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GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS!
===Is Hilarious in trouble beyond Sander's rise in the polls? (See 1 below.)
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If you believe Sharia law is not coming to America you had better re-think because the more Mid Eastern immigrants are allowed to come here the more likely they will demand they be judged under their own law as has occurred in several Michigan cities. (See 2 below.)
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Testy Kerry and Obama respond to Jewish push back. (See 3, 3a and 3b below.)
In his defense of the Iran Deal, Obama went overboard in equating Republicans, opposed to his Deal, with those in Iran screaming Death to Americans. The man's thin skin and manner in which he rejects being challenged always works against him because his extreme partisanship reveals a significant character flaw.
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Historian Victor Hanson outlines the world's response, or lack thereof, should Israel take unilateral action. Israelis have learned well the lesson of world indifference and that drives their decision making. (See 4 below.)
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As I have been saying. (See 5 and 5a below.)
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Dick
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1) Ed Klein: Hillary Racing to Stave Off Indictment
Klein said he also believes Clinton is in "a kind of race against timePresident Barack Obama and those closest to him are "doing everything they can" to encourage Vice President Joe Biden to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, former New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Edward Klein tells Newsmax TV.
Klein said he also believes Clinton is in "a kind of race against time."
"Which is going to come first, is she going to be able to sew up the nomination by just throwing more money, more organization at the primaries so that she is unbeatable – or will a criminal indictment come down from the Justice Department [over her personal email system while Secretary of State] before that fact?" Klein said.
"And they're very concerned about which is going to come first."
Political commentator Dick Morris said if a possible Biden candidacy doesn't signal any animosity between the Obama and Clinton camps, "there sure will be if Biden runs, because the inevitable dynamos of the race are going to cause it, even if nobody wants it."
"You can only have one candidate out there saying everything Obama's doing is right…. I'll just continue what Obama's doing," he said. "You can't have two candidates saying that because the other one won't get covered and Biden lives on campus. These are his programs as well as Obama's."
Morris added Hillary Clinton, in order to get media coverage, will have to distinguish herself, and that means criticizing the president's record — "at first gently," but eventually becoming "more and more acerbic."
"It really could endanger Hillary's pursuit of Obama's base," Morris predicted.
In the meantime, Morris predicts Clinton's polling will continue continue to trend downward.
"I believe that Hillary is in free fall," Morris said. "She's dropped from the high 60s to 37 percent in favorability and she's going to continue to drop and she's losing her grip on the base and the Clintons are wrong. Something may happen before she sews up the nomination ... which is the sound of Hillary crashing and hitting bottom.
"If Biden comes into the race, the opening head to head would probably be Hillary 38 [percent support], Biden 18, [Vermont Sen. Bernie] Sanders 15. And then a month later, it'll become close to a two-way tie. I don't think that Hillary can easily defeat Biden and Sanders. Biden would probably win that contest."
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2)
What America Would Look Like Under Sharia Law
The diurnal interminable squabbling about First Amendment rights intentionally and ironically ignores the concerted effort to ensure its compliance to Sharia law.Under the guise of “religious freedom,” Islamic organizations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood such as the Islamic Circle of North America, the Association of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA), and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) have devoted millions of dollars and resources to a well coordinated campaign to ensure American laws, including judicial proceedings and state constitutions, be Sharia compliant. Sharia (“legislation”) is rooted in the Quran, the foundation of Islamic law; non-compliance is punishable by death (3:85; 4:65).
Such efforts are curious however, in light of Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) assertions. Islamic scholars, who draft opinions on issues concerning American Muslims, advocate no conflict exists “between Islamic teachings and the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.”
FCNA asserts, “it is false and misleading to suggest that there is a contradiction between being faithful Muslims committed to God (Allah) and being loyal American citizens. Islamic teachings require respect of the laws of the land where Muslims live as minorities, including the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, so long as there is no conflict with Muslims' obligation for obedience to God. The primacy of obedience to God is a commonly held position of many practicing Jews and Christians as well.”
But, if Sharia doesn't contradict American law, why vigilantly advertise, lobby, award “educational grants,” and fund political campaigns, to implement Sharia compliant American law?
The answer is quite simple. Groups like FCNA may use terminology like “religious freedom” but their definitions of religion and freedom can only be rightly understood within the context of Islamic ideology—not from western law or culture.
FCNA's assertion is obviously false when understood from within the context of taqqiya, Qur'an sanctioned deceit, and the Islamic doctrine of abrogation (2:106; 3:185; 16:101).
Sharia law is in fact what the European Court on Human Rights ruled more than once: “incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy.” Sharia actually rejects Constitutional rights, legislating restrictions and punishments against them.
Consider how First Amendment rights fare under Sharia law.
Under Sharia, no free exercise of religion exists, especially for Muslims who choose to leave Islam. Muhammad ordered, “Whoever changes his Islamic religion, kill him” (Hadith Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 9, Book 84, No. 57). Likewise, Muslims are instructed to murder, crucify, and dismember those who reject Islam, “wage war against
Allah and his apostle and strive to make mischief in the land” (2:191, 5:32,33; 9:5, 123, 29).
Allah and his apostle and strive to make mischief in the land” (2:191, 5:32,33; 9:5, 123, 29).
