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Russia and China take Obama’s measure

by Mojambo ( 82 Comments › )
Filed under Ahmadinejad, China, Iran, Israel, Libya, Russia, Syria, Turkey at February 8th, 2012 - 8:30 am

I guess The One really bought into the B.S. of his great oratorical powers as well as his overhyped interpersonal skills. Russia and China laughed at him and his U.N. ambassador Susan Rice (his next National Security after he wins reelection), and vetoed a resolution condemning the Syrian regime lead by the murderous “reformer” and Iranian stooge Bashar Assad.

by Caroline Glick

The Obama administration is absolutely furious at Russia and China. The two UN Security Council permanent members’ move on Saturday to veto a resolution on Syria utterly infuriated the US’s President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice. And they want us all to know just how piping mad they really are.

Rice called the vetoes “unforgivable,” and said that “any further blood that flows will be on their hands.” She said the US was “disgusted.”

Clinton called the move by Moscow and Beijing a “travesty.” She then said that the US will take action outside the UN, “with those allies and partners who support the Syrian people’s right to have a better future.”

The rhetoric employed by Obama’s top officials is striking for what it reveals about how the Obama administration perceives the purpose of rhetoric in foreign policy.

Most US leaders have used rhetoric to explain their policies. But if you take the Obama administration’s statements at face value you are left scratching your head in wonder. Specifically on Syria, if you take these statements literally, you are left wondering if Obama and his advisers are simply clueless. Because if they are serious, their indignation bespeaks a remarkable ignorance about how decisions are made at the Security Council.

Is it possible that Obama believed that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would betray Bashar Assad, his most important strategic ally in the Middle East? Is it possible that he believed that the same Chinese regime that systematically tramples the human rights of its people would agree to intervene in another country’s domestic affairs? Outside the intellectual universe of the Obama administration – where stalwart US allies such as Hosni Mubarak are discarded like garbage and foes such as Hugo Chavez are wooed like Hollywood celebrities – national governments tend to base their foreign policies on their national interests.

[,,,,,]

In fact, it is impossible to believe that the administration was unaware that its plan to pass a Security Council resolution opposing Assad’s massacre of his people – and so jeopardize Russian and Chinese interests – had no chance of success. The fact that they had to know the resolution would never pass leads to the conclusion that Obama and his advisers weren’t trying to pass a resolution on Syria at all.

Rather they were trying to pass the buck on Syria.

We have two pieces of evidence to support the view that the Obama administration has no intention of doing anything even vaguely effective to end Assad’s reign of terror that has so far taken the lives of between five and ten thousand of his countrymen.

First, for the past 10 months, as Assad’s killing machine kicked into gear, Obama and his advisers have been happy to sit on their hands. They supported Turkey’s feckless diplomatic engagement with Assad. They sat back as Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayep Erdogan employed the IHH, his regime-allied terror group, to oversee the organization of a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition.

Second, the administration supported the Arab League’s farcical inspectors’ mission to Syria. That mission was led by Sudanese Gen. Muhammad al- Dabi. Dabi reportedly was one of the architects of the genocide in Darfur. Clearly, a mission under his leadership had no chance of accomplishing anything useful. And indeed, it didn’t.

AND SO, after nearly a year, the issue of Assad’s butchery of his citizens finally found its way to the Security Council last month. Many in the US expected Obama to use the opportunity to finally do something to stop the killing, just as he and his NATO allies did something to prevent the killing in Libya last year.

Ten months ago Obama, Rice, Clinton and National Security Council member Samantha Power decided that the US and its allies had to militarily intervene in Libya to ensure that Muammar Gaddafi didn’t have the opportunity to kill his people as Assad is now doing. That is, to prevent the type of human rights calamity that the Syrian people are now experiencing, Obama used the UN as a staging ground to overthrow Gaddafi through force.

