So much for hope!
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If Obama gets his way and raises the debt ceiling he will be able to wreck the nation claiming 'fairness,' standing up for the 'little guy' and for 'taxing the rich' to achieve 'rightful redistribution.'
If he is not allowed to raise the debt ceiling he will claim Republicans wrecked the nation through contempt for that same 'little man,' for having a stone heart and because they support 'capitalist greed.'
Turning America into a European socialized styled nation is actually perverse because Obama has consistently railed against European Colonialism so why would he want to turn America into an economic clone of Europe?
Secondly, if Obama is as intellectual as claimed then, why cannot he see what has happened to Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, even Russia, etc. where economic Socialism has failed? Even Israel, which began totally socialistic, prospered when it began to throw off the yoke of economic statism and embraced their semblance of capitalism.
Perhaps the answer is Obama is steeped in contempt for this nation, its 'unfairness' and questionable history and his mission of change is truly based on all he has been taught by all the radicals with whom he has been associated. In a word, his actions are, as I have alleged, purposeful!
(I have just finisheed Francis Fukuyama's: "The Origins of Political Order" and will discuss in a separate memo.)
If this is obvious then why do a vast number of Americans remain blind? I guess part of the answer is their dependency upon government and their fear they could not survive in a more austere government. A government supposedly caring less for their welfare dependency.
Another reason could be jealousy of their fellow citizens who have more and who, they believe, have achieved their vaulted status because the system is rigged or because they have lied and cheated their way to the top driven by greed. There certainly is plenty of evidence available for disreputable politicians seeking to lay blame beyond the shores of Congress.
Then there is the issue of victim hood that PC'ism guilt has perpetrated upon our society.
Finally, ignorance provides a fertile field for gullibility. Take fear, jealousy and add stupidity and you have a powerful concoction dishonest politicians can manipulate. Castro did it, Chavez is doing it and then we have the Arab/Muslim street, numbering in the billions, buying the hate and distortions spewed by the likes of Arafat, Hezballah, Hamas, Assad etc..
Saul Alinsky knew what he was doing and writing and so does Obama. I defy anyone who believes otherwise. Why? Because the facts point in only one direction and I return to my repeated theme - Obama is willingly engaged in purposeful behaviour and we re-elect him at our Republic's peril!
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Stratfor has published an article pertaining to Chinese companies listed on American Exchanges where accounting is questionable. The Chinese government maintains companies that are owned by China are immune from accounting investigation as well as companies that might not be owned but are engaged in sectors strategically critical to China's security.
Stratfor writes: "The problem faced by Chinese companies, and more broadly the Chinese government, is this: To be listed on U.S. stock exchanges, Chinese companies have to make their financial information public. The companies and their Chinese auditors may be trying to hide behind the threat of state-secrets prosecution in order to hide their own problems. The Ministry of Finance may also be bringing up the importance of "national economic information," as Reuters reported July 6, to deter Chinese companies and auditors from revealing too much." (See 1 below)
I actually own stock in one such company which claims it is co-operating with the SEC and The NYSE to rectify any questionable financial activities and accounting procedures.
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Pat Buchannan is one ticked off guy and with some justification. On the other hand asking for credit from oppressed blacks by claiming you assisted them after their shackles of oppression were removed is a bit disingenuous. (See 2 below.)
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Bolton said it, I just think it. (See 3 below.)
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Facts speak louder than Obama's B.S. Then and now!(See 4 below.)
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And if you want a little Southern humor from our police look at these responses. (See 5 below.) ---
Dennis Prager about sizes it up. (See 6 below.)
Talking about sizing it up I understand two disreputable politicians are opening a bar in Little Italy, New York and are naming their signature concoction the "Weiner Spitzer."
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Jordan rethinks support of a Palestinian state and now seems to want to oppose it in the U.N. Read why. (See 7 below.)
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Government bureaucrats are human and therefore, they react like humans.
The problem is they are ofetn dealing with critical issues and matters of national security.
That is when their human reactions can get dangerous. (See 8 below.)
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Because of a rcent poll regarding Palestinian intentions, their continued intransigence and unwillingness to recognize Israel's right to exist Caroline Glick writes, Israel has basically one option to remain a viable nation - annex Samaria and Judea with all the consequent problems entailed in doing so. (See 9 below.)
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Dick
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1) China Security Memo: Looking into 'Reverse Mergers' on Wall Street
What is a Trade Secret Now?