According to a 2012 Pew Research Report, 60 percent of Middle Eastern and North African countries criminalize apostasy, the act of abandoning one's faith. Apostasy laws also exist in Asian-Pacific and sub-Saharan African countries. Examples abound in America, however, just consider Ground Zero's Imam Abdallah Adhami's assertion that Muslims who leave Islam should be imprisoned.
Likewise, blasphemy laws exist worldwide to criminalize offensive speech or actions related to the Qur'an, Allah, and Muhammad. Seventy percent of Middle Eastern and North African countries, 31 percent of countries in the Americas, and 16 percent of European countries criminalize blasphemy.
Those who correctly claim the word “blasphemy” cannot be found in the Quran exclude the fact that blasphemous acts are easily identifiable. Any “offensive” speech is illegal, which is why Dutch filmmaker van Gogh was brutally stabbed to death and French Charlie Hedbo satirists were gunned down; all victims were unarmed. These violent acts were not random, extreme or isolated, but examples of following the Quran's instructions.
Discrimination against all non-Muslims exists under Sharia—because the underlying concept of equality does not. In fact, inequality, slavery and murder are enforced through the Islamic construct of dhimmitude.
Under dhimmitude, non-Muslims are divided into two groups. The polytheists, “pagans, idolaters and heathens” are given a choice to convert to Islam or die. Jews and Christians, known as “people of the book,” dhimmi and/or kuffar, are legally classified as third class citizens. They first must be humiliated and subjugated to pay a tax (Jizyah) in increasing amounts to Muslim-majority rulers. Next, they are given time to convert or leave their town, region and eventually country. If the Kuffar can't or don't pay the Jizyah, convert to Islam or move, Muhammad states that peace is impossible and the kuffar must be caught and beheaded (9:29; 22:19; 47:4).
Sharia law first imposes unequal legal status for non-Muslims; then eliminates them. The near extinction of non-Muslims in Muslim-majority countries evidences the stark reality that no First Amendment rights exist under Sharia. Instead, Muslims are instructed to “terrorize and behead those who believe in scriptures other than the Quran” and punish non-Muslims with “garments of fire, hooked iron rods, boiling water; melt their skin and bellies” (8:12; 22:19). The Quran incontrovertibly clarifies that conflict not only exists “between Islamic teachings and the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights,” but also exists infinitively.
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3)--Kerry Warns Congress About Risk of ‘Screwing’ the Ayatollah
In an interview, the U.S. secretary of state calls the Iran nuclear pact “as pro-Israel as it gets.” He also casts doubt on the charge that the Iranian regime seeks the destruction of the Jewish state.
When I met with Secretary of State John Kerry in his office this past Friday, it was apparent that he was in an exceedingly feisty mood, and it’s not easy to display feistiness when you’re trapped, as he was, in a recliner. Kerry, who broke his leg two months ago, will be rid of his crutches soon, which for him is not soon enough, because he’d prefer to do battle in Congress for the Iran nuclear agreement—quite obviously the crowning achievement, in his mind, of his long and distinguished career in public life—with two good legs.
Congress is the target of Kerry’s feistiness, as is his close friend and staunch adversary, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is leading the charge against congressional ratification of the deal. In the course of a lengthy and freewheeling interview—which you will find published in full, below—Kerry warned that if Congress rejects the Iran deal, it will confirm the anti-U.S. suspicions harbored by the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and eliminate any chance of a peaceful solution to the nuclear conundrum:
“The ayatollah constantly believed that we are untrustworthy, that you can’t negotiate with us, that we will screw them,” Kerry said. “This”—a congressional rejection—“will be the ultimate screwing.” He went on to argue that “the United States Congress will prove the ayatollah’s suspicion, and there’s no way he’s ever coming back. He will not come back to negotiate. Out of dignity, out of a suspicion that you can’t trust America. America is not going to negotiate in good faith. It didn’t negotiate in good faith now, would be his point.”
Kerry also said that his chief Iranian interlocutor, the foreign minister, Javad Zarif, and Zarif’s boss, the (relatively) reformist president, Hassan Rouhani, would be in “serious trouble” at home if the deal falls through. Zarif, Kerry told me, explicitly promised him that Iran will engage with the United States and its Arab allies on a range of regional issues, should Congress approve the deal. “Zarif specifically said to me in the last two weeks, ‘If we get this finished, I am now empowered to work with and talk to you about regional issues.’” Kerry went on, “This is in Congress’s hands. If Congress says no, Congress will shut that down, shut off that conversation, set this back, and set in motion a series of inevitables about what would happen with respect to Iranian behavior, and, by the way, the sanctions will be over.”
Kerry rejected criticism from Israel, and from many in the American Jewish community, that by publicly warning Israel that it will be further isolated internationally if the deal should be rejected, he has encouraged scapegoating of the Jewish state: “If you’ve ever played golf, you know that you yell ‘fore’ off the tee,” he explained. “You’re not threatening somebody, you’re warning them: ‘Look, don’t get hit by the ball, it’s coming.’”
Kerry believes that a congressional rejection of the deal will lead to war—he explains his theory of his case in detail below—and he finds the “visceral” and “emotional” criticism of the deal in Israel, and among many of Israel’s supporters, flummoxing. “I’ve gone through this backwards and forwards a hundred times and I’m telling you, this deal is as pro-Israel, as pro-Israel’s security, as it gets,” Kerry said. “And I believe that just saying no to this is, in fact, reckless.” When I asked him how he interprets Israeli criticism of the deal, he said there is a “a huge level of fear and mistrust and, frankly, there’s an inherent sense that, given Iran’s gains and avoidance in the past, that somehow they’re going to avoid something again. It’s a visceral feeling, it’s very emotional and visceral and I’m very in tune with that and very sensitive to that.”
