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ACRU COMMENTARYThe National Security Policy of Barney Fife Posted By Allen West, Lt. Col. Ret
It was an absolutely beautiful Saturday morning as I did my normal weekend five-mile run. The sunrise over Lake Ray Hubbard here in Garland and Rowlett, Texas, was serene. As I ran along, it suddenly hit me how best to characterize the recent balloon tomfoolery of the Biden administration. It reminded me of Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife of Mayberry RFD. Yes, I am dating myself, but many of you recall the character portrayed by actor-comedian Don Knotts on the “The Andy Griffith Show.” We all still laugh at the reruns of that classic, but to think that it mirrors the strategy of the Biden administration is quite terrifying.
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Golda Meir would agree with Netanyahu on this one
Helen Mirren is a wonderful actress, but her claim that she understands Golda’s “world” or the current debate about Israel’s Supreme Court is pure bunk.
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
(February 22, 2023 / JNS) There are many issues worth having an argument over; then again, some are better left alone. For example, a debate about whether or not the actress who is hired to play Golda Meir in a movie is Jewish is not worth a moment of anyone’s time. By contrast, the discussion about whether the current nearly unlimited powers of Israel’s Supreme Court should be checked and balanced by giving more power to the Knesset elected by the country’s voters is of utmost import.
As it so happens, the British actress Helen Mirren is the focus of an unimportant controversy, yet has injected herself into a controversial debate despite having nothing to say that is of even minimal value about it.
Mirren is a great performer with a long list of theater and film credits. However, the current fashion in which “lived experience”— what other kind of experience is there other than that which is lived through?—is considered necessary in order to be able to pretend to be someone other than oneself, has rendered controversial the casting of Mirren in a film about the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. According to some, the instance of a non-Jewish actor playing a Jew has been dubbed “Jewface.”
The entire idea of “Jewface”—a play upon “blackface,” the reprehensible practice in which white people would mimic blacks in the manner of 19th-century minstrel shows—is a pathetic attempt by some Jews to get in on the victim game in which minorities have demanded better representation in the arts. While adopting a different race goes back to a tragic racist past, imposing that same concern on Jewish roles is ridiculous. Acting is, after all, make-believe.
The producers of the upcoming “Golda” biographical movie were lucky to get Mirren to play the title role, and whatever the film’s ultimate merits or failings turn out to be, it isn’t likely that Mirren not being a member of the tribe will be the reason why it flops. But while criticism of the casting is utterly without merit the same thing can be said about an article in which the actress was asked to weigh in on the merits of the current Israeli government’s proposals for judicial reform.
In an interview conducted with Agence France Presse during her appearance at the Berlin Film Festival, Mirren not only attempted to justify her casting in the role as Israel’s leader during the Yom Kippur War but claimed to have understood Meir, and to know what she would have thought about the current debate about judicial reform.
Mirren was chosen by Israeli film director Guy Nattiv, who said in the same article that he felt the actress’s long relationship with his country “lent authenticity” to her portrayal. It turns out that Mirren hitchhiked around Israel back in the 1960s and stayed at a kibbutz not long after the Six-Day War in June 1967 because her then-boyfriend was Jewish, and he wanted to be there.
Meir was a complex figure born in what was then the Russian empire before immigrating to the United States as a child, settling in Milwaukee. As a young woman, she made aliyah in 1921, settling with her Chicago-born husband, Morris Meyerson, on the kibbutz of Merhavia, living there for a few years before moving to Tel Aviv, where she began her career as a Labor Zionist activist. She would serve that movement for decades as a politician and then as Israel’s ambassador to the Soviet Union and Israel’s foreign minister before becoming prime minister in 1969.
She was much beloved in the United States and responsible for raising millions for the yishuv before 1948 and the establishment of modern-day Israel. But her premiership is chiefly remembered in Israel for a decision in which, despite last-minute warnings about an imminent attack from Egypt and Syria, she allowed Israel’s enemies to strike first on Yom Kippur in 1973, rather than to pre-empt the blow as her predecessor had done in 1967. Though the war ended in military triumph for the Israel Defense Forces, the grim death toll from its first days caused many in the country to view it as a defeat. Many blamed Meir; in fact, her reputation never really recovered from it.
Mirren’s claims about what Meir would think of this issue demonstrate her complete ignorance.
That Mirren seems to think that a few weeks spent in a kibbutz more than half a century ago qualifies her as an expert on “Golda’s world” is ridiculous. Even worse is her claim that it gives her the standing to give a considered opinion on Israel’s judicial system.
According to the actress, the proposals to establish some checks on the untrammeled power of an Israeli Supreme Court “would be a complete reversal and denial of her values and her understanding of the world that she wanted to create.” Mirren went on to claim, “I think she would have been utterly horrified. It’s the rise of dictatorship and dictatorship was what has always been the enemy of people all over the world and she would recognize it as that.”
This is nonsense on stilts.
