My number 3 daughter, Lisa Thaler, is a prominent editor and two of her edited books have just been released:David Hovey (Images Publishing, 504 pp, 400 color illus, 10 b&w, $125) debuts 30 January 2022. "The beautifully illustrated monograph chronicles the architecture of David C. Hovey, FAIA, and his influence on the discipline, as well as the story of his life and career." December 2021, Hovey receives two 2021 American Architecture Awards in the multi-family housing category. Authors: Cheryl Kent, Helmut Jahn, Alex Marshall. Line Editor: Lisa Thaler.
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Laurina Buro Carroll launches the paperback edition of her Perfect Health for Busy People: A Maharishi-Ayurveda Guide to Enjoying a Longer, Happier Life (Perfect Health Press, April 2021, 232 pp). Author: Laurina Buro Carroll. Line Editor: Lisa Thaler.
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This from a dear friend of long standing and fellow memo reader regarding a recent posting in on eof my memos about good things happening in Israel:Great essay on Israel.
"Israel is not perfect (who is?) but the amazing things happening there are inspiring. Meanwhile, our leaders totally ignore Israel's fine example of cooperation with Arab states and fantastic technology developments. I am ashamed of our country.
For all his faults, at least Trump was adamant about making us proud of America again. (MAPA!)
R-----"
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The Hunter Lap Top Story is more than just that:
Why the Biden Laptop Matters Now
The New York Times rediscovers its seriousness in a serious time.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
I’ve been wondering when our media, at least those with a long-term hope of authority, would begin clawing back from their Russia collusion disgrace. The answer turns out to be: “When Vladimir Putin starts World War III in Ukraine.”
Russia and China are coming together now not because of oil and gas but because they have a common enemy, the democratic idea. I’m not being pious here. The only real threat either nuclear-armed regime faces is from its own people in a Tiananmen-style uprising. Russia is openly fascist, China is becoming so. A third giant power on the Eurasian continent, India, is at risk of evolving in the same direction.
This is our world. Overnight, we find ourselves in a full-scale economic war against a nuclear-armed petro-state, with the unspoken goal of regime change. Joe Biden, steeped in NATO and Cold War deterrence, has been handy in the moment but we are going to need a new foreign-policy elite, trained in new imperatives, for a new era.
So we come to the New York Times. The paper, which aspires to be nation’s and even the world’s “newspaper of record,” has chosen this moment to rectify its own record on the Hunter Biden laptop.
Critics understandably chortle but the paper perhaps is resurrecting itself for a serious moment. No “news” triggered its surprise acknowledgment of the laptop’s existence; its revisiting of the younger Mr. Biden’s seamy history was not driven by events. Instead, the need was for the Times to redeem itself from its participation in 2020’s craven spectacle, when top-drawer news organizations suppressed the news and even tried to convince readers that something wasn’t true that they knew was true.
The laptop story, broken by the New York Post, was everything the Russia collusion story wasn’t: meticulous, transparent, on-the-record sourcing; contemporaneous, documentary evidence that doesn’t depend on a source’s after-the-fact recollection or spin.
A paper of record has one job, to let its readers know what’s true and what isn’t. The Times abdicated, and whether the motive was partisanship or simple Twitter cowardice is irrelevant. The media failure that culminated in so much Russia-related folly in the Trump era was cumulative, as former British government adviser Dominic Cummings recently noted: “It both ignored many awful aspects of the Putin mafia state for 20 years and invented nonsense about it” (emphasis in the original).
Mr. Putin makes his plans according to his assessment of America’s enduring foreign-policy elite, not a passing wild card as Donald Trump would have seemed to him.
As tasteless as the Trump-Zelensky phone call may have been, in Hunter Biden’s activities while his father was leading U.S. Ukraine policy Mr. Putin would have seen the kind of oligarchic corruption he could recognize.
In the circling of the wagons around Mr. Biden by the media and its intelligence sources, in their premeditated lying that the laptop was “Russian disinformation,” he would have seen the same “political technology” he uses on Russian voters at home.
You may think, as I do, that Mr. Trump subordinates every consideration to flogging an image of himself as the world’s greatest winner in a world of losers. But the plain truth is, however you explain it, Mr. Putin paused his Ukraine Anschluss during the Trump presidency. Perhaps a piece of the puzzle is the Washington Post’s account this week of Mr. Biden’s failed effort in 2014 to convince Barack Obama to send antitank weapons to Ukraine. Alas, the week saw also a gratingly stupid article in the Los Angeles Times suggesting Mr. Trump somehow caused Mr. Putin’s actions in Ukraine.