Members of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) went to Beijing for meetings July 11-12 with the Chinese Ministry of Finance and the China Securities Regulatory Commission. The meetings were prompted by a series of accounting scandals that involved Chinese companies being listed on U.S. stock exchanges through "reverse mergers." This is a process in which companies enter an American exchange not by an initial public offering but by acquiring a shell company that is already publicly traded on the exchange.
The United States allows foreign companies to gain access to its markets if approved by foreign auditors, and the PCAOB is responsible for accrediting the foreign auditors. But if the auditors fail to perform due diligence they can allow fraudulent accounting to affect American markets — hence the need for the PCAOB to conduct investigations abroad.
For years the Chinese government has rejected American appeals to investigate 110 Chinese auditing companies on the basis of preserving its sovereignty over China's business practices. The latest scandals have resulted in the U.S. suspension of 24 Chinese-listed companies that had already been reviewed by the approved auditing companies. This has had a significant impact on the markets, so there is renewed market pressure for U.S. authorities to gain access to Chinese books. STRATFOR sources say the most recent round of negotiations was preliminary and that it will be a long time before the two countries agree on a solution, such as raising standards for accreditation or allowing joint U.S.-China inspections on Chinese soil.
Chinese auditors have reportedly denied giving American investigators access to their books, claiming that to do so would be to violate China's state-secrets law. STRATFOR sources believe this reference to the state-secrets law is a smokescreen for firms that do not want to provide transparency or cooperate with American authorities. Therefore, entirely aside from the stock scandals and financial regulatory negotiations, this incident has again brought up the issue of China's state-secrets laws.
The question comes down to whether auditors in China can legally be allowed to give information to U.S. regulators or whether such information can be designated as state secrets. The current state-secrets law, which was updated in 2010, theoretically gives the Chinese government less flexibility in prosecuting such cases, but it does not make it impossible. The reality is that taking action under the new law — trying to prosecute a case — is the only way to assess how the new law will be interpreted.
One criterion for information to qualify as a state secret would have to be whether it is related in any way to state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The rules set in April 2010 by China's State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), which manages SOEs, and the state secrets law that went into effect in October 2010 provided some clarity on this issue. Any commercial information from "central enterprises," which are identified as 120 companies overseen by the SASAC, could be considered a state secret. None of the Chinese companies that have been publically identified so far in the recent accounting scandals is an SOE, so information on these companies is not clearly defined as state secrets. But if any of the companies being audited has major business dealings with SOEs, or if SOEs are stakeholders in these companies, such information could be so defined.
Another criterion would be whether the information is related to any "strategic sectors" defined by Beijing or whether it would be in the interest of national security. This is the part of the law that gives Beijing flexibility, and any information relevant to the U.S. investigation could be considered a state secret. An example of this would be the prosecution of Xue Feng, who collected public information on oil reserves, which relate to an industry classified as a strategic sector. This also ignores the whole concept of commercial secrets, which could more clearly be applied to the companies in question. While not as serious as a state secrets prosecution, commercial secrets are also protected under Chinese law, a charge Stern Hu also faced, but was not convicted of, in the 2009 Rio Tinto scandal.
The redefinition of SASAC rules and the new state-secrets law came after Hu's case, in which he was originally accused but not prosecuted for violating the previous law. The new law broadened the potential classification for information related to state-owned companies but not private ones. If what Chinese authorities consider important auditing information is exposed during the U.S. investigation, they may use the same tactics they used in the Hu case. Chinese authorities have created a culture of fear around the issue, making it difficult to move forward with proper due diligence for fear of prosecution.
The problem faced by Chinese companies, and more broadly the Chinese government, is this: To be listed on U.S. stock exchanges, Chinese companies have to make their financial information public. The companies and their Chinese auditors may be trying to hide behind the threat of state-secrets prosecution in order to hide their own problems. The Ministry of Finance may also be bringing up the importance of "national economic information," as Reuters reported July 6, to deter Chinese companies and auditors from revealing too much.
In the end, Beijing may decide that the release of information by the Chinese companies being investigated could reveal state secrets and threaten national security. However it chooses to handle the situation will be telling. If the Chinese government prosecutes auditors for handing over their books, the message will be clear: China's state-secrets law is incompatible with American expectations regarding foreign access to U.S. equity markets. If no auditors hand over their books, it will reinforce the assumption that they are using their fears to hide fraudulent accounting.