Though he says he is in tune with this set of Israeli fears, he does not endorse a view widely shared by Israelis—and by many Americans—that Iran’s leaders, who have often said that they seek the destruction of Israel, mean what they say. “I think they have a fundamental ideological confrontation with Israel at this particular moment. Whether or not that translates into active steps to, quote, ‘Wipe it,’ you know ...” Here I interjected: “Wipe it off the map.” Kerry continued: “I don’t know the answer to that. I haven’t seen anything that says to me—they’ve got 80,000 rockets in Hezbollah pointed at Israel, and any number of choices could have been made. They didn’t make the bomb when they had enough material for 10 to 12. They’ve signed on to an agreement where they say they’ll never try and make one and we have a mechanism in place where we can prove that. So I don’t want to get locked into that debate. I think it’s a waste of time here.”
Though he says he is in tune with Israeli fears, Kerry does not endorse a view widely shared by Israelis that Iran’s leaders, who have often said that they seek the destruction of Israel, mean what they say.
On a related matter—whether or not the nuclear agreement represents a bad deal for the people of Syria, who suffer under the Iran-supported Assad regime, which will presumably benefit financially from the lifting of sanctions on its primary sponsor—Kerry was somewhat dismissive. In response to my question, “Does it bother you that money will be going to Assad and Hezbollah?,” Kerry responded, “Yes, but it’s not dispositive. It’s not money that’s going to make a difference ultimately in what is happening.”
Kerry and I also spoke about the possibility that we might see a revived Israeli-Palestinian peace process once the matter of the Iran deal is settled. I’ve gotten the sense over the past year that Kerry, unlike President Obama, is not quite ready to give up on the idea of U.S. mediation, despite their serious disagreements with Netanyahu and with the Palestinians as well. At one point in our meeting, Kerry, from his recliner, asked his senior communications advisor, Marie Harf, to bring him an Iran briefing book from his private study. I called after Harf to bring Kerry’s West Bank maps—maps that presumably outline the U.S. vision for a two-state solution—while she was at it. Kerry considered saying nothing, but then couldn’t help himself: “Doable,” he said of the peace process.
“But not unless somebody wants to do it.”
3a)
Kerry’s Perverse Warning
He’s worried about losing the ayatollah’s trust.
John Kerry at the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
We have to hand it to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg: Probably because he is (or at least appears) sympathetic to the Obama administration, he has a way of extracting statements from top officials that reveal their true thinking. The result is generally newsworthy—and terrifying. For an earlier example, see our May column on Goldberg’s interview with the president himself. For the most recent, read on.
This morning Goldberg published an interview with Secretary of State John Kerry on Iran. Here is the most alarming bit:
Kerry warned that if Congress rejects the Iran deal, it will confirm the anti-U.S. suspicions harbored by the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and eliminate any chance of a peaceful solution to the nuclear conundrum:
“The ayatollah constantly believed that we are untrustworthy, that you can’t negotiate with us, that we will screw them,” Kerry said. “This”—a congressional rejection—“will be the ultimate screwing.” He went on to argue that “the United States Congress will prove the ayatollah’s suspicion, and there’s no way he’s ever coming back. He will not come back to negotiate. Out of dignity, out of a suspicion that you can’t trust America. America is not going to negotiate in good faith. It didn’t negotiate in good faith now, would be his point.”
Goldberg’s headline is “John Kerry on the Risk of Congress ‘Screwing’ the Ayatollah.” We write for a family newspaper, so we went with something a bit more delicate.
To put this as politely as possible—and believe us, we’re straining to do so—Kerry’s tender concern for the ayatollah’s “dignity” is perverse. It’s true that a degree of mutual trust is necessary for a negotiation to succeed, but Kerry ignores the “mutual” part. His analysis is one-sided, and on the wrong side. The main question for Congress—as it should have been for the administration—is whether America can trust Iran.
This is, after all, a regime that traduced all diplomatic norms by seizing the U.S. Embassy and holding dozens of Americans hostage for over a year. OK, that was a long time ago. But it’s the same regime, one whose slogan is “Death to America.”
As the New Yorker’s Robin Wright notes, Kerry was asked about that slogan at a congressional hearing last week. His response was evasive:
“Is it the policy of the Ayatollah, if you can answer for him, that Iran wants to destroy the United States?” the Texas Republican Ted Poe, of the House Foreign Relations Committee, asked Secretary of State John Kerry, on Tuesday.
“I don’t believe they’ve said that,” Kerry replied. “I think they’ve said ‘Death to America!’ in their chants.”
“Well, I kind of take that to mean that they want us dead,” Poe countered.
“I think they have a policy of opposition to us and a great enmity, but I have no specific knowledge of a plan by Iran to actually destroy us,” Kerry said. “I do know that the rhetoric is—is beyond objectionable.”
Goldberg didn’t bring up that subject, but he did ask Kerry a similar question about Israel (the “little Satan,” as per the Iranians, as opposed to the “great” American one). The answer was the same:
Goldberg: Do you believe that Iranian leaders sincerely seek the elimination of the Jewish state?
Kerry: I think they have a fundamental ideological confrontation with Israel at this particular moment. Whether or not that translates into active steps to, quote, “Wipe it,” you know—
Goldberg: Wipe it off the map.
