Middle East and Other Musings: A Mixture Of Things To Consider. I Did It My Way!

President Trump is getting attacked for refusing to raise the age of a rifle purchase to 21. He is also getting attacked for a new proposal, out over the weekend, that would arm teachers. Except that is not quite true and the reporters saying it are misrepresenting his proposal. The proposal is quite solid.

First, it is refreshing that the President has walked back the idea of raise the rifle purchase age to 21. Florida has just done it and that just shows this is an issue for the states. Congress need not involve itself.

Second, the President is not proposing arming teachers. He is proposing a voluntary program that would train school personnel. Others are interpreting that as meaning teachers, but that's not in the proposal itself, other than teachers can volunteer if they are so inclined.

The proposal would pay for firearms training for school personnel and would "support the transition of military veterans and retired law enforcement into new careers in education." The proposal also encourages states to adopt Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs). From the outline of the President's proposal, White House staff explain:

ERPOs allow law enforcement, with approval from a court, to remove firearms from individuals who are a demonstrated threat to themselves or others and temporarily to prevent individuals from purchasing new firearms.

The proposal is basically an all hands on deck idea. The Attorney General and Justice Department will audit the FBI's procedures and processing of the tip line. The Secretary of Education will set up a commission to see how schools handle safety and how they handle reporting of problematic behavior. The instant background check procedures will be improved and bureaucrats retrained to make sure they promptly enter appropriate data.

Fortunately, the proposal embraces federalism and recognizes there is not a one size fits all national solution. The President intends to recommend frameworks that states can optionally enact. This is a huge step in the right direction and the White House has done a good and credible job

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2) Many Dems Want to Make Abolishing ICE a Campaign Issue

(Daily Caller News Foundation) Left-wing pundits and activists are increasing pressure on Democratic politicians to embrace the fringe position of abolishing ICE.

Once a fringe idea on the far-left, abolishing the nation’s immigration enforcement agency now looks likely to become a campaign issue in the Democrats’ 2020 presidential primary.

Former Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon came out for abolishing the agency in January.

“ICE operates as an unaccountable deportation force,” Fallon argued. “Dems running in 2020 should campaign on ending the agency in its current form.”

Liberal writer Jack Mirkinson on Friday slammed Harris for her answer in an article titled, “Not Good Enough, Kamala Harris.”

“Any serious defender of undocumented people in this country would look at ICE and know that it is a cancer that needs to be excised from the U.S. Pretending that the most diseased levers of state power can be molded into something better is a useless fantasy. ICE must be abolished. Anything less is not good enough,” Mirkinson wrote on Splinter, a left-wing website.

“Kamala Harris is very likely running for president in 2020. It should be a political problem for her that she is not willing to take her criticisms of ICE to their logical conclusion and call for its abolition. She should be asked, over and over again, why exactly she is willing to uphold the legitimacy of such a racist, corrupt, and thuggish organization,” Markinson concluded.

“Anyone else who decides to run—Bernie Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Eric Garcetti, you name it—should be asked the same question.”

Left-wing publication The Nation on Friday pushed out a similar piece, entitled “It’s Time to Abolish ICE.”

“The idea of defunding ICE has gained traction among immigrant-rights groups horrified by the speed at which, under President Donald Trump, the agency has ramped up an already brutal deportation process,” The Nation’s Sean McElwee claimed.

Major donor-funded groups on the Left, including Indivisible Project, the Center for Popular Democracy and Brand New Congress, now support abolishing the ICE, McElwee noted.

“ICE is terrorizing American communities right now,” Angel Padilla, policy director of the Indivisible Project, told The Nation. “They’re going into schools, entering hospitals, conducting massive raids, and separating children from parents every day. We are funding those activities, and we need to use all the leverage we have to stop it.”

“This is a growing position on the left, and I imagine 2020 Democratic presidential aspirants will have to grapple with it,” Chris Hayes, the MSNBC host, wrote on Twitter.