We’re going to need better than this from our press.
Joe Ferullo, a former CBS and NBC news executive, writes hopefully in the Hill of a new era in cable news in which “resentment and resistance are pushed to the side and straight news steps back into the spotlight.”
He invests perhaps more hope than is warranted in ambivalent words from the new corporate master of CNN. We’ll see. Suddenly, at least, the New York Times wants to grow up, as if the events of the past three weeks merit a rediscovery of seriousness of purpose.
An unfinished bit of business here is the U.S. intelligence establishment—the one whose behavior Mr. Putin has actually been betting on, the one that deliberately gaslighted U.S. voters in 2020. Five years ago I wrote that instead of a fake collusion Watergate, we needed a real Pentagon Papers-type scandal to expose the “awkward, contradictory and humiliating straddles that Western governments have engaged in concerning the rise of the Putin regime.”
We still need this. It will be painful but necessary as our society and foreign-policy elite adapt to the new world being born as result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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There are two sides to the Ukraine War just as there are at least two sides to every story I have recently posted op eds by those who present both sides.
The history of Ukraine and the alleged corruption associated with it may be a strong argument why we and NATO should not be engaged.
The fact that we have a weak leader who has not been right on major issues his entire life could also be a reason why we should abandon involvement which could lead to a further war and eventually a nuclear one.
From my view point, we are far too into it to back out now and because our adversary is Putin, I believe we need to do everything we can to help Ukraine defeat Putin and the prospects are good if we are bold. Seldom do we have an ally dedicated to winning and an adversary that is not as powerful as first believed.
For once it would be healthy to be on the winning side because we chose to do what was morally correct, ie. help a nation that was attacked and brutalized to defend itself against a tyrant willing to commit heinous atrocities with abandon.
It is way past the time to continue feeding bullies.
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Is Biden Leading On Ukraine?
Kyiv needs the technology for a hard-to-fly zone that will degrade Russia’s air power.
By Daniel Henninger
One of the most criticized statements in the history of U.S. foreign policy was former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s remark in 2003 that Germany and France were “old Europe.” Now even old Europe agrees: Rummy was right.
Rumsfeld’s detractors included then-Sen. and now U.S. President Joe Biden, who will spend Thursday meeting with current Europe’s leaders about Vladimir Putin’s attempted destruction of Ukraine.
Let’s cut through the diplo-speak: If Mr. Biden and the Europeans don’t get Ukraine right, Europe’s future is finished.
Putin is Hitler. He is attempting the extermination of a people and the obliteration of their cities. World War II wasn’t fought in Europe to prevent a future nuclear exchange between Russia and the U.S. It was fought because Europe was experiencing the indiscriminate murder of civilians under Nazi military doctrine, now revived by Mr. Putin and the Russian general staff.
Since coming out of the ruins in 1945, the collective European memory has never quite lost an aversion to allowing the reappearance of that horror on its soil. It’s happening now.
This week on leaving Mariupol—nearly 90% of it destroyed—Greece’s Consul General Manolis Androulakis said, “What I saw, I hope no one will ever see.” Mariupol, he said, is now “Guernica, Coventry, Aleppo, Grozny, Leningrad.”
Rumsfeld’s critics chose to ignore that the former defense secretary, rather than writing off Europe, was optimistic about its ability to respond.
Asked about leadership in Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Rumsfeld replied: “You’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east.”
He meant Poland and the Baltics, the NATO members that for years warned France and Germany—and U.S. presidents—that Mr. Putin’s Russia was a clear and present danger.
But the full Rumsfeld quotation includes this, recalling when he was ambassador to NATO: “I found that Europe on any major issue . . . if there’s leadership and if you’re right, and if your facts are persuasive—Europe responds. And they always have.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, addressing Congress, put Rumsfeld’s first requirement for success with Europe—if there’s leadership—to Mr. Biden directly: “I wish you would be the leader of the world.” So far, no such luck. In the four weeks of the Putin war, it has been hard to tell if Mr. Biden is leading from behind, beside, above or below. The one place he’s rarely seen is out front. It’s hard not to notice. A Wall Street Journal poll found 52% of Americans don’t think Mr. Biden will run again, mainly because of his age.