Kerry: I don’t know the answer to that. I haven’t seen anything that says to me—they’ve got 80,000 rockets in Hezbollah pointed at Israel, and any number of choices could have been made. They didn’t make the bomb when they had enough material for 10 to 12. They’ve signed on to an agreement where they say they’ll never try and make one and we have a mechanism in place where we can prove that. So I don’t want to get locked into that debate. I think it’s a waste of time here.
Wright—not to be confused with the actress of the same name whose credits include “The Princess Bride,” “Forrest Gump” and Netflix’s “House of Cards”—also means to dismiss the significance of the “Death to America” slogan. She reports that “some Iranians” with whom she spoke “downplayed the revolutionary mantra’s importance,” while “others insisted it still has strong symbolic merit.” None, she implies, think it should be taken at face value. “All of them—particularly senior Iranian officials educated in the United States—seemed befuddled about why it would ever impact the fate of the nuclear deal.”
She adds that “the gap in perception may be the deal’s greatest vulnerability.” She closes with a quote from American-educated Nasser Haidan, “a Tehran University political scientist and influential voice in policy circles”: “Whom does America want to rely on to judge public opinion? The twenty per cent who do shout ‘Death to America!’ or the eighty per cent who don’t?”
In a regime that claims absolute religious authority, public opinion is rather beside the point. Still, it’s worth noting the contrast between the way in which Obama administration supporters treat domestic and foreign adversaries. When Tea Party protesters said “Take back our country”—a commonplace political trope—they imagined it had invidious racial implications and argued that it discredited opposition to Obama’s domestic initiatives. “Death to America” is invidious on its face, but the administration and its apologists are anxious to explain it away.
At any rate, “Death to America” is the slogan of the regime—the negotiating partner about whose trust and dignity John Kerry is so concerned. Wright quotes Rep. Eliot Engel—a New York Democrat who has expressed skepticism of the Iran deal but has not yet said how he’ll vote on it—at the House hearing: “You would think that after an agreement was signed with us there might be a modicum of good will that perhaps they would keep quiet for a week or two, or a month.” That’s asking far too little, but the point is right: “How can we trust Iran when this type of thing happens?”
Goldberg began his interview by asking Kerry about, as the interviewer put it, “something that you believe is analytical: If this deal goes down in Congress, if Congress doesn’t let this through, you’ve said that Israel will be blamed, Israel will be isolated. Many Israelis took this as a threat, not a piece of analysis. Why did you say this publicly?”
Kerry tried to avoid the question by saying nice things about Israel: “legitimately besieged,” “our friend,” “our ally.” Goldberg pressed ahead and finally got an answer:
Goldberg: Go to this Heisenberg question. By analyzing this publicly, you’re affecting this, giving permission to Israel’s enemies to isolate it—
Kerry: If you’ve ever played golf, you know that you yell “fore” off the tee. You’re not threatening somebody, you’re warning them: “Look, don’t get hit by the ball, it’s coming.” There are any number of analogies. What I’m saying is, I don’t want Israel to be isolated—obviously not. I don’t want Israel to see further tension and problems. I don’t want to see that. I really don’t want to get bogged down in this because then I look like the analyst. I was really sort of saying that there are consequences to the choices that everybody is making.
The Times of Israel reports that Obama has issued even direr threats—sorry, “warnings”—to the Jewish state:
If the US Congress shoots down the Iranian nuclear deal, America will eventually be pressured into a military strike against Tehran’s nuclear facilities, which will in turn increase terror against Israel, US President Barack Obama told Jewish leaders Tuesday, a source who was present at the meeting said.
During the two-hour meeting, Obama said it was legitimate for opponents of the deal to lobby lawmakers to reject it, but added that a discussion focused on personal attacks, rather than the merits of the deal, could jeopardize the coherence of the American Jewish community and ultimately the resilience of US-Israel relations, according to Greg Rosenbaum, the chair of the National Jewish Democratic Council. . . .
“[The Iranians] will fight this asymmetrically. That means more support for terrorism, more Hezbollah rockets falling on Tel Aviv,” Rosenbaum quoted Obama as saying. “I can assure that Israel will bear the brunt of the asymmetrical response that Iran will have to a military strike on its nuclear facilities.”
That points to the rather shocking inaptness of Kerry’s golf analogy. This is not a game. If the “ball” is “coming,” Obama and Kerry are the ones who “hit” it. They didn’t have to.
3b)Obama: If Congress strikes down Iran deal, rockets will rain on Tel Aviv
In meeting with American Jewish leaders, president warns Israel will pay price for failure of nuclear deal with Tehran; 'American military action against Iran will not end with Tehran declaring war on us. What Iran could do is increase support for terrorism'.
Itamar Eichner
WASHINGTON - US President Barack Obama told Jewish leaders on Tuesday that if the nuclear deal signed between world powers and Iran is rejected by Congress, the United States will be forced to attack Tehran, which will lead to Hezbollah retaliating with rockets on Tel Aviv.
The president asserted that if Congress votes against the agreement, the Islamic Republic will back out of it and he will then face pressure from those who oppose the deal to militarily strike Tehran.
