This millennial wants to be your next Senator. Her handling of her personal finances and debt obligations certainly qualifies her.
https://finance.yahoo.com/
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I picked up on this trend fairy early and have been outspoken.
Though I lived in Atlanta over 40 years I never had the pleasure of meeting Professor Lipstadt. (See 1 below.)
And:
Dershowitz speaks out as well.
As readers of my memos know, I invited him to speak at the SIRC's PDD. He turned me down because it was a fund raiser for those on the opposite end of the political spectrum. (See 1a below.)
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This was sent to me by a very dear friend and also a fellow memo reader. He is a great golfer and not politically inclined.
I am posting it because he brought it to my attention and know, by doing so, I will be accused of raking over old bones. (See 2 below.)
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Like pouting children who, hopefully, may not get their candy.
I met George Will at a cocktail party when I was on The President's Commission On White House Fellowships. Will was a White House Fellow at one time.
He was full of himself then and has remained so but in this op ed he has seen the light. (See 3 below.)
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Jordan holds an important key. (See 4 below.)
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Go Green no matter the cost because AOC says so and the dunces line up! (See 5 below.)
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Prager on George Washington. (See 6 below.)
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Dick
++++++++++++++++++
1) Why we need to pay attention to the rise of anti-Semitism in America now
Completed in May 2018, Deborah E. Lipstadt’s book “Antisemitism: Here and Now” was prescient. “By the time this book appears,” Lipstadt wrote in its opening, “there will have been new examples of anti-Semitism.” Five months later, a white supremacist shot and killed 11 people at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the United States. The incident makes Lipstadt’s book all the more crucial for understanding the dismaying resurgence of anti-Semitism — on both the right and the left.
Written as a series of letters to two fictional people — Abigail and Joe, composites of students and colleagues Lipstadt has worked with as a professor at Emory University — “Antisemitism: Here and Now” addresses questions many people began asking after the white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. Is today’s anti-Semitism different from what we’ve seen before? Where is it coming from? What exactly is anti-Semitism, anyway?
Anti-Semitism is difficult to define, Lipstadt writes: “It is hard, if not impossible, to explain something that is essentially irrational, delusional, and absurd.” At its heart, she explains, anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory, and in its most extreme case, it manifests in the belief that Jews are responsible for the evil in the world. Persisting through millennia, in different cultures and regions, the belief that “Jews are not an enemy but the ultimate enemy” is what makes anti-Semitism different from other prejudices.
More commonly, anti-Semitism persists in the notion that Jews control the banks and the media, or that Jews are pushy, cheap, rich or simply good with money. It also reveals itself in more subtle ways — as in the “dinner party anti-Semite” (a polite person who casually makes anti-Semitic statements but claims not to be anti-Semitic because of Jewish friends or business associates) and the “clueless anti-Semite” (“an otherwise nice and well-meaning person who is completely unaware that she has internalized anti-Semitic stereotypes and is perpetuating them” by making statements such as “Jews are bargain shoppers”).
These ideas aren’t new, especially to Lipstadt, author of numerous books on the subject — “Denying the Holocaust,” “History on Trial: My Day in Court With a Holocaust Denier” and “The Eichmann Trial” — and herself the subject of anti-Semitic attacks, especially for her confrontation of Holocaust deniers.
What is new is the unabashed public anti-Semitism that’s been unleashed since 2016. During that year’s election, for example, anti-Semites on social media began placing triple parentheses around the surnames of Jewish journalists. Jewish journalists critical of Trump began receiving messages that they “should be gassed” and images of their faces superimposed on those of Auschwitz prisoners. Trump, Lipstadt argues, is an enabler, not an extremist; he didn’t create white-supremacist groups, but he “let these reprehensible genies out of the bottle.”
Anti-Semitism is not just a product of right-wing extremism. And it’s here that the conversation gets more complicated. In the interest of social justice, Lipstadt writes, some progressives reveal subconscious anti-Semitism by making “blanket statements about Jews in their excoriation of wealthy capitalists who oppress and exploit the poor, who imply that Jews exert undue influence on the media, who deny that Jews can be the victims of race-based hatred in the same way that people of color are, and who include offensive, hate-filled Jewish stereotyping in their criticism of Israel government policies regarding Palestinians.”
