It long predates Zionism, going back at least to Karl Marx, if not to Voltaire. The task of community organizers in the 19th and early 20th century was to get workers to say in public “capitalist” instead of “Jew.” And as long as Israel exists, left anti-Semitism will only become more vociferous and more audacious. Nationalism (in the West) is wicked, but nothing is as evil as Jewish nationalism. The solution for the left has always been for Jews to disappear, a bloodless (they hope) Final Solution.
Anti-Semitism on the right is growing too. It’s an update of the 19th century version. Jews are denounced precisely because they are not nationalists. Their first loyalty is not to their own country, but to Israel. According to the ADL, 31% of Americans and 41% of individuals worldwide believe this. Before 1947, a common accusation was also that the first loyalty of Jews was to their co-religionists abroad: the scourge of America was “the international Jew.”
There’s probably a still larger group in the U.S. that resents Jews less for their support of Israel than for their leftist politics, particularly their advocacy of open borders and amnesty -- even when they understand the historical reasons for this support. Others, who are in no way anti-Semites, are puzzled about this, too. Hispanics, after all, do not like Jews any more than do African-Americans. According to the ADL, 30% of each group is anti-Semitic, versus 5% of non-Hispanic whites.
Mass immigration does not seem to be any more in the interest of Jews than is their support of Obama, disciple of Edward Said, pal of Rashid Khalidi, Ali Abunimah, Salam al-Marayati, Mohammed Elibiary, et. al.
It’s sometimes not appreciated even by those who are not anti-Semitic that Jewish opinion is not monolithic on any subject. Politics in Israel, as the recent election showed, is as rancorous as anywhere in the West. If in fact 69% of Jews in the U.S. supported Obama in 2012, as pollsters claim, that still means about one in three did not vote for the President. Though most families agree to disagree, every week there are shouting matches -- or at least sarcastic exchanges -- over lox and bagels at holiday gatherings, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals.
Jews can do no more about neo-Nazi anti-Semitism than they can about that of Bill Ayers and his friends or about Muslim anti-Semitism. The good news is that Jews can do something about the low-grade antipathy on the right on the part of individuals who don’t know Stormfront from The Weather Channel. But to do so, they will have to fly in face of the good opinion of the bi-coastal bien pensants.
They will have to say:
Americans? My people.
European-Americans, AKA Whites? (We’re not on campus) My people. Afrikaners? My people.
And they will want to say as well, proudly, along with Evangelicals and the great majority of conservatives:
Israelis? My people.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5)- A Nuclear Iran?
By William Kristol
On Tuesday I spent some time with the reelected prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. I think he was happy to take a short break from his Herculean labors of putting together a government and dealing with controversies galore. So we engaged in some small talk and exchanged compliments and stories about our parents. I particularly enjoyed his fascinating account of his father’s work with the great Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the last year of Jabotinsky’s life, and his father’s subsequent efforts to rally support in the United States during World War II for European Jewry and for the creation of the state of Israel. His failure on the first front and his success in the second is a useful reminder of the extent to which, in politics, tragedy and triumph are not alternatives but cousins.
Speaking of triumphs, I did of course congratulate the prime minister on his reelection victory. But he had no interest in dwelling on that, and, indeed, his manner was in no way triumphalist or even exuberant. The prime minister was sober, and he was alarmed.
The main cause of his alarm wasn’t the host of attacks that have recently been launched against Israel by the administration in Washington. He simply expressed confidence in the underlying strength of the U.S.-Israel relationship and refused to engage, even in this private setting, in any reciprocal attacks on his American counterparts.
No, what alarmed the prime minister was Iran. The progress of the Iranian regime toward nuclear weapons is the threat, as he sees it, to the well-being of Israel, the overall success of American foreign policy, and any hopes for peace and stability in the Middle East. The nuclear arms deal the Obama administration seeks with Iran would secure Iran’s path to nuclear weapons capability and would strengthen a regime that not only proclaims death to Israel and death to America but shows by its behavior that it means both statements. And this is to say nothing of the likelihood of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East to follow.