Just as the world needs Mr. Biden to step it up, he somehow doesn’t appear to be committing himself or his office to anything equal to the scale of the Ukraine catastrophe. Speaking last week at a Democratic party fundraiser, Mr. Biden mentioned Ukraine once, to wit: “Russia and Ukraine is another reason why we have to get off our dependency on fossil fuels.”
Ageless ambition may have propelled Mr. Biden to the presidency, but by instinct and habit he remains a lifer from the U.S. Senate. He talks, he confers, he considers “options.” Forward motion, even in the face of World War III, will be incremental at best, such as imposing sanctions on members of Russia’s State Duma.
Old Europe is trying to reform itself into a single, new Europe, united by a capable NATO. But that’s in the future, involving hard questions about paying for an adequate military deterrent.
The harder question is: Where will old Europe be in the next four weeks, as Mr. Putin launches cruise missiles from Russian territory or the Black Sea into apartment buildings, schools and hospitals across Ukraine? The increasingly clear answer is that Mr. Biden and Europe will stay on the short side of what Ukraine needs militarily to force Mr. Putin into a cease-fire and negotiation. Worse, to get it over, they may pressure Mr. Zelensky into a premature de facto surrender.
As so often, President Zelensky was right about the real point of asking for Poland’s MiGs or a no-fly zone. As long as Mr. Putin rules the skies, nothing will deter his obsession with erasing Ukraine as a sovereign nation.
Yes, it is true that a literal “no-fly zone” is impossible. But that three-word phrase has become an excuse for limiting the Ukrainians to a suboptimal level of military technology. What Ukraine needs are the tools to convincingly establish a “hard-to-fly zone.” They need to be able to sustain a significant degradation of Mr. Putin’s air attacks, as they have his ground offensive.
The U.S. and NATO should make clear their intention to transfer more-effective air-defense weaponry and technology, such as the Patriot antimissile system, deployed wherever it will work best. Another no-action excuse for not providing antiaircraft systems more modern than the Soviet-made S-300 from the 1980s is that it would be too hard to train the Ukrainians on such sophisticated equipment. Really? Ask Russia’s generals.
It remains a good formula: Provide American leadership and the facts. Europe will respond.
And:
Ukraine Can Win With Enough Help
Biden and NATO are still too cautious in opposing Putin’s war.
By The Editorial Board
The public message out of Thursday’s meeting of NATO leaders in Brussels is sure to be heavy on unity and resolve in support of Ukraine. But the unfortunate reality is that the democratic alliance confronting Vladimir Putin still isn’t doing enough to ensure the Russian’s defeat. And behind the scenes, some leaders would prefer if Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to a peace settlement sooner rather than later.
The stunning fact of this war is that the Ukrainians have rescued Europe and the U.S. as much as NATO is assisting Ukraine. Kyiv’s stalwart resistance, at great human cost, has given the West a chance to stop the advance of Russian imperialism before it imperils NATO. The war has exposed the Russian military as weaker than our intelligence services and the Pentagon thought. Against all expectations, Ukraine may be winning.
Most surprising, the Ukrainian resistance has renewed a sense among the people of the West that their countries stand for something more than welfare-state ease and individual indulgence. Ukrainians are showing that freedom has a price, often a fearsome one.
Yet Western leaders still seem worried of what would happen if Ukraine won. That’s especially true in the Biden Administration, which has taken many good steps—but typically under pressure from Congress or Europe, and typically late. President Biden is rightly outraged by Mr. Putin’s brutality, and he calls him a war criminal,
At the White House on Tuesday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan was asked twice if he and the President thought Ukraine could win. The best he could offer was the assurance that Russia is “never going to be able to subjugate the Ukrainian people” and a boilerplate commitment to Kyiv’s sovereignty.
This cautious commitment extends to the slow pace of weapons delivery. Slovakia has offered its S-300 missile-defense system, which Ukraine says it needs, but it isn’t clear when it will be delivered. News leaked on March 16 that the U.S. would finally deliver Switchblade loitering drones to counter an invasion that began on Feb. 24. But on Monday the Pentagon conceded the Switchblades still weren’t on the ground in Ukraine. The U.S. should be emptying and restocking its weapons stockpiles on an emergency basis.
The same goes for assisting Western Europe as it copes with 3.5 million refugees and tries to wean itself from Russian oil and gas. The U.S. can accept many more Ukrainians for temporary protected status.
