===
Comment from one of my staunchest friends and fellow memo readers: " Hello Dick,
just a few lines to tell you how appalled I am by the Islamic terrorist activities in Israel and the total lack of support for Israel provided by the US government. Sending John Kerry is certainly not going to help, especially after his surrender in Iran . As a Christian, I see it as our duty to fully support Israel in taking extreme steps against this psychopathic Islamic terrorism : if this is an expression of "religion," then perhaps the meaning of the word "religion" has lost it's meaning. it is an expression of barbarism that goes back to the Stone Age, and it should he dealt with in the same way.
B--"
https://www.youtube.com/embed/A4U7WoDDFyw?rel=0
===
The immoral resort to moral equivalence by Victor Hanson. (See 1 below.)
Palestinians spend a great deal of time engaging in terrorism and then use the tragic consequences to make favorable demands.
Palestinians may be wicked and evil but they are not stupid.
They know how to manipulate weak Westerners and could have even taught Hitler's Hess and Goebbels a thing or two. (See 1a below.)
===
Obama continues to play politics when it comes to adhering to his sworn oath and commitment to protect and defend America.
Apparently Obama has contempt for the military because they are strong. The weak always do.
That is why Democrats , Liberals, progressives and Hollywood were turned off by Reagan, John Wayne and G.W among many others. Overt patriotism is not one of their top deck cards. (See 2 below.)
===
The hearings involving Hillarious could well turn into a farce because Demwits will protect her at all cost and in doing so will make a mockery of Gowdy's pursuit to get at the bottom of another Administration blunder.
Questioning ethical behaviour on Hillarious' part has always been a useless pursuit because the Clinton's have proven to be experts at dodging, weaving and blocking.
The public does not trust them and for good reason based on their activities but what difference does it make.
American values, American respect for the law and an attempt at even handedness no longer counts for much. We have become a nation so used to corruption at the highest level we no longer give much of a damn. We have become immune to unethical activities.
In the end, I suspect Gowdy will be the one on trial. It is an old trick at which Demwits are expert.(See 3 below.)
===
It is quite evident the U.N. might have served a purpose some thirty plus years ago but since then it has become a play pen for Arabs and Muslims and they, along with blocking from China and Russia, have turned this organization into a farce engaged in constant anti-Semitic actions.
The latest evidence of how far UNESCO has sunk is the proposed vote on the status of Jerusalem's
Wall!
The Obama Administration has given subtle confirmation as America engages in ambivalent support of our most consistent ally in the region - Israel. (See 4 below.)
===
Dick
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) Moral Equivalence in the Middle East
By Victor Hanson
The West has developed a dangerous concern for ‘proportionality.’ In the current epidemic of Palestinian violence, scores of Arab youths are attacking, supposedly spontaneously, Israeli citizens with knives. Apparently, edged weapons have more Koranic authority, and, in the sense of media spectacle, they provide greater splashes of blood. Thus the attacker is regularly described as “unarmed” and a victim when he is “disproportionately” stopped by bullets.
The Obama State Department has condemned the use of “excessive” Israeli force in response to Palestinian terrorism. John Kirby, the hapless State Department spokesman, blamed “both” sides for terrorism, and the president himself called on attackers and their victims to “tamp down the violence.” In short, the present U.S. government — which is subsidizing the Palestinians to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year — is incapable of distinguishing those who employ terrorist violence from the victims against whom the terrorism is directed.
But why is the Obama administration — which can apparently distinguish those who send out drones from those who are blown up by them on the suspicion of employing terrorist violence — morally incapable of calling out Palestinian violence? After all, in the American case, we blow away suspects whom we think are likely terrorists; in the Israeli instance, they shoot or arrest those who have clearly just committed a terrorist act.