President Barack Obama (Photo: MCT)
Obama, Jewish leaders exchange concerns about distortions and attacks in Iran deal debate
U.S. President Barack Obama and Jewish leaders met for two hours at the White House on Aug. 4. (Mark
WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Barack Obama and pro-Israel leaders exchanged concerns about how each side distorts the other’s arguments in the debate over the Iran nuclear deal, and how the distortions are creating divisions in the Jewish community.
The meeting Tuesday evening at the White House between Obama and an array of Jewish leaders lasted more than two hours.
Participants said it was civil and friendly — Obama got a round of “happy birthdays” when he walked in the room — but that Obama forcefully expressed his frustrations with how the deal has been presented in the Jewish community. In contrast with previous meetings, they said, much of the discussion focused on the effect the debate was having on American Jews, as opposed to the details of the agreement.
Pro-Israel officials confronted Obama about the impression they said he leaves that his opponents are “warmongers” and his suggestions that there is something untoward about their lobbying.
According to participants, Obama was especially frustrated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for not allowing activists who flew in last week to lobby the extended encounter he offered with his top officials (their presentation was limited by AIPAC to 30 minutes).
Obama met the Jewish leaders as deal opponents and supporters are waging a battle for the hearts and minds of Democrats in Congress, who are the key to success or failure of a resolution of disapproval in a legislative window that closes toward the end of September. Democratic lawmakers are facing intensive lobbying and a barrage of ads from both sides. AIPAC is leading the effort to kill the deal.
“He asked people in the room, state your positions, argue them as you wish, but at least represent the facts objectively,” said Robert Wexler, a former congressman from Florida who now directs the Center for Middle East Progress. “Don’t misrepresent what the agreement provides.”
Five other people in the room, among them officials who favored and opposed the deal, related accounts similar to Wexler, the first Jew in Congress to endorse Obama’s presidential run in 2007, who favors the deal. Four asked not to be identified.
In the first 30 minutes of the meeting, Obama picked through the sanctions relief for nuclear restriction deal reached last month between Iran and six major powers and argued that it cut off Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon.
Obama displayed a familiarity with the arguments among opponents of the deal, even having read the talking points memo AIPAC distributed to more than 600 activists who flew in last week, according to Greg Rosenbaum, the chairman of the National Jewish Democratic Council, and the only other participant besides Wexler, to speak on the record.
Among the frustrations Obama expressed, Wexler said, was that some materials distributed by pro-Israel groups suggest sanctions relief will kick in straight way, and not after Iran has met the deal’s requirements to roll back uranium and plutonium enrichment. (It’s not clear if that was one of the AIPAC talking points.)
Wexler summed up Obama’s message as: “The debate is too important for the promotion of inaccuracies and misleading misrepresentations.”
Obama was especially frustrated that AIPAC allowed his top officials just 30 minutes to explain their side of the deal last week, in an encounter that included no questions from the audience.
AIPAC officials have said that the White House requested the meeting at the last minute with Denis McDonough, his chief of staff; Wendy Sherman, the top U.S. negotiator at the Iran talks, and Adam Szubin, Obama’s top sanctions enforcement official. More than 30 minutes would have impinged on lobbying appointments, the officials said.
Obama, who had directed his staff to ask AIPAC for the meeting, said he was ready to give AIPAC four hours after the activists finished their meetings.
The two AIPAC lay leaders at the Tuesday meeting at the White House were Michael Kassen and Lee Rosenberg, both past presidents. Obama expressed disappointment that some of the organizations attacking the plan were led by friends, an apparent reference to Rosenberg, who was a fundraiser for Obama.
An AIPAC spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment.
Deal opponents at the meeting complained that they had been depicted as warmongers because Obama insists that the only alternative to his plan is war. Obama said that there were among the plan’s critics those who favored war, but acknowledged that was not true of all of the opponents. Nonetheless, he said, he would continue to point out that the likely outcome of the plan’s failure was war.
The deal critics also criticized Obama for saying in a conference call with liberal groups last week that his opponents were funded by billionaires. Obama noted that an AIPAC affiliate was ready to spend between $20 and $40 million to kill the deal, and he saw nothing wrong with pointing that out to his followers.
Much of the conversation focused on the split the deal is generating in the Jewish community, which Obama said concerned him, said Rosenbaum, whose Jewish Democratic group backs the Iran deal.
According to Rosenbaum, the president said that “he felt that if we continue to make this personal and substitute attacks for the deal pro or con, we weaken the Jewish community and the long-term U.S.-Israel relationship.”
Another participant said Obama acknowledged anxieties among some pro-Israel leaders about making public profound differences with Israel, but said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s adamant opposition to the deal left him little choice.
Among the other groups represented were J Street, the liberal Middle East policy group that backs the deal, and representatives of an array of groups that have yet to pronounce, including the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Jewish Federations of North America, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League and representatives of the Reform and Conservative movements. The Orthodox Union, which opposes the deal, was also present. There were regional leaders present as well.
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4)
Israeli Preemptive Action, Western Reaction
Israel Can’t Count on the West to Protect it. Will Israel do the unthinkable to stop the unimaginable?
by Victor Davis Hanson
Israeli Air Force F-16 fighter (Jack Guez/AFP/Getty)
The Obama administration seems peeved that almost everyone in Israel, left and right, has no use for the present Iranian–American deal to thwart Iran’s efforts to get the bomb.
