Obama’s policy has no clothes

Posted on February 21, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Emperors clothesPresident Obama is searching for ways to hurt PM Netanyahu when he comes to the US in March to speak before Congress and at the annual meeting of AIPAC. So far, he’s tried acting insulted with little effect, and has even gone as far as attempting to racialize the issue. But with only a small number of Democrats planning to boycott Netanyahu’s speech, he’s digging deeper into his bag of possible slights. The AP lists a few:

Among them: a presidential interview with a prominent journalist known for coverage of the rift between Obama and Netanyahu [Jeffrey Goldberg — ed.], multiple Sunday show television appearances by senior national security aides and a pointed snub of America’s leading pro-Israel lobby, which is holding its annual meeting while Netanyahu is in Washington, according to the officials.

The administration has already ruled out meetings between Netanyahu and Obama, saying it would be inappropriate for the two to meet so close to Israel’s March 17 elections. But the White House is now doubling down on a cold-shoulder strategy, including dispatching Cabinet members out of the country and sending a lower-ranking official than normal to represent the administration at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the officials said.

I initially wrote about the White House choosing the lowest-ranked official possible to send, the time-honored Municipal Dog Catcher. But despite my best efforts, it wasn’t funny.

Do the President and his people have any idea how stupid and petty they look? Do they understand that they are projecting a moral stance that will be remembered in history as worse than that of Neville Chamberlain, who at least believed that Hitler didn’t want war?

It is bad enough that despite the virtual certainty that empowering Iran will lead to a bloody regional war — with the potential of developing into  a nuclear exchange — the administration continues on its path to enable Iran’s nuclear weapons development despite its violations of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty and several UN Security council resolutions.

It is bad enough that the administration wrecked the admittedly weak diplomatic effort to slow Iran’s progress and prevented Israel from taking surgical military action at the point at which it might have delayed it.

It is bad enough that the US gave in to Iranian demands to the extent that what was originally supposed to be a process that would prevent Iran from getting the bomb has morphed into one that will legitimize it in doing so.

All this is bad enough, but then the president of the supposedly greatest nation in the world, the leader of the West, did his best to humiliate the PM of tiny Israel, whose nation is arguably the primary target of Iranian weapons. He lied about the PM ‘violating protocol’ by accepting the invitation to speak, invented excuses to avoid meeting him, sent his own electoral experts to Israel to work for the PM’s opponents, and is now looking for even more ways to embarrass him.

He is doing this because the PM will stand up and say, politely but clearly, that the emperor’s policy has no clothes. He will show that the administration’s actual objective is the opposite of what the President says it is, and what most Americans think it should be. It may even become clear to some Americans that this is emblematic of the behavior of this administration.

Obama knows that there will be no defense against Netanyahu’s words, because they are true and obviously so. So he’s decided to fall back on insults and personal attacks. In a word, the president is a chickenshit bully.

Obama promised ‘change’, but what he didn’t say was that it would be the most radical change in the direction of American policy since its emergence as a superpower after WWII. He didn’t say that he would try to establish an alliance with Iran, the greatest supporter of terrorism in the world — which isn’t even pretending to give up its anti-American attitude while it pockets his concessions.

He didn’t say that he would speak in Orwellian tongues in order to avoid intimating that there could be a connection between Islam and terrorism.

He didn’t warn us that he would be fine with Egypt under control of the (viciously anti-American, by the way) Muslim Brotherhood, and that his administration would welcome Muslim Brothers to Washington and appoint them to counter-terrorism positions.

He didn’t say that his commitment to protect human rights didn’t include those of Syrian Sunnis being bombed and gassed by the ally of his Iranian buddies, Bashar al Assad.

He didn’t say that he would take the side of the Palestinian Arabs with their phony grievances against Israel, bringing the attitudes of the radical campus Left to the White House.

But mainly, he didn’t say that America would retreat all over the world, fall back before, and in many cases even support, the forces of Islamic barbarism that want to replace the enlightened Western civilization that Americans had hoped would lead a new, peaceful and prosperous world, a world that would have learned the lessons of the horrors of the 20th century.

Posted in American politics, US-Israel Relations, War | Comments Off on Obama’s policy has no clothes

Israeli elections are surreal, but important

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

I am pleased to report that I will now be writing a weekly post for one of the top pro-Israel blogs, Elder of Ziyon. It will appear every Thursday, and will be reposted here on Friday morning. I’m extremely grateful to the mysterious Elder for the opportunity. Here is my first post.

I got the news in real time while sitting in a doctor’s waiting room: the feverishly-awaited State Comptroller’s report on the expenditures of the Prime Minister’s residences had been released, and a woman seated across the room was smacking her lips reading numbers from her smartphone to her husband: “75 thousand shekels for cleaning,” she smacked. “And all that take-out food! Can you believe it? Those two are living like a king and queen, aren’t they?”

Welcome to the surreal Israeli election campaign, in which there are no real issues except the absolute conviction of the out-of-power Left that the world is upside down and can only be righted by them replacing the present government, and the fact that many people really don’t like the Prime Minister. Or his wife. Especially his wife.

None of his opponents can explain how they would solve the multiple security issues on Israel’s borders with Egypt, Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria any better than Netanyahu. And probably they wouldn’t even be that much more compliant with their ‘friend’ Obama on the Palestinian issue when push came to shove (although one never knows, and I hope we don’t find out). They also talk a lot about ‘social issues’, by which they mean that the cost of living is high and there are too many poor people, and it is all the Prime Minister’s fault. And probably that of his over-spending wife.

Different newspapers take different approaches to explaining their dislike of the Prime Minister. Ha’aretz publishes variations of the same thing over and over: how the immoral occupation will make us an apartheid state if we don’t act soon and get rid of the PM, as if there is any imaginable way Israel can leave the territories without inviting Hamas to be a next-door neighbor to our airport.

Yediot Acharonot, on the other hand, prefers to go directly to the root of the problem:  reliable sources have reported that Mrs. Netanyahu may have recycled deposit bottles and kept the money (on the other hand, she may not have). It is also an opportunity to remind everyone that former workers in the PM’s residence have accused her of being rude and demanding, as well as to publish any unflattering pictures of her that they may have around.

Lately we have been hearing the theme that the PM has ‘wrecked the relationship’ with the US by conspiring with Republicans to speak to Congress against Obama’s wishes. In fact, the relationship, such as it was, suffered when Netanyahu refused to be a good puppet and follow orders, usually relating to concessions to the PLO in the forever-fruitless negotiations process. Obama then responded with calculated snubs, such as the May 2010 incident in which Netanyahu and his aides were left sitting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House while Obama went to dinner.

The Obama Administration will not be able to have a good relationship with Netanyahu, or indeed with any Israeli Prime Minister who is not an out-and-out traitor, for multiple reasons. The most important is that it has adopted a policy of rapprochement with Iran, which includes accepting it as a nuclear-weapons threshold state (and it will soon drop the ‘threshold’ qualification). Israel’s view, of course, is that Iran cannot be allowed to obtain nuclear capability. Period.

On the Palestinian issue, Obama wants a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the territories, also something Israel cannot accept. There is a continuing disagreement about how Israel is permitted to respond in self-defense to attacks on its citizens. Finally, there is the hard-to-understand but persistent support by the administration for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Possibly the White House’s dislike of Netanyahu is being translated into action now, as the V15 campaign (a supposedly ‘non-partisan’ effort to defeat the PM — try figuring that out) is ramping up in Israel, with the participation of veterans of Obama’s campaigns, and funds which come from left-wing sources in the US and even from the US State Department. The campaign is very Obama — lots of young people relying on slogans like ‘hope and change’ — almost embarrassingly content-free.

It would be a mistake to discount V15’s possible effectiveness despite its apparent silliness. The idea seems to be primarily to identify people who might vote against Netanyahu but are normally unlikely to vote and to get them to the polls, a technique that worked effectively for Obama with young and minority voters.

And here is why the campaign stops being surreal and gets very real. The Left wants to win badly, very badly. How far will they go? Consider this: even if the misleadingly-named “Zionist Union” gets a few more seats in the Knesset than Netanyahu’s Likud, they will not be able to form a coalition since the normally right-wing bloc of parties is larger than those that would join with the Left.

Unless, for the first time in Israel’s history, they ask the Arab parties to join them.

Because of a change in the election law that raised the percentage of votes needed for a party to enter the Knesset, the various Arab parties joined together in a Joint Arab List which is currently polling 12 mandates. Historically, neither the Zionist parties nor the Arabs have agreed for Arab parties to join the government. But if they did, and if some of the more ‘opportunist’ of the center parties joined them, there could be a massive upset. A revolution.

Note that if every eligible Arab in Israel voted for the Arab list it would theoretically get 25 mandates, so there is great potential in a get-out-the-vote operation.

This is only one scenario. Powerful forces are at work behind the scenes in this election, with money coming from Europe as well as America. And it isn’t over until it’s over.

Posted in Israeli Politics, US-Israel Relations | 5 Comments

There’s only one issue in Israel’s election

Posted on February 19, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Our election campaign stumbles on. One could laugh if one could keep from crying when Mrs. Netanyahu’s recycling of deposit bottles or whether it was legal for the Netanyahus to hire an electrician who was also a Likud activist are presented as issues.

The Left is going after young secular voters, apparently an important swing segment of the electorate (another is Arabs, whose participation in elections has historically been lower than that of Jews). Naftali Bennett of the right-wing Bayit Hayehudi party was making inroads in the young secular segment even though most of his list was composed of older religious people. The Left needed an issue, and they chose a good one: gay marriage.

Young man challenges Naftali Bennett (foreground with raised hand). T-shirt reads "I have two moms and I don't apologize."

Young man challenges Naftali Bennett (foreground with raised hand). T-shirt reads “I have two moms and I don’t apologize.”

A recent campaign commercial for one of the leftwing parties showed members of Bayit Hayehudi answering — mostly in the negative — the question of whether they support gay marriage. Bennett has used “I don’t apologize” (for Zionism, for Israel’s economic success, for building in the territories, etc.) as a slogan, so not apologizing for supporting gay rights, including marriage, is clever.

But as an election issue, it is ridiculous. As long as marriage in Israel is under the control of religious authorities, not only will there be no gay marriage but even heterosexual marriage for Jewish couples who can’t produce the documentation required by the Rabbinate — and this pretty much means all immigrants — will continue to be difficult. Neither the Right nor the Left is in a position to change this, unfortunately.

I’ve personally experienced the randomness, incompetence and infuriating condescension of the Rabbinate when my Jewish and heterosexual daughter was married. But even if there was a likelihood that a civil marriage bill could be passed, this would not be an issue for me.

Because there is only one — there can be only one — issue for Israeli voters today, and that is security. Israel is surrounded by enemies, some of whom are very well-armed. Iran, whose leaders constantly reiterate that Israel will be destroyed, is building nuclear weapons, and the US — the only power that could stabilize the region — seems prepared to let this happen.

There is absolutely no doubt that Israel will confront Iran, Hizballah, Hamas and who knows whom else in the near future. It’s not a possibility, it’s a certainty. They aren’t going to go away, give up or suddenly decide to make peace with us.

So to the young man with two mothers, I have this to say: yes, you shouldn’t apologize for your support for gay rights, but you don’t live in Berkeley, California. You live in the Middle East, at a time of historic upheavals. Gay rights, the cost of food or an apartment, the education budget — things that are significant in a normal country in a normal time — are not important here and now. Neither are deposit bottles and Likudnik electricians.

When you go to vote, the question in your mind ought to be about one single issue: who will best guide the state of Israel through one of the most militarily challenging periods of its existence. Who will have the best chance of successfully making a strategic plan and carrying it out so that the Jewish state will emerge victorious and whole from the coming struggle.

Posted in Israeli Politics | 1 Comment

Terrorism in Europe, weakness in America

Posted on February 16, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
L: Dan Uzan (with niece Karoline), 37-year old volunteer guard murdered at Copenhagen synagogue. R: memorial to victims of terrorist shootings at cafe and synagogue.

L: Dan Uzan (with niece Karoline), 37-year old volunteer guard murdered at Copenhagen synagogue. R: memorial to victims of terrorist shootings at cafe and synagogue.

PM Netanyahu ruffled some feathers in the Jewish community of Denmark when he invited them to “come home” to Israel.

“We appreciate the invitation, but we are Danish citizens, this is our country,” Dan Rosenberg Asmussen, chairman of the Jewish Society in Denmark, told Reuters as he offered condolences to mourners at the synagogue.

This is understandable, especially in Denmark, whose population has historically been protective of its Jewish minority (unlike, for example, France, where authorities talk a good game today but have a poor record).

But European Jews have to be aware that demographic trends are against them. Much of the more and more frequent anti-Jewish behavior comes from the growing Muslim sector. That’s a fact, as is the fact that even without increased immigration from Muslim countries, the disparity in birthrates between ‘native’ Europeans and immigrants will guarantee that this growth will continue. And it’s unlikely that immigration will be cut back.

European governments are honestly horrified by the violence and promise to fight terrorism aggressively. But they mostly miss the point. In a very perceptive piece, Benjamin Weinthal explains,

To understand the continuation of violent anti-Semitism, the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno said in post-Holocaust Europe, “We will not have come to terms with the past until the causes of what happened then are no longer active. Only because these causes live on does the spell of the past remain, to this very day, unbroken.”

What has filled the vacuum since Europe has relegated Nazism to a largely meaningless status, is the rise of Islamic-animated anti-Semitism enabled by an indifferent mainstream public coupled with an aggressive European Left. Anti-Jewish forces have turned Israel into a human punching bag.

Unfortunately, media and governments have bought into the anti-Israel conceptual scheme that inspires and is used to justify violence against Jews:

Prof. Gerald Steinberg, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University, told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday, “The repeated and false allegations of Israeli ‘war crimes,’ ‘child killer’ and even ‘genocide’ from political groups under the facade of human rights and humanitarian assistance has certainly contributed to the lethal European anti-Semitism. And many European media platforms and government officials repeat these modern blood libels without bothering to verify the facts or the double standards that are employed.”

As a result, the problem will not get better. It will only get worse. In France, many Jews have decided that it is already intolerable.

This isn’t to say that there is the prospect of “another Holocaust” in Europe, and that Jews need to make plans for escape before it’s too late. It is not 1938 all over again. The changes that are overtaking the continent will be gradual, and little by little it will become clear that it is not a suitable home for us. Even the most self-deluded of European Jews will understand sooner or later.

American Jews are a different story. I doubt that they are in immediate danger from terrorism, at least not to a much greater degree than other Americans are. But their hubris and self-deception may be placing the Jewish community in Israel in danger. Several prominent American Jews, including Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the Reform movement and Abraham Foxman of the ADL have called on PM Netanyahu to back down from his planned speech to a joint session of Congress on the subject of Iran.

This is not surprising, really, since these Jewish leaders are close to the Obama Administration, which has pulled out all the stops to prevent Netanyahu from speaking and possibly torpedoing its planned deal with the Iranian regime. I can’t help but be reminded of the efforts of Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), Ben Hecht and others to raise awareness of the ongoing Holocaust, and how they were viciously attacked by American Jewish leaders of the time.

In Israel the consensus of opinion is that the deal will leave Iran the ability to break out with deliverable nuclear weapons in a very short time frame. The very strident election campaign that is going on should not hide the fact that even those who will do anything to undermine Netanyahu understand that the deal is unacceptable, and while they are accusing him of damaging relations with the US, probably secretly hope he will speak persuasively before Congress.

From the point of view of Israel, it is 1938 again, in which the great powers sacrificed Czechoslovakia in a vain effort to appease Hitler. The difference, of course, was that Czechoslovakia did not have the power to act alone to protect itself, while Israel arguably does.