The One-State Solution, Ctd. Two reasons stand out. One, Obama’s Middle East policies are in shambles. Phony red lines, faux deadlines, reset with Putin, surrendering all the original bargaining chips in the Iranian deal, snubbing Israel, cozying up to the Muslim Brotherhood, dismissing the threat of ISIS, allowing Iraq to collapse by abruptly pulling out all American troops, giving way to serial indecision in Afghanistan, ostracizing the moderate Sunni regimes, wrecking Libya, and setting the stage for Benghazi — all of these were the result of administration choices, not fated events. One of the results of this collapse of American power and presence in the Middle East is an emboldened Palestinian movement that has recently renounced the Oslo Accords and encouraged the offensive of edged weapons.
The Obama Intifada Mahmoud Abbas, the subsidized president of the self-proclaimed Palestinian State, and his subordinates have sanctioned the violence. Any time Palestinians sense distance between the U.S. and Israel, they seek to widen the breach. When the Obama team deliberately and often gratuitously signals its displeasure with Israel, then the Palestinians seek to harden that abstract pique into concrete estrangement. Amid such a collapse of American power, Abbas has scanned the Middle East, surveyed the Obama pronouncements — from his initial Al Arabiya interview and Cairo speech to his current contextualizations and not-so private slapdowns of Netanyahu — and has wagered that Obama likes Israel even less than his public statements might suggest. Accordingly, Abbas assumes that there might be few consequences from America if he incites another “cycle of violence.”
Palestinian Reasoning: Yield to Our Crazy Religious Intolerance or We’ll Kill You The more chaos there is, the more CNN videos of Palestinian terrorists being killed by Israeli civilians or security forces, the more NBC clips of knife-wielding terrorists who are described as unarmed, and the more MSNBC faux maps of Israeli absorption of Palestine, so all the more the Abbas regime and Hamas expect the “international community” to force further Israeli concessions. The Palestinians hope that they are entering yet another stage in their endless war against Israel.
But this time, given the American recessional, they have new hopes that the emerging Iran–Russia–Syria–Iraq–Hezbollah axis could offer ample power in support of the violence and could help to turn the current asymmetrical war more advantageously conventional. The Palestinians believe, whether accurately or not, that their renewed violence might be a more brutal method of aiding the administration’s own efforts to pressure the Israelis to become more socially just, without which there supposedly cannot be peace in the Middle East.
But there is a second, more general explanation for the moral equivalence and anemic response from the White House. The Obama “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” administration is the first postmodern government in American history, and it has adopted almost all the general culture’s flawed relativist assumptions about human nature. Affluent and leisured Western culture in the 21st century assumes that it has reached a stage of psychological nirvana, in which the Westernized world is no longer threatened in any existential fashion as it often was in the past. That allows Westerners to believe that they no longer have limbic brains, and so are no longer bound by Neanderthal ideas like deterrence, balance of power, military alliances, and the use of force to settle disagreements. Their wealth and technology assure them that they are free, then, to enter a brave new world of zero culpability, zero competition, and zero hostility that will ensure perpetual tranquility and thus perpetual enjoyment of our present material bounty.
There Is No God But Hephaestus — And Fire Is His Messenger Our children today play tee-ball, where there are no winners and losers — and thus they are schooled that competition is not just detrimental but also can, by such training, be eliminated entirely. Our adolescents are treated according to the philosophy of “zero tolerance,” in which the hero who stops the punk from bullying a weaker victim is likewise suspended from school. Under the pretense of such smug moral superiority, our schools have abdicated the hard and ancient task of distinguishing bad behavior from good and then proceeding with the necessary rewards and punishments.
Our universities have junked military history, which schooled generations on how wars start, proceed, and end. Instead, “conflict resolution and peace studies” programs proliferate, in which empathy and dialogue are supposed to contextualize the aggressor and thus persuade him to desist and seek help — as if aggression, greed, and the desire for intimidation were treatable syndromes rather than ancient evils that have remained dangerous throughout history.
Under the canons of the last 2,500 years of Western warfare, disproportionality was the method by which aggressors were either deterred or stopped. Human nature is not so easily transcended, just because a new therapeutic generation has confused its iPhone apps and Priuses with commensurate moral and ethical advancement.