While Lipstadt emphasizes that criticizing the polices of the Israeli government is not necessarily an act of anti-Semitism, several sections of her book look at how the anti-Zionist discourse often “relies on anti-Semitic motifs or is simply a cover for anti-Semitism.” After elucidating such anti-Semitic rhetoric in Britain’s Labour Party, the book turns to the attacks on Jewish students and speakers by the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, and meanders into the muddy debate of free speech now raging on college campuses. Lipstadt’s “Abigail” is a progressive student who says she has been silenced at social justice meetings because she is a Jew. People assume she is pro-Israel and therefore condemn her for supporting white supremacy — a notion oblivious to the existence of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews, not to mention how actual white supremacists believe, as the Pittsburgh shooter did, that “Jews are the enemy of white people.”
One of the book’s most disheartening bits details how three leaders of the 2017 Women’s March — Linda Sarsour, Tamika D. Mallory and Carmen Perez — publicly supported anti-Semitic statements made by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and even made anti-Semitic statements themselves. Similarly, two freshman Democrats in Congress — Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib — have recently criticized Israel and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) by expressing anti-Semitic rhetoric, making offensive comments that reinforce stereotypical tropes about Jews and money. Omar has since apologized and acknowledged her “unknowing” use of anti-Semitic tropes. Even so, it is deeply discouraging that many on the left exhibit prejudice similar to what they condemn on the right; as the progressive Rabbi Sharon Brouse says, “You can’t fight racism but excuse anti-Semitism, just as you cannot fight anti-Semitism while excusing and justifying racism and Islamophobia.”
Lipstadt lays out a convincing case for being concerned about the recent explosion of anti-Semitism, but she also wants readers to appreciate how much America has changed. No longer do elite universities have quotas on Jewish students, for example. And anti-Semitic violence is still much more prevalent in Europe, where Jews are encouraged to cover their kippah and most synagogues are protected by police officers. We’re not there yet, at least.
The way to avoid getting there is for people on all sides of the political spectrum to examine their potential blind spots regarding anti-Semitism, Lispstadt argues, and “call out both friends and foes.” As Lipstadt writes, “The existence of prejudice in any of its forms is a threat to all those who value an inclusive, democratic, and multicultural society.” And so if we think ourselves to be liberal, or progressive, or simply decent, “we must insist that anti-Semitism be treated with the same seriousness as racism, sexism, homophobia, and Islamophobia.” How we do that is up to each of us, but this book is a good place to start.
By Deborah E. Lipstadt
Randy Rosenthal teaches writing at Harvard.
1a) Why such a surge of worldwide antisemitism
By Alan Dershowitz
Why are so many of the grandchildren of Nazis and Nazi collaborators who brought us the Holocaust once again declaring war on the Jews?
By Alan Dershowitz
Why are so many of the grandchildren of Nazis and Nazi collaborators who brought us the Holocaust once again declaring war on the Jews?
Why have we seen such an increase in anti-Semitism and irrationally virulent anti-Zionism in western Europe?
To answer these questions, a myth must first be exposed. That myth is the one perpetrated by the French, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Swiss, the Belgians, the Austrians, and many other western Europeans: namely that the Holocaust was solely the work of German Nazis aided perhaps by some Polish, Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian collaborators.
False.
The Holocaust was perpetrated by Europeans: by Nazi sympathizers and collaborators among the French, Dutch, Norwegians, Swiss, Belgians, Austrians and other Europeans, both Western and Eastern.
If the French government had not deported to the death camps more Jews than their German occupiers asked for; if so many Dutch and Belgian citizens and government officials had not cooperated in the roundup of Jews; if so many Norwegians had not supported Quisling; if Swiss government officials and bankers had not exploited Jews; if Austria had not been more Nazi than the Nazis, the Holocaust would not have had so many Jewish victims.
In light of the widespread European complicity in the destruction of European Jewry, the pervasive anti-Semitism and irrationally hateful anti-Zionism that has recently surfaced throughout western Europe toward Israel should surprise no one.
“Oh no,” we hear from European apologists. “This is different. We don’t hate the Jews. We only hate their nation-state. Moreover, the Nazis were right-wing. We are left-wing, so we can’t be anti-Semites.”
