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The progressive anti-Semitic projection syndrome

by Mojambo ( 60 Comments › )
Filed under Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Palestinians at November 23rd, 2012 - 9:00 am

If you want to see anti-Semitism in a 1930’s genocidal version, see the comments on the IDF spokesperson twitter site.

by Caroline Glick

I’ve been on the road for the past several days and out of the loop so to speak. I just got home last night.

I read a blog post by Jonathan Tobin from Commentary today where I discovered that the post-Zionist poster boy of the American Jewish left Peter Beinart is now accusing Israel’s non-Jewish supporters of being anti-Semites.

Beinart you see, thinks that an anti-Semite is someone who criticizes anti-Zionist (or post-Zionist, or fair-weathered Zionist) American Jews for hanging Israel out to dry.

So if a non-Jew criticizes, say Peter Beinart for spewing nonsense about how Israel’s rejection of Beinart’s positions on territorial surrender legitimizes anti-Israel sentiment, then that person is an anti-Semite.

Beinart, after all, criticizes Israel as a Jew so since he does it as a Jew, attacking him for making ridiculous accusations against Israel makes you an anti-Semite.

There is a wider context for Beinart’s position. Beinart has closely associated himself with J Street the pro-Palestinian lobbying group run by American Jews. During the last election cycle, J-Street targeted Israel’s staunchest supporters in Congress for defeat. Specifically it targeted Joe Walsh and Allen West, (both ran in gerrymandered districts), because they refused to support the establishment of another Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, (to the side of the Palestinian state in Gaza which the Left likes to pretend doesn’t exist).

J-Street claimed that West and Walsh — among Israel’s firmest supporters on the Hill — were anti-Israel because they rejected the establishment of another Palestinian terror state in the historic and strategic heartland of the Jewish state.

Beinart’s attacks on Rupert Murdoch and others who criticize Jews who attack Israel have to be seen as a continuation of the J Street campaign against Israel’s supporters in Washington.

[………]

He is saying that there is no difference between those who support Israel and decry its critics and those who oppose Israel and decry its supporters.

This post-modern moral equivalence is absolutely necessary. If you want to make a completely false argument sound reasonable, the first thing you have to do is erase all distinction between good and evil. (See the film clips in my last blog post.)

We need to be aware of what Beinart and his allies are doing. In the coming months and years, we should expect more and more of Israel’s supporters to be attacked as anti-Semites by leftist American Jews. The intention of people like Beinart and J Street is to demonize and discredit Israel’s supporters just as Israel itself is being demonized and discredited.

In the face of this new initiative it is imperative that we continue to point out the real distinctions.

[……..]

Read the rest – The liberal anti-Semitic projection syndrome

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Palestinians | 60 Comments »

A time for stout heartedness – and for action

by Mojambo ( 89 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Elections 2012, IDF, Israel at November 12th, 2012 - 8:00 am

As Miss Glick mentions – she will not be doing her column again until next Spring as she is working on a book. This blog (well at least myself) will miss her columns. Good luck Caroline, I did not always agree with you but you always wrote well edited and thought provoking columns. Thank you for giving me scores of columns to post.

by Caroline Glick

Mitt Romney wasn’t a bad candidate. He ran a fairly strong race. He made a few errors. And he made many good moves.

Certainly he was adequate. And he was probably the strongest Republican candidate among the primary field of contenders. That is, he was the best man available to run against Barack Obama.

And he did a pretty good job.

Obama, on the other hand, was a horrible candidate. He was mean and vindictive. He was contemptuous and superficial. He ran on irrelevancies like abortion and a fictitious Republican war against women. He didn’t give his supporters any reason to feel good about themselves.

Instead, he used class warfare to stir them to hatred of their countrymen.

Yet Obama won. And Romney lost.

In retrospect it is possible that the race was over before it began. A strong case can be made that Obama secured his reelection in 2009 when he bailed out the US auto industry and so temporarily stanched the hemorrhage of jobs in Ohio and Michigan. And maybe, with the youth of the 1960s now the Medicare recipients of the 2010s and ’20s, there are simply too many Americans dependent on government handouts to care about what happens in the future.

An equally strong case can be made that Romney lost the election before he secured the Republican nomination. He may have squandered his chances when he took a strong position against illegal immigration in one of the early Republican primary debates and so arguably made winning Florida, and perhaps Colorado, a mathematical impossibility.

Many have argued that demography is destiny.

And the American electorate has changed tremendously in the past decade. Government dependency among the white working class has grown. Government dependency among an aging population and a rising tide of single-parent families has grown. And the Latino share of the vote has grown. Today some are arguing that Republicans today simply cannot win the presidency, regardless of their candidate.

All of this is important because for the past four years, most Republicans, and most non-leftists throughout the world, had been hoping that the Obama years would be an aberration. They had hoped and trusted that he would be a oneterm president. All the policies he enacted during that term, on domestic and foreign policy alike, would be reversed by his Republican successor, elected by voters who understood they had been taken in by a huckster in 2008. The US economy – the anchor of US power and the engine of the international financial system – would come roaring back.

In international affairs, the US would reverse course. It would stop supporting the rise of its enemies from the Middle East to Asia to Latin America. It would embrace its allies. The former would be weakened. The latter would be secured and strengthened. America would be safe and defended.

Alas, apparently it could not be. The American spirit has been overwhelmed by the European model of social democracy at home and appeasement and treachery abroad.

But all the dependency champions who celebrated on Tuesday night cannot stop the coming storm. The greatest advantage Obama had going into the election was not demography but the fact that the full consequences of his statist economic policies and his pro-jihadist foreign policy have not yet been felt.

Nationalized healthcare will only be fully implemented in 2014. Americans will only begin watching old men and women die because the federal government denied them lifesaving, but expensive, treatments a year from now. They will only lose their doctors due to dwindling Medicare reimbursements in a year.

College students who got out the vote for Obama will only find themselves doomed to low-paying jobs and a life of indebtedness as they fail year in and year out to pay off their college loans, in a year or two. And by the time they realize what it means to be saddled with a national debt of $16 trillion, they will be locked into a government-controlled economy that requires them to keep their silence or lose their livelihoods.

THEN THERE are the consequences of Obama’s foreign policies. The attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi exposed the failure of his strategy of appeasing jihadists and had the potential to sink his presidency by turning suburban voters against him in places like Pennsylvania. But lucky for him, the Benghazi debacle was small enough for the media to hide from the electorate.

Sure a US ambassador and three others were murdered. But four is not a very large number.

And it was over in a day.

It will be harder for Obama to contain the damage of his foreign policy when Iran gets nuclear weapons and begins molesting US shipping in the Persian Gulf as gas prices rise to $10 a gallon. It will be harder for Obama to hide the effect of his foreign policy when American tourists in Egypt are massacred or held hostage and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government demands the release of the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, in exchange for intervention.

It will be harder for Obama to hide the dangers of his foreign policy when the Taliban return to power in Afghanistan and al-Qaida rebuilds its training camps. It will be harder for Obama to blame his failure on hapless American filmmakers when Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is controlled by a Taliban-aligned government that seeks a nuclear war with India. It will be harder for Obama to protect America with a gutted, demoralized military, demobilized under his command.

Rather than contend with these calamities, Obama and his statist, pro-Islamist supporters and advisers will blame their critics. Just as they blamed – and jailed – an American filmmaker for Ambassador Stevens’s murder, so they will blame overworked doctors, struggling hospital administrators, “partisan” lawmakers and “Islamophobic, neoconservative warmongers,” for the domestic decline and international mayhem Obama’s policies will necessarily cause.

With the critical election lost, Republicans have a very hard and thankless task before them. They have to do the hard work of opposing his policies with dwindling resources. They have the job of energizing, inspiring and expanding a base that is demoralized. They have the job of explaining to wavering citizens why the Republican alternative puts America on the right track.

Conservatives need to prepare the ground for their return to power. They need to make the arguments for ending the welfare state. They need to make the arguments for destroying the ascendant – and politically savvy – forces of jihad at home and abroad. They need to argue against defense cuts even as the Obamaappointed Joint Chiefs of Staff abandon strategic reason for personal promotions.

And they need to write the books, produce the movies, found the television stations, and prepare the school curricula that will enable a future resurrection of the American dream.

[……….]

Israel’s demographic and economic power have been largely ignored and undervalued.

But the time has come to use them for all they are worth. As America enters its age of dependency and decline, Israel must end its age of dependency on America and begin to depend on itself. That does not mean that Israel won’t cooperate with America. But as America’s foreign policy becomes indistinguishable from Europe’s, Israel will increasingly need to take its fate in its own hands.

We need to expand the size of the IDF ground forces. We need to expand the size of the navy.

We should reinstate the Lavi jet fighter project.

We need to expand our independent offensive missile programs, developing a serious cruise missile arsenal. And we need to promote a new generation of generals that is not psychologically dependent on their American counterparts.

As for the Palestinians, and the international, leftist anti-Israel cottage industry that supports and feeds off of them, the time has come to take our demographic advantage for a spin. As we decrease our psychological dependence on America, we need to increase our trust in ourselves.

[……….]

True, talk is cheap. We can expect – indeed we were warned to expect – for Obama to turn on Israel immediately after the election.

Obama can be expected to dispatch his political advisers to Israel to run the Left’s electoral campaign with the goal of defeating Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and paving the way for the return to power of the socialist, appeasement-crazed Israeli Left. We can expect the State Department, (under the guidance of New Israel Fund alumni) to renew its attacks against Israel’s religious institutions and the Jews of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. We can expect the US to abandon us at the UN. We can expect the US military to undermine any Israeli strike against Iran.

No one said any of this will be easy. But difficult is not the same as impossible. Within a year, the consequences of Obama’s failed domestic and foreign policies will make him weaker rather than stronger than he was in his first term. He will be hard pressed to pressure Israel when the US loses its leadership role in the Muslim Brotherhood- dominated Middle East. And Israel’s independence of action will consequently grow.

Our side suffered a massive loss on Tuesday.

But as long as we keep our minds and hearts focused on the fundamental goodness and truth that guide our path, we will not be defeated. We will endure, persevere and in due course, we will be vindicated.

Note to my readers: I am currently writing a book in which I describe the strategic course Israel and the US should take in relation to the Palestinians. To complete my work in a timely fashion, I am taking a leave of absence from my column until next spring.

Read the rest – A time for courage – and for action

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Elections 2012, IDF, Israel | 89 Comments »

Barack Obama and the politics of contempt

by Mojambo ( 209 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Barack Obama, Egypt, Elections 2012, Iran, Israel, Libya, Mitt Romney, Muslim Brotherhood at November 6th, 2012 - 12:00 pm

Miss Glick takes apart Obama’s totalitarian instincts.

by Caroline Glick

“Your first time shouldn’t be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy.”

So begins the now famous official Barack Obama for President campaign ad that was released last week. The ad depicts a young woman named Lena Dunham, who is apparently a celebrity among Americans in their teens and 20s.

After that opening line, Ms. Dunham continues on for another minute and a half discussing how having sex for the first time and voting for Barack Obama for president are really the same thing, and how young women don’t want to be accused of either being virgins or of having passed up on their chance to cast their votes for Obama next Tuesday.

I’ve never been particularly interested in so-called “women’s issues.” It never seemed to me that any party or politician was particularly good or bad for me due to the way they thought of women. That all changed with the Dunham ad for Obama.

With this ad, Obama convinced me he is a misogynist.

The Obama campaign’s use of a double entendre to compare sex – the most personal, intimate act we engage in as human beings, with voting – the most public act we engage in as human beings – is a scandal.

It is demeaning and contemptuous of women. It reduces us to sexual objects. When called on to vote, as far as Obama is concerned, as slaves to our passions, we make our decisions not based on our capacity for rational choice. Rather we choose our leaders solely on the basis of our sexual desires.

Beyond the ad’s bald attempt to impersonalize, generalize and cheapen the most personal act human beings engage in, the ad is repulsive because it takes for granted that what happens in our private lives is the government’s business.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a totalitarian position.

The whole point of liberal democracy is to put a barrier between a person’s personal life and his or her government. A liberal democracy is founded on the notion of limited government. It assumes there are a lot of places where government has no role to play. And first and foremost among those places is the bedroom.

The theory behind limited government is that if the government is permitted in our private space then we are no longer free. When – as in the case of the Dunham ad – a political campaign conveys the message that there is something personally wrong with not actively supporting its candidate, it communicates the message that it sees no distinction between personal and public life, and therefore rejects the basic notion of freedom from government. And this is repugnant, not just for women, but for everyone who values freedom.

One of the oddest aspects of the Obama sex ad is that to believe that this sort of message can be effective, the campaign had to ignore mountains of data about the demographic group the ad targets – young college-educated women.

According to just about every piece of survey data collected over the past 20 years, young women in America today are more accomplished, more professionally driven, and more intellectually successful than their male counterparts. That the Obama campaign believes the votes of this successful, smart group of women can be won by appealing to their basest urges rather than their capacity to reason is demeaning and perverse and, one would think, counterproductive.

[…….]

The fact is that the Obama campaign – and indeed, the Obama presidency – has treated the American people with unprecedented arrogance and contempt. On issue after issue, Obama and his minions have eschewed intellectual argumentation.

On issue after issue they have preferred instead to attack Obama’s detractors as stupid, backwards, bigoted, bellicose and evil.

For instance, however one feels about current events in the Middle East, there is a legitimate – indeed critical – argument to be had about the nature of the Islamist forces the Obama administration is supporting from Cairo, Egypt, to Alexandria, Virginia.

[…….]

There is an intellectual case to be made for appeasing these popular, popularly elected forces.

There is a (stronger) intellectual case to be made for opposing them. But rather than make any of the hard arguments for appeasing the Muslim Brotherhood, the Obama administration has deflected the issue by castigating everyone who opposes its appeasement policies as racist, McCarthyite warmongers.

If women who don’t support Obama are prudish geeks, Americans who oppose his appeasement policies are bloodthirsty bigots.

Then there was the attack in Benghazi on September 11 and the general Islamic assaults on US embassies throughout the Muslim world that day.

[…….]

The rioters who stormed the US embassies in Egypt, Tunis and Yemen and replaced the American flag with the flag of al-Qaida all violated sovereign US territory and carried out acts of war. The US had the right, under international law, to repel and respond with military force against the rioters as well as against their governments. Instead the White House blamed the acts of war on a US citizen who posted a video on YouTube.

Then there was Benghazi. In Benghazi, jihadists took this collective aggression a step further. They attacked the US Consulate and a US government safe house with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Their goal was to murder all the US citizens inside the compounds. In the event, they successfully murdered four Americans, including the US ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

In the six weeks that have passed since the attack in Benghazi, despite administration attempts to stonewall, and despite the US’s media’s inexcusable lack of interest in the story, information has continuously dribbled out indicating that Obama and his senior advisers knew in real time what was happening on the ground. It has also come out that they rejected multiple requests from multiple sources to employ military power readily available to save the lives of the Americans on the ground.

There may be good reasons that Obama and his top aides denied those repeated requests for assistance and allowed the American citizens pinned down in Benghazi to die. But Obama and his aides have not provided any.

Rather than defend their actions, Obama and his advisers first sought to cover up what happened by blaming the acts of war on that YouTube video.

When that line of argument collapsed of its own absurdity, Obama shifted to blaming the messenger.

His campaign accused everyone asking for facts and truthful explanations about what happened in Benghazi of trying to politicize the attack.

Obama himself has twice struck the Captain Renault pose and declared himself “Shocked, shocked!” that anyone would dare to insinuate that he did not do everything in his power to save the lives of the Americans whose lives he failed to save.

The reason specific sectors of a society usually feel compelled to vote on the basis of their sectoral interests rather than their general interests as citizens of their country is that they feel that one candidate or party specifically endangers their sectoral interests. Hence, the Lena Dunham ad, which insults women specifically, compels women to vote as women against Obama.

[…….]

As we saw in Libya, Egypt, Tunis, Yemen and beyond, his appeasement policies endanger all Americans equally.

This is not the case with Obama’s treatment of Israel and Jews. Obama’s supporters always highlight statements he has made and actions he has taken in relation to Israel and Jews that are relatively supportive of both.

To be sure, like every other US president, Obama has made some statements, and taken some actions, that have been supportive of Jews and of Israel. But unlike most other US presidents, he has made far more statements and taken far more actions that have been contemptuous and hostile to Israel and Jews. And this is inexcusable.

It is inexcusable that Obama uses coded anti- Semitic language to blame America’s economic woes on “fat cat bankers.” It is inexcusable that his secretary of state and his senior advisers have repeatedly made references to the so-called Israel Lobby to explain why America is supposedly hamstrung in its ability to sell Israel to the wolves.

It is inexcusable that Obama sends his surrogates before the cameras to refer to Israel’s prime minister as “ungrateful,” or to castigate Israel for permitting Jews to build homes in Jerusalem on land they own and for permitting Jews to exercise their legal rights to their property – simply because they are Jews.

Israel is the US’s most important ally in the Middle East. As such, it deserves to be treated well by the US – all the time. Any move to treat Israel with contempt is an unprovoked hostile act and therefore inexcusable.

So, too, US Jews have a right to make an honest living doing anything they wish – including working on Wall Street or owning a casino in Las Vegas. Jews have a right to be treated with respect by the US government. They should not have to be concerned about having their reputations maligned by politicians who use anti-Semitic tropes to gain political advantage.

Obama’s contemptuous vilification of Israel and successful American Jews make him bad for Jews specifically. Just as the Dunham ad exposes his underlying hostility towards women and so makes clear that women’s interests are imperiled by his presidency, so Obama’s repeated hostile treatment of Israel and American Jews make him a specific danger to Jewish interests.

Many would-be deep thinkers have proclaimed that the presidential election is a choice between two competing narratives. But that isn’t an accurate description of the race.

Only Republican nominee Mitt Romney is presenting a narrative. In his narrative, the US faces very difficult problems in domestic and foreign policy alike. Romney has laid out his priorities for which problems he wishes to contend with, and has presented policies he will adopt to do so if he is elected next Tuesday.

On the other hand, by Obama’s telling, the real problems America faces are all the result of the empowerment of his political opponents and America’s allies.
[…….]

Women will vote for him because we are dimwitted sex objects. And Jews will vote for him because we are taken in by his occasional Borscht Belt schmaltz platitudes about Hanukka.

God help us all if his contemptuous assessment of his countrymen is borne out next Tuesday.

Read the rest – Obama and the politics of contempt

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Anti-semitism, Barack Obama, Egypt, Elections 2012, Iran, Israel, Libya, Mitt Romney, Muslim Brotherhood | 209 Comments »

Libya, Jordan and Obama’s guiding lights

by Mojambo ( 125 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Barack Obama, Dhimmitude, Egypt, Fatah, Hamas, Israel, Lebanon, Libya, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Political Correctness at October 22nd, 2012 - 8:00 am

Obama is as they used to say about the Bourbon Kings of France, someone who “learns nothing and forgets everything”.

by Caroline Glick

The operational, intelligence and political fiascos that led to and followed the September 11 jihadist assault on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, all derive from the same problem. That problem is the failure of US President Barack Obama’s conceptual framework for understanding the Middle East.

The Islamic revolutionary wave sweeping across the Arab world has rent asunder the foundations of the US alliance system in the Middle East. But due to Obama’s ideological commitment to an anti-American conceptual framework for understanding Middle Eastern politics, his administration cannot see what is happening.

That framework places the blame for all or most of the pathologies of the Muslim world on the US and Israel.

What Obama and his advisers can see is that there are many people who disagree with them. And so they adopted a policy of delegitimizing, discrediting and silencing their opponents. To this end, his administration has purged the US federal government’s lexicon of all terms that are necessary to describe reality.

“Jihad,” “Islamist,” “radical Islam,” “Islamic terrorism” and similar phrases have all been banned. The study of Islamist doctrine by government officials has been outlawed.