That she would repeat the slanders of Israel’s left-wing opposition parties is unsurprising since they reflect Nattiv’s political views. Like most liberal elites in Israel, the director seems to despise Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu’s coalition won a clear majority in the Knesset elections last November. As such, it acquired a mandate to restore some balance to Israel’s political system in which the representatives of the voters will regain some of the power grabbed by an unaccountable court that thinks arbitrary ideas about what is “reasonable” is more important than the law. The government’s proposal is an attempt to re-establish democracy, not destroy it—let alone the start of a dictatorship.
Mirren’s claims about what Meir would think about this issue demonstrate complete ignorance of the subject matter at hand.
During her entire time serving in and then leading Israel’s governments during its first quarter-century, the country’s Supreme Court did not exercise or claim to have the powers that contemporary left-wingers now assert are essential to democracy. On the contrary, the governments led by Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol did not recognize the right of the court to act in the manner it has done for the last 30 years. Neither did Meir.
The idea that founding father Ben-Gurion or Meir—or anyone in their Labor Zionist-led coalitions—would have tolerated for a single minute the court weighing in on every decision that the cabinet, ministers or the military made is laughable. They didn’t believe that any Israeli court had the right to override their decisions on appointments, policies or military operations without even establishing their standing to do so. The judicial revolution initiated by former Chief Justice Aharon Barak didn’t begin until many years later.
Meir was a hard-core partisan, and despised the Israeli right and its leader Menachem Begin. But the assumption that Netanyahu’s reforms would end democracy in Israel would mean that the country wasn’t one before Barak’s power grab. That happened more than a decade after Meir was driven from office in 1974.
That Mirren doesn’t know any of this is not surprising. But that anyone would listen to her on this question or give credence to her uninformed opinions in order to promote the “resistance” to Netanyahu says more about the Israeli left than it does about the object of their ire.
Whatever we may ultimately think about the current movie about Meir, Mirren’s comments about judicial reform should remind all of both the pitfalls of celebrity culture and the perils of historical ignorance.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
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Biden continues to spend tax payer money with abandon.
https://thefederalist.com/2023
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Christiane Amanpour’s Dubious, and Likely Fabricated, Polling Data
By: David Litman
CAMERA - Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis
In yet another display of Christiane Amanpour’s prioritization of her disdain for Israel over journalistic integrity, the CNN anchor appears to have fabricated poll results to falsely suggest that the Palestinian side supports the two-state solution with Israel.
The comments came during her interview with former Israeli ambassador Yael German on February 14, 2023. Toward the end of the interview, Amanpour asked Ambassador German: “I want to know from you, as a diplomat, is there any hope for anything resembling negotiations on a two-state solution, given that the settlements and the settlement-believers are emboldened by now their backers who are in government?”
Ambassador German answered by pointing out the unwillingness of Palestinian leaders to agree to repeated offers of statehood and to live side by side with Israel. She also argued that the Palestinian people generally refuse to accept the existence of a Jewish state.
Then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, U.S. President Bill Clinton, and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat at the Camp David talks in 2000, which would end with Arafat’s rejection of the negotiated peace agreement that would have seen the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Amanpour responded first by downplaying the extent of Palestinian rejectionism of the Jewish state, saying only “some people” believe that, and then, without providing any specific source, claimed: “The latest polls from the Palestinian side also show that they want a peaceful, two-state solution to co-exist with you.”
It’s unclear what “latest polls” Amanpour might be referring to, given that every major recent poll from the Palestinian side shows exactly the opposite.
Recent polling by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) has consistently shown low support for a two-state solution. A June 2022 poll found that only 28% of Palestinians support the concept of a two-state solution. In September, that figure rose to 37%, but dropped again in December to 32%.
Other Palestinian polls show the same. An August 2021 poll from the Ramallah-based Arab World for Research & Development (AWRD) found that only 36% of Palestinians supported the principle of a two-state solution. A July 2022 poll by the Palestinian organization Jerusalem Media & Communication Center (JMCC) found that only 26% preferred a two-state solution. The data is further supported by polling data from The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (TWI), which found in June 2022 that only 37% of Gazans and 25% of West Bank Palestinians would “definitely accept” or “probably accept” the principle of “two states for two peoples.”
The PCPSR polls also dispel the notion that the “Palestinian side” seeks a peaceful solution. As the December 2022 poll showed, a “majority of 55% support the return to an armed intifada.” The figure was 55% and 48% respectively in June and September 2022. TWI found in June 2022 that approximately 70% of Gazans and 61% of West Bank Palestinians either strongly or somewhat agree that “Palestinians should move to a new intifadah and make armed struggle their top priority.”
The December 2022 PCPSR poll also found that 72% of Palestinians “support the formation of armed groups such as the ‘Lions’ Den’,” a terrorist organization behind a significant portion of the uptick in terror attacks in the last year, including by sending a 16-year-old to attack Jewish worshippers.
Given these consistent findings of relatively well-respected Palestinian polls, it seems likely that Amanpour entirely fabricated findings from nonexistent “latest polls.” A request for substantiation sent to Amanpour has so far gone unanswered.
Even if a recent poll does exist that shows dramatically different results than the consistent figures from PCPSR, AWRD, TWI, and JMCC, it would be intellectually dishonest to omit any mention of the other “recent polls” contradicting Amanpour’s preferred results.
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