Sadly for the people of Syria, who are being shot dead even as they try to bury their families who were shot dead the day before, unlike the situation in Libya, Obama has never had the slightest intention of using his influence to take action against Assad. And faced with the rapidly rising public expectation that he would take action at the Security Council to stop the killing, Obama opted for diplomatic Kabuki.

Knowing full well that Putin – who is still selling Assad weapons – would veto any resolution, rather than accept that the Security Council is a dead end, Obama had Rice negotiate fecklessly with her Russian counterparts. The resolution that ended up being called to a vote on Saturday was so weak that US Rep.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued a statement on Friday calling for the administration to veto it.

As Ros-Lehtinen put it, the draft resolution “contains no sanctions, no restrictions on weapons transfers, and no calls for Assad to go, but supports the failed Arab League observer mission,” and so isn’t “worth the paper it’s printed on.”

She continued, “The Obama administration should not support this weak, counterproductive resolution, and should also reconsider the legitimacy that it provides to the Arab League – an organization that continues to boycott Israel – when it comes to the regime in Damascus.”

But instead of vetoing it, the administration backed it to the tilt and then expressed disgust and moral outrage when Russia and China vetoed it.

The lesson of this spectacle is that it we must recognize that the Obama administration’s rhetoric hides more than it reveals about the president’s actual policies.

THE FIRST place that we should apply this lesson is to the hemorrhage of administration rhetoric about Iran.

For the past several weeks we have been treated to massive doses of verbiage from Obama and his senior advisers about Iran. The most notable of these recent statements was Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s conversation with The Washington Post’s David Ignatius last week.

Panetta used Ignatius to communicate two basic messages. First, he wanted to make clear that the administration adamantly opposes an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear installations. And second, he wanted to make clear that if Iran strikes Israeli population centers, the US will come to Israel’s defense.

The purpose of the first message is clear enough.

Panetta wished to increase pressure on Israel not to take preemptive action against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

The purpose of the second message is also clear.

Panetta spoke of the US’s obligation to Israel’s defense in order to remove the justification for an Israeli attack.

After all, if the US is obliged to defend it, then Israel mustn’t risk harming US interests by defending itself.

When taken together, Panetta’s message sounds balanced and responsible. But when examined carefully, it is clear that it is not. First of all, it is far from responsible for the US government to tell its chief ally that it should be willing to absorb an attack on its population centers from Iran. No government can be expected to sit back and wait to be attacked with nuclear weapons because if it is, the Americans will retaliate against its attacker. Panetta’s message was not just irresponsible.

It was obnoxious.

And this leaves the first message. Since Obama was elected the US has devoted most of its energies not to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but to pressuring Israel not to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And Panetta’s remarks to Ignatius were consistent with this mission.

[…..]

We only know three things for certain about Iran. It is getting very late in the game for anyone to take any military actions to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Iran will not stop its nuclear weapons program voluntarily. And Obama will not order US forces to take action to stop Iran’s nuclear project.

What remains uncertain still is how Israel plans to respond to these three certainties. The fact that Israel has waited this long to strike presents the disturbing prospect that our leaders may have been confused by the Obama administration’s rhetoric. Perhaps they have been persuaded that the US is on our side on this issue and that we don’t have to rely only on ourselves to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

But as the foregoing analysis of the administration’s very angry words on Syria and very sober words on Iran demonstrates, Obama and his deputies use rhetoric not to clarify their intentions, but to obfuscate them. Just as they will do nothing to prevent Assad from continuing his campaign of murder and terror, so they will do nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Read the rest – Obama’s rhetorical storm

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Ahmadinejad, China, Iran, Israel, Libya, Russia, Syria, Turkey | 82 Comments »

The Lyin’ King tries to fool Israel twice

by Mojambo ( 86 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Israel at February 6th, 2012 - 3:00 pm