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2)SILENT!!!! NOT ANY MORE -- BUCHANAN TO OBAMA
This appears accurate. Blacks are 12.9% of our population, but comprise about 40% of the federal work force whose average salary is $78,000 per year as compared to the general population's annual salary of about $42,000 per year. It is odd that no one writes about this great disparity.
And then:
BUCHANAN TO OBAMA
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America .. Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation.. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.... This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:
First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.. Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.
Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ' 60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream. Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks -- with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas -- to advance black applicants over white applicants.Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated their time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.
We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude??
Barack talks about new 'ladders of opportunity' for blacks. Let him go to Altoona ? And Johnstown , and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for 'deserving' white kids...? Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America ? Is it really white America 's fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?
Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?
As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?
Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?
We have all heard ad nauseam from the Rev. Al about Taiwan Brawly, the Duke rape case and Jena .. And all turned out to be hoaxes. But about the epidemic of black assaults on whites that are real, we hear nothing.
Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago
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3)Fmr. U.N. Ambassador Bolton: Obama is “the Most Anti-Israel President in the History of the State, Without Any Question”
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, American Enterprise Institute Fellow and possible Republican presidential aspirant, John Bolton, has said during a visit to Israel that Barack Obama is “the most anti-Israel president in the history of the State, without any question.” In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Mr. Bolton emphasized that the tensions that have beset the U.S./Israel relationship are not the result of misunderstanding, saying, “If you think that this is just a misunderstanding of where the green crayon went in 1949, then think again.” Mr. Bolton said that President Obama bought in to what he said was the “European line,” namely, that if you make progress between Israel and the Palestinians “sweetness and light” will break out in the region, and every other problem from Iran to terrorism will be easier to solve. “I think that is like looking through the wrong end of the telescope.”
Mr. Bolton also criticized President Obama’s policy towards Iran, saying that he believed the Obama administration’s “real Plan B for the Iranian nuclear weapons program is that it can be contained and deterred, much as we contained and deterred the Soviet Union in the Cold War. I think that is fundamentally wrong.” Mr. Bolton stated that in his view, the only way to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons was through military action and that “Diplomacy and sanctions are not going to work. The Obama administration certainly isn’t going to use force against the Iranian program, and Israel is obviously very reluctant to do it as well … If Israel is not prepared to strike, then get ready for an Iran with nuclear weapons, and you can draw your own conclusions. If you think Iran’s behavior is bad now, imagine what it will be if it gets nuclear capability. I think we are all sleepwalking past this … If I had been in charge of the Israeli government, I would have attacked in 2008 for several reasons. First, it was three years ago, so you are much more likely to have eliminated the key elements of Iran’s nuclear weapons program … [Secondly] in 2008 you had a president sympathetic to Israel – so you calculate the next time that is going to occur.”
Mr. Bolton also argued that the Palestinian Authority’s bid for recognition of Palestinian statehood at the U.N. should not – as it is in Israel and elsewhere – be getting more attention and energy than the Iranian nuclear threat. Israel’s proper response to the move, he said, is “not to pay any attention to it, and to care no more about it than the grass you tread beneath your feet … if you make the General Assembly into something more than what it is, than you are giving it authority and legitimacy it doesn’t have.” Mr. Bolton said that the only way to get this move stopped in the UN was for the U.S. Congress to pass legislation saying that if the move did go through, Washington would cut off funding to the international body, as the U.S. successfully threatened in 1989 when the UN was moving towards accepting the PLO as a full U.N. member (Herb Keinon, ‘Bolton: Obama worst president for Israel – ever,’ Jerusalem Post, July 13, 2011).
ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “Mr. Bolton’s assessment of President Obama and his policy towards Israel is one with which we agree and which, indeed, we have long suspected to be true. In fact, immediately following President Obama’s June 2009 Cairo speech, we predicted in a press release that President Obama “may become most hostile president to Israel ever.” We also published an opinion piece in the Jerusalem Post in January 2009 and other publications regarding ‘Hillary Clinton's troubling transformation on Israel,’ detailing several of the swings towards pro-Palestinian positions and ignoring of Palestinian incitement to hatred and murder under President Obama. Clearly, there is a range of issues relating to Israel in which President Obama’s policy is of deep concern to the pro-Israel community.”