He linked to McElwee’s article.

Acting ICE Director Tom Homan said Thursday that Democrats are being misleading about the illegal immigrants that his agency is deporting.

“Nine out of every 10 aliens we arrested [in the last fiscal year] did have a criminal history,” Homan told Fox News. “They don’t want to know the facts. They want to keep playing this political game and put smoke and mirrors up about what ICE is actually doing.”

Republished with permission from Daily Caller News Foundation via iCopyright license

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3) When Progressives Embrace Hate
By Bari Weiss

A mere half-year ago, before collusion and Comey, before Mika’s face and Muslim bans and the Mooch, there was a shining moment where millions of Americans flooded the streets in cities across the country to register their rage that an unapologetic misogynist had just been made leader of the free world.

Donald Trump’s election was a watershed moment. Even those like me, who had previously pulled levers for candidates of both parties, felt that Mr. Trump had not only violated all sense of common decency, but, alarmingly, that he seemed to have no idea that there even existed such an unspoken code of civility and dignity. Now was the time to build a broad coalition to resist the genital-grabber with the nuclear codes.

The Women’s March moved me. O.K., so Madonna and Ashley Judd said some nutty things. But every movement has its excesses, I reasoned. Mr. Trump had campaigned on attacking the weakest and most vulnerable in our society. Now was the time to put aside petty differences and secondary issues to oppose his presidency.

That’s certainly what the leaders of the Democratic Party, who applauded the march, told us. Senator Charles Schumer called the protest “part of the grand American tradition.” The House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, offered her congratulations to the march’s “courageous organizers” and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand gushed about them in Time, where they were among the top 100 most influential people of 2017. “The Women’s March was the most inspiring and transformational moment I’ve ever witnessed in politics,” she wrote. “And it happened because four extraordinary women — Tamika Mallory, Bob Bland, Carmen Perez and Linda Sarsour — had the courage to take on something big, important and urgent, and never gave up.”

The image of this fearsome foursome, echoed in more than a few flattering profiles, was as seductive as a Benetton ad. There was Tamika Mallory, a young black activist who was crowned the “Sojourner Truth of our time” by Jet magazine and “a leader of tomorrow” by Valerie Jarrett. Carmen Perez, a Mexican-American and a veteran political organizer, was named one of Fortune’s Top 50 World Leaders. Linda Sarsour, a hijab-wearing Palestinian-American and the former head of the Arab-American Association of New York, had been recognized as a “champion of change” by the Obama White House. And Bob Bland, the fashion designer behind the “Nasty Women” T-shirts, was the white mother who came up with the idea of the march in the first place

What wasn’t to like?

A lot, as it turns out. The leaders of the Women’s March, arguably the most prominent feminists in the country, have some chilling ideas and associations. Far from erecting the big tent so many had hoped for, the movement they lead has embraced decidedly illiberal causes and cultivated a radical tenor that seems determined to alienate all but the most woke.

Start with Ms. Sarsour, by far the most visible of the quartet of organizers. It turns out that this “homegirl in a hijab,” as one of many articles about her put it, has a history of disturbing views, as advertised by . . . Linda Sarsour.

There are comments on her Twitter feed of the anti-Zionist sort: “Nothing is creepier than Zionism,” she wrote in 2012. And, oddly, given her status as a major feminist organizer, there are more than a few that seem to make common cause with anti-feminists, like this from 2015: “You’ll know when you’re living under Shariah law if suddenly all your loans and credit cards become interest-free. Sound nice, doesn’t it?” She has dismissed the anti-Islamist feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the most crude and cruel terms,insisting she is “not a real woman” and confessing that she wishes she could take away Ms. Ali’s vagina — this about a woman who suffered genital mutilation as a girl in Somalia.

Ms. Sarsour and her defenders have dismissed all of this as a smear campaign coordinated by the far right and motivated by Islamophobia. Plus, they’ve argued, many of these tweets were written five years ago! Ancient history.