It takes a certain amount of unbridled gall to say with a straight face that The Lyin’ King is a friend of Israel, and anyone who believes that Obama has the best interests of Israel at heart is engaged in a massive attempt at self deception. Frankly, the failure of Obama’s appeasement of the Islamic world has left him confused and stunned and he has no idea what to do next. His vaunted “credibility” and “charisma” is a fraud and the world has taken his measure and found him wanting.

by Caroline Glick

Former US congressman Robert Wexler is a man worth listening to. Wexler served as then-senator Barack Obama’s chief booster in the American Jewish community during the 2008 presidential campaign. He appeared everywhere and said anything to convince the American Jewish community that the same man who sat in the church pews listening to Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s anti-Semitic vitriol for two decades, and listed among his closest friends and associates a host of Israel-haters as well as former terrorists, was the greatest friend Israel could ever have.

Once Obama was elected, Wexler continued to serve as his Jewish shill. Wexler traveled to Israel multiple times in the early months of Obama’s presidency, to pressure Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to submit to Obama’s demand and embrace the cause of Palestinian statehood. After Netanyahu finally announced his support for Palestinian statehood at his speech at Bar-Ilan University in September 2009, Wexler returned with a new demand – that Netanyahu enact a moratorium on Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post at the time, Wexler promised that Israel would be richly rewarded if it took the unprecedented step of denying Jews the right to their property in Judea and Samaria simply because they were Jewish. Even if the moratorium were temporary, Obama would view the discriminatory measure as proof of Israel’s good intentions.

Moreover, he would expect the Palestinians and the wider Arab world to respond to Israel’s move by taking steps to normalize their relations with Israel.

For instance, Wexler claimed that Obama had demanded that the Arabs respond to an Israeli moratorium on Jewish property rights by among other things opening trade offices and direct economic ties; conducting cultural and economic exchanges; and permitting Israeli airplanes to overfly their territory.

And in the event that the Arabs refused to rise to the occasion, Wexler proclaimed, “You can rightly say that all bets are off.”

Wexler continued, “I want to call their bluff. I want to see, if Israel makes substantial movement toward a credible peace process, whether they are willing to do it. And if they are not, better that we should find out five or six months into the process, before Israel is actually asked to compromise any significant position.”

[……]
Amazingly, far from calling their bluff, Obama doubled down on his pressure on Israel.

Among other things, since squeezing the first temporary ban on Jewish property rights out of Netanyahu, Obama has demanded that the moratorium be made permanent and be extended to Jerusalem.

As for his vision of the “peace process,” Obama has demanded that Israel accept the 1949 armistice lines as the basis for negotiations.

He has used the US veto at the UN Security Council as a means of pressuring Israel to make further unreciprocated concessions to the Palestinians.

And the pro-Israel US president has demanded no similar concessions from the Palestinians.

THIS WEEK, Wexler, now the head of the far-left S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, was back in town. Speaking at the Herzliya Conference, he said that Israel should consider extending the ban on Jewish property rights to within the 1949 armistice lines. Wexler based his claim on then-prime minister Ehud Olmert’s 2008 peace offer to Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas.

[…..]

While Wexler appeared at the Herzliya Conference as the president of a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, his continued intimate relationship with Obama is well known. Last fall, Commentary’s Omri Ceren documented that Zvika Krieger, Wexler’s vice president at the Daniel Abraham Center, authored documents for Obama’s reelection campaign. Among other things, those documents cited articles authored by Krieger and Wexler in which they championed Obama’s record on Israel from their nonpartisan perch at the Daniel Abraham Center.

Given Wexler’s close ties to Obama, it is reasonable to assume that his suggestion that Israel cease exerting its national sovereignty over its sovereign territory in the interests of the peace process is not simply his personal view.

There is much to criticize about Wexler’s suggestion.

But more important than its arrogant, insulting absurdity, and more disconcerting than Wexler’s own hypocrisy, is what his suggestion tells us about the dangers inherent in Netanyahu’s current negotiations with the Palestinians.

To understand the connection we need to recall the nature of Olmert’s offer to Abbas.

Olmert’s negotiations with Abbas were based upon the proposition – repeated ad nauseam to the Israeli public – that “nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to.”

The idea was clear. True, on the one hand, the prime minister was conducting negotiations far from the spotlight, and refusing to tell the public what was on offer. But on the other hand, we could rest assured that that nothing he offered would have any significance whatsoever unless the Palestinians agreed to a final-peace deal with Israel. If they rejected peace, then everything Olmert said would become null and void, and be tossed down the memory hole.

In accordance with this basic proposition, when Abbas rejected Olmert’s offer, and made no counteroffer, it was naturally assumed that Olmert’s proposal was rendered null and void.

Yet four years later, here is Wexler, Obama’s surrogate, advocating a policy of unilateral abrogation of Israeli sovereignty over 4.5% of its national territory in order to enable the eventual implementation of an offer that was predicated on the notion that “nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to.”

AND THIS brings us to the current negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. For the past month, under the aegis of the Middle East Quartet, Netanyahu’s representative attorney Yitzhak Molcho has been conducting negotiations with Abbas’s representatives in Amman, Jordan. Last week, Molcho reportedly outlined the government’s general positions on lands it is willing to cede to the Palestinians.

[……]

For his part, Netanyahu this week reiterated his position that Israel must maintain a long-term military presence in the Jordan Valley. This has been interpreted to mean that Netanyahu is willing to cede sovereign rights to the area to the Palestinians.

Taken together, what Molcho’s statement and Netanyahu’s statement indicate is that at a minimum, in exchange for peace, the Netanyahu government is willing to expel some portion of the 350,000 Jews living in Judea and Samaria from their homes and to transfer sovereignty over a significant portion of the territory to a Palestinian state.

From the vagueness of what has been reported, it is apparent that Netanyahu has been far less specific about the scope of the territorial concessions he is willing to undertake than his predecessor was. But then again, Olmert made his offer after conducting negotiations with Abbas for over a year. Netanyahu only entered these talks a month ago.

And while no one in or out of government believes that these negotiations have any chance of leading to a peace deal, the fact is that Netanyahu is feverishly working to ensure that the talks continue. He spent a good part of his day on Wednesday speaking on the phone to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and meeting with Quartet envoy Tony Blair and UN Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon, begging the foreign leaders to convince the Palestinians not to abandon the negotiations.

As he put it in his joint press conference with Ban, “You cannot complete the peace process unless you begin it. If you begin it, you have to be consistent and stick to it.”

For his part, Abbas is doing everything in his power to make clear that he does not wish to negotiate, and that even if negotiations continue, he will never cut a deal with Israel. To underscore his bad faith, next week Abbas will travel to Egypt to meet with Hamas terror chief Khaled Mashaal. The two men are set to discuss the means of implementing the unity government deal they signed last May.

Netanyahu is obviously under great pressure to continue with these talks. A day doesn’t go by without some US official or European leader talking about the need for talks, or a leftist politician or political activist at home blaming Netanyahu for the absence of peace. But none of this pressure can justify the damage that is done to Israel’s position by continuing to engage in these negotiations.

As Netanyahu’s own experience with Obama (and Wexler) shows, concessions never bring a respite from the US leader’s pressure. They only form the baseline for demands for further concessions.

Beyond the narrow confines of Obama’s personal hostility towards Israel, Netanyahu’s current engagement in negotiations with the Palestinians is devastating to Israel’s position in two ways.

First, it makes it impossible for Israel to extricate itself from the lie of PLO moderation and to start telling the truth about its Palestinian “partner.”

Quite simply, as Abbas’s continued courtship of Hamas and his open embrace and glorification of mass murderers such as the murderers of the Fogel family make clear, the PLO has returned to its roots as a terrorist organization. It is no longer credible to claim that the PLO has abandoned terror in favor of peace.

By engaging in peace talks with the PLO, Netanyahu renders it impossible to make this critical claim. Consequently, he damns Israel to a situation in which we continue to empower and politically legitimize a terrorist organization committed to our destruction.

The second way continued negotiations devastates Israel’s position is by eroding our ability to claim our rights to Judea and Samaria and so extricate ourselves from this fake peace process with terrorists. As Wexler made clear, from the international community’s perspective, everything that Israel offers at the negotiating table is catalogued. Regardless of Palestinian bad faith, irrespective of actual prospects for peace, every theoretical Israeli concession becomes the new baseline for further negotiations.

American “friends” like Wexler and Obama play Israel for a fool again and again.

In truth, we should thank Wexler for coming here this week and reminding us of his bad faith, and the bad faith of the president he serves. But it is up to Netanyahu to draw the appropriate lessons.

Read the rest – Fool me twice

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Israel | 86 Comments »

Anti-Semitism goes mainstream

by Mojambo ( 105 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Egypt, France, Hamas, History, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Sweden at January 23rd, 2012 - 12:00 pm

It is funny how we never see any thorough analysis of The Arab Lobby in general or The Saudi Lobby in particular. Outside of a small bunch of kooks on the paleocon Right (including Paulturds), the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism is coming from the liberal and progressive Left. On a related note, January 20 was the 70th anniversary of the infamous Wannsee Conference (a villa outside of Berlin) in which 15 Nazis planned the elimination of the Jews from Europe – from Ireland and Portugal to the European part of Turkey – which would encompass around 11,000,000 people. Had Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban or Ahmadinajad been around then, they would have felt right at home being at the conference table at Wannsee.

by Caroline Glick

Anti-Semitism may not yet be a litmus test for social acceptability in the US, but it has certainly become acceptable.

Proof of this dismal state of affairs came this week with the publication of a supportive profile of University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer in The Atlantic monthly written by the magazine’s in-house foreign policy guru Robert Kaplan.

Mearsheimer is the author, together with Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government’s Prof.

Stephen Walt, of the infamous 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Since the book’s publication, Mearsheimer has become one of the most high-profile anti-Semites in America.

Kaplan’s article was a clear bid to rehabilitate Mearsheimer in order to advance his pre-Israel Lobby theory of realism in international affairs.

Mearsheimer’s realist theory argues that the international arena exists in a state of perpetual anarchy. As a consequence, the factor motivating states’ actions in international affairs is their national interests. Morality, he claims, has no place in international affairs.

This theory’s considerable intellectual underpinning rendered Mearsheimer one of the most prominent political scientists in America during the 1990s. As a realist himself, particularly in relation to the rise of China as a superpower, Kaplan perhaps believed that by rehabilitating Mearsheimer, he would advance his goal of convincing US policy-makers to adopt a realist approach to China.

[…]

It has become necessary to rehabilitate Mearsheimer because in the years since he and Walt published their conspiracy theory against Israel and its American supporters, Mearsheimer has actively embraced fringe elements in the US and the world in order to advance his campaign to discredit Israel and its supporters. As Alan Dershowitz highlighted in November, Mearsheimer wrote an enthusiastic endorsement of a psychotically anti-Semitic book written by British jazz musician and prolific anti-Semite Gilad Atzmon.

The book, titled The Wandering Who? is replete with Holocaust denial, claims that Jews control the world and America, characterizations of the Jewish God as evil and corrupt, and claims that Israel is worse than Nazi Germany.

In his endorsement, Mearsheimer called the book “fascinating,” and said it “should be read widely by Jews and non-Jews alike.”

As far as Kaplan was concerned, Mearsheimer’s embrace of Atzmon was a simple mistake. But it wasn’t. It was part of an apparent decision on Mearsheimer’s part to use his own celebrity to legitimize his anti-Semitic views.

In a speech to the Palestine Center in April 2010, for example, Mearsheimer distinguished between “righteous” Jews and “New Afrikaner” Jews. The former are Jews who oppose and attack Israel and the latter are Jews who support and defend Israel.

By sanitizing Mearsheimer’s bigotry in his sympathetic profile, Kaplan mainstreamed his hatred.

And Kaplan is not alone.

KAPLAN’S PROFILE of Mearsheimer is part of a larger trend in US letters, politics and culture in which anti-Semitism is becoming more and more acceptable. As Adam Kirsch noted in an article in the Tablet online magazine this week, The Israel Lobby’s central contention, that a cabal of disloyal Jews and sympathizers has forced the US to adopt a pro-Israel policy against its national interests, has found recent expression in the writings of mainstream journalists including New York Times’ columnist Tom Friedman and Time’s Joe Klein.

Last week, The Washington Post-owned online magazine Foreign Policy – which publishes a regular blog by Stephen Walt, published an article by Mark Perry claiming that in 2007 and 2008 Mossad agents posed as CIA agents in a false-flag operation whose aim was to build a cooperative relationship with the Pakistani/Iranian Baluchi anti-regime Jundallah terror group.

[…]

Following the publication of Perry’s article, Israel abandoned its general policy of never commenting on intelligence issues. The Foreign Ministry denounced his report as “utter nonsense.”

What Foreign Policy failed to tell its readers is that Perry is not an objective reporter. He is a former adviser to Yassir Arafat and an advocate of US engagement with Hamas and Hezbollah. By failing to mention his biases, Foreign Policy became an accessory to the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism. Like The Israel Lobby, Perry’s report in Foreign Policy adds to the legitimacy of the attitude that there is something fundamentally wrong with having close relationship with the Jewish state.

Perhaps if Mearsheimer and Walt had published their updated version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1997 instead of 2007 they would have been received in the same manner.

That is, they would have sat in the mainstream doghouse for a few years but then gradually acceptance and support for their bigotry would have moved from the margins to the mainstream.

And within five years they would have been rehabilitated by the establishment. But in all likelihood, that wouldn’t have been the case.

It is a fact that since the turn of the century, and particularly in the wake of the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in 2000 – a collapse precipitated by Arafat’s rejection of Palestinian statehood; and in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the US, anti-Semitism has become far more acceptable in the US and throughout the world. The volume of attacks against Jews has skyrocketed and the intellectual war against Israel and its Jewish supporters has grown ever more virulent.

The rise of anti-Semitism in the US has many causes, but three parallel developments stand out. First, the development of Arab satellite stations like Al Jazeera has brought the open Jew-hatred of the Arab world into the Western discourse.

True, most Westerners reject the Arab annihilationist form of anti-Semitic propaganda as crude and wrong. But the Jew-hatred propounded by these broadcasts has had a corrosive impact on the Western discourse. It has deadened observers to the lies at the heart of the propaganda.

That is, whereas they may reject the daily calls to destroy the Jews, Westerners have increasingly internalized the basic claim that Jews deserve to be hated. Take for instance a Washington Post story last week on Egypt’s decision to bar Jewish worshipers from making their annual visit to the grave of Torah sage Rabbi Yaakov Abuhatzeira.

[…]

THEN OF course there is the European media.

This week, the Dutch Christian newspaper Trouw published an article about prenatal care in Israel written by Ilse van Heusden. Van Heusden wrote of the superior medical care she received in Israel where she lived temporarily and where she gave birth to a healthy son.

Rather than extol the dedicated care she received, van Heusden attacked it. She claimed that Israel’s world class prenatal medicine is a product of its embrace of eugenics and its similarity to Nazi Germany. As she put it, “To be pregnant in Israel is comparable to a military operation. Countless ultrasounds and blood tests should produce the perfect baby, nothing can be left to the luck of the draw. The state demands healthy babies and a lot of them too.”

Trouw’s decision to publish van Heusden’s anti-Semitic assault is of a piece with countless articles published in the European media portraying Israelis as evil Jews intent on using science and every other means at their disposal to advance the Jews’ malign goals of global domination, genocide, apartheid, and general evil. When Israel dares to complain about these attacks, European politicians and media celebrities are quick to stand up and defend their right to freedom of expression.

So it was that Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt – who barred all the Muhammad cartoons from being published in the Swedish media – stood by Sweden’s leading tabloid Aftonbladet when in 2009 it published an article accusing IDF soldiers of killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. In the mind of the anti-Semites, by trying to object to the blood libel, Israel was proving that it seeks to control the media.

The European media’s lies about Israel have been translated into official government policies of lying about Israel. So it is that the French National Assembly published a report last month about the geopolitics of water that included a 20-page diatribe claiming that Israel uses water as a weapon of apartheid against the Palestinians.

To write the report, the French legislators had to ignore not only the content of the Israeli-Palestinian agreement on water in the 1995 Interim Agreement. They had to ignore the basic fact that Israel gives the PA far more water than the agreement requires it to give, and to associate malign intent to the Israeli government. That is, they had to embrace the irrationality of anti-Semitism.

[…]

The international Left’s embrace of the likes of Hamas, the Taliban, Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood has increased leftist and isolationist American policy-makers’ comfort level in adopting hostile postures towards Israel. So it is that at the same time that the Obama administration is assiduously courting the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian regime, according to Channel 2, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has refused to meet with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman during his upcoming trip to Washington. Channel 2 reported that senior US officials said that “Lieberman is an obstacle to peace. We don’t want our pictures taken with him and with what he represents.”

Anti-Semitism is prejudice that is based on a rejection of reason. To fight it, it is not sufficient to disprove the contentions of the likes of Mearsheimer. He and his colleagues must be discredited and their enablers must be shamed.

But before this can happen, world Jewry and Israelis alike need to recognize what is happening.

Anti-Semitism is back in style. Its new justification is not race or religion. It is nationalism. Today’s anti-Semitism is predicated on preferring Palestinian and pan-Arab nationalism to Jewish nationalism.

And like its racist and religious predecessors, its aim is to deny the right of Jews to be free.

In the face of this onslaught the Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora have two choices. We can either succumb to our enemies, or we can fight back.

Read the rest: Mainstreaming anti-Semitism

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Anti-semitism, Egypt, France, Hamas, History, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Sweden | 105 Comments »

The price for failing to call things by their proper names

by Mojambo ( 75 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Egypt, George W. Bush, Hezballah, Iran, Iraq, Islamic Terrorism, Islamists, Israel, Syria at November 28th, 2011 - 5:00 pm

There has been little comment about Obama’s withdrawal plans from Iraq probably because most people understandably want to forget that muddled affair. However we will be throwing away the fruits of our victory and it is disturbing to see Iraq slowly but gradually fall under the influence of Iran. As Miss Glick writes, a “war on terror” is merely a war on a tactic which the enemy employs – and that enemy is radical Islam. While rightfully criticizing the haphazard Obama administration, she lays a lot of blame on the previous administration for not clearly defining the enemy. I am glad that Miss Glick referred to Gaddafi as an impotent adversary which is what he was.

by Caroline Glick

Next month, America’s long campaign in Iraq will come to an end with the departure of the last US forces from the country.

Amazingly, the approaching withdrawal date has fomented little discussion in the US. Few have weighed in on the likely consequences of President Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw on the US’s hard won gains in that country.

After some six thousand Americans gave their lives in the struggle for Iraq and hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on the war, it is quite amazing that its conclusion is being met with disinterested yawns.

[…]

For its part, the Bush administration spent little time explaining to the US public who the forces fighting in Iraq were and why the US was fighting them.

US military officials frequently admitted that the insurgents were trained, armed and funded by Iran and Syria. But policy-makers never took any action against either country for waging war against the US. Above the tactical level, the US was unwilling to take any effective action to diminish either regime’s support for the insurgency or to make them pay a diplomatic or military price for their actions.