Chamberlain and Daladier gave in to the Nazis in the hope that they would obtain “peace in [their] time.” It’s hard to see what Obama thinks will come out of his surrender, but I can guarantee that it will not be peace.

Posted in Iran, Terrorism, US-Israel Relations | 2 Comments

Obama’s ‘random’ animus

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Dry Bones Feb 9We know that President Obama doesn’t often just say what pops into his head. His public speeches are carefully crafted to send the messages that he and his advisers want to send. So when he says,

It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris,

some of us random folks got the message. 10-4, Mr. President, we read you loud and clear. Nobody out there is murdering Jews for ideological reasons. If you happen to walk into a Kosher market with an AK-47, then the folks you shoot at random are likely to be Jews. Nothing to see here.

Is it also random the way Obama has taken every opportunity since he came into office to insult and try to embarrass the Prime Minister of the Jewish state, in a way that he does not do to any other national leader or even domestic political rival? The latest manufactured slight to arouse an Obama tantrum is just one of many.

Maybe he just randomly dislikes some folks and our PM happens to be one of them. He dislikes him even more than Vladimir Putin, who is rebuilding the Soviet empire, and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, who is using him for a doormat on his way to a Persian one, or the new Ottoman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

It is really important to Obama to make a deal with the Iranians that will recognize their ‘right’ to enrich uranium and legitimize their continued violations of the non-proliferation treaty that they signed. Not only are Israel and the Sunni Arab nations of the Middle East worried, even the Europeans are having a hard time swallowing this. But it will be the crowning achievement of this “anti-imperialist” (but see the previous paragraph) president to once and for all right the wrongs of first-world colonialism by empowering today’s greatest enemy of Western civilization.

But just as he is on the verge of success, here comes that annoying Netanyahu again, who frustrated Obama’s efforts to be the savior of the Palestinian Arabs (at our expense), and now has the chutzpah to complain that just because the Iranians chant “death to Israel” all the time they should be prevented from getting nuclear weapons. It’s not entirely random — he has a reason to dislike Netanyahu; the man wants to preserve the Jewish state at Obama’s expense!

Obama wants to minimize Muslim Jew hatred because he really does buy into the post-colonial worldview: Arabs can’t be racists, because they are a colonized people, and ‘racism’ is a concept that applies only to colonizers. What the colonized do is resistance, which is understandable even if violent. Netanyahu does not feel colonial guilt because as a student of history, he knows that Israel is neither colonialist nor illegitimate.

So I guess it makes sense that Obama dislikes him.

What doesn’t make sense is why so many American Jews continue to support this man.

Posted in American Jews, Jew Hatred, US-Israel Relations | 2 Comments

Obama sinks to new low in anti-Netanyahu campaign

Posted on February 8, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
Agitator Al Sharpton (yes, that's him in the blue track suit) leads march protesting the alleged rape of Tawana Brawley in 1987.

Agitator Al Sharpton (yes, that’s him in the blue track suit) leads march protesting the alleged rape of Tawana Brawley in 1987.

Relations between blacks and Jews in the US have been poor since 1968, when the New York teachers strike pitted the overwhelmingly Jewish United Federation of Teachers against a black community-controlled school board. The traditional flirtation of the black community with various forms of Islam, from the homegrown version of the original Nation of Islam to the increasing numbers of black converts to more normative Islam, has added an anti-Zionist flavor; and there seems to be no lack of outright anti-Jewish agitators like Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, and of course Jeremiah Wright.

In this context, the appropriation by anti-Israel elements of the ‘Ferguson’ movement against police violence and putative racism makes sense. There is, they think, a fertile field in the black community to plant with comparisons between blacks and Palestinian Arabs, between the PLO and Hamas and the SCLC, SNCC, CORE, etc. groups that fought the battle against Jim Crow in the South in the 1950s and 1960s.

The complete absurdity of these comparisons is lost on those who don’t understand the racism, violence, and genocidal attitudes that characterize the real Palestinian movement, which is precisely a movement opposed to human rights. But who cares about reality?

Now it appears that US President Obama isn’t helping, by trying to make the US-Israel relationship not only a partisan affair, but a racial one.