Indeed, at times John Kerry has hinted darkly that Israel’s opposition to the pact might incur American wrath should the deal be tabled — even though Kerry knows that the polls show a clear majority of Americans being against the proposed agreement while remaining quite supportive of the Jewish state. President Obama, from time to time, suggests that his agreement is being sabotaged by nefarious lobbying groups, big-time check writers, and neoconservative supporters of the Iraq war — all shorthand, apparently, for pushy Jewish groups.
Obama and his negotiators seem surprised that Israelis take quite seriously Iranian leaders’ taunts over the past 35 years that they would like to liquidate the Jewish state and everyone in it. The Israelis, for some reason, remember that well before Hitler came to power, he had bragged about the idea of killing Jews en masse in his sloppily composed autobiographical Mein Kampf. Few in Germany or abroad had taken the raving young Hitler too seriously. Even in the late 1930s, when German Jews were being rounded up and haphazardly killed on German streets by state-sanctioned thugs, most observers considered such activities merely periodic excesses or outbursts from non-governmental Black- and Brownshirts.
The Obama administration, with vast oceans between Tehran and the United States, tsk-tsks over Iranian threats as revolutionary hyperbole served up for domestic consumption. The Israelis, with less than a thousand miles between themselves and Tehran, do not — and cannot. Given the 20th century’s history, Israel has good reason not to trust either the United States or Europe to ensure the security of the Jewish state. Israel has learned from the despicable anti-Semitism now prevalent at the U.N. and from the increasing thuggery directed at Jews in Europe that the world at large would shed crocodile tears over the passing of Israel on the day of its destruction, but, the next day, sigh and get right back to business in a “that was then, this is now” style.
In 1981 the Israelis took out the Iraqi nuclear reactor — sold to Saddam Hussein by France. They were ritually blasted as state terrorists and worse by major U.S. newspapers and at the United Nations — though not by Khomeini’s Iran, which earlier had failed in a preemptive bombing strike to do much damage to the Osirak reactor. Today, in retrospect, most nations are privately glad that the Israelis removed the reactor from a country that had hundreds of years’ worth of natural-gas and oil supplies and no need for nuclear power — and that is now under assault from ISIS.
In 2007, when the Israelis preempted once more, and destroyed the al-Kibar nuclear facility that was under construction in Syria, the world, after initial silence, again in Pavlovian fashion became outraged at such preemptive bombing. The global chorus claimed that there was no intelligence confirming that the North Koreans had helped to launch a Syrian uranium-enrichment plant.
Yet eight years later, most observers abroad once again privately shrug that Bashar Assad most certainly had hired the Koreans to build a nuclear processing plant — and are quietly satisfied that the Israelis took care of it. Note that the al-Kibar site lies in territory now controlled by ISIS. One can imagine a variety of terrifying contemporary scenarios had the Israelis not preempted. Most of those who condemned Israel’s attack would now be worrying about an ISIS improvised explosive device, packed with dirty uranium, that might go off in a major Western city.
In all these cases, the Israelis assumed that Western intelligence about nuclear proliferation in the Middle East was unreliable. They took for granted that Westerners automatically would blame Israelis for any preemptive attack against an Islamic nuclear site. And they likewise concluded that, privately and belatedly, Westerners would eventually be happy that the Israelis had belled the would-be nuclear cat.
But in a larger sense, the Israelis also recall the sad story of the West and the Holocaust less than 75 years ago — a horror central to the birthing of a “never again” Jewish state. By 1943, the outlines of the Nazis’ Final Solution were well known in both Washington and London; Jews were already being gassed at German death camps in Poland in an effort to kill every Jew from the Atlantic Ocean to the Volga River.
It was also a matter of record that the major Western democracies — America, Britain, and prewar France — had refused sanctuary to millions of Jewish refugees who had been stripped of their property by the Third Reich and told to leave Germany and its occupied territories. In some notorious cases, shiploads of Jews were turned away after docking in Western ports and were sent back to Nazi-occupied Europe, where the passengers were disembarked and soon afterward gassed. Moreover, Israelis understand that Hitler’s Final Solution would have been far more difficult to implement without the active participation of sympathetic anti-Semites in occupied European nations, who volunteered to round up their own Jews and send them on German trains eastward to the death camps.
In the case of the United States, anti-Semitic or indifferent officials high up in the State Department and elsewhere within the Roosevelt administration went out of their way to hide data about the plight of Jewish refugees, and circumvented protocol in order to refuse entry into the United States to the vast majority of Jews fleeing the Holocaust. The British were nearly as exclusionary, and also did their best to stop Jewish refugees from fleeing to Palestine to escape the death camps.
As it happens, Fascist and Nazi-allied Japan was sometimes more sympathetic to Jews desperate to leave Europe than were the Allies. Indeed, Hitler and his Nazi top echelon constantly bragged about the fact that neither the Allied powers nor occupied European nations wanted to take Jews off Berlin’s hands — proof, in Nazi eyes, of a supportive wink-and-nod attitude to the Holocaust. Each time the Allies published a threat to the Nazi leadership that there would be an accounting and war-crime trials after the war, Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler remembered that none of these outraged governments wanted to accept Jews themselves, and thus they must secretly still have remained indifferent to their fate. Thus the threats rang hollow to the Nazis, and the crematoria burned on.
By mid-1943 at the latest, American authorities had comprehensive knowledge — from firsthand reports by camp escapees, from photo reconnaissance, and from brave Germans who passed on detailed inside information through the neutral Swiss — of the vast scope of the Holocaust. They were constantly beseeched by international Jewish advocates to at least bomb the crematoria and gas chambers at Auschwitz, which were within range of the Allies’ four-engine heavy bombers. Indeed, an Allied bombing mission would on occasion hit one of the key German factories that surrounded Auschwitz itself — to the delight of the doomed inmates of the death camps.