But just last month, Ms. Sarsour proved that her past is prologue. On July 16, the official Twitter feed of the Women’s March offered warm wishes to Assata Shakur. “Happy birthday to the revolutionary #AssataShakur!” read the tweet, which featured a “#SignOfResistance, in Assata’s honor” — a pink and purple Pop Art-style portrait of Ms. Shakur, better known as Joanne Chesimard, a convicted killer who is on the F.B.I.’s list of most wanted terrorists.

Like many others, CNN’s Jake Tapper noticed the outrageous tweet. “Shakur is a cop-killer fugitive in Cuba,” he tweeted, going on to mention Ms. Sarsour’s troubling past statements. “Any progressives out there condemning this?” he asked.

In the face of this sober criticism, Ms. Sarsour cried bully: “@jaketapper joins the ranks of the alt-right to target me online. Welcome to the party.”

There’s no doubt that Ms. Sarsour is a regular target of far-right groups, but her experience of that onslaught is what makes her smear all the more troubling. Indeed, the idea that Jake Tapper is a member of the alt-right is the kind of delirious, fact-free madness that fuels Donald Trump and his supporters.

Troublingly, it is exactly the sentiment echoed by the Women’s March: “Our power — your power — scares the far right. They continue to try to divide us. Today’s attacks on #AssataShakur are the latest example.”

Since when did criticizing a domestic terrorist become a signal issue of the far right? Last I checked, that position was a matter of basic decency and patriotism.

What’s more distressing is that Ms. Sarsour is not the only leader of the women’s movement who harbors such alarming ideas. Largely overlooked have been the similarly outrageous statements of the march’s other organizers.

Ms. Mallory, in addition to applauding Assata Shakur as a feminist emblem, also admires Fidel Castro, who sheltered Ms. Shakur in Cuba. She put up a flurry of posts when Mr. Castro died last year. “R.I.P. Comandante! Your legacy lives on!” she wrote in one. She does not have similar respect for American police officers. “When you throw a brick in a pile of hogs, the one that hollers is the one you hit,” she posted on Nov. 20.

Ms. Perez also expressed her admiration for a Black Panther convicted of trying
to kill six police officers: “Love learning from and sharing space with Baba Sekou Odinga.”

But the public figure both women regularly fawn over is Louis Farrakhan.

On May 11, Ms. Mallory posted a photo with her arm around Mr. Farrakhan, the 84-year-old Nation of Islam leader notorious for his anti-Semitic comments, on Twitter and Instagram. “Thank God this man is still alive and doing well,” she wrote. It is one of several videos and photos and quotes that Ms. Mallory has posted of Mr. Farrakhan.

Ms. Perez is also a big fan. In the fall, she posted a photo in which she holds hands with Mr. Farrakhan, writing, “There are many times when I sit with elders or inspirational individuals where I think, ‘I just wish I could package this and share this moment with others.’ ” She’s also promoted video of Mr. Farrakhan “dropping knowledge” and another in which he says he is “speaking truth to power.”

What is Mr. Farrakhan’s truth? Readers born after 1980 will probably have little idea, since he has largely remained out of the headlines since the Million Man March he organized in 1995. But his views, which this editorial page has called“twisted,” remain as appalling as ever.

“And don’t you forget, when it’s God who puts you in the ovens, it’s forever!” he warned Jews in a speech at a Nation of Islam gathering in Madison Square Garden in 1985. Five years later, he remained unreformed: “The Jews, a small handful, control the movement of this great nation, like a radar controls the movement of a great ship in the waters.” Or this metaphor, directed at Jews: “You have wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell.”He called Hitler “a very great man” on national television. Judaism, he insists, is a “gutter religion.”