Europeans now understand the mistake they made on energy and are changing their policies. But Mr. Biden refuses to set aside his climate-change obsessions to address this world-changing crisis. His regulators are still targeting U.S. oil and gas production for slow extinction. He will have little credibility in persuading Germans and Italians to make sacrifices if he won’t help them meet their energy needs now and next winter.
It’s hard to resist the conclusion that Mr. Putin has succeeded in intimidating Mr. Biden and other leaders with his threats of nuclear escalation. This concern may justify the decision not to assist Ukraine with a NATO no-fly zone, which could require U.S. planes to attack Russian radars and missile defenses inside Russian territory.
But it shouldn’t be an excuse for caution in doing everything short of that to help Ukrainians defeat Mr. Putin. If the nuclear threat works to stop NATO support now, the Russian will use it in the future against NATO proper. The essence of deterrence is credibility, which means persuading Mr. Putin that his resort to nuclear weapons in Ukraine will be met with a requisite response. The same goes for chemical or biological weapons.
Our fear is that Mr. Biden, and perhaps other NATO leaders, will lean on Mr. Zelensky to agree to let Ukraine become one more “frozen conflict” like Georgia. Russia would be able to keep the Ukrainian territory it occupies in return for no more bombing. Mr. Putin would be able to consolidate control over those areas and rearm to threaten Ukraine again in the future. The NATO leaders could put that fear to rest if they said publicly that sanctions against Russia won’t be lifted until its troops leave Ukraine.
We’ve said before that a country goes to war, hot or cold, with the President it has. We want Mr. Biden to lead and succeed in Ukraine. But he needs to lead more decisively—and with a goal not merely of military stalemate but of Ukrainian victory.
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The Fed was established by Congress so politicians could continue along their merry way off loading their profligate manners on others.
Consequently, The Fed has a history of seldom, if ever, landing without cracking up and this time is likely to be no different.
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Is Bennett waving the white flag? If so, can he avoid doing so?
Must Bennett wave the white flag on a new Iran deal?
Israel’s preemptive surrender to Washington will also hamstring American critics of a disaster for the West as well as the Middle East. Biden critics in both countries must stop pulling their punches.
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN (JNS)
As far as Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is concerned, there’s no point in getting into a fight you can’t win. Given the Biden administration’s unshakable commitment to cutting a deal with Iran that will revive the 2015 nuclear agreement, he’s right that the chances of stopping this disaster from happening are slim and none. But while he may think he’s saving himself a lot of trouble and perhaps even gaining some credit with President Joe Biden to cash in during a future crisis, giving up even before the battle has even formally begun is not the wise strategy he thinks it is. More importantly, his decision will have implications not just for Israel, but for Americans who wish to mount a campaign against this policy or to reverse it that he and friends of the Jewish state will have good cause to regret.
Speaking on Monday, Bennett sounded a familiar theme to those who have followed his attempts to justify his journey from a position to the right of the Likud Party to one in which he is now in a coalition with left-wingers and even Arab Islamists. He says his predecessor—former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—not only failed to stop former President Barack Obama from getting his way on Iran, but that after that, “ears in Washington were closed on all other matters.”
It’s been the conviction of both Bennett and his coalition partner, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, that the best way to improve U.S.-Israel relations was to keep all arguments private rather than played out on the public stage. In theory, that makes sense. But as Bennett should have already learned in his nine months in office, refraining from public criticisms of the United States has gotten him exactly nowhere.
The low-key approach was supposed to help the Israelis persuade their American counterparts that instead of doubling down on the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), they should begin to reassemble an international coalition to pressure Tehran into giving up its nuclear ambitions.
But just as Bennett is determined to reverse whatever Netanyahu did, Biden would rather do anything than to concede that his predecessor—former President Donald Trump—was right to begin the process of undoing the damage that Obama did. Contrary to the claims of Obama and Biden apologists, the old deal didn’t forestall Iran getting a nuclear weapon; it actually guaranteed that outcome. With the sunset clauses in the 2015 pact expiring at the end of the decade, this will grant the Islamist regime a legal path to a nuclear weapon. Reviving this mistake makes no sense if Washington’s goal is to actually prevent that from happening.
American foreign policy is currently in the hands of former Obama staffers who are hell-bent on picking up where they left off with respect to achieving a rapprochement with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism as well as in undermining Israel.