Given that eventually over 10,000 Jews per day were being gassed and cremated at Auschwitz, almost every Jewish leader advocated bombing the camps to destroy the rail links, the intricate camp machinery, and the SS guards so essential to the perpetration of the Holocaust. Again, such pleas were met with both indifference and lies, once more offered up by heralded American statesmen like U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long and well-connected consigliere and future “wise man” John McCloy of the War Department. The latter falsely argued at times that the camps were not really in reach of Allied bombers, or that the numbers of Jews being slaughtered were exaggerated, or that the diversion of even one or two missions from the strategic bombing of Germany would hamper the entire Allied war effort.
After the war, with rising Cold War tensions and a need to ensure that the West German public remained firmly in the new NATO alliance, many Nazi war criminals either were let out of prison early, had their sentences commuted, or were never charged at all. For all the Western empathy about the horrific Final Solution, Jews remembered (1) that it would once have been possible to save many fleeing Jews, if only the democracies had just allowed in political refugees; (2) that many of the death camps could have been leveled by Allied bombers in their last year or two of full-bore operation, saving perhaps 2 to 3 million of the doomed; and (3) that the political expediency of the postwar Western alliance had trumped bringing Nazi war criminals to a full accounting for their horrendous acts.
The Israelis have taken to heart lots of lessons over the last 70 years. They have concluded that often the world quietly wants Israel to deal with existential threats emanating from the Middle East while loudly damning it when it does. They have learned from the experience of the Holocaust that, for good or evil, Jews are on their own and can never again trust in the world’s professed humanity to prevent another Holocaust. And they are convinced that they can also never again err on the side of the probability that national leaders, with deadly weapons in their grasp, do not really mean all the unhinged things they shout and scream about killing Jews.
Given all that, we should conclude that any deal that leads, now or in the near future, to an Iranian bomb is unacceptable to Israel — a nation that will likely soon have no choice but to consider the unthinkable in order to prevent the unimaginable.
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5)
The Wages of Racial Discord
The president will leave office with race relations at their lowest ebb in decades. His politics of division bear much of the responsibility.
The president at a conference of the National Action Network, founded by Rev. Al Sharpton (right), April 11, 2014. PHOTO: JULIA XANTHOS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
One great irony of the current presidency is that Barack Obama won the support of so many seasoned political journalists—not to mention otherwise-skeptical voters—who thought that a black president would improve racial unity. David Remnick of the New Yorker called him “the bridge.” Time magazine’s Joe Klein assured readers that Mr. Obama, who “transcends the racial divide so effortlessly,” would help America turn the page on race. But six years in, that hasn’t happened.
According to a CBS News/New York Times poll in July, nearly 60% of Americans, including large majorities of both blacks and whites, say race relations “are generally bad.” Almost 40% say they are getting worse. Other surveys back those findings. CNN pollsters reported in March that the share of people who think race relations have improved on Mr. Obama’s watch had fallen to 15% this year from 32% in 2009, while the share who think relations have worsened grew to 39% from 6%. A Gallup survey in January reported that 62% of respondents are “somewhat dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with the state of race relations in the country, versus 40% in 2008.
The press has dutifully reported this racial retrogression but is reluctant to lay any blame on Mr. Obama. The president obviously isn’t responsible for the racially charged incidents that have occurred on his watch, from Ferguson, Mo., to Baltimore, to Charleston, S.C. Still, he ought to be held accountable for the racial impact of his reactions, his polices and his political bedfellows.
Mr. Obama campaigned as a racial conciliator, someone who believed, as he said in a speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2004, that “there is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s the United States of America.”
But that is not how he has governed. As president, he has repeatedly—and often prematurely—taken sides in local police matters involving black suspects.
He has supported college-admissions policies that favor black applicants over their white and Asian peers. He has dispatched his attorney general to accuse advocates of voter ID laws of trying to disenfranchise blacks and Hispanics. He has pressured wealthy suburbs to change zoning laws and build low-income housing so that he can shoehorn minorities into neighborhoods where they otherwise can’t afford to live. He has leaned on local school districts to discipline students differently based on their race and ethnicity rather than solely on their misbehavior. He has appeared before activists at the NAACP to denounce the criminal-justice system as racially skewed.
When Mr. Obama first ran for president, he went to such lengths to distance himself from professional agitators such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson that “Saturday Night Live” ran a cartoon parody that featured then-Sen. Obama sending Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson off to places like Botswana and Paraguay so that they couldn’t interfere with the campaign.
These days, Mr. Obama has the reverend on speed dial. Mr. Sharpton is a frequent White House visitor and the president’s point man on civil-rights issues. Given that the president is keeping company with someone who monetizes racial conflict for a living, is it any wonder that so many people believe race relations have regressed?
In the CBS News/Times poll, 77% of respondents said that race relations in their own community were generally good, but only 37% said they were good nationwide. One explanation for the disparity could be that the president’s emphasis on race in general and racial conflict in particular has made things seem worse than they really are. Presidents—especially the ones who can count on mostly favorable mainstream-media coverage—have the ability to control the narrative. And racial strife, or the perception of it, works to the political advantage of Mr. Obama and the political left.