In one of the several widely available YouTube videos he’s made about the Jews, he told black Americans that “the control of the Synagogue of Satan over our people must be exposed.” He adds: “These satanic ones have not only controlled hip-hop but they control, according to their own words, the very messages that are brought to the public.” He goes on to offer a truly remarkable analysis of the hip-hop industry in which “intelligent” rappers are rejected by the “satanic minds” who insist that they “want filth” and encourage “vulgarity” and “savagery.” This is the first 10 minutes of an hour.

Mr. Farrakhan is also an unapologetic racist. He insists that whites are a “race of devils” and that “white people deserve to die.”

Feminists will find little to cheer in his 1950s views of gender: “Your professional lives can’t satisfy your soul like a good, loving man.” Recently he told Jay-Z that he should make Beyoncé put on some clothes. He also opposes gay marriage.

If that wasn’t enough of a rap sheet, Mr. Farrakhan also loves Scientology and believes 9/11 was a false flag operation.

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I can already hear the pushback. What’s a few impolitic tweets and photos compared to the horror show of this administration? Save your outrage for the transgender ban in the military, for the lies that spew forth daily from the press briefing room, for the cuts to Planned Parenthood, the shady business with Russia, and, and, and.

But the nightmare of the Trump administration is the proof text for why all of this matters. We just saw what happens to legitimate political parties when they fall prey to movements that are, at base, anti-American. That is true of the populist, racist alt-right that helped deliver Mr. Trump the White House and are now hollowing out the Republican Party. And it can be true of the progressive “resistance” — regardless of how chic, Instagrammable and celebrity-laden the movement may seem. Recall that only a few months ago, Keith Ellison, a man with a long history of defending and working with anti-Semites, was almost made leader of the Democratic National Committee.

Will progressives have more spine than conservatives in policing hate in their ranks? Or will they ignore it in their fury over the Trump administration?

I am sure that Linda Sarsour, and perhaps the other leaders of the Women’s March, will block me for writing this. Maybe I’ll be accused of siding with the alt-right or tarred as Islamophobic. But what I stand against is embracing terrorists, disdaining independent feminist voices, hating on democracies and celebrating dictatorships. If that puts me beyond the pale of the progressive feminist movement in America right now, so be it.

Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) is a staff editor in The New York Times opinion section.

3a) What Really Bothers The New York Times — Nepotism in the White House, or Jews?

By Ira Stoll

The New York Times recently unveiled an unusual three-part editorial series (one, two, three) on the evils of “nepotism in the White House.”

After a brief attempt to distinguish between its own family business and the president’s (“A legacy of family control has helped sustain many private companies, including The New York Times. But it has never been embraced in public service by Americans…”), the Times sets out a brief history of presidential family assistance, from John Quincy Adams through Robert Kennedy, Rosalynn Carter, and Hillary Clinton.

The context is useful, because none of the other presidential relatives have gotten the three-part-series treatment and the extensive negative coverage that the Times is giving to President Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner.

The Times greeted President Kennedy’s appointment of his brother Robert as attorney general, for example, not with a three-part editorial series on the evils of nepotism, but with a mere couple of paragraphs in an editorial on December 17, 1960:

The one appointment this far that we find most disappointing is Mr. Kennedy’s choice of his young brother Robert as Attorney General. Let us willingly grant that Robert Kennedy is tough, able, alert, hard-hitting and single-mindedly devoted to his older brother’s interests — all qualities that came through with clarity this year when he was the extremely astute manager of John F. Kennedy’s campaign for nomination and then election.

But these are qualities, coupled with the complete trust the President-elect has in him, that entitle him to an important position in the White House as a confidant or adviser of the President, not as chief legal officer of the United States. In the post of Attorney General he will be in charge of the civil rights program, of the antitrust program, of the appointments to the Federal judiciary, among many other responsibilities. If Robert Kennedy were one of the outstanding lawyers of the country, a pre-eminent legal philosopher, a noted prosecutor or legal officer at Federal or state level, the situation would be different. But his experience as counsel to the McClellan committee, notably successful as he was, is surely insufficient to warrant his present appointment.