As he ratchets up the pressure against Netanyahu, after falsely claiming to be ‘blindsided’ by his acceptance of an invitation from Speaker of the House John Boehner, it seems likely that Obama specifically asked members of the Congressional Black Caucus to boycott Netanyahu’s speech:

Two prominent black Democrats in the House of Representatives are vowing to skip Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress next month, a move that a White House insider says was put in motion by the Obama administration.

John Lewis of Georgia and G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina both said Friday that they disapproved when House Speaker John Boehner invited the Israeli leader to address a joint session of Congress on March 3 without consulting President Barack Obama first.

That disapproval apparently was orchestrated, or at least strongly encouraged, by the White House through communications with lawmakers connected to the Congressional Black Caucus.

‘I’m not saying the president called anyone personally,’ a current White House staffer told Daily Mail Online.

‘But yeah, the White House sent a message to some at the CBC that they should suddenly be very upset about the speech.’

The president is worried that Netanyahu’s speech might prompt some members of the legislative branch — which he wishes would go away and leave him alone to make a potentially disastrous deal with Iran — to oppose said deal. He apparently doesn’t care what he has to do to discredit Netanyahu, and that seems to include dynamiting any vestiges of support for Israel among African-Americans by arranging a black boycott of his speech.

The Iran deal is of great importance, not just to Israel, but to the entire region and to the US as well. The Washington Post — which is considered a liberal newspaper and which supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 — wrote in an editorial on February 5 that the proposed deal has three major failings:

● First, a process that began with the goal of eliminating Iran’s potential to produce nuclear weapons has evolved into a plan to tolerate and temporarily restrict that capability.

● Second, in the course of the negotiations, the Obama administration has declined to counter increasingly aggressive efforts by Iran to extend its influence across the Middle East and seems ready to concede Tehran a place as a regional power at the expense of Israel and other U.S. allies.

● Finally, the Obama administration is signaling that it will seek to implement any deal it strikes with Iran — including the suspension of sanctions that were originally imposed by Congress — without a vote by either chamber. Instead, an accord that would have far-reaching implications for nuclear proliferation and U.S. national security would be imposed unilaterally by a president with less than two years left in his term.

It continues,

Rather than contest the Iranian bid for regional hegemony, as has every previous U.S. administration since the 1970s, Mr. Obama appears ready to concede Iran a place in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and beyond — a policy that is viewed with alarm by Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey, among other allies.

Whatever his motives, President Obama wants this deal. Many members of Congress, and not just Republicans, are very uneasy about it. PM Netanyahu is taking a great risk — both from possible retaliation by the US president and from the use his electoral opponents are making of this issue at home — by making this trip.

Obama’s use of the so-called ‘race card’ is contemptible and only emphasizes more strongly the lack of moral stature that characterizes this president.

Posted in American politics, Iran, US-Israel Relations | 1 Comment

Why Netanyahu will go to America

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

As the discussion of PM Netanyahu’s upcoming visit to the US to speak before Congress heats up on both sides of the world, I received an email from an Israeli correspondent. In part, he wrote,

…one could ask why is Netanyahu risking bi-partisan support of Israel over this? Why he is making this speech now when it is not really going to stop Iran? Or prevent some kind of Obama appeasement deal with Iran? Is it as the cynics claim all for election purposes? Or does the Prime Minister believe that more sanctions will actually lead Iran to reverse its race to nuclear weaponry? Doesn’t the Prime Minister understand that what  he himself has said about the regime in Tehran is true? That  their goal is to have weapons of mass destruction which will enhance their power in a way so as to totally transform power relations in the Middle East? Not to speak of giving them a means to when the moment is right for them possibly aim at realizing a major goal, the destruction of Israel?  Doesn’t he understand that all the talk and the threat and the sanctions are not going to do the job?  Doesn’t he understand that Iran understands an absence of military threat means a green light for them?

I’ve asked the same question myself. I’ll add that the visit might even hurt the PM in the upcoming election, because it’s given his opponents the only real issue they can deploy against him. What else is there? Deposit bottles?