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4)“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America ’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government can not pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America ’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”
-- Senator Barack H. Obama, March 2006
When you compare the increases in the national debt for Clinton through the Obama presidencies, here is what you will see as per the Government's own figures:
Clinton JAN 1993 4.2 trillion to JAN 2001 5.7 trillion or 1.5 in 8 years or 187 billion per year
G. Bush JAN 2001 5.7 trillion to JAN 2009 10.6 trillion or 4.9 in 8 years or 613 billion per year
obama JAN 2009 10.6 trillion to JAN 2011 14.0 trillion or 3.4 in just 2 years or 1.7 trillion per year
Obama has been averaging almost 3 times the annual debt level rate increase than President Bush and the Democrats want us to believe that their increases in the debt are just as bad as those of the previous Republican administration. You do not have to be a mathematician to see the true story and why we need to start cutting the spending and pass a balance budget amendment.
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5)Southerners have a way with words!
These are actual comments made by South Carolina Troopers that were taken off their car videos:
1. "You know, stop lights don't come any redder than the one you just went through."
2. "Relax, the handcuffs are tight because they're new. They'll stretch after you wear them a while."
3. "If you take your hands off the car, I'll make your birth certificate a worthless document."
4. "If you run, you'll only go to jail tired."
5. "Can you run faster than 1200 feet per second? Because that's the speed of the bullet that'll be chasing you."
6. "You don't know how fast you were going? I guess that means I can write anything I want to on the ticket, huh?"
7. "Yes, sir, you can talk to the shift supervisor, but I don't think it will help. Oh, did I mention that I'm the shift supervisor?"
8. "Warning! You want a warning? O.K, I'm warning you not to do that again or I'll give you another ticket."
9. "The answer to this last question will determine whether you are drunk or not. Was Mickey Mouse a cat or a dog?"
10. "Fair? You want me to be fair? Listen, fair is a place where you go to ride on rides, eat cotton candy and corn dogs and step in monkey poop."
11. "Yeah, we have a quota. Two more tickets and my wife gets a toaster oven."
12. "In God we trust; all others we run through NCIC." ( National Crime Information Center )
13. "Just how big were those 'two beers' you say you had?"
14. "No sir, we don't have quotas anymore. We used to, but now we're allowed to write as many tickets as we can."
15. "I'm glad to hear that the Chief (of Police) is a personal friend of yours. So you know someone who can post your bail."
16. "You didn't think we give pretty women tickets? You're right, we don't. Sign here."
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6) Big Government, Small People
By Dennis Prager
While liberals are certain about the moral superiority of liberal policies, the truth is that those policies actually diminish a society’s moral character. Many individual liberals are fine people, but the policies they advocate tend to make a people worse. Here are ten reasons:
1. The bigger the government, the less the citizens do for one another. If the state will take care of me and my neighbors, why should I? This is why Western Europeans, people who have lived in welfare states far longer than Americans have, give less to charity and volunteer less time to others than do Americans of the same socioeconomic status.
The greatest description of American civilization was written in the 19th century by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville. One of the differences distinguishing Americans from Europeans that he most marveled at was how much Americans — through myriad associations — took care of one another. Until Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt began the seemingly inexorable movement of America toward the European welfare state — vastly expanded later by other Democratic presidents — Americans took responsibility for one another and for themselves far more than they do today. Churches, Rotary Clubs, free-loan societies, and other voluntary associations were ubiquitous. As the state grew, however, all these associations declined. In Western Europe, they have virtually all disappeared.
2. The welfare state, though often well intended, is nevertheless a Ponzi scheme. Conservatives have known this for generations. But now any honest person must acknowledge it. The welfare state is predicated on collecting money from today’s workers in order to pay for those who paid in before them. Unfortunately, today’s workers don’t have enough money to sustain the scheme, because there are too few of them to do so. As a result, virtually every welfare state in Europe, along with many American states, like California, is going broke.
3. Citizens of liberal welfare states become increasingly narcissistic. The great preoccupations of vast numbers of Brits, Frenchmen, Germans, and other Western Europeans are how much vacation time they will have and how early they can retire and be supported by the state.
4. The liberal welfare state makes people disdain work. Americans work considerably harder than Western Europeans, and, contrary to liberal thought since Marx, work builds character.
5. Nothing more guarantees the erosion of character than getting something for nothing. In the liberal welfare state, one develops an entitlement mentality — another expression of narcissism. And the rhetoric of liberalism — labeling each new entitlement a “right” — reinforces this sense of entitlement.
6. The bigger the government, the more the corruption. As the famous truism goes, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Of course, big businesses are also often corrupt. But they are eventually caught or go out of business. The government cannot go out of business. And, unlike corrupt governments, corrupt businesses cannot print money and thereby devalue a nation’s currency, and they cannot arrest you.