It turned out that Robert Kennedy was a wonderful attorney general who played an important role both in racially integrating Southern state universities and in mediating a peaceful conclusion to the Cuban Missile Crisis. But that’s another story.

Back during the Kennedy administration, the Times uttered not a peep of editorial protest to John Kennedy’s appointment of his own brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, as founding director of the Peace Corps.

In 1960, the Times’ position seemed to be that a presidential relative would be a fine White House adviser. Yet when it comes to that role as played by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in the Trump White House, the Times of 2018 finds it unacceptable. What could possibly account for the Times’s change of perspective on the issue?

One clue is provided by the opening paragraph of the Times editorial attack on Jared Kushner. Like many Times attacks on Jews or Israel, the Kushner-bashing editorial happened to appear in the print newspaper on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, when religious Jews are limited in the ability to respond to such an attack. The editorial begins:

For a Middle East negotiator, President Trump could have chosen a seasoned envoy trusted by all stakeholders and fluent in the region’s nuance. Instead, he appointed the heir to an opaque Manhattan real estate empire with deep ties to Israel who boasts that, as a businessman, “I don’t care about the past.”

Did you catch the mention of “deep ties to Israel”? What really bothers the Times editorial writers about Jared Kushner, in other words, isn’t that he is President Trump’s son-in-law, but that he has what the newspaper calls “deep ties to Israel.” In fact, while the editorial is ostensibly about “nepotism,” the word “Israel” appears five times.

In case any Times readers didn’t get the point from the five mentions of Israel in the Kushner editorial, including the one in the first paragraph, the newspaper had prepared the ground with a print op-ed under the too-cute title, “Has Jared Kushner Conspired To Defraud America?” (If the newspaper had any solid evidence he had, it wouldn’t need to phrase the headline as a question.)

That op-ed said:

On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that “officials in at least four countries” — United Arab Emirates, China, Israel and Mexico — “have privately discussed ways they can manipulate” Mr. Kushner by taking advantage of his “complex business arrangements, financial difficulties and lack of foreign policy experience.” The president gave his son-in-law an expansive foreign policy role, including an effort to negotiate peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The implication in the article is that the United States government has intercepted communications of foreign leaders talking about ways they could take advantage of Mr. Kushner…

The biggest concern in the Post report — and surely one reason such intelligence led to Mr. Kushner’s being stripped of his interim top-secret security clearance last week — is that foreign countries would offer him personal financial benefits…

What’s the greater security risk? The groundless speculative concern, irresponsibly fueled by the Times and playing into the old antisemitic accusation that American Jews are disloyal, that Kushner is going to be a paid asset of Israel? Or the anonymous sources who demonstrably jeopardized American intelligence methods by disclosing intercepted communications of foreign leaders? The Times is apparently very concerned about Kushner, but the newspaper expresses no concern about the anonymous leakers who let the foreign leaders know we can listen in on their private communications.

In case the source of the Times’ disdain for Jared and Ivanka wasn’t totally clear, the newspaper gives it away in the third and final editorial of the series, when it writes, “After Mr. Trump blamed ‘many sides’ for a violent neo-Nazi demonstration in Charlottesville, Va., in which a young counterprotester was killed, Ms. Trump, who converted to Judaism when she married Mr. Kushner, tweeted an anodyne rejection of ‘racism, white supremacy and neo-Nazis.’”

How is Ivanka Trump’s religion or the timing of her conversion at all relevant? Shouldn’t everyone be against neo-Nazis? The Times has no problem celebrating Jews who convert to Christianity (see here and here and here for examples), but when a Christian converts to Judaism, the Times can’t seem to handle it.