The prime minister made his points without hyperbole or bravado. None of them was new, as he himself stressed. After all, he has been as clear and outspoken as anyone could be about the threat of a bad deal, including in his remarks earlier this month to the United States Congress. His private arguments very much reflected his public ones, and the arguments other critics of the deal have been making. Indeed, on a couple of occasions the prime minister interrupted himself to say, “but of course you understand this point, you’ve published these arguments.” And so we and others have. It’s not as if scholars at the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Council on Foreign Relations and the Hudson Institute—to say nothing of senators and congressmen and former secretaries of state—haven’t explained that we are heading towards a bad deal with a bad regime.
It’s a bad deal for all the reasons experts have pointed out. It won’t disassemble Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, while it does disassemble the sanctions regime that finally had started to bite and that holds the best hope of peacefully stopping Iran’s nuclear program. It doesn’t deal with Iran’s weapons programs or force Iran to come clean about its military agenda. It has limits on inspections and verification, and a time limit on the restrictions on Iran’s capabilities to boot. It demands no promise of any change in Iranian behavior. So it’s a bad deal with a bad regime, one that is a leading sponsor of terror, an aggressor in the region, an enemy of the United States, and committed to the destruction of Israel. And it’s a bad deal that will strengthen a bad regime, that will encourage bad regimes elsewhere in the world to redouble their murderous pursuits, and thus will make war—no, wars—more likely.
I walked back to my hotel after the hour-and-a-half discussion thinking this was perhaps the most soberly alarming conversation I have ever had with a political leader in a position of responsibility. And in pondering the path of the Obama administration, I couldn’t get out of my mind Winston Churchill’s admonition to Neville Chamberlain after Munich: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.”
The next day, in my hotel room in Jerusalem taking a break from preparing the class I was here to teach, I read about Tuesday night’s Simon Wiesenthal Center annual gala tribute dinner at the Beverly Hilton hotel. The news from the dinner was the speech by Harvey Weinstein, recipient of the Center’s Humanitarian Award.
Weinstein spoke colorfully about the need to fight anti-Semitism: “We’re gonna have to get as organized as the mafia. We better stand up and kick these guys in the ass. . . . We just can’t take it anymore [from] these crazy bastards.” He went on:
I think it’s time that we, as Jews, get together with the Muslims who are honorable and peaceful—but we [also] have to go and protect ourselves. . . . There’s gotta be a way to fight back. While we must be understanding of our Arab brothers and our Islamic brothers, we also have to understand that these crazy bastards [Arab and Islamic extremists] are also killing their own—they’re killing neighbors, they’re killing people from all sorts of different races.
These seemed to me perhaps useful things to be said to a Hollywood audience—especially when said by a liberal who was a strong and vocal supporter of President Obama in both 2008 and 2012.
But reading about these remarks in Jerusalem, one couldn’t help but be put off, even embarrassed, by the bravado and tough talk. Fighting anti-Semitism is of course a good thing. But all the deplorable kinds of anti-Semitism Weinstein is going to spend time fighting pale in importance next to the prospect of an anti-Semitic Iranian regime getting nuclear weapons with the acquiescence of the United States. And about that, Weinstein has been, so far as I know, silent. And Weinstein’s friends in American politics have mostly been silent.
Perhaps Weinstein will call Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid, and persuade them to act to block a bad deal with the Iranian regime. Perhaps Weinstein will call his friend President Obama and ask him to stop participating in the delegitimization of Israel as he contributes to the legitimization of Iran. Perhaps Weinstein will even ask him to put the threat of military force back on the table.
But counting on prominent and wealthy Jewish liberals to speak up against their friends in the face of existential threats to the Jewish people has never been a good bet. Benzion Netanyahu saw this up close in June 1940, when mainstream American Jewish leaders boycotted his mentor Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s speech in New York when Jabotinsky sounded the alarm about what was happening in Europe.
Now his son, Benjamin Netanyahu, is sounding the alarm about what is happening today. He has made the case, in my view irrefutably, that no friend of Israel can support the forthcoming deal with the Iranian regime. Nor is such a deal in any way in the broader American national interest. Yet a misguided American administration is on a path to choosing dishonor and setting the stage for future wars. It is up to American leaders in both parties and all walks of life to do their best to avert this outcome. And if it is left to Israel to act, the least Americans can do is support our democratic ally, just as the least Americans could honorably do in 1940 was support Britain as, in her finest hour, she stood and fought alone.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6) The Campus Climate Crusade
Liberal groups are out to sully the names of conservative professors and shut down programs funded by the Koch foundation.