With people like Robert Malley in charge of the talks with Iran, Bennett had no chance to alter the outcome. That’s why the prime minister’s claim that his decision will now give him the leverage to persuade the Americans not to make even more disastrous concessions to Iran this time around is equally mistaken.
Bennett wants the Americans to rescind Malley’s reported decision to give in to Iranian demands and to remove their Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations. But as we’ve already seen, once a concession is made to Iran, it isn’t reversed because it will be claimed that to do so will torpedo the entire deal. This is not just diplomacy for its own sake but a dynamic that makes surrender to Iranian demands inevitable.
Nor is there any reason to believe that Israel’s government behaving like an obedient client state will persuade the administration to look kindly on efforts by it to take matters into their own hands. Once a new deal is in place, Bennett knows very well that Biden won’t tolerate further attacks on Iran by covert means or an Israeli military strike on nuclear targets.
The Israeli government is entitled to decide what is best for its country. But their preemptive surrender to Biden will also undermine American critics of this effort to empower and enrich Iran.
Like the old deal, the new one is also a terrible blow to the security of the United States and the West. That’s why a decisive bipartisan majority of Congress opposed the original nuclear deal in 2015.
At that time, the Obama administration bamboozled the Republican leadership in Congress into accepting a process by which the pact would be given congressional oversight. They failed to demand, as they should have, that Obama submit the deal as a treaty, for which the Constitution states requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate for confirmation. Demonstrating the weakness in dealing with the Democrats that would lead a year later to the GOP electorate choosing Trump as their presidential nominee, both then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and then-Foreign Relations Committee chair Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) acquiesced to a different process.
The GOP leaders should have thrown down the gauntlet to Obama and told him that they would defund the State Department and refuse to confirm any diplomatic appointments until he respected the Constitution and submitted the deal for a treaty confirmation. Instead, they agreed to pass the Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 that allowed the deal to go into effect so long as one-third, plus one member of either House of Congress, approved it. In so doing, they allowed Obama and then Secretary of State John Kerry to mock the constitutional process for approving treaties.
That left it to Netanyahu to attempt to galvanize opposition to the Iran deal with his speech to a joint meeting of Congress. Obama used this unprecedented gesture to rally his party around the deal. But it also had the effect of sending a clear message to the American people about the nature of the threat facing both Israel and the United States. Without Netanyahu’s speech, it’s impossible to imagine the Trump administration prioritizing the reversal of Obama’s Iran policies.
By shutting down the fight against the new deal in advance of its announcement, Bennett has sent a message to the Republicans and Democrats who have been speaking out against Biden’s appeasement that they should also give up. After all, though this is about America’s best interests as well as Israel’s, for them to continue opposing Biden on this makes them appear to be trying to be more Israeli than the Israelis themselves. Though Bennett may hope that the congressional majorities that Republicans aim to win in the midterms this fall will act to restrain Biden’s folly, his giving up now will tell them it isn’t important enough for them to prioritize the issue.
If Bennett were able to show the same foresight that his former mentor turned bitter enemy showed then, he would not be giving Biden a pass for a decision that presents an existential threat to Israel.
Why is Bennett doing this? Though it seems to be a case of wishful thinking, perhaps he really has convinced himself that waving the white flag on the deal will pay off eventually in a favor from Biden. Maybe he also believes that keeping on the good side of the Americans, as well as his leftist coalition allies, is the only way to ensure that he will be able to continue to serve as prime minister for another 17 months until Lapid is scheduled to replace him.
Either way, his backing down in the face of what he claims is the inevitable will have consequences that are more important than his own future. If Israelis want Americans to help them avert this threat, either now or in the future, knuckling under to Biden isn’t an option.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate).
Meanwhile:
Biden cannot help scapegoating because he has no "buck," no scruples and no morals. His wide pathetic, smile reminds me of Batman's Joker.
Biden Blames the Jews for His Ukraine Policy
The president and his people try to seal a new Iran deal by hanging their appeasement of Putin on Israel.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was precipitated by assurances from China, Germany, and the United States that each of Russia’s major trading partners either backed his position or had zero interest in getting in his way. President Joe Biden’s invitations to Putin to bite off more chunks of Ukraine made it clear that America was not interested in a fight with the Russian dictator in his own backyard. Surely, the mighty Putin would make quick work of the Ukrainians. After all, he helped put down the Syrian rebellion to preserve Iran’s stake in Syria, and thereby sealed Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with the clerical regime in Tehran. So why make a big fuss, especially since at the same time Putin is intent on breaking Ukraine, he is also brokering the new Iran deal with U.S. negotiators in Vienna?