Under the canons of the last 2,500 years of Western warfare, disproportionality was the method by which aggressors were either deterred or stopped. Deterrence — which alone prevented wars — was predicated on the shared assumption that starting a conflict would bring more violence down upon the aggressor than he could ever inflict on his victim. Once lost, deterrence was restored usually by disproportionate responses that led to victory over and humiliation of the aggressive party.
The wreckage of Berlin trumped anything inflicted by the Luftwaffe on London. The Japanese killed fewer than 3,000 Americans at Pearl Harbor; the Americans killed 30 times that number of Japanese in a single March 10, 1945, incendiary raid on Tokyo. “They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” was the standard philosophy by which aggressive powers were taught never again to start hostilities. Defeat and humiliation led to peace and reconciliation.
The tragic but necessary resort to disproportionate force by the attacked not only taught an aggressor that he could not win the fight he had started, but also reminded him that his targeted enemy might not be completely sane, and thus could be capable of any and all retaliation. Unpredictability and the fear sown by the unknown also help to restore deterrence, and with it calm and peace. In contrast, predictable, proportionate responses can reassure the aggressor that he is in control of the tempo of the war that he in fact started.
And worse still, the doctrine of proportionality suggests that the victim does not seek victory and resolution, but will do almost anything to return to the status quo antebellum — which, of course, was disadvantageous and shaped by the constant threat of unexpected attack by its enemies. Westerners are either unwilling or unable to distinguish the more culpable from the more innocent.
They lack the confidence to make moral judgments. Applying this to the Middle East, the Palestinians believe that the new American indifference to the region and Washington’s slapdowns of Netanyahu have reshuffled relative power. They now hope that there is no deterrent to violence and that, if it should break out, there will be only a proportionate and modest response from predictable Westerners.
Under the related doctrine of moral equivalence, Westerners are either unwilling or unable to distinguish the more culpable from the more innocent. Instead, because the world more often divides by 55 to 45 percent rather than 99 to 1 percent certainty, Westerners lack the confidence to make moral judgments — afraid that too many critics might question their liberal sensitivities, a charge that in the absence of dearth, hunger, and disease is considered the worst catastrophe facing an affluent Western elite.
The question is not only whether the Obama administration, in private, favors the cause of the radical Palestinians over a Western ally like Israel, but also whether it is even intellectually and morally capable of distinguishing a democratic state that protects human rights from a non-democratic, authoritarian, and terrorist regime that historically has hated the West, and the United States in particular — and is currently engaged in clear-cut aggression.
NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425787/obama-palestinians-istaelis
1a)
The Western Wall (Photo: Eli Mandelbaum)
Aerial view of Rachel's Tomb (Photo: Lowshot.com)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)
The immoral resort to moral equivalence by Victor Hanson. (See 1 below.)
Palestinians spend a great deal of time engaging in terrorism and then use the tragic consequences to make favorable demands.
Palestinians may be wicked and evil but they are not stupid.
They know how to manipulate weak Westerners and could have even taught Hitler's Hess and Goebbels a thing or two. (See 1a below.)
===
Obama continues to play politics when it comes to adhering to his sworn oath and commitment to protect and defend America.
Apparently Obama has contempt for the military because they are strong. The weak always do.
That is why Democrats , Liberals, progressives and Hollywood were turned off by Reagan, John Wayne and G.W among many others. Overt patriotism is not one of their top deck cards. (See 2 below.)
===
The hearings involving Hillarious could well turn into a farce because Demwits will protect her at all cost and in doing so will make a mockery of Gowdy's pursuit to get at the bottom of another Administration blunder.
Questioning ethical behaviour on Hillarious' part has always been a useless pursuit because the Clinton's have proven to be experts at dodging, weaving and blocking.
The public does not trust them and for good reason based on their activities but what difference does it make.
American values, American respect for the law and an attempt at even handedness no longer counts for much. We have become a nation so used to corruption at the highest level we no longer give much of a damn. We have become immune to unethical activities.
In the end, I suspect Gowdy will be the one on trial. It is an old trick at which Demwits are expert.(See 3 below.)
===
It is quite evident the U.N. might have served a purpose some thirty plus years ago but since then it has become a play pen for Arabs and Muslims and they, along with blocking from China and Russia, have turned this organization into a farce engaged in constant anti-Semitic actions.