It’s almost enough to make a reader suspect that what really bothers the Times isn’t “nepotism in the White House” but Jews in the White House. I’m not saying that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump should be beyond all criticism. And I’m not saying that any criticism of them is necessarily motivated by antisemitism. I don’t want to draw any conclusions about the Times’ motives or cast any aspersions. But when one Times editorial mentions Israel five times and the other Times editorial goes out of its way to mention Ivanka Trump’s Judaism, it’s hard to avoid looking back, again, at the Robert Kennedy example. Not only did the Times only devote a couple of paragraphs rather than three entire editorials to the Kennedy appointment, but somehow the Times failed to mention at all Robert Kennedy’s deep Roman Catholic faith or his family ties to Ireland. Whether the double standard is for Democratic presidents versus Republicans ones or for Christian presidential relatives versus Jewish ones, the clear conclusion is that there’s been a dramatic lack of consistency in the Times approach to the issue.

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Coalition deal reached, likely to end crisis, avoid elections

By GIL HOFFMAN,JEREMY SHARON

Netanyahu met with coalition partners in an effort to avoid elections.

In a sign that the coalition crisis may have been averted, the United Torah Judaism Council of Torah Sages ruled late Sunday that the party's MKs can vote for the 2019 state budget, after an agreement was reached between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and UTJ leader Ya'acov Litzman.

Netanyahu held late-night meetings with his coalition partners Litzman and Kulanu chairman Moshe Kahlon on Sunday night in an effort to prevent the collapse of his government and the initiation of June 26 elections.

Such talks were expected to continue Monday, ahead of a key vote on a haredi (ultra-Orthodox) conscription bill in the Ministerial Committee on Legislation that Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked delayed from Sunday to give Netanyahu more time to resolve the crisis.

A deal worked out by Netanyahu and Litzman late on Sunday would have a conscription bill pass in Shaked’s committee on Monday and a preliminary reading in the Knesset, then continue to be legislated after the Knesset’s spring recess. UTJ, which refused to vote for the budget at the height of the dispute, are now expected to vote in favor and enable its passage before the recess.

Talks between Netanyahu and Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman are expected to be key to resolving the dispute.

If no agreement is finalized, the Knesset is likely to vote to disperse itself Wednesday and initiate elections. The June 26 date is as early as possible, which Netanyahu would prefer, as would Zionist Union leader Avi Gabbay and Yesh Atid head Yair Lapid.

But other Zionist Union MKs said they opposed the date, parties in Netanyahu’s coalition prefer elections in the fall and Joint List MK Ahmed Tibi said the election cannot be held too close to Ramadan, which will be from mid-May to mid-June.

Netanyahu’s associates said he was more involved than ever in fixing the problems that led to the dispute, and sources in United Torah Judaism said they believed the crisis is solvable if a new version of the conscription bill is acceptable to its rabbis.

The chances of Israel going to early elections had appeared to increase dramatically hours earlier Sunday when the Council of Torah Sages of UTJ’s Agudat Yisrael faction insisted that a law to guarantee military-service exemptions for yeshiva students be passed before the 2019 budget is approved.

MKs from Agudat Yisrael presented the details of the bill to the party’s Council of Torah Sages on Sunday afternoon. The council secretary issued a statement that, while not addressing the content of the draft law, said the council’s demands from two weeks ago that the bill pass before the budget remained in place.

The decision of Agudat Yisrael, which makes up half of the UTJ faction, constituted a rejection of a compromise bill proposed by Bayit Yehudi leaders Naftali Bennett and Shaked that aimed to ward off the collapse of the government that would see the country go to the ballot boxes more than a year before the scheduled date.

Kahlon has rejected Agudat Yisrael’s demands to pass the enlistment law before the budget, saying the budget must pass this week or he will resign as finance minister and topple the government.

At the same time, Litzman, who heads Agudat Yisrael, has said he will not vote for the budget until the enlistment-exemption bill is approved.

Shaked, UTJ MK Meir Porush and former Shas MK Ariel Atias have been working on a new bill that could pass muster in the High Court of Justice while preserving the ability of haredi yeshiva students to obtain military-service exemptions.

The bill that has been drawn up would set binding annual targets for haredi enlistment, which would be reviewed every one or two years. Should the targets not be met, the law would be voided and young haredi men would theoretically be obliged to enlist to the IDF, although the Knesset would have a year to pass a new exemptions law.