The Black Lives Matter movement may be built on a falsehood—that cops shooting blacks is somehow a bigger problem than blacks shooting each other—but the falsehood will be indulged by politicians like Mr. Obama because the last thing Democrats want is for black people to stop seeing themselves as helpless victims of systemic racism.
“A central problem—perhaps the central problem—in improving the relationship between white and black Americans is the difference in racial crime rates,” observed the late political scientist James Q. Wilson. “The high black crime rate cannot be wished away by talk of racism, overarresting, excessive punishment, or whites having allegedly drugged or armed blacks.”
Race relations under Mr. Obama haven’t soured by accident, and so long as a wisher-in-chief occupies the Oval Office, there is little chance of improvement. Community organizers specialize in creating social divisions, not bridging them. So do presidents who profit politically from racial anxiety. America has learned these lessons the hard way.
Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor, is the author of “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” (Encounter Books, 2014).
5a)
The Unsettling, Anti-Science Certitude on Global Warming
Climate-change ‘deniers’ are accused of heresy by true believers. That doesn’t sound like science to me.
Are there any phrases in today’s political lexicon more obnoxious than “the science is settled” and “climate-change deniers”?
The first is an oxymoron. By definition, science is never settled. It is always subject to change in the light of new evidence. The second phrase is nothing but an ad hominem attack, meant to evoke “Holocaust deniers,” those people who maintain that the Nazi Holocaust is a fiction, ignoring the overwhelming, incontestable evidence that it is a historical fact. Hillary Clinton’s speech about climate change on Monday in Des Moines, Iowa, included an attack on “deniers.”
PHOTO: CORBIS
The phrases are in no way applicable to the science of Earth’s climate. The climate is an enormously complex system, with a very large number of inputs and outputs, many of which we don’t fully understand—and some we may well not even know about yet. To note this, and to observe that there is much contradictory evidence for assertions of a coming global-warming catastrophe, isn’t to “deny” anything; it is to state a fact. In other words, the science is unsettled—to say that we have it all wrapped up is itself a form of denial. The essence of scientific inquiry is the assumption that there is always more to learn.
Science takes time, and climatology is only about 170 years old. Consider something as simple as the question of whether the sun revolves around the Earth or vice versa.
The Greek philosopher Aristarchus suggested a heliocentric model of the solar system as early as the third century B.C. But it was Ptolemy’s geocentric model from the second century A.D. that predominated. It took until the mid-19th century to solve the puzzle definitively.
Assuming that “the science is settled” can only impede science. For example, there has never been so settled a branch of science as Newtonian physics. But in the 1840s, as telescopes improved, it was noticed that Mercury’s orbit stubbornly failed to behave as Newtonian equations said that it should.
It seems not to have occurred to anyone to question Newton, so the only explanation was that Mercury must be being perturbed by a planet still closer to the sun. The French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier had triumphed in 1846 when he had predicted, within one degree, the location of a planet (later named Neptune) that was perturbing Uranus’s orbit.
He set out to calculate the orbit of the planet that he was sure was responsible for Mercury’s orbital eccentricity. He named it Vulcan, after the Roman god of fire. Once Le Verrier had done the math, hundreds of astronomers, both amateur and professional, searched for the illusive planet for the next few decades. But telescopic observation near the immensely bright sun is both difficult and dangerous. More than one astronomer injured his eyesight in the search.
Several possible sightings were reported, but whether they were illusions, comets, or asteroids is unknown, as none could be tracked over time. After Le Verrier’s death in 1877 the hunt for Vulcan slacked off though it never ceased entirely.
Only in 1915 was the reason no one could find Vulcan explained: It wasn’t there. Newton had written in the “Principia” that he assumed space to be everywhere and always the same. But a man named Albert Einstein that year, in his theory of general relativity, demonstrated that it wasn’t always the same, for space itself is distorted by hugely massive objects such as the sun.
When Mercury’s orbit was calculated using Einstein’s equations rather than Newton’s, the planet turned out to be exactly where Einstein said it would be, one of the early proofs of general relativity.
Climate science today is a veritable cornucopia of unanswered questions. Why did the warming trend between 1978 and 1998 cease, although computer climate models predict steady warming? How sensitive is the climate to increased carbon-dioxide levels? What feedback mechanisms are there that would increase or decrease that sensitivity? Why did episodes of high carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere earlier in Earth’s history have temperature levels both above and below the average?
With so many questions still unanswered, why are many climate scientists, politicians—and the left generally—so anxious to lock down the science of climatology and engage in protracted name-calling? Well, one powerful explanation for the politicians is obvious: self-interest.
If anthropogenic climate change is a reality, then that would be a huge problem only government could deal with. It would be a heaven-sent opportunity for the left to vastly increase government control over the economy and the personal lives of citizens.
Moreover, the release of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in 2009 showed climate scientists concerned with the lack of recent warming and how to “hide the decline.” The communications showed that whatever the emailers were engaged in, it was not the disinterested pursuit of science.
Another batch of 5,000 emails written by top climate scientists came out in 2011, discussing, among other public-relations matters, how to deal with skeptical editors and how to suppress unfavorable data. It is a measure of the intellectual corruption of the mainstream media that this wasn’t the scandal of the century. But then again I forget, “the science is settled.”
Mr. Gordon is the author of the forthcoming “Washington’s Monument and the Fascinating History of the Obelisk,” out early next year from Bloomsbury.
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