As for Obama, as the Kagans and Sullivan show, the administration abjectly refused to intervene when Maliki stole the elections or to defend US allies in the Iraqi military from Maliki’s pro- Iranian purge of the general officer corps. And by refusing to side with US allies, the Obama administration has effectively sided with America’s foes, enabling Iranian-allied forces to take over the USbuilt, -trained and -armed security apparatuses in Iraq.

ALL OF these actions are in line with the US’s current policy towards Egypt. There, without considering the consequences of its actions, in January and February the Obama administration played a key role in ousting the US’s most dependable ally in the Arab world, president Hosni Mubarak.

Since Mubarak was thrown from office, Egypt has been ruled by a military junta dubbed the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Because SCAF is comprised of the men who served as Mubarak’s underlings throughout his 30-year rule, it shares many of the institutional interests that guided Mubarak and rendered him a dependable US ally. Specifically, SCAF is ill-disposed toward chaos and Islamic radicalism.

However, unlike Mubarak, SCAF is only in power because the mobs of protesters in Tahrir Square demanded that Mubarak stand down to enable civilian, majority rule in Egypt. Consequently, the military junta is much less able to keep Egypt’s populist forces at bay.

Throughout Mubarak’s long reign, the most popular force in Egypt was the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood. The populism unleashed by Mubarak’s ouster necessarily rendered the Brotherhood the most powerful political force in Egypt. If free elections are held in Egypt next week as planned and if their results are honored, within a year Egypt will be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the outcome Obama all but guaranteed when he cut the cord on Mubarak.

Recognizing the danger a Brotherhood government would pose to the army’s institutional interests, in recent weeks the generals began taking steps to delay elections, limit the power of the parliament and postpone presidential elections.

Their moves provoked massive opposition from Egypt’s now fully legitimated and empowered populist forces. And so they launched what they are dubbing “the second Egyptian revolution.”

And the US doesn’t know what to do.

[…]

The Left refused to acknowledge that the US was under attack from the forces of radical Islam enabled by Islamic supremacist regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Iran because the Left didn’t want the US to fight. Moreover, because the Left believes that US policies are to blame for the Islamic world’s hostility to America, leftists favor foreign policies predicated on US appeasement of its enemies.

For its part, the Right refused to acknowledge the identity and nature of the US’s enemy because it feared the Left.

And so, rather than fight radical Islamists, under Bush the US went to war against a tactic – terrorism. And lo and behold, it was unable to defeat a tactic because a tactic isn’t an enemy.

It’s just a tactic. And as its war aim was unachievable, the declared ends of the war became spectacular.

Rather than fight to defend the US, the US went to war to transform the Arab world from one imbued with unmentionable religious extremism to one increasingly ruled by democratically elected unmentionable religious extremism.

The lion’s share of responsibility for this dismal state of affairs lies with former president Bush and his administration. While the Left didn’t want to fight or defeat the forces of radical Islam after September 11, the majority of Americans did. And by catering to the Left and refusing to identify the enemy, Bush adopted war-fighting tactics that discredited the war effort and demoralized and divided the American public, thus paving the way for Obama to be elected while running on a radical anti-war platform of retreat and appeasement.

Since Obama came into office, he has followed the Left’s ideological guidelines of ending the fight against and seeking to appease America’s worst enemies. This is why he has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This is why he turned a blind eye to the Islamists who dominated the opposition to Gaddafi. This is why he has sought to appease Iran and Syria. This is why he supports the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition. This is why he supports Turkey’s Islamist government. And this is why he is hostile to Israel.

And this is why come December 31, the US will withdraw in defeat from Iraq, and pro- American forces in the region and the US itself will reap the whirlwind of Washington’s irresponsibility.

There is a price to be paid for calling an enemy an enemy. But there is an even greater price to be paid for failing to do so.