The latest casualty of this policy was an instructor at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.

Until he was sacked this week, the instructor taught a class called “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism.”

According to Col. Dave Lapan, spokesman for the Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the instructor was fired for committing a thought crime. He “portrayed Islam almost entirely in a negative way.” Dempsey himself ordered the probe of all Islamic courses across the US military educational system.

[……….]

Another failure, also deriving from Obama’s embrace of the anti-American and anti-Israel foreign policy narrative, is also wreaking havoc on the region. And like the conceptual failure that led to the murderous attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, this conceptual failure will also come back to haunt America.

This second false conceptual framework argues that the root of instability in the region is the absence of formal treaties of peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. It claims that the way to pacify the radical regional forces is to pressure Israel to make concessions in land and legitimacy to its neighbors.

Obama is not unique for his embrace of this conceptual framework for US Middle East policy. He is just the latest in a long line of US presidents to adopt it.

At the same time the concept that peace processes and treaties ensure peace and stability collapsed completely during Obama’s tenure in office. So what makes Obama unique is that he is the first president to cling to this policy framework since it was wholly discredited.

Israel signed four peace treaties with its Arab neighbors. It signed treaties with Egypt, Jordan, the PLO and Lebanon. All of these treaties have failed or been rendered meaningless by subsequent events.

Today Israel’s 31-year-old peace treaty with Egypt is a hollow shell. No, Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood regime has not officially abrogated it. But the rise of the genocidally anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood to power has rendered it meaningless.

[……..]

All of this has changed in the past 10 to 15 years as the Beduin of the area underwent a drastic process of Islamic radicalization. Today the Beduin of Sinai stand behind much of the jihadist violence. The Beduin of Israel have increasingly embraced the causes of irredentism, radical Islam and jihad. And the Beduin of Jordan have become even more opposed to peaceful coexistence with Israel than the Palestinians.

This leaves the Hashemites. A small Arabian clan installed in power by the British, the Hashemites have historically viewed Israel as their strategic partners and protectors of their regime.

Since the fall of the Mubarak regime, Jordan’s King Abdullah II has been increasingly stressed by regional events and domestic trends alike. The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has empowered the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan. The rise of pro-Iranian Shi’ite forces in post-US-withdrawal Iraq has made pro-Western Jordan an attractive target for triumphant jihadists across the border. The rise of Islamist forces in the Syrian opposition, not to mention the constant subversive activities carried out by Syrian regime agents, has limited Jordan’s maneuver room still further.

[………]

This revolt was exposed in all of its ugliness in recent weeks following Abdullah’s appointment of Walid Obeidat to serve as Jordan’s new ambassador to Israel.

Obeidat’s tribe disowned him and his family and branded him a traitor for accepting the appointment. His tribe invited the other tribes to join it in a mass rally demanding the abrogation of the treaty and the destruction of Israel.

In this state of affairs, the strategic value of Israel’s peace treaty has been destroyed. Even if Abdullah wished to look to Israel as a strategic protector, as his father, King Hussein, did in the 1970 Jordanian civil war between the Hashemites and the Palestinians, he can’t. In 1970, the Syrians shared Hussein’s antipathy to Yasser Arafat and the PLO and therefore did not intervene on their behalf. Today, there is no Arab force that would back him in an Israeli-supported fight against Islamic fundamentalists.

Perhaps in recognition of the fragility of the Hashemites’ hold on power, last week it was reported that the US has deployed military forces to the kingdom. According to media reports, the force consists of a few hundred advisers and other teams whose main jobs are to assist Jordan in handling the 200,000 refugees from Syria who have streamed across the border since the onset of the civil war in Syria, and to help to secure Syria’s chemical and biological arsenals. It is more than likely that the force is also in place to evacuate Americans in the event the regime collapses.

[………]

But to adopt this policy, the Americans first need to discard their false conceptual frameworks regarding the Middle East. Unfortunately, as the US response to the Benghazi attack and its continued assaults on Israel make clear, there is no chance of that happening, as long as Obama remains in the White House.