Nonsense
The hard left has a history of anti-Semitism as deep and enduring as the hard right. The line from Voltaire to Karl Marx, to Levrenti Beria, to Robert Faurisson, to today’s hard-left Israel bashers is as straight as the line from Wilhelm Mars to the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus to Hitler.
The Jews of Europe have always been crushed between the Black and the Red – victims of extremism whether it be the ultra-nationalism of Khmelnitsky to the ultra-anti-Semitism of Stalin.
“But some of the most strident anti-Zionists are Jews, such as Norman Finkelstein and even Israelis such as Gilad Atzmon. Surely they can’t be anti-Semites?”
Why not? Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas collaborated with the Gestapo. Atzmon, a hard leftist, describes himself as a proud self-hating Jew and admits that his ideas derive from a notorious anti-Semite.
He denies that the Holocaust is historically proved but he believes that Jews may well have killed Christian children to use their blood to bake Passover matzah. And he thinks it’s “rational” to burn down synagogues.
Finkelstein believes in an international Jewish conspiracy that includes Steven Spielberg, Leon Uris, Eli Wiesel, and Andrew Lloyd Webber! “But Israel is doing bad things to the Palestinians,” the European apologists insist, “and we are sensitive to the plight of the underdog.”
No, you’re not! Where are your demonstrations on behalf of the oppressed Tibetans, Georgians, Syrians, Armenians, Kurds, or even Ukrainians? Where are your BDS movements against the Chinese, the Russians, the Cubans, the Turks, or the Assad regime?
Only the Palestinians, only Israel? Why? Not because the Palestinians are more oppressed than these and other groups.
Only because their alleged oppressors are Jews and the nation-state of the Jews. Would there be demonstrations and BDS campaigns on behalf of the Palestinians if they were oppressed by Jordan or Egypt?
Oh, wait! The Palestinians were oppressed by Egypt and Jordan .. Gaza was an open-air prison between 1948 and 1967, when Egypt was the occupying power. And remember Black September, when Jordan killed more Palestinians than Israel did in a century? I don’t remember any demonstration or BDS campaigns — because there weren’t any.
When Arabs occupy or kill Arabs, Europeans go ho-hum. But when Israel opens a soda factory in Maale Adumim, which even the Palestinian leadership acknowledges will remain part of Israel in any peace deal, Oxfam parts ways with Scarlett Johansson for advertising a soda company that employs hundreds of Palestinians
Keep in mind that Oxfam has provided “aid and material support” to two anti-Israel terrorist groups, according to the Tel Aviv-based Israeli Law Group.
The hypocrisy of so many hard-left western Europeans would be staggering if it were not so predictable based on the sordid history of Western Europe’s treatment of the Jews.
Even England , which was on the right side of the war against Nazism, has a long history of anti-Semitism, beginning with the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 to the notorious White Paper of 1939, which prevented the Jews of Europe from seeking asylum from the Nazis in British-mandated Palestine .. And Ireland , which vacillated in the war against Hitler, boasts some of the most virulent anti-Israel rhetoric.
The simple reality is that one cannot understand the current western European left-wing war against the nation-state of the Jewish people without first acknowledging the long-term European war against the Jewish people themselves.
Theodore Herzl understood the pervasiveness and irrationality of European anti-Semitism, which led him to the conclusion that the only solution to Europe’s Jewish problem was for European Jews to leave that bastion of Jew hatred and return to their original homeland, which is now the state of Israel …
None of this is to deny Israel’s imperfections or the criticism it justly deserves for some of its policies. But these imperfections and deserved criticism cannot even begin to explain, must less justify, the disproportionate hatred directed against the only nation-state of the Jewish people and the disproportionate silence regarding the far greater imperfections and deserved criticism of other nations and groups including the Palestinians.
Nor is this to deny that many western European individuals and some western European countries have refused to succumb to the hatred against the Jews or their state. The Czech Republic comes to mind. But far too many western Europeans are as irrational in their hatred toward Israel as their forbearers were in their hatred toward their Jewish neighbors.
As author Amos Oz once aptly observed: the walls of his grandparents’ Europe were covered with graffiti saying, “Jews, go to Palestine” Now they say, “Jews, get out of Palestine”, by which is meant Israel …
Who do these western European bigots think they’re fooling? Only fools who want to be fooled in the interest of denying that they are manifesting new variations on their grandparents’ old biases.