Conservative thought on campus these days is rare, though for some it’s still not rare enough. Witness the growing campaign by politicians, unions and environmentalists to intimidate into silence any academic or program that might challenge liberal ideology.
Congressional Democrats have grabbed most of the attention here, with their recent attempt to cow climate skeptics. Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT and a Cato Institute scholar, earlier this month described in these pages how House Rep. Raul Grijalva was targeting seven academics skeptical of President Obama’s climate policies, demanding documents about their funding and connections. A trio of Senate Democrats is working to muzzle more than 100 nonprofits and companies that have questioned the climate agenda, with a fishing expedition into their correspondence.
Largely unnoticed is that the congressional climate crusaders didn’t come up with this idea on their own. For several years a coalition of liberal organizations have been using “disclosure” to sully the names of conservative professors and try to shut down their programs. Their particular targets are academics who benefit from funding from the Koch Foundation, which has for decades funded free-market professors and groups on U.S. campuses.
Giving money to universities, and earmarking it for certain purposes, is common, though the left has largely cornered the market. Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer and his wife several years ago pledged $40 million to Stanford to start the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy. The Morningside Foundation, established by the family of the late T.H. Chan, last year gave Harvard $350 million to fund work on, among other things, gun violence and tobacco use. The Helmsley Charitable Trust has given money to several schools to advance Common Core.
Apparently the only kind of thought not allowed is that which might “undermine,” according to UnKochMyCampus, “environmental protection, worker’s rights, health care expansion, and quality public education.” Stopping such research is the mission of this organization, which is spearheaded by Greenpeace, Forecast the Facts (a green outfit focused on climate change), and the American Federation of Teachers.
The group’s website directs student activists to a list of universities to which Kochfoundations have given money, and provides a “campus organization guide” with instructions for how to “expose and undermine” any college thought that works against “progressive values.” Students are directed to first recruit “trusted allies and informants” (including liberal faculty, students and alumni) and then are given a step-by-step guide on hounding universities and targeted professors with demands for records disclosure and with Freedom of Information Act requests. The AFT and the National Education Association devoted nearly a full day at a conference this month to training students on the “necessary skills to investigate and expose” any “influence” the Kochs have at universities.
This week Michigan State University released documents to student activists who had targeted political-theory professor Ross Emmett, director of the Michigan Center for Innovation and Economic Prosperity. His crime? Using Koch grant money to fund a reading group, called the Koch Scholars, that brings together students to discuss competing political economy ideas. The first two weeks were devoted to Marx, though the activists apparently couldn’t tolerate an equal discussion of capitalism.
Art Hall, who runs the Center for Applied Economics at the University of Kansas School of Business, was forced last year to file a lawsuit to try to stop a state records request from student activists demanding his private email correspondence for the past 10 years. Mr. Hall’s sins? His center got a seed grant from the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation, and he testified against green energy quotas at the state legislature last year.
As for those defenders of academic freedom and integrity, the American Association of University Professors several years ago defended climate scientist Michael Mann against a conservative group’s demands for his records. Now the Kansas chapter of AAUP helped fund the students’ demand for Mr. Hall’s records.
These UnKoch tactics are spreading. In February, Right to Know, a California nonprofit opposed to genetically modified food, filed freedom of information requests at four universities, demanding correspondence between a dozen academics and outside agriculture companies and trade organizations. The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, a left-leaning organization, recently forced the University of Louisville to release information about the founding of a new Free Enterprise Center, partly funded by Koch money.
Congressional Democrats are simply getting in on the game, using the power of government inquiry to up the ante. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin ran a campaign in 2013 against the free-market American Legislative Exchange Council, demanding information from its donors, trying to embarrass them out of funding ALEC. It worked.
Disclosure is becoming the left’s new weapon. And it’s shutting down debate across the country.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment