Caroline Glick › 2.0: The Blogmocracy

Posts Tagged ‘Caroline Glick’

Israel as a wedge issue

by Mojambo ( 101 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Elections 2010, Israel, Palestinians at October 3rd, 2011 - 5:00 pm

Elections have consequences, and the recent Democratic defeat in the New York 9th congressional district (my old Brooklyn district) has resonated in Washington D.C. When Debbie Wasserman-Schultz feels the need to proclaim Jewish loyalty to Obama, you know that Obama is in trouble. Also Obama in his recent U.N. speech fearing further domestic repercussions failed to bash Israel (not that he is a Zionist because he clearly is not).

Last week at the UN, President Obama did something he had never done before. He discussed Israel and the Palestinians without once attacking Israel. He didn’t blame Israel for the absence of peace.

True, Obama did not blame the Palestinians for refusing to negotiate with Israel. He did not attack Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas for making a unity deal with Hamas. He did not condemn the Palestinians as anti-Semites in light of their demand that a Palestinian state be ethnically cleansed of Jews, or for their refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

But for the first time in his presidency, last week at the UN Obama spoke to a world audience and drew a moral equivalence between an Israel that seeks peace and the Palestinians who seek Israel’s destruction. Given his record, this is a step forward.

[…]

Cong. Bob Turner’s election, like that of other Republican politicians since 2009 in traditionally Democratic constituencies, owes in large part to Obama’s poor economic record. But what made the NY-9 election unique was the major role Obama’s hostile policies toward Israel played in the race.

[…]

Obama’s UN speech, like the administration’s leaked report that it has sold Israel bunker buster bombs, signal that the White House views the Jewish vote as in play for 2012. And it is trying to woo Jewish voters and donors back into the Democratic fold.

The deterioration of Jewish support for the Democrats has been a long time in coming. Traditional Democratic support for Israel began eroding with the nomination of George McGovern as the party’s presidential candidate in 1972. Before Obama, Jimmy Carter was the most hostile president Israel ever experienced.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton was widely regarded as pro-Israel. Yet during Clinton’s eight years in office, Yasir Arafat was the most frequent foreign guest at the White House. Clinton’s legacy was the Palestinian terror war that broke out in his last months in office.

By the end of Clinton’s second term, Republicans had clearly surpassed Democrats in their support for Israel. In the face of this shift, Democratic leaders insisted that Republicans must not make Israel a “wedge issue.” Since Israel enjoys support from both parties, the Democrats argued, it would harm Israel if Republicans made their outspoken and nearly unanimous support for Israel an electoral issue.

American Jewish leaders were happy to oblige the Democrats. Since most of them and most of their organizations’ members are Democrats, American Jewish groups from AIPAC to the New York Jewish Federation willingly pretended the Democratic Party’s growing support for the Palestinians against Israel meant nothing. And the few voices pointing out the increasingly obvious partisan divide were attacked for “politicizing” Israel.

In the two and a half years since Obama entered office, as the president’s hostility toward Israel became increasingly obvious, demands by Democratic leaders that the Republicans keep mum on the subject of Israel and the Democrats became more and more shrill. They reached their climax during Prime Minister Netanyahu’s dramatic visit to Washington in May.

While Netanyahu was en route to the U.S., Obama blindsided him by endorsing the Palestinian demand that all future peace talks be based on Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines. Since those lines would render Israel indefensible, Netanyahu was compelled to confront Obama on the issue during a photo opportunity at the White House the following day.

In the face of Obama’s unprecedentedly harsh treatment of Israel, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz used the opportunity of a joint meeting with Netanyahu for leaders of the National Democratic Jewish Council and the Republican Jewish Coalition to make the case for silence concerning her party’s weak support for Israel.

Her statement reportedly made Netanyahu so uncomfortable that he asked, “Do you guys want me to leave the room and give you guys some privacy?

While requests to block debate on Israel were respected in the past, the current divide between Democrats and Republicans on Israel is so wide that avoidance of the issue no longer makes sense for Republicans. And so, days after the meeting with Netanyahu, Republican Jewish Coalition Executive Director Matt Brooks wrote a letter to Wasserman Schultz officially rejecting her request.

As he put it, “The Jewish community has a right to be informed about people’s records and people should be answerable for the positions they take. This is the essence of democracy.”

And indeed both the RJC and the Emergency Committee for Israel, a conservative group formed ahead of the 2010 Congressional elections, made Obama’s hostility to Israel a major issue in the NY-9 race.Congressional Republicans have also stopped giving the Democrats a free ride. In the past Republicans avoided introducing major legislation on Israel without Democratic co-sponsors and willingly watered down their initiatives to attract Democratic support. This is no longer the case.

Last month Cong. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced a bill that will end U.S. financial support for the Palestinian Authority and steeply curtail U.S. funding for the UN if the UN upgrades the PLO’s diplomatic mission. All 57 of the bill’s co-sponsors are Republicans.

Congressman Joe Walsh introduced a resolution this month calling for Israel to annex Judea and Samaria. His resolution’s 40-odd co-sponsors are also all Republicans.

Israel’s enemies in the U.S. peddle the anti-Semitic fiction that Israel’s supporters are nothing more than a cabal of activists who band together to defend Israel at America’s expense. Extensive polling data shows that the “pro-Israel cabal” includes the vast majority of Americans. It is due to the public’s overwhelming support for Israel that pro-Israel activists have no reason to fear injecting support for Israel into the political debate. The more politicians are called to account for their positions on Israel, the most pro-Israel their positions will be.

In fact, it was due to the Jewish community’s willingness to pretend there is no partisan divide on Israel that for the past generation, in the face of growing popular support for Israel, successive administrations adopted policies of appeasement toward the Arabs that required Israel to take actions that weakened it. That is, because American Jews have agreed not to make Israel an issue, politicians have felt free to pressure Israel to take steps that harm it – without the public’s knowledge and against its wishes.

Bob Turner’s victory and Obama’s UN speech expose the folly of this practice. They show that Israel’s position in the U.S. is enhanced, not weakened, when politicians are called to account for their positions.

Read the rest: Making Israel a wedge issue

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Barack Obama, Elections 2010, Israel, Palestinians | 101 Comments »

Subsidizing the enemy

by Mojambo ( 70 Comments › )
Filed under Israel, Palestinians at September 21st, 2011 - 2:00 pm

It is the height of folly to fund people who want to kill you. Yet the pygmies in Israel and the United States still operate under the illusion that there are “good terrorists’ (Fatah) and “bad terrorists” (Hamas). The PLO is on the whole a terrorist entity because it is committed to the use of terror to achieve its nihilistic ends – the destruction of Israel. Sending money and even worse, weapons to them is as insane an idea as it would have been arming Japan in World War II. We know that Palestinian security forces under Arafat were directing the terror offensives of 2000 – 2002. One of Ariel Sharon’s mistakes was in my opinion that he sought only to destroy Hamas and Islamic Jihad (both laudable goals) but he should also have sought to brought down and dispersed the Arafat regime.

by Caroline Glick

Speaking Sunday at the UN’s conference of donors to the Palestinian Authority, Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon warned that while Israel supports economic assistance to the PA now, that is liable to change within the week.

As he put it, “Future assistance and cooperation could be severely and irreparably compromised if the Palestinian leadership continues on its path of essentially acting in contravention of all signed agreements which also regulate existing economic relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.”

Ayalon’s position is eminently reasonable. Unfortunately, it contradicts utterly the official position of the Government of Israel.

The government’s position was transmitted on Friday to the same donor conference that Ayalon was participating in. According to the government document, “Israel calls for ongoing international support for the PA budget and development projects that will contribute to the growth of a vibrant private sector, which will provide the PA an expanded base for generating internal revenue.”

Israel’s move was reportedly championed by the Defense Ministry and the IDF senior brass, which reportedly adamantly opposes cutting off any aid to the PA, including aid to the US-trained and financed Palestinian army in Judea and Samaria. As The Jerusalem Post reported on Sunday, senior Defense Ministry officials argue that an aid cutoff is liable to lead to the PA’s collapse and PA employees – which comprise the majority of Palestinian workers – may become violent.

[…]

In other words, the Defense Ministry argues that if the donor countries stop paying off the Palestinian militias – including the US-trained and funded Palestinian army – then their supposedly moderate forces will turn to the terror business to support themselves.

Aside from being strategically insane, this position bespeaks an unjustifiable unwillingness on the part of the leftist-dominated Defense Ministry to understand the basic nature of the Palestinian cause and what it requires from Israel.

Since the IDF and the Foreign Ministry and the rest of the government bureaucracy embraced the PLO as Israel’s “peace partner” 18 years ago, they have been operating on the assumption that the PLO and its spinoffs – Fatah and the PA – are interested in reaching a peace deal with Israel. But this has never been the case.

For the PLO and its spinoffs, the Palestinian conflict has always been and will always be a zero sum game. The goal of the Oslo process, the goal of the PA, of the Palestinian militias, and of the UN bid is one: to strengthen the Palestinians and weaken Israel.

As far as Israel’s “peace partner” is concerned, Israel can never concede enough. There is no deal that Israel can ever offer that the Palestinians will ever accept. Even if Israel offered to destroy itself and hand its ruins to the Palestinians, the Palestinians would pocket the concession and then declare war against whatever remnants remain of the defunct Jewish state in order to “liberate” the land from its Jewish “occupiers.”

We know this is the case because this is what the Palestinians – led by the PLO/Fatah/PA – did in Gaza after Israel unilaterally surrendered. The last military vehicle had barely cleared the border when the Palestinians torched the synagogues Israel had left standing.

So too, after Ehud Barak essentially offered the Palestinians Israel’s head on a platter when he offered them the Temple Mount, they pocketed his offer and began butchering Israelis in a bid to “liberate” the Temple Mount.

The much vaunted Palestinian security forces organized, funded and directed the terror war. And the internationally financed PA budget paid for it.

The reason that the Palestinians are turning to the UN is not because they cannot receive statehood in the framework of a peace deal with Israel. They are going to the UN because they don’t want a peace deal with Israel. They want sovereignty and they want to remain at war with Israel.

For 18 years the IDF’s top brass has refused to recognize the game that the PLO has been playing since the onset of the fake peace process. Informed by the leftist establishment, the IDF’s senior officers vacuously argue that Israel’s only option is to strengthen the PA, including its US-trained and funded army.

This appeasement mindset has paralyzed the IDF’s ability to develop comprehensive strategies for victory for nearly a generation. And the IDF’s leadership clings to appeasement despite the fact that the public has completely rejected it due to its consistent failure.

The basic rule of commonsense policy-making is to be good to your friends and bad to your enemies because then people will want to be your friends and they will not want to be your enemies. The appeasement mindset turns this rule on its head.

As far as the appeasers are concerned, you must be good to your enemies and bad to your friends because your enemies will stop hating you if you’re nice to them. As for your friends, they are wrong to be your friends since you have yet to be worthy of friendship since you have not yet appeased your enemies.

By supporting continued foreign aid to the Palestinians in the aftermath of their UN bid the government has adopted a classic appeasement policy. It has told the Palestinians that they will pay no price for their act of aggression. Worse, Israel just told them they will be rewarded. Israel has gone on record saying it cannot manage without the Palestinian governing body that exists to destroy it.

As for Israel’s friends, the government just pulled the rug out from under their feet. Cong. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is a true friend of Israel. Her bill calling for a cutoff of US aid to the PA and a massive decrease of US aid to the UN in the event the UN upgrades the Palestinians’ diplomatic status is one of the most important pieces of pro-Israel legislation to be introduced in the US Congress in a generation.

[…]

Read the rest: Funding the enemy

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Israel, Palestinians | 70 Comments »

The Palestinian fixation

by Mojambo ( 84 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Europe, Fatah, Israel, Palestinians at September 20th, 2011 - 8:30 am

The blow back from Obama’s insane speeches in front of the U.N. is upon us. The Palestinians want to be able to bring Israel before the International Criminal Court (an evil institution) and to wage further diplomatic war based on isolating and delegitimizing the Jewish nation. Abba Eban once said that if the Arab League put forward a resolution announcing the world is flat, they would get at least a 2/3rd majority supporting it. Watch Obama veto the statehood resolution with a sickening apology to the Palestinians.

by Caroline Glick

If nothing else, the Palestinians’ UN statehood gambit goes a long way towards revealing the deep-seated European and US pathologies that enable and prolong the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

In a nutshell, the Palestinian Authority – or Fatah – or PLO initiative of asking the UN Security Council and the General Assembly to upgrade its status to that of a sovereign UN member state or a sovereign non-UN member state is an act of diplomatic aggression.

Eighteen years ago this week, on September 13, 1993, the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles with Israel on the White House lawn.

There, the terror group committed itself to a peace process in which all disputes between Israel and the PLO – including the issue of Palestinian statehood – would be settled in the framework of bilateral negotiations.

[…]

By abandoning negotiations with Israel two years ago, and opting instead to achieve its nationalist aims outside the framework of a peace treaty with Israel, the Palestinians are destroying the diplomatic edifice on which the entire concept of a peace process is based. They are announcing that they have no intention of living at peace with Israel. Rather they intend to move ahead at Israel’s expense.

In truth, there is little new in the Palestinians’ behavior. They have been using the UN to weaken Israel diplomatically since the early 1970s. Moreover, even if their bid does provide them with upgraded diplomatic status, it won’t change the reality on the ground, nor are the Palestinians particularly interested in changing the situation on the ground.

As the PLO ambassador in Lebanon, Abdullah Abdullah, made clear in an interview Wednesday with that country’s Daily Star, in the event that the UN recognizes some form of Palestinian statehood at the UN, the new “State of Palestine” will still expect the UN to support the so-called Palestinian “refugees.” This is true, he said, even for the “refugees” who live in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. That is, the same UN that the Palestinians seek recognition of statehood from will be expected to provide relief to Palestinian “refugees” living inside “Palestine.” As he put it, “Even Palestinian refugees living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”

So if nothing will change on the ground, why do the US and the EU care what the Palestinians do at the UN next week with their automatic General Assembly majority? Why have the senior peace-processors of Washington and Europe descended on Jerusalem and Ramallah, begging and pleading with the Palestinians to cancel their plans? Why have the Americans and the Europeans been pressuring Israel to make massive concessions to the Palestinians in order to convince them to put out the diplomatic fire there have set at the UN? Why are the White House and the State Department telling the media that the US will consider it a major diplomatic embarrassment if the Palestinians go through with their threats? Why in short, do the Americans and the Europeans care about this?

THE PALESTINIANS have certainly never given either the Americans or the Europeans a good reason to support their cause. Just this week, the PLO representative in Washington told reporters that the future state of Palestine will ban Jews and homosexuals.

And yet, the Obama administration and the EU have made the establishment of a racist, homophobic Palestinian state the greatest aim of their policies in the Middle East.

Every single Palestinian leader from the supposedly moderate Fatah party has rejected Israel’s right to exist and said that they will never set aside their demand that Israel accept millions of foreign-born Arabs – the so-called Palestinian “refugees” – as citizens. They say this with the full knowledge that this demand is nothing less than a demand for Israel’s destruction.

[…]

Every year, the US and Europe transfer collectively approximately a billion dollars in various forms of aid to the Palestinian Authority and yet, the PA has failed to develop a market economy capable of supporting the Palestinians without foreign assistance. Rather, they have developed a welfare society where most economic activity stems from foreign handouts.

Rather than feel embarrassment at their failures, PA leaders use their economic corruption to continuously threaten their patrons. If aid is cut off, they say, the PA will disintegrate and the far more popular Hamas movement will take over, and then, woe of woes, the peace process will be destroyed.

Of course, Hamas is also sustained by Western aid money. Every month, the same PA that warns of the dangers of a rising Hamas transfers tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid to Hamas-controlled Gaza to pay salaries of Hamas “government” employees.

Yet despite its mafia economy, and its exploitation of their aid funds to support a terrorist organization, the US and EU insist on maintaining the PA’s status as the largest per capita foreign aid recipient in human history. And they do so even as the Eurozone is on the brink of collapse and the US is descending rapidly into a new recession.

Finally, in the interest of maintaining the peace process, aside from periodic pro forma statements, the US and the EU have turned blind eyes to the PA’s routine and institutional glorification of terrorist mass murderers and Nazi-style anti-Semitic indoctrination and incitement of Palestinian society.

Given their absolute commitment to the so-called peace process, it would be reasonable to expect the US and the EU to oppose the Palestinians’ decision to move their conflict with Israel from the negotiating table to the UN.

After all, in acting as they are, the Palestinians are making clear that they are abandoning the sacrosanct peace process.

Alas, this is not the case.

The Obama administration is engaging in desperate eleventh hour diplomacy to convince the Palestinians to cancel their UN plan, because it does not wish to oppose it. Most EU member states are expected to support the Palestinian bid at both the Security Council and the General Assembly.

The fact that the US and the EU are reluctant to oppose the Palestinian UN initiative, despite the fact that it destroys the foundations of the peace process, tells us two things about the Americans and the Europeans. First, their support for the Palestinians has more in common with a psychological obsession than with a rational policy decision.

The Obama administration, the EU bureaucracy and most EU member states are obsessed with the Palestinians. There is nothing the Palestinians can say or do to convince them that the Palestinian case is anything other than wholly and completely just.

There are many possible explanations for how they arrived at this obsession. But the fact is that it is an obsession. Like all obsessions, their faith in the justice of the Palestinian cause is impermeable to contrary facts or rational interests.

The flip side of this obsession is, of course, a complementary obsession with blaming Israel for everything that goes wrong. For if the Palestinians are always in the right, and they are fighting Israel, then it naturally follows that Israel is always in the wrong.

This “Blame Israel First” mindset was exposed in all its madness in a New York Times editorial on Thursday.

Despite the Palestinians’ refusal to negotiate with Israel, despite Fatah’s unity-government deal with Hamas, and despite their rejection of Israel’s right to exist, the Times argued that Israel is to blame for the current crisis in relations.

In the paper’s view, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu “has been the most intractable” party to the conflict. Netanyahu’s crime? He has permitted Jews in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to exercise their property rights and build on land they own.

[…]

On Thursday, Netanyahu announced that he will address the UN General Assembly in New York next week and put the truth about the Palestinian cause on the table.

Perhaps someone will be moved by his words.

Perhaps not.

But whether he makes a difference or not, at least reason will have one defender at the UN next week.

Read the rest: The Palestinian Obsession

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Barack Obama, Europe, Fatah, Israel, Palestinians | 84 Comments »

The War on Terror has 3 problems that make it impossible for America to win

by Mojambo ( 125 Comments › )
Filed under Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Hamas, Hezballah, Iran, Iraq, Islamic Terrorism, Islamists, Israel, Jihad, Lebanon, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Syria, Turkey at September 13th, 2011 - 11:30 am

It is interesting to note that Miss Glick mentions that by refusing to call the war what it really is – a war against jihadist terrorism as opposed to a war on terror, the U.S. has stuck it’s head in the sand. This refusal to recognize the threat means that we were slow to react to the growing danger coming from of all places NATO member Turkey. Appeasement seems to be the word of the day of the Obama administration.

by Caroline Glick

Ten years ago, in the shadow of the crater at Ground Zero, the smoldering Pentagon and a field of honor in Pennsylvania, America found itself at war.

Today, a decade on, America is still at war.

Ten years after the September 11, 2001, attacks, the time has come to assess the progress of America’s war. But to assess its progress, we must first understand the war.

What war has the US been fighting since September 11? President George W. Bush called the war the War on Terror. The War on Terror is a broad tactical campaign to prevent Islamic terrorists from targeting America.

The War on Terror has achieved some notable successes. These include Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan which denied al-Qaida free rein in Afghanistan by overthrowing the Taliban.

They also include the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and his fascist regime in Iraq, which played a role – albeit far less significant than the Taliban regime and others – in supporting Islamic terrorism against the US.