7. The welfare state corrupts family life. Even many Democrats have acknowledged the destructive consequences of the welfare state on the underclass. It has rendered vast numbers of males unnecessary to females, who have looked to the state to support them and their children (and the more children, the more state support) rather than to husbands. In effect, these women took the state as their husband.
8. The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults. As regards men specifically, I was raised, as were all generations of American men before me, to aspire to work hard in order to marry and to support a wife and children. No more. One of the reasons many single women lament the prevalence of boy-men — men who have not grown up — is that the liberal state has told men they don’t have to support anybody. They are free to remain boys for as long as they want.
And here is an example regarding both sexes. The loudest and most sustained applause I ever heard was that of college students responding to a speech by Pres. Barack Obama informing them that they would now be covered by their parents’ health-insurance policies until age 26.
9. As a result of the Left’s sympathetic views of pacifism, and because almost no welfare state can afford a strong military, European countries rely on America to fight the world’s evils and even to defend them.
10. The leftist weltanschauung sees society’s and the world’s great battle as between rich and poor rather than between good and evil. Equality therefore trumps morality. This is what produces the morally confused liberal elites that can venerate a Cuban tyranny with its egalitarian society over a free and decent America that has greater inequality.
None of this matters to progressives. Against all this destructiveness, they will respond not with arguments to refute these consequences of the liberal welfare state, but by citing the terms “social justice” and “compassion,” and by labeling their opponents “selfish” and worse.
If you want to feel good, liberalism is awesome. If you want to do good, it is largely awful.
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7)Jordan on verge of survival showdown?
By ALEXANDER BLIGH
Jordan’s prime minister revealed that his country would vote against Palestinian statehood at the UN General Assembly in September.
Jordan has been relatively quiet since the outbreak of popular unrest engulfing many Arab and North African countries.
However, two recent developments perhaps indicate that the kingdom is far from complacent.
Last Saturday, King Abdullah declared a reshuffle in the cabinet not five months after it was sworn in – clearly in response to demonstrations protesting alleged government corruption. Earlier that week, the Dubai-based daily Al-Bayan published a leaked report that Jordan’s prime minister revealed his country would vote against Palestinian statehood at the UN General Assembly in September – thus breaking Arab consensus.
Unsurprisingly Jordan is facing two major challenges. On the one hand, there are mounting domestic pressures, especially from the Beduin South, the backbone of the regime for over 90 years. So far, the king has been following in the footsteps of his late father, King Hussein, and has demonstrated no less than brilliance in balancing all domestic players.
On the other hand, Jordan is nearing a crossroads in its attitude toward the Palestinians. In my book, The Political Legacy of King Hussein (2004), I analyze the advantages that Hussein could have found in losing the West Bank to Israel.
First and foremost, Israel would be in charge of resolving the Palestinian issue, and the Palestinians would not be in a position to claim Jordan as a Palestinian state.
In recent months, Israel seems to have divorced itself from its traditional policy of resisting a Palestinian state at all costs.
In the Jordanian mind, this translates to a position that might endanger the very existence of the Hashemite Kingdom, as well as the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian Peace Treaty, and a de-facto abandonment of the traditional friendship between the two countries that has survived many crisis since 1960.
Jordan has tried (and usually succeeded) in letting Israel lead the way against the creation of a Palestinian state. However, Israel is now seen as being too weak to halt a Palestinian independence process. The creation of such a state would put Jordan’s very existence in jeopardy: The PLO is formally and spiritually committed to taking over all of mandatory Palestine – i.e., Jordan, the territories and Israel.Considering Israel would hold its ground within the 1967 lines, the next target of a small, economically weak, irredentist Palestinian state would be Jordan –a country that has already served as a battleground for the PLO in 1970-71.
If, indeed, this is the current Jordanian reading, it follows that the US and Israel are seen as weak players that cannot be trusted to support the kingdom.
Furthermore, if Jordan is to take to arms – diplomatic in this case – it has quite a strong weapon: Declaring a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital constitutes a flagrant violation of the internationally recognized Israeli-Jordanian Peace Treaty. That instrument states (Article 9): “When negotiations on the permanent status will take place, Israel will give high priority to the Jordanian historic role in these shrines [Muslim holy shrines in Jerusalem].” A Palestinian unilateral declaration of a state – let alone one that claimed Jerusalem as part of that state – cannot, at least in the Jordanian mind, be approved by any country, since it negates a basic element of the peace agreement and directly harms the interests of the Hashemite family, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, in the Holy City.
All in all, a stable and strong ally of the US, led by a courageous ruler, would be directly threatened by a Palestinian state, and is apparently on the verge of openly fighting for its own survival.
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8)America's Intelligence Denial on Iran
CIA censors prevented me from naming the outside reviewers who rubber stamp agency estimates.
By FRED FLEITZ
Mounting evidence over the last few years has convinced most experts that Iran has an active program to develop and construct nuclear weapons. Amazingly, however, these experts do not include the leaders of the U.S. intelligence community. They are unwilling to conduct a proper assessment of the Iranian nuclear issue—and so they remain at variance with the Obama White House, U.S. allies, and even the United Nations.
The last month alone has brought several alarming developments concerning Tehran's nuclear program. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Yukiya Amano said last month that his agency has new information pointing to the military ambitions of Iran's nuclear program. As of today, Iran has over 4,000 kilograms of low-enriched uranium—enough, according to the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, for four nuclear weapons if enriched to weapons grade.
Iran has accelerated its production of low-enriched uranium in defiance of U.N. and IAEA resolutions. It has also announced plans to install advanced centrifuge machines in a facility built deep inside a mountain near the city of Qom. According to several U.S. diplomats and experts, the facility is too small to be part of a peaceful nuclear program and appears specially constructed to enrich uranium to weapons grade.
To top this off, an item recently posted to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps website mused about the day after an Iranian nuclear test (saying, in a kind of taunt, that it would be a "normal day"). That message marked the first time any official Iranian comment suggested the country's nuclear program is not entirely peaceful.
Despite all this, U.S. intelligence officials are standing by their assessment, first made in 2007, that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and has not restarted it since.
In February, the 17 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community issued a highly classified National Intelligence Estimate updating their 2007 assessment. That estimate had been politicized by several officials who feared how President George W. Bush might respond to a true account of the Iranian threat. It also was affected by the wave of risk aversion that has afflicted U.S. intelligence analysis since the 2003 Iraq War. Intelligence managers since then have discouraged provocative analytic conclusions, and any analysis that could be used to justify military action against rogue states like Iran.
I read the February 2011 Iran NIE while on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee. I believe it was poorly written and little improvement over the 2007 version. However, during a pre-publication classification review of this op-ed, the CIA and the Office of the Director of Intelligence censored my criticisms of this analysis, including my serious concern that it manipulated intelligence evidence. The House Intelligence Committee is aware of my concerns and I hope it will pursue them.
Censors also tried to prevent me from discussing my most serious objection to the 2011 Iran NIE: its skewed set of outside reviewers. The U.S. intelligence community regularly employs reviewers who tend to endorse anything they review: former senior intelligence officers, liberal professors and scholars from liberal think tanks. These reviewers tend to share the views of senior intelligence analysts, and they also want to maintain their intelligence contacts and high-level security clearances.
I believe that senior intelligence officials tried to block me from naming the NIE's outside reviewers because the names so strongly suggest that intelligence agencies took no chances of an outside reviewer unraveling the document's poorly structured arguments and cavalier manipulation of intelligence.
I have been permitted to say the following about the outside reviewers: Two of the four are former CIA analysts who work for the same liberal Washington, D.C., think tank. Neither served under cover, and their former CIA employment is well known. Another reviewer is a liberal university professor and strong critic of George W. Bush's foreign policy. The fourth is a former senior intelligence official. Not surprisingly, the 2011 NIE included short laudatory excerpts from these reviewers that offered only very mild criticism.
It is unacceptable that Iran is on the brink of testing a nuclear weapon while our intelligence analysts continue to deny that an Iranian nuclear weapons program exists. One can't underestimate the dangers posed to our country by a U.S. intelligence community that is unable to provide timely and objective analysis of such major threats to U.S. national security—or to make appropriate adjustments when it is proven wrong.
If U.S. intelligence agencies cannot or will not get this one right, what else are they missing?
Mr. Fleitz retired this year after a 25-year career at the CIA, DIA, State Department and House Intelligence Committee staff. He now writes for Newsmax.com. This op-ed was amended to obtain classification clearance from the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 9)Israel’s only two options
By CAROLINE B. GLICK
The Jewish state’s choices are to either annex Judea and Samaria or be destroyed by its neighbors.
Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas is in Europe this week seeking to convince the Spanish and Norwegian governments to support the Palestinian bid to sidestep negotiations with Israel and have the UN General Assembly recognize Palestinian sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem in addition to Gaza.
The Palestinians know that without US support, their initiative will fail to gain Security Council support and therefore have no legal weight. But they believe that if they push hard enough, Israel’s control over these areas will eventually unravel and they will gain control over them without ever accepting Israel’s right to exist.
Fatah’s UN gambit, along with its unity deal with Hamas, makes clear that the time has come for Israel to finally face the facts: There are only two realistic options for dealing with Judea and Samaria.
Either the Palestinians will take control of Judea and Samaria, or Israel will annex them.
If the Palestinians take control, they will establish a terror state in the areas, which – like their terror state in Gaza – will use its territory as a starting point for continued war against Israel.
It isn’t only Israel’s experience with post-withdrawal Gaza and South Lebanon that make it clear that a post-withdrawal Palestinian-controlled Judea and Samaria will become a terror state. The Palestinians themselves make no bones about this.
In a Palestinian public opinion survey released last week by The Israel Project, 65 percent of Palestinians said they believe that they should conduct negotiations with Israel. But before we get excited, we need to read the fine print.
According to the survey, those two-thirds of Palestinians believe that talks should not lead to the establishment of the State of Palestine next to Israel and at peace with the Jewish state. They believe the establishment of “Palestine” next to Israel should serve as a means for continuing their war against Israel. The goal of that war is to destroy what’s left of Israel after the “peace” treaty and gobble it into “Palestine.”
That is, 66% of Palestinians believe “peace” talks with Israel should be conducted in bad faith.
Moreover, three-quarters deny Jewish ties to Jerusalem, and 80% support Islamic jihad against Jews as called for in the Hamas charter; 73% support the annihilation of the Jewish people as called for in the Hamas charter on the basis of Islamic scripture.
As bad as Israel’s experience with post-withdrawal Gaza and South Lebanon has been, Israel’s prospects with a post-withdrawal Judea and Samaria will be far worse. It isn’t simply that withdrawal will invite aggression from Judea and Samaria. It will invite foreign Arab armies to invade the rump Jewish state.
Unlike the post-withdrawal situation with Gaza and South Lebanon, without Judea and Samaria, Israel would not have the territorial depth and topographical advantage to defend itself from invasion from the east.
Moreover, the establishment of the second Palestinian terror state after Gaza in Judea and Samaria would embolden some of Israel’s Arab citizens in the Galilee and the Negev as well as in Jaffa, Lod, Haifa and beyond to escalate their already declared irredentist plans to demand autonomy or unification with whatever Palestinian terror state they choose.
Living under the constant threat of invasion from the east (and the south, from a Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egyptian army moving through the Sinai and Gaza), Israel would likely be deterred from taking concerted action against its treacherous Arab citizens.
As then-prime minister Ariel Sharon warned in 2001, the situation would be analogous to the plight of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Just as the Nazis deterred the Czech government from acting against its traitorous German minority in the Sudetenland in the 1930s, so Arab states (and a nuclear Iran), supporting the Palestinian terror states in Judea and Samaria and in Gaza, would make it impossible for Israel to enforce its sovereign rights on its remaining territory.
Israel’s destruction would be all but preordained.
The second option is for Israel to annex Judea and Samaria, complete with its hostile Arab population.
Absorbing the Arab population of Judea and Samaria would increase Israel’s Arab minority from 20% to 33% of the overall population. This is true whether or not Israel grants them full citizenship with voting rights or permanent residency without them.
Obviously such a scenario would present Israel with new and complex legal, social and law enforcement challenges. But it would also provide Israel with substantial advantages and opportunities.
Israel would have to consider its electoral laws and weigh the prospect of moving from a proportional representation system to a direct, district system. It would have to begin enforcing its laws toward its Arab citizens in a manner identical to the way it enforces its laws against its Jewish citizens. This includes everything from administrative laws concerning building to criminal statutes related to treason. It would have to ensure that Arab schoolchildren are no longer indoctrinated to hate Jews, despite the fact that according to the Israel Project survey, 53% of Palestinians support such anti-Semitic indoctrination in the classroom.
These steps would be difficult to enact.
On the other side, annexing Judea and Samaria holds unmistakable advantages for Israel. For instance, Israel would regain complete military control over the areas. Israel ceded much of this control to the PLO in 1996.