The latest evidence of how far UNESCO has sunk is the proposed vote on the status of Jerusalem's
Wall!
The Obama Administration has given subtle confirmation as America engages in ambivalent support of our most consistent ally in the region - Israel. (See 4 below.)
===
Dick
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) Moral Equivalence in the Middle East
By Victor Hanson
The West has developed a dangerous concern for ‘proportionality.’ In the current epidemic of Palestinian violence, scores of Arab youths are attacking, supposedly spontaneously, Israeli citizens with knives. Apparently, edged weapons have more Koranic authority, and, in the sense of media spectacle, they provide greater splashes of blood. Thus the attacker is regularly described as “unarmed” and a victim when he is “disproportionately” stopped by bullets.
The Obama State Department has condemned the use of “excessive” Israeli force in response to Palestinian terrorism. John Kirby, the hapless State Department spokesman, blamed “both” sides for terrorism, and the president himself called on attackers and their victims to “tamp down the violence.” In short, the present U.S. government — which is subsidizing the Palestinians to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year — is incapable of distinguishing those who employ terrorist violence from the victims against whom the terrorism is directed.
But why is the Obama administration — which can apparently distinguish those who send out drones from those who are blown up by them on the suspicion of employing terrorist violence — morally incapable of calling out Palestinian violence? After all, in the American case, we blow away suspects whom we think are likely terrorists; in the Israeli instance, they shoot or arrest those who have clearly just committed a terrorist act.
The One-State Solution, Ctd. Two reasons stand out. One, Obama’s Middle East policies are in shambles. Phony red lines, faux deadlines, reset with Putin, surrendering all the original bargaining chips in the Iranian deal, snubbing Israel, cozying up to the Muslim Brotherhood, dismissing the threat of ISIS, allowing Iraq to collapse by abruptly pulling out all American troops, giving way to serial indecision in Afghanistan, ostracizing the moderate Sunni regimes, wrecking Libya, and setting the stage for Benghazi — all of these were the result of administration choices, not fated events. One of the results of this collapse of American power and presence in the Middle East is an emboldened Palestinian movement that has recently renounced the Oslo Accords and encouraged the offensive of edged weapons.
The Obama Intifada Mahmoud Abbas, the subsidized president of the self-proclaimed Palestinian State, and his subordinates have sanctioned the violence. Any time Palestinians sense distance between the U.S. and Israel, they seek to widen the breach. When the Obama team deliberately and often gratuitously signals its displeasure with Israel, then the Palestinians seek to harden that abstract pique into concrete estrangement. Amid such a collapse of American power, Abbas has scanned the Middle East, surveyed the Obama pronouncements — from his initial Al Arabiya interview and Cairo speech to his current contextualizations and not-so private slapdowns of Netanyahu — and has wagered that Obama likes Israel even less than his public statements might suggest. Accordingly, Abbas assumes that there might be few consequences from America if he incites another “cycle of violence.”
Palestinian Reasoning: Yield to Our Crazy Religious Intolerance or We’ll Kill You The more chaos there is, the more CNN videos of Palestinian terrorists being killed by Israeli civilians or security forces, the more NBC clips of knife-wielding terrorists who are described as unarmed, and the more MSNBC faux maps of Israeli absorption of Palestine, so all the more the Abbas regime and Hamas expect the “international community” to force further Israeli concessions. The Palestinians hope that they are entering yet another stage in their endless war against Israel.
But this time, given the American recessional, they have new hopes that the emerging Iran–Russia–Syria–Iraq–Hezbollah axis could offer ample power in support of the violence and could help to turn the current asymmetrical war more advantageously conventional. The Palestinians believe, whether accurately or not, that their renewed violence might be a more brutal method of aiding the administration’s own efforts to pressure the Israelis to become more socially just, without which there supposedly cannot be peace in the Middle East.