[…]

But 10 years on, the fact that Islamic terrorism directed against the US remains a salient threat to US national security shows that the War on Terror is far from won.

And this makes sense. Despite its significant successes, the War on Terror suffers from three inherent problems that make it impossible for the US to win.

The first problem is that the US has unevenly applied its tactic of denying terrorists free rein in territory of their choosing. In his historic speech before the Joint Houses of Congress on September 20, 2001, Bush pledged, “We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism.

[…]

The second problem is that since September 11, 2001, the US has steadfastly refused to admit the identity of the enemy it seeks to defeat.

US leaders have called that enemy al-Qaida, they have called it extremism or extremists, fringe elements of Islam and radicals. But of course the enemy is jihadist Islam which seeks global leadership and the destruction of Western civilization. Al-Qaida is simply an organization that fights on the enemy’s side. As long as the enemy is left unaddressed, organizations like al- Qaida will continue to proliferate.

It isn’t that US authorities do not acknowledge among themselves whom the enemy is. They do track Islamic leaders, and in general prosecute jihadists when they can build cases against them.

But their refusal to acknowledge the nature of the enemy has paralyzed their ability to confront and defeat threats as they arise. For instance, US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was not removed from service or investigated, despite his known support for jihad and his communication with leading jihadists. Rather, he was promoted and placed in a position where he was capable of massacring 12 soldiers and one civilian at Fort Hood, Texas.

Had the US not been in denial about the identity of its enemy, Hasan’s victims would likely be alive today.

So too, the US’s refusal to identify its enemy has made it impossible for US officials to understand and contend with the mounting threat from Turkey. Because the US refuses to recognize radical Islam as its enemy, it fails to connect Turkey’s erratic and increasingly hostile behavior to the fact that the country is ruled by an Islamist government.

[…]

The last problem intrinsic to the US’s War on Terror is the persistent and powerful strain of appeasement that guides so much of US policy towards the Muslim world.

This appeasement is multifaceted and pervades nearly every aspect of the US’s relations with the Islamic world.

The urge to appeasement caused the US to divorce the Islamic jihad against the US from the Islamic jihad against Israel from the outset.

Appeasement has been the chief motivating factor informing the US’s intense support for Palestinian statehood and its refusal to reassess this policy in the face of Palestinian terrorism, jihadism and close ties with Iran.

Appeasement provoked the US to embrace radical Islamic religious leaders and terror operatives such as Sami Arian and Abdurahman Alamoudi as credible leaders in the US Muslim community. It stood behind the decisions of both the Bush and Obama administrations to embrace US affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood as legitimate leaders of the American Muslim community and to court the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to the detriment of US ally former president Hosni Mubarak.

Appeasement stood behind the US’s bid to try to entice Iran to end its nuclear weapons programs with grand bargains.

It motivated US’s decision not to confront Syria on its known support for al-Qaida and Hezbollah as well as Palestinian terror groups; its proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; or its involvement in facilitating the insurgency in Iraq.

It is what has compelled the US not to seek the dismantlement of Hezbollah in Lebanon and indeed to fund and arm the Hezbollah-controlled government and army of Lebanon.

The urge to appease has motivated the US’s decision to take no action to stem the advance of Iran and its terror allies and proxies in al-Qaida and Hezbollah in Latin America.

[…]

The chronic instability of the Iranian regime and the current unrest in Syria demonstrate the structural weakness of these regimes. The dependence of terror groups such as Hezbollah, al-Qaida and Hamas on the support of governments make clear that containment could potentially defeat them as well by drying out their support structure at its roots.

The problem is that the US’s moves to appease its enemies empower them to keep fighting.

Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah are far stronger militarily today than they were on September 11, 2001. Hamas controls Gaza and would likely win any Palestinian elections.

Hezbollah controls Lebanon.

[…]

Today the events of September 11 are still vivid enough in the American memory for America to continue the fight despite the administration’s efforts to discredit the war in the national discourse and imagination. But how long will that memory be strong enough to serve as the primary legitimating force behind a war that even in its limited form is far from won?