The Palestinian armies Israel agreed to allow the PLO to field have played a central role in the Palestinian terror machine. They have also played a key role in indoctrinating Palestinian society to seek and work toward Israel’s destruction. By bringing about the disbanding of these terror forces, Israel would go a long way toward securing its citizens from attack.
Furthermore, by asserting its sovereign rights to its heartland, for the first time since 1967, Israel would be adopting an unambiguous position around which its citizens and supporters could rally. Annexation would also finally free Israel’s politicians and diplomats to tell the truth about the pathological nature of Palestinian nationalism and about the rank hypocrisy and anti-Semitism at the heart of much of the international Left’s campaigns on behalf of the Palestinians.
No, annexation won’t be easy. But then again, the alternative is national suicide.
And again, these are the only options. Either the Palestinians form a terror state from which it will wage war against the shrunken, indefensible Jewish state, or Israel expands the size of the Jewish state.
Since 1967, Israel has refused to accept the fact that these are the only two options available. Instead, successive governments and the nation as a whole have set their hopes on imaginary third options. For the Left, this option has been the fantasy of a two-state solution. This “solution” involves the Palestinians controlling some or all of the lands Israel took over from Jordan and Egypt in the Six Day War, establishing a state, and all of us living happily ever after.
Given the Palestinians’ overwhelming, consistent and violent support for the destruction of Israel in any size, this leftist fantasy never had a leg to stand on.
And since 1993, when the Rabin government adopted the Left’s fantasy as state policy, more than 2,000 Israelis have been killed in its pursuit.
Not only has the Left’s third option fantasy facilitated the Palestinian terror machine’s ability to kill Jews, it has empowered their propaganda war against Israel.
Israel’s pursuit of the nonexistent two-state solution has eroded its own international position to a degree unprecedented in its history.
Last week’s meeting of the so-called Middle East Quartet ended without a final statement. It isn’t that its members couldn’t agree on the need to establish “Palestine” in Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem. That was a no-brainer. The Quartet members couldn’t agree on the need to accept the Jewish state. Russia reportedly rejected wording that would have enjoined the Palestinians to accept the Jewish state’s right to exist as part of a peace treaty.
And this was eminently foreseeable. The unhinged two-state solution makes Israel’s legitimacy contingent on the establishment of a Palestinian state. And it put the burden to establish a Palestinian state on Israel.
Since everyone except Israel and the US always accepted the establishment of a Palestinian state, and no one except Israel and the US always accepted the existence of the Jewish state, by making its own legitimacy dependent on Palestinian statehood, Israel started the clock running on its own demonization.
The longer Israel allows its very right to exist to be contingent on the establishment of another terror state committed to its destruction, the less the nations of the world will feel obliged to accept its right to exist.
As for the Right, its leaders have embraced imaginary third options of their own. Either Jordan would come in and save us, or the Palestinians would come to like us, or something.
The one thing that both the Left’s fantasy option and the Right’s fantasy option share is their belief that the Palestinians or the Arabs as a whole will eventually change. Both sides’ imaginary third options maintain that with sufficient inducements or time, the Arabs will change their behavior and drop their goal of destroying Israel.
Our 44-year dalliance in fantasyland has not simply weakened us militarily and diplomatically. It has torn us apart internally by surrendering the debate to the two ideological fringes of the political spectrum. Actually, to be precise, we have surrendered 99% of our public discourse to the radical Left and 1% to the radical Right.
The Left’s control over the discourse has caused its ideological opposite’s numbers to increasingly disengage from the state. That would be bad enough, but the Palestinians’ inarguable bad faith and continued commitment to Israel’s destruction have driven the far Left far off the cliff of reason and rationality.
Unable to convince their fellow Israelis that their two-state pipe dream will bring peace, the Israeli Left has joined forces with the international Left in its increasingly shrill campaigns to delegitimize the country’s right to exist and undermine its ability to defend itself.
This sorry state of affairs is exemplified today by the radical Left’s hysterical response to the Knesset’s passage last week of the anti-boycott law. The comparatively mild law makes it a civil offense to solicit boycotts against Israel. It bars people engaged in economic warfare against Israel from getting government benefits and makes them liable to punitive damages in civil suits.
The Left’s hysterical public relations campaign to demonize the law and its supporters as fascists and seek its overthrow through the Supreme Court makes clear that the Left will wage war against its own country in pursuit of its delusion.
But aside from driving the public discourse into the depths of ideological madness, Israel’s embrace of fantasy has made it impossible for us to conduct a sober-minded discussion of our only real options. The time has come to debate these two options, choose one, and move forward
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