But there is a second, more general explanation for the moral equivalence and anemic response from the White House. The Obama “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” administration is the first postmodern government in American history, and it has adopted almost all the general culture’s flawed relativist assumptions about human nature. Affluent and leisured Western culture in the 21st century assumes that it has reached a stage of psychological nirvana, in which the Westernized world is no longer threatened in any existential fashion as it often was in the past. That allows Westerners to believe that they no longer have limbic brains, and so are no longer bound by Neanderthal ideas like deterrence, balance of power, military alliances, and the use of force to settle disagreements. Their wealth and technology assure them that they are free, then, to enter a brave new world of zero culpability, zero competition, and zero hostility that will ensure perpetual tranquility and thus perpetual enjoyment of our present material bounty.
There Is No God But Hephaestus — And Fire Is His Messenger Our children today play tee-ball, where there are no winners and losers — and thus they are schooled that competition is not just detrimental but also can, by such training, be eliminated entirely. Our adolescents are treated according to the philosophy of “zero tolerance,” in which the hero who stops the punk from bullying a weaker victim is likewise suspended from school. Under the pretense of such smug moral superiority, our schools have abdicated the hard and ancient task of distinguishing bad behavior from good and then proceeding with the necessary rewards and punishments.
Our universities have junked military history, which schooled generations on how wars start, proceed, and end. Instead, “conflict resolution and peace studies” programs proliferate, in which empathy and dialogue are supposed to contextualize the aggressor and thus persuade him to desist and seek help — as if aggression, greed, and the desire for intimidation were treatable syndromes rather than ancient evils that have remained dangerous throughout history.
Under the canons of the last 2,500 years of Western warfare, disproportionality was the method by which aggressors were either deterred or stopped. Human nature is not so easily transcended, just because a new therapeutic generation has confused its iPhone apps and Priuses with commensurate moral and ethical advancement.
Under the canons of the last 2,500 years of Western warfare, disproportionality was the method by which aggressors were either deterred or stopped. Deterrence — which alone prevented wars — was predicated on the shared assumption that starting a conflict would bring more violence down upon the aggressor than he could ever inflict on his victim. Once lost, deterrence was restored usually by disproportionate responses that led to victory over and humiliation of the aggressive party.
The wreckage of Berlin trumped anything inflicted by the Luftwaffe on London. The Japanese killed fewer than 3,000 Americans at Pearl Harbor; the Americans killed 30 times that number of Japanese in a single March 10, 1945, incendiary raid on Tokyo. “They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” was the standard philosophy by which aggressive powers were taught never again to start hostilities. Defeat and humiliation led to peace and reconciliation.
The tragic but necessary resort to disproportionate force by the attacked not only taught an aggressor that he could not win the fight he had started, but also reminded him that his targeted enemy might not be completely sane, and thus could be capable of any and all retaliation. Unpredictability and the fear sown by the unknown also help to restore deterrence, and with it calm and peace. In contrast, predictable, proportionate responses can reassure the aggressor that he is in control of the tempo of the war that he in fact started.
And worse still, the doctrine of proportionality suggests that the victim does not seek victory and resolution, but will do almost anything to return to the status quo antebellum — which, of course, was disadvantageous and shaped by the constant threat of unexpected attack by its enemies. Westerners are either unwilling or unable to distinguish the more culpable from the more innocent.
They lack the confidence to make moral judgments. Applying this to the Middle East, the Palestinians believe that the new American indifference to the region and Washington’s slapdowns of Netanyahu have reshuffled relative power. They now hope that there is no deterrent to violence and that, if it should break out, there will be only a proportionate and modest response from predictable Westerners.
Under the related doctrine of moral equivalence, Westerners are either unwilling or unable to distinguish the more culpable from the more innocent. Instead, because the world more often divides by 55 to 45 percent rather than 99 to 1 percent certainty, Westerners lack the confidence to make moral judgments — afraid that too many critics might question their liberal sensitivities, a charge that in the absence of dearth, hunger, and disease is considered the worst catastrophe facing an affluent Western elite.
The question is not only whether the Obama administration, in private, favors the cause of the radical Palestinians over a Western ally like Israel, but also whether it is even intellectually and morally capable of distinguishing a democratic state that protects human rights from a non-democratic, authoritarian, and terrorist regime that historically has hated the West, and the United States in particular — and is currently engaged in clear-cut aggression.
NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425787/obama-palestinians-istaelis
1a)
Palestinian proposal to UNESCO: Western Wall is part of al-Aqsa
A new proposal to establish that the Western Wall is part of al-Aqsa Mosque is set to be submitted by the Palestinians to a vote at UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) next week, Ynet learned Thursday.
The proposal states among other things that the Western Wall is part of al-Aqsa Mosque, and condemns the Israeli government for its call on citizens to bear arms because of the recent wave of terror attacks – presumably referring to statements by the mayors of Jerusalem and the police chief in Ashdod. The proposal was presented to the Executive Council of UNESCO, which has 58 member countries.
Since the Palestinians are not members of the committee, the six Arab states submitted the proposal on behalf of the Palestinians: Algeria, Egypt, Kuwait, Morocco, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. However, senior Israeli sources say that the Palestinians are simultaneously acting to move the proposal to the UNESCO plenum, in which they are recognized as a state.
The Western Wall (Photo: Eli Mandelbaum)
Israel has been acting behind the scenes to persuade as many countries as possible to oppose the proposal, or at least to abstain, but it is likely that the proposal will be approved due to the automatic Muslim and Arab majority. Yedioth Ahronoth received a copy of the proposal, which reveals the main points:
1. To declare and confirm that the Western Wall is part of al-Aqsa Mosque, and is called Buraq Plaza (as the Palestinians call the Western Wall). The same applies to the Mughrabi Gate.
2. The Palestinians want the countries of the world to condemn Israel for calling on its citizens to bear arms in light of recent terror wave. The Palestinian argument is that this has led to the continuation of the cycle of violence and has caused multiple casualties.
3. The Palestinians seek to condemn recent actions by Israel and the IDF in Jerusalem, which is called “the occupied capital of Palestine” in the document.
Aerial view of Rachel's Tomb (Photo: Lowshot.com)
4. It calls for a condemnation of Israel for the continued excavations near the Temple Mount and the Old City, in opposition to previous UNESCO decisions. The Palestinians condemn the Israeli refusal to allow UNESCO inspection teams to visit the Temple Mount.
5. Harsh condemnation of “Israeli aggression and illegal measures taken against the freedom of worship and access of Muslim to al-Aqsa Mosque and Israel's attempts to break the status quo since 1967”. Israel is also accused of preventing clerics, sheikhs and preachers from accessing the mosque, in addition to Israeli security forces arresting many people at the mosques. Israel is also condemned for alleged incursions into the mosque.
6. Condemnation of the continued attacks on al-Aqsa Mosque by right-wing Jewish extremists. Palestinians call on Israel, “the occupying power”, to take measures to prevent provocations which violate the sanctity of the mosque, and call for an end to the “aggression” which fuels tensions in the area and among believers.
7. Condemnation of Israel's decision to build a cable car in East Jerusalem and build “Beit Haliba” (an office building and a museum near the Western Wall), a few other buildings and an elevator near the wall.
8. Palestinians call for the confirmation and declaration that the Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel's Tomb (the supposed resting place of grave of Bilal ibn Rabah, a companion of the Prophet Mohammed) are part of Palestine.
9. Condemnation of alleged violence by Israeli settlers and Jewish extremists against Palestinians, including children, intended to harm the character of Hebron. The Palestinians urge “the occupying power” to prevent these attacks.
Israel's Ambassador to UNESCO Carmel Shama Hacohen said in response that while Jews are being massacred on their way to pray, Palestinians are asking to strongly condemn violence and illegal measures that allegedly infringe on the religious freedom of Muslims.
“The Palestinians continue to add fuel to the fire of incitement and ongoing terror,” Shama Hacohen said. “In my first speech to UNESCO last year I warned the world’s countries that false incitement by the Palestinians against Israel especially regarding the Temple Mount means playing with fire. At the last conference in Bonn, I suggested registering the Palestinianian culture of lies as an intangible world heritage site.”