Any objective person with an open mind, open eyes, and an open heart must see the double standard being applied to the nation-state of the Jewish people. Many doing so are the grandchildren of those who lethally applied a double standard to the Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.
For shame!
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2)Here are 4 Simple questions from an attorney..... are there ANY logical answers?
You be the judge……
Here's what I would like to know. If the TRUTH ever comes out and it
is decided that Obama was never eligible to be president, what happens
to all the laws he signed into being and all the executive orders?
Should they all be null and void?
Here are 4 Simple questions from a reputable attorney..... this should
really get your "gray matter" to churning, even if you are an Obama
fan.
For all you "anti-Fox News" folks, none of this information came from
Fox. All of it can be verified from legitimate sources (Wikipedia, the
Kapiolani hospital website itself, and a good history book, as noted
herein). It is very easy for someone to check out.
4 Simple Questions.......
1. Back in 1961 people of color were called 'Negroes’. So how can the
Obama 'birth certificate' state he is "African-American" when the term
wasn't even used at that time ?
2. The birth certificate that the White House released lists Obama's
birth as August 4, 1961 and Lists Barack Hussein Obama as his father.
No big deal, Right? At the time of Obama's birth, it also shows that
his father is aged 25 years old, and that Obama's father was born in
"Kenya, East Africa".
This wouldn't seem like anything of concern, except the fact that
Kenya did not even exist until 1963, two whole years after Obama's
birth, and 27 years after his father's birth. How could Obama's father
have been born in a country that did not yet Exist?
Up and until Kenya was formed in 1963, it was known as the "British
East Africa Protectorate". (check it below)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
3. On the Birth Certificate released by the White House, the listed
place of birth is "Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital".
This cannot be, because the hospital(s) in question in 1961 were
called "KauiKeolani Children's Hospital" and "Kapi'olani Maternity
Home", respectively.
The name did not change to Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological
Hospital until 1978, when these two hospitals merged. How can this
particular name of the hospital be on a birth certificate dated 1961
if this name had not yet been applied to it until 1978?
(CHECK IT BELOW)
( http://www.kapiolani.org/ wo
Why hasn't this been discussed in the major media?
4. Perhaps a clue comes from Obama's book on his father. He states how
proud he is of his father fighting in WW II. I'm not a math genius, so
I may need some help from you. Barack Obama's "birth certificate" says
his father was 25 years old in 1961 when Obama was born. That should
have put his father's date of birth approximately 1936 - if my math
holds (Honest! I did that without a calculator!) Now we need a
non-revised history book-one that hasn't been altered to satisfy the
author's goals-to verify that WW II was basically between 1939 and
1945. Just how many 3 year olds fight in Wars? Even in the latest
stages of WW II his father wouldn't have been more than 9 years old.
Does that mean that Mr. Obama is a liar, or simply chooses to alter
the facts to satisfy his imagination or political purposes ?
Very truly yours,
RICHARD R. SILVERLIEB
Attorney at Law
354 Eisenhower Parkway
Livingston, NJ 07039
( https://www.linkedin.com/in/
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3) The New, Angrier Socialism
By George Will
Socialism is more frequently praised than defined by its advocates.
In his volume in the Oxford History of the United States (The Republic for Which It Stands) covering 1865–1896, Stanford’s Richard White says that John Bates Clark, the leading economist of that era, said “true socialism” is “economic republicanism,” which meant more cooperation and less individualism. Others saw socialism as “a system of social ethics.” All was vagueness.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2)Here are 4 Simple questions from an attorney..... are there ANY logical answers?
You be the judge……
Here's what I would like to know. If the TRUTH ever comes out and it
is decided that Obama was never eligible to be president, what happens
to all the laws he signed into being and all the executive orders?
Should they all be null and void?
Here are 4 Simple questions from a reputable attorney..... this should
really get your "gray matter" to churning, even if you are an Obama
fan.
For all you "anti-Fox News" folks, none of this information came from
Fox. All of it can be verified from legitimate sources (Wikipedia, the
Kapiolani hospital website itself, and a good history book, as noted
herein). It is very easy for someone to check out.
4 Simple Questions.......
1. Back in 1961 people of color were called 'Negroes’. So how can the
Obama 'birth certificate' state he is "African-American" when the term
wasn't even used at that time ?
2. The birth certificate that the White House released lists Obama's
birth as August 4, 1961 and Lists Barack Hussein Obama as his father.
No big deal, Right? At the time of Obama's birth, it also shows that
his father is aged 25 years old, and that Obama's father was born in
"Kenya, East Africa".
This wouldn't seem like anything of concern, except the fact that
Kenya did not even exist until 1963, two whole years after Obama's
birth, and 27 years after his father's birth. How could Obama's father
have been born in a country that did not yet Exist?
Up and until Kenya was formed in 1963, it was known as the "British
East Africa Protectorate". (check it below)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
3. On the Birth Certificate released by the White House, the listed
place of birth is "Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital".
This cannot be, because the hospital(s) in question in 1961 were
called "KauiKeolani Children's Hospital" and "Kapi'olani Maternity
Home", respectively.
The name did not change to Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological
Hospital until 1978, when these two hospitals merged. How can this
particular name of the hospital be on a birth certificate dated 1961
if this name had not yet been applied to it until 1978?
(CHECK IT BELOW)
( http://www.kapiolani.org/ wo
Why hasn't this been discussed in the major media?
4. Perhaps a clue comes from Obama's book on his father. He states how
proud he is of his father fighting in WW II. I'm not a math genius, so
I may need some help from you. Barack Obama's "birth certificate" says
his father was 25 years old in 1961 when Obama was born. That should
have put his father's date of birth approximately 1936 - if my math
holds (Honest! I did that without a calculator!) Now we need a
non-revised history book-one that hasn't been altered to satisfy the
author's goals-to verify that WW II was basically between 1939 and
1945. Just how many 3 year olds fight in Wars? Even in the latest
stages of WW II his father wouldn't have been more than 9 years old.
Does that mean that Mr. Obama is a liar, or simply chooses to alter
the facts to satisfy his imagination or political purposes ?
Very truly yours,
RICHARD R. SILVERLIEB
Attorney at Law
354 Eisenhower Parkway
Livingston, NJ 07039
( https://www.linkedin.com/in/
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3) The New, Angrier Socialism
By George Will
Socialism is more frequently praised than defined by its advocates.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”
— Karl Marx
Norman Thomas was not easily discouraged. Running for president in 1932, three years into the shattering, terrifying Depression, which seemed to many to be a systemic crisis of capitalism, Thomas, who had been the Socialist Party’s candidate in 1928 and would be in 1936, 1940, 1944, and 1948, received, as this column previously noted, fewer votes (884,885) than Eugene Debs had won (913,693) as the party’s candidate in 1920, when, thanks to the wartime hysteria President Woodrow Wilson had fomented, Debs was in jail.
In 1962, Michael Harrington, a founder of the Democratic Socialists of America (it succumbed to a familiar phenomenon: Two American socialists = three factions), published The Other America. It supposedly kindled President John Kennedy’s interest in poverty, which had not escaped his attention while campaigning in West Virginia’s primary. Harrington, like “democratic socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders today, thought socialism should be advanced through the Democratic party.
Today, socialism has new, angrier advocates. Speaking well of it gives the speaker the frisson of being naughty and the fun of provoking Republicans like those whose hosannas rattled the rafters when the president vowed that America would never become socialist. Socialism is, however, more frequently praised than defined because it has become a classification that no longer classifies. So, a president who promiscuously wields government power to influence the allocation of capital (e.g., bossing around Carrier even before he was inaugurated; using protectionism to pick industrial winners and losers) can preen as capitalism’s defender against socialists who, like the Bolsheviks, would storm America’s Winter Palace if America had one.
Time was, socialism meant thorough collectivism: state ownership of the means of production (including arable land), distribution, and exchange. When this did not go swimmingly where it was first tried, Lenin said (in 1922) that socialism meant government ownership of the economy’s “commanding heights” — big entities. After many subsequent dilutions, today’s watery conceptions of socialism amount to this: Almost everyone will be nice to almost everyone, using money taken from a few. This means having government distribute, according to its conception of equity, the wealth produced by capitalism. This conception is shaped by muscular factions: the elderly, government employees unions, the steel industry, the sugar growers, and so on and on and on. Some wealth is distributed to the poor; most goes to the “neglected” middle class. Some neglect: The political class talks of little else.
Two-thirds of the federal budget (and 14 percent of GDP) goes to transfer payments, mostly to the non-poor. The U.S. economy’s health-care sector (about 18 percent of the economy) is larger than the economies of all but three nations, and is permeated by government money and mandates. Before the Affordable Care Act was enacted, 40 cents of every health-care dollar was government’s 40 cents. The sturdy yeomanry who till America’s soil? Last year’s 529-page Agriculture Improvement Act will be administered by the Agriculture Department, which has about one employee for every 20 American farms.
Socialists favor a steeply progressive income tax, as did those who created today’s: The top 1 percent pay 40 percent of taxes; the bottom 50 percent pay only 3 percent; 50 percent of households pay either no income tax or 10 percent or less of their income. Law professor Richard Epstein notes that in the last 35 years the fraction of total taxes paid by the lower 90 percent has shrunk from more than 50 percent to about 35 percent.
In his volume in the Oxford History of the United States (The Republic for Which It Stands) covering 1865–1896, Stanford’s Richard White says that John Bates Clark, the leading economist of that era, said “true socialism” is “economic republicanism,” which meant more cooperation and less individualism. Others saw socialism as “a system of social ethics.” All was vagueness.
Today’s angrier socialists rail, with specificity and some justification, against today’s “rigged” system of government in the service of the strong. But as the Hoover Institution’s John H. Cochrane (a.k.a. the Grumpy Economist) says, “If the central problem is rent-seeking, abuse of the power of the state, to deliver economic goods to the wealthy and politically powerful, how in the world is more government the answer?
The “boldness” of today’s explicit and implicit socialists — taxing the “rich” — is a perennial temptation of democracy: inciting the majority to attack an unpopular minority. This is socialism now: From each faction according to its vulnerability, to each faction according to its ability to confiscate.
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4) Why Jordan Is the Key to Israeli-Palestinian Peace
By Daniel Arbess
Last week’s Mideast security conference in Poland might have looked like a bust for the Trump administration, which hoped to consolidate European support for a harder line on Iran, and Arab support for Trump’s as-yet undisclosed “Deal of the Century” for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Neither of those things happened, but, in the process, plenty of stage-setting was accomplished.
Many European leaders stayed home, and Saudi Arabia, whose king recently stripped reformist Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of his responsibility for the “Palestinian file,” accused Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu of misleading the Israeli people into believing that relations with Israel’s Arab neighbors would continue to improve without a resolution of the “Palestinian issue.” Other Arab leaders jumped on the bandwagon, restating their old trope that the “Palestinian issue” — not their own exploitative authoritarian and, is some cases, Islamist terror-promoting regimes — is the root cause of instability in the region.
Trump official Jared Kushner told the conference that both Israel and the Palestinians would have to compromise for the “Deal of the Century,” while the Palestinians, whose chief negotiator described the conference as a “plot against the Palestinian cause,” skipped the event altogether.
But looks can be deceiving — especially when it comes to the Middle East.
The Trump administration is constructively giving its erstwhile allies a chance to show their true colors, and that itself has intrinsic value. The Europeans will eventually get in line on Iran or suffer the economic consequences. The Arab states are already aligned with the US relative to Iran, and Saudi chatter won’t obscure the fact that the Arabs were fed up with the Palestinians long before the Iranian regional menace got this far. And what might the Palestinian leaders be suggesting is their true “cause” by not showing up at all? Seems unlikely to be peace negotiations.
Israel is a strong nation, but it has always had a weakness for peace. This is what led Israel to allow the Biblical territories of Judea and Samaria (miraculously won in the multi-front 1967 war meant to destroy the Jewish state) to be designated as “disputed” — which, with 50 years of Palestinian obstinance, are now being positioned as “occupied” and eventually even “apartheid.”
Nonsense. Israel agreed to the Oslo two-state framework in 1993 and unilaterally walked away from Gaza in 2005. For their part, Palestinian leaders have over the decades proposed nothing for final status peace negotiations, instead dismissing several Israeli initiatives that would have given them most of the West Bank territories captured in the Six-Day War.
It should finally be clear from the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to engage at all with Israel or the United States since 2017 that Arafat and his successors shrewdly played on Israel’s willingness to sacrifice land for peace — entertaining Oslo’s “two state” discussions only as cover for their ultimate cause of rejecting and resisting the existence of the Jewish state.
That ship has sailed. The Jewish nation is a regional military and economic force. Everyone, especially West Bank Palestinians, would be better off if Israel were to eliminate the confusion and mixed signals of simultaneously settling and negotiating away territory, finally declare victory in the Six-Day War, and annex and stop apologizing for settling Judea and Samaria.
The Palestinian homeland is Jordan, the majority of whose population is in fact Palestinian. Jordan should restore Palestinian citizenship benefits (abandoned 30 years ago) to West Bank Palestinians, and the Hashemite kingdom should give Palestinians on both sides of the Jordan River legitimate consideration in the affairs of Jordan. Law-abiding West Bank Palestinians could remain in Israel as permanent residents, with all of the civil rights as other inhabitants of Israel. They don’t need another nation state in the Biblical heart of Israel.
Under this “True State” scenario, Israel and a newly legitimate Jordan would collaborate more closely than ever on both security and economic integration of West Bank Palestinian residents in Israel’s economy. Ask the West Bank Palestinians (not their corrupt “leaders”) where in the Middle East — or anywhere else, for that matter — they would enjoy a better life.
One critically important caveat: The transition from Oslo and the end of the Palestinian Authority (PA) would need to be closely managed to avoid disrupting the security at the Jordan River. Coordinating security with Jordan and Israel was probably the only useful role played by the PA; there needs to be continuity after Oslo reaches its terminus. Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy could remain, but its ongoing legitimacy, and therefore stability, would require greater investment of resources in the well-being of its Palestinian citizens.
Whatever happens with the Arab-Israeli alliance, the outcome of the upcoming Israeli elections, and Trump’s “Deal of the Century,” the United States and Israel shaping incentives for Jordan to assume a larger role in the security and administration of its West Bank Palestinian citizens could be one of the most constructive stabilizers for the entire region.
Daniel J. Arbess is a policy analyst and investor, the CEO of Xerion Investments LLC. He is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations and co-founder of No Labels, a bipartisan US political organization.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
5)
Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Every Democratic
Presidential Candidate’ Supports Green
New Deal
By Cameron Cawthorne
Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) on Saturday touted "every Democratic presidential candidate" supporting her Green New Deal resolution.
Ocasio-Cortez, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, spoke at her inaugural ceremony in the Bronx, where she touted her support from 2020 Democrats in the battle against climate change.
"The Green New Deal that we introduced two weeks ago, which was an amazing step forward, when we first were engineering it before it was introduced they were saying, ‘She's divisive. She's too confrontational. No one will sign onto a single piece of legislation that she introduced,'" said Ocasio-Cortez.
"We were able to to introduce a resolution in both chambers co-sponsored by every presidential candidate, every Democratic presidential candidate and 65 House members," Ocasio-Cortez continued.
The Green New Deal resolution, a 14-page economic stimulus plan released last Thursday by Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), has received backlash from conservatives and some moderates. President Donald Trump, who compared it to a "high school term paper that got a low mark" earlier in the week.
According to a FAQ released—and later deleted and retracted—by Ocasio-Cortez's office, the Green New Deal's framework includes replacing or upgrading every building in America with green energy alternatives. They also proposed building "high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary," and providing economic security to people "unwilling to work."
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y) on Friday said that she supported "all of the framework"of the Green New Deal during a campaign stop in New Hampshire. Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) alsosupported the framework and signed on as a co-sponsor. She called the plan "bold" and said, "Bold action takes bold leadership."
Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.), who recently announced he's running for president, likened the Democrat's "bold" effort to implement the Green New Deal to fighting Nazis during World War II and landing on the moon in 1969.
"We have to deal with this. Our planet is in peril and we need to be bold. It’s one of the reasons I signed on to the resolution; I co-sponsored the resolution for the Green New Deal," said Booker.
Other possible 2020 contenders that support the Green New Deal include Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), along with the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg.
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What Made George Washington Great?
There would have never been a United States of America without George Washington. John Rhodehamel, author of George Washington: The Wonder of the Age, details how Washington successfully guided the budding nation through war and nurtured her in peace.
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