The Jerusalem Post has learned that the grand rabbis of Agudat Yisrael’s Council of Torah Sages oppose the clause in which the law lapses if the targets are not met, because they are concerned it could lead to a mass drafting of yeshiva students.

MKs from Agudat Yisrael were working on a new version of the bill to overcome the rabbis’ objections on Sunday night, and they intended to bring it back to the Council of Torah Sages once it was reworked.

NETANYAHU SET three conditions to keep the coalition intact before meeting with party leaders on Sunday.

The first condition is that there will be a conscription bill agreed upon by Shas and UTJ, as well as by Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit.

Second, Kulanu and all of its MKs would have to agree to support it in all three Knesset votes.

The final condition is aimed at Liberman. Yisrael Beytenu and all other parties will have to commit to continuing the coalition partnership “over time.”

Netanyahu faced a challenge Sunday morning from Bayit Yehudi chairman Bennett, who warned him that he and the people of Israel would not accept him initiating an election due to his criminal investigations.

In a series of tweets and radio interviews, Bennett became increasingly critical and even suggested that he could run against him for prime minister.

“Mr. Prime Minister Netanyahu: As long as you act for the good of the State of Israel, we will remain behind you,” Bennett wrote on Twitter. “If you topple a right-wing government and cause unnecessary elections for personal purposes, you will lose us.”

In an interview with Army Radio, Bennett said he always has said he would run for prime minister in the post-Netanyahu era, but if it became apparent that “he is playing with the state and advancing elections for his personal needs,” he will reconsider that decision. He told Israel Radio the dispute was “a fake crisis” and going to elections was “not smart.”

The Likud responded that “while Prime Minister Netanyahu is busy solving the crisis and stabilizing his right-wing government, Bennett is busy with his personal campaign.” Netanyahu’s party said if Bennett was really concerned about maintaining a right-wing government, he would commit to remaining in it until its term ends in November 2019.

“The last thing Bennett cares about is stabilizing a nationalist government under Netanyahu,” the Likud said. “As his statements reveal, Bennett is trying to topple the prime minister and worrying about his own job.”

In a meeting with Likud ministers, Netanyahu said he was working to ensure his government would complete its term. He said all coalition partners had to do their part to ensure that could happen.

Netanyahu ruled out returning to a coalition of 61 MKs without Liberman’s party. He said Likud MKs would issue too many demands if they each held the balance of power.

Liberman said he cannot back the current bill of UTJ and Shas on haredi conscription that is the focus of the current crisis. He criticized Bennett without mentioning him by name, saying that “those who want to be defense minister and also prime minister should be more modest.”

“We will not work with a gun to our heads,” Liberman said. “There is a limit to the amount of mudslinging from coalition partners that we can tolerate.”

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From the Baltics to the Middle East: Russia’s rising threat

By Claudia Rosett

It’s less than six years since President Obama mocked presidential contender Mitt Romney for warning about the resurgent threat from Russia. In one of the most memorable lines of the 2012 election, Obama scoffed that “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Today, there’s plenty of evidence that the Cold War was already on its way back, with a vengeance. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin seized every opening presented by Obama’s policies of “reset,” “flexibility,” appeasement and retreat. During Obama’s second term, Russia made its military reentry via Syria into the conflicts of the Middle East, shored up its ties to Iran, and began reconfiguring the borders of Eastern Europe and the rules of the post-Soviet world order by snatching Crimea from Ukraine. In Washington, American politics has been embroiled since the 2016 election in investigations and bitter quarrels involving allegations of Russian dirty tricks.

By now, the upshot is a global landscape of rising frictions and growing risks of military confrontation between Russia and the United States. For years, Putin’s strategy has been to test the limits of American tolerance — buttressing his projects with a massive military modernization and buildup, while daring the U.S. superpower to stop him. Obama failed this challenge, bequeathing to President Trump the job of redrawing those vanished red lines, and restoring a credible U.S. strategy of deterrence.

That has become far more difficult and dangerous than it might have been a decade ago. As the director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency testified to Congress just last week, “Although Russia repeatedly emphasizes that is it not interested in a new Cold War with the United States, it has also made clear that it will no longer reconcile with the West through concessions or a policy of appeasement.”

Recent weeks have brought a number of flashing red signals over where Russia is headed, from the Middle East, to the Baltics and beyond.

Most dramatic was Putin’s March 1 annual speech to the Russian parliament, in which Putin announced advances in Russia’s nuclear arsenal which he said have made it “invincible,” designed to defeat America’s missile defenses. Putin illustrated his speech (a la North Korea ) with video depictions of a next-generation Russian nuclear triad — land, air and submarine -based — including an animation of a missile striking the United States. Putin warned that Russia is done deferring to the West: “No one listened to us. Listen to us now.”

Analysts are debating whether Putin was exaggerating Russia’s nuclear prowess, showboating in the runup to Russia’s next presidential vote, scheduled for March 18. Putin, whose regime controls the Russian media and has a history of annihilating his opponents, is expected to win. Officially, that will add another six years to Putin’s long reign, which began with the resignation of President Boris Yeltsin, on Dec. 31, 1999.

Whatever the tweaks yet in store for Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal, there’s virtually no room for doubt about Russia’s growing threat to the Baltics — Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — and by extension to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to which all three nations belong. NATO’s ultimate guarantor of security is U.S. military power — and political willpower.

Last week, the RAND Corporation released a report assessing that Russia’s military is now well positioned to overrun the Baltics in a surprise attack, before NATO could muster an effective response. In a summary of key findings, the report warns that while NATO ultimately has the resources to win a protracted war, Russia is positioned to “achieve a rapid fait accompli in the Baltic states followed by brinksmanship to freeze the conflict.”

The RAND report details an alarming scene in Europe, in which NATO’s forces since the end of the Cold War have dramatically declined, with NATO refocusing on “lighter forces” that can easily be deployed to places such as Afghanistan. By contrast, Russia since 2008 has been expanding and refining “its capability for high-intensity conventional warfare,” and has placed the highest density of its “most capable ground and air forces” near the Baltics.

Meantime, from Syria’s cauldron of warring factions, where both Russia and Iran have been fighting on the side of the Assad regime, there were reports last month that scores of Russian mercenaries had died in a failed attack on a post held by U.S. troops and their allies.

There were no reports of any U.S. casualties. But the bottom line, as summed up by veteran Russia correspondent Gregory White, in a Feb. 13 dispatch on Bloomberg News, is that “The war in Syria is now threatening to embroil the major powers in direct conflict.” White noted that “The raid was likely the first such deadly conflict between the former Cold War rivals since the Vietnam War, according to Russian experts.”

Plenty of murk surrounds the precise circumstances of this clash, which Defense Secretary James Mattis described in a press briefing last month as “perplexing.” To attack the Americans, the Russians crossed the “deconfliction” line with which Russia and the U.S. have tried to avoid coming into direct conflict in Syria. On Feb. 22, the Washington Post reported that the Russian mercenaries likely acted with at least an indirect nod from the Kremlin.

On the broader world scene, Russia has been holding joint military exercises with China, abetting sanctions-busting smuggling by North Korea, and is suspected in the poisoning in Britain last week of a retired Russian double agent and his daughter.

It all adds up to an ever more menacing showdown, in which Trump has every reason to consult and adapt the 1980s Ronald Reagan playbook, including beefing up U.S. military power and defenses. It is becoming imperative that the U.S. stand up to Putin’s threats. Americans would be wise to understand that while this might play in some quarters as reckless war-mongering, it is vital to reestablishing deterrence.

Claudia Rosett is a foreign policy fellow with the Independent Women’s Forum.

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