The problem for Biden is that Putin is not winning his war in anything like the quick and easy fashion that the White House and other world powers apparently expected. Moreover, the prospect of a dictator murdering thousands of Ukrainians in Europe in a prolonged war may be a tougher pill to swallow for so-called Western elites than the same dictator helping to murder half a million Syrians.
Biden’s position has thus become difficult, even with a captive media eager to read from a script in which the president of the United States bravely rallies NATO to do something, while in fact doing as close to nothing as politically possible. Luckily, the White House has a playbook for situations in which the contradictions between appearance and reality threaten to overwhelm the ever-changing storylines about who is responsible for, say, $6 per gallon gas. The playbook, like the Iran deal, is a legacy of the Obama administration, and a variation on an age-old incantation: “Blame the Jews.”
In the case of Ukraine, blaming the Jews might seem like a stretch—the Jewish state is a regional power in a region far from Ukraine. But senior Capitol Hill sources told Tablet that the Biden administration is trying to put Israel in the line of fire by pushing Jerusalem to mediate between Kyiv and Moscow. The point is to position Israel to catch the blame if Putin doesn’t relent, or the stubborn Ukrainians prove unwilling to surrender enough territory to end the war on terms that the Russian president finds acceptable.
Sources explain that the Israelis have reluctantly relayed messages between the two states but don’t want to get further involved, for two reasons: First, with Russian forces on their Syrian border, the Israelis don’t want trouble with Putin; second, they see that the White House is setting them up for failure by forcing them into taking a stand against Putin.
Team Biden’s PR offensive blaming Israel for the failure of two-faced U.S. policy has included Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland’s warnings to Jerusalem not to help hide “dirty money” belonging to Putin-allied oligarchs. Nuland also said that Israel should join the international sanctions regime targeting Russian assets—a regime that notably does not include world powers like China and India, which Nuland failed to mention.
The administration’s misdirection campaign also relied on Biden validators from the foreign policy establishment. Richard Haass and Aaron David Miller tweeted to the effect that if Israel wants to be an American ally, it should stand with America’s values, embodied by its moral stance toward Russia, which includes impoverishing ordinary Russians by crashing the ruble.
The coordinated operation to embroil Israel culminated in a story last week pushed out by the White House’s communications infrastructure inside Israel, whose lead publicist, Axios reporter Barak Ravid, proved his value during the Obama years. The story, which quickly went global, claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept Putin’s terms of surrender. A “senior Ukrainian official claimed Bennett initiated the call,” according to an account sourced to an anonymous Ukrainian official and given to Ravid. The source claimed that Bennett “recommended Zelensky take the offer.”
Was the story true? The Ukrainian government said it was false, and moved to correct the record the next day. Zelensky adviser Mikhail Podolyak wrote on Twitter that Israel did not push the Ukrainians to accept the concessions Putin demanded to end the invasion. Zelensky’s adviser tweeted that Bennett, “just as other conditional intermediary countries, does NOT offer Ukraine to agree to any demands of the Russian Federation.” Instead, he wrote, “Israel urges Russia to assess the events more adequately.” He also pointed out that the source could not have been on the call, which was private, and was probably not in Ukraine.
But whether the surrender story is true or not, shouldn’t the Israelis be openly and proudly pro-Zelensky? Ukraine’s president has won the affection of decent—and smart—people the world over, who have festooned their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds with the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag. And he’s Jewish! Why doesn’t Israel join in?
The reality is that Israel has frequently stood up for Ukraine against Russia, and with little to show for it. But the issue in this case is simple: The Russian military is on Israel’s border, kind of like it was on Ukraine’s border before it invaded. The difference is that the Russian-Ukrainian border is a geographical fact. Russia is only on Israel’s border due to a geostrategic power play that Moscow implemented with the acquiescence of the U.S. political faction now trying to drive Israel toward conflict with Putin.
The purpose of the Biden team’s anti-Israel smear campaign is not just to make the Israelis look like they sympathize with a tyrant while offering to hide the blood money of their Russian co-religionists. That part is just ugly propaganda. The strategic purpose of the administration’s campaign is to force Jerusalem into an error that would give Putin reason to move against Israel, and thereby further limit its ability to strike Iran or its allies. As with Obama, Biden’s moves against Israel are keyed to the Iran deal.