Shama Hacohen added: “The new proposal is tantamount to pouring fuel on the fire of incitement and ongoing terror instead of being responsible and calming the situation down. Of course we must not despair or get alarmed, as they have lies whereas we have the ethical, realistic and historical truth, and it will triumph. The Jewish people and the Western Wall are one and the chances of the Palestinians to Islamize the Western Wall are the same as the chances of Islamizing the Jewish people. Even the morning after the vote the Israeli flag will fly over the wall.
“We pay a high cost for our existence in our country, but there is no responsible partner able to reduce this cost in the near future, because apart from the question of their right to a state in our country, their conduct raises a critical question regarding their ability to act as a responsible country and this is the saddest conclusion from the Palestinian’s conduct at UNESCO,” concluded Shama Hacohen.
2)
Obama Takes the Military Hostage
He’ll veto a bipartisan defense bill to coerce more domestic spending.
President Obama is determined to end his second term in another blaze of spending glory, and toward that end he’s taking the U.S. military hostage. That’s the way to understand his threat to veto the National Defense Authorization Act.
The House and Senate recently passed this annual bill with significant bipartisan majorities and they’ll send it to Mr. Obama as early as Tuesday. The NDAA is a policy bill that contains major military reforms and authorizes $612 billion in national defense spending, though that money would have to be appropriated separately.
The bill matches Mr. Obama’s budget request for an increase of $38 billion above federal budget caps for military spending. The NDAA does this by allocating the money through an Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund, which isn’t subject to the budget caps. The President calls this a budget gimmick, which it is, but that hasn’t stopped Mr. Obama from requesting his own OCO funds when it suits. The point is that this is $38 billion Mr. Obama requested, and that the military needs.
The President’s real goal is to force Republicans to break the caps on non-military domestic spending. His veto threat explains he will not “fix defense without fixing non-defense spending.” So he admits that he’s willing to squeeze a military that is fighting the likes of Islamic State unless he gets more for Head Start, “job training and employment services” and welfare programs.
This intransigence risks derailing vital Pentagon reforms. The NDAA includes Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain’s sweeping overhaul of Defense’s bloated and sluggish acquisition process. The reforms would give the four heads of the armed services more control over their weapons programs—an idea pushed by former Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno. It would give the Pentagon new tools to speed weapons from development to the battlefield, and allow specific units, such as Cyber Command, to roll out technology with fewer bureaucratic roadblocks.
It would also allow Defense to purchase commercial items (say, laptops) from nondefense contractors like Apple, and encourage Silicon Valley to do more to meet U.S. defense needs. The goal is to promote more competition in defense contracting.
The NDAA also contains a historic revamp of military retirement. The Pentagon currently has an all-or-nothing program in which troops qualify for retirement benefits only after 20 years of service. Some 83% of those who serve receive nothing for retirement. The NDAA creates a new 401(k)-style plan that would provide even troops who serve as little as two years with some retirement savings. The program would provide an automatic payout of 1% of base pay, and matching federal funds up to 5% for individual contributions.
The bill contains other important provisions, including funds to provide military aide to Ukraine in its defense against Russian separatists, new money for ballistic missile defense, and a military pay raise.
On the rare occasions—four times—that a President has vetoed a defense authorization bill, he did so over a specific policy dispute. In 1988 Ronald Reagan vetoed a bill that slashed missile-defense funding. George W. Bush vetoed the NDAA in 2007 over a provision allowing plaintiffs lawyers to freeze Iraqi assets in U.S. banks for use in lawsuits brought by the victims of Saddam Hussein. Mr. Bush argued those assets would be vital to Iraq’s ability to rebuild. Congress struck those provisions and returned the bills for signature.
The NDAA has passed for 53 years in a row, making it a rare display of bipartisanship. It passed the Senate this year with 70 votes, including 21 Democrats, and the House with 270 votes, including 37 Democrats. But under pressure from the White House, many of those Democrats may switch to sustain a veto.
It’s hard to find a worse example of Washington dysfunction than a Commander in Chief, backed by fellow Democrats, who is willing to punish the military so he can break the little fiscal discipline that Congress has.
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3)
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