Despite some occasional public vows of affection for Israel, Obama’s performative progressives, who staff nearly every important position in the Biden administration, do not see it as an ally. Insofar as Israel jeopardizes the Iran deal, it is a U.S. adversary. Russia, on the other hand, is an important partner in getting the deal across the finish line.
Putin supplied the deterrence that protected the only foreign policy goal that really mattered to Obama. With Putin in Syria, Israel could only go so far.
The hypocrisy, gaslighting, and attempt to blame Israel for Russian depredations started more than a decade ago with the onset of the Syrian war. Putin stood behind Moscow’s Cold War-era ally and its only remaining regional partner, the regime Bashar Assad inherited from his father, Hafez. The Russians armed the Syrian government and represented it in international forums like the United Nations, where they regularly blocked action against Assad. When Obama’s U.N. Ambassadors Susan Rice and Samantha Power complained about the Russians’ immoral support for Assad, their shrill protests appeared designed to underscore American impotence. In fact, it disguised the disturbing reality that Obama was on the Russians’ side.
That’s because by defending Assad, Moscow was also defending the nuclear deal with Assad’s other patron, Iran. Instead of owning up to a policy that put the United States on the side of tyrants in Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran, the Obama team claimed that the fault lay with its regional allies, especially Israel, which was said to be pleading to keep the Russian-backed strongman in power. The idea then, as now, was to make the Israelis take the blame for what was in fact the American position: supporting despotic and anti-American regimes.
Israel’s then-ambassador to the United States Michael Oren repeatedly tried to correct the record. “I must once again state,” Oren wrote in 2011, “that Israel wants the Assad regime to be replaced by a genuine Syrian democracy that eschews terror, turns its back on Iran, and seeks peace with its Israeli neighbor.” But it didn’t matter how many times Jerusalem explained its actual position. Israel’s alliance with the United States prevented it from blaming the Americans, which meant that the Americans were free to act in bad faith and blame Israel.
Even with Moscow supporting Assad’s war on their border, the Israelis stood publicly with Ukraine. Shortly after Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, Israel voted at the U.N. in defense of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Soon, Russian forces would move toward Israel’s border with its 2015 escalation in Syria, a move celebrated at the time by U.S. officials but in no way welcomed by the Israelis.
In public, Obama’s aides claimed Russia would help rid the world of ISIS and other terror groups, but that’s not why Putin dispatched his forces at the request of Iranian terror commander Qassem Soleimani. The Russians were there to support Iran. And that’s what Obama wanted, too. What was the point, after all, of legalizing Iran’s industrial-scale nuclear program, if the Iranian regime was going to lose its war in Syria? Iran had to win, which meant Putin had to help. The government of then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understood that for the first time in half a century, Jerusalem would not have Washington’s support if it wound up in a shooting war with Moscow.
Accordingly, the Israelis worked out a modus vivendi with Putin, a “deconfliction” mechanism by which Israel was permitted in certain circumstances to attack Syrian and Iranian forces, including Hezbollah. But should the Israelis get it into their heads to conduct air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, they’d have hell to pay on their border. Putin supplied the deterrence that protected the only foreign policy goal that really mattered to Obama. With Putin in Syria, Israel could only go so far.
Yet even then, in December 2016, Israel again took Kyiv’s side at the U.N. in a vote on the human rights situation in Crimea.
How did Vice President Biden show his appreciation for Israel’s principled stance against Putin’s war in Europe? Less than a week later, he strong-armed the Ukrainian president to vote for Security Council Resolution 2334, finding that Israel was in occupation of Palestinian land—which according to the resolution included historical Jewish holy sites. The Ukrainians asked to abstain, but Biden said no. Kyiv then asked for a delay. There was a large and influential Jewish community in Ukraine with family ties to Israel. And after all, what would the optics be of turning against Jerusalem just days after the Israelis had stood with Ukraine? That was not good enough for Biden. So the Ukrainians joined the other powers the Obama team had corralled into voting against Israel.
The Biden administration’s moves against Israel over Ukraine are part of a ghoulish puppet show. Yes, the administration will sanction the Russian economy until it bleeds—at the same time that the nuclear deal with Iran gives Russia a cash-rich client eager to buy Russian arms. And why not? From the perspective of the Obama-Biden faction, Russia is hardly the main problem. That distinction is reserved for Israel.
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