I agree with my correspondent that even if Netanyahu persuades Congress to pass a sanctions bill, and even if Obama can’t circumvent it, and even if (and we are already in unlikely territory) such sanctions would severely impact the Iranian economy, they would not stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Iran’s program has been a top national priority for more than a decade. Iran has made great sacrifices to get to where it is now, and it is not likely to stop because the price of bread for the average citizen is rising. A regime that shoots down anti-government protesters in the street can ignore popular discontent and will allocate its resources where it sees fit.

The so-called ‘bad deal’ that the Obama Administration is cooking up will make it more comfortable for Iran to become a nuclear weapons state. It will make it harder for other countries (Israel) to take action against Iran. But they will get nuclear weapons even without it, unless they are stopped by force or the threat thereof.

So why, as my correspondent asks, is Netanyahu making a big balagan if it will not stop Iran?

The answer is that he knows that the US, under Obama and probably even under a Republican president, will not take the only action that could be effective. He knows that it will not make a credible military threat and, if necessary, carry it out. Although we might argue that it is in America’s interest to do so, few Americans agree at this point.

He also knows that when there is absolutely no time left, when inaction will result in our waking up tomorrow to find that an enemy that has sworn to destroy our state has nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, that he will be obligated to give the order to strike first and destroy those weapons.

He understands that this will unleash a war in which possibly thousands of Israelis, civilians and soldiers both, will die, as well as Lebanese unlucky enough to live upstairs from Hizballah’s missile launchers, and Iranians. He will do this even though he knows that there is a risk of an even wider, perhaps nuclear, war.

He will do it because there is no option other than suicide, because he is the son of Ben-Zion Netanyahu, because he reads history, and because he learned the lesson of the Holocaust.

So his job in America will be to prepare the American people and its representatives. He will try to gain their understanding and support, for the coming struggle.

The administration is bitterly opposed to this. It has already at least once prevented Israel from hitting Iranian nuclear facilities, and has since then carried out a policy to enable Iran to reach the nuclear threshold. I won’t speculate as to its motives, but the reality is undeniable. It can be expected to try its best to prevent an Israeli attack and to deny Israel support if it does strike.

Netanyahu’s strategy will be to explain why Israel has no alternative, and to try to blunt, as much as is possible, the administration’s response. Anything the US can do to weaken Iran or slow down its progress will be welcome, of course. He certainly wouldn’t be unhappy if the Congress passed something like the Kirk-Menendez bill, or if the ‘bad-deal’ could be derailed.

But I don’t think he has any illusions that Iran can be stopped by diplomacy. He is a very conservative and risk-averse Prime Minister (some criticize him for this), but the day will come that he will have to act.

Posted in Iran, US-Israel Relations | 5 Comments

Time to get serious and crush radical Islam

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
Da'esh executes Mu'az al-Kasasbeh, Jordanian pilot captured in December

Da’esh executes Mu’az al-Kasasbeh, Jordanian pilot captured in December

You may know that Da’esh recently released a video of the execution of the Jordanian pilot that they captured in December. After his capture, they asked for suggestions for the best way to kill him, and the method they chose, to burn him alive in a cage, was about as cruel as can be imagined. Some say that they do these things in order to shock or frighten their enemies into submission, but I think that’s only a small part of it. I think they glory in evil and cruelty, perhaps the same way as this man did. The psychological warfare and recruitment benefits of their behavior are secondary. They do it for fun.

Be that as it may, membership in the organization must become a capital crime. The Jordanians have already executed two Da’esh prisoners in their possession, and have threatened to kill more. I hope they do.

Da’esh taps into the deepest wells of evil in the human psyche in order to recruit like-minded creatures. In this sense — you can decide according to your beliefs if there is a supernatural or transcendent meaning here — they are creatures of the devil.

There’s no way to see their point of view, nothing to empathize with, no positive elements in their ‘culture’, nothing to talk to them about. They need to be exterminated like the Anopheles mosquito or the Polio virus. Those who flirt with the idea of joining them must understand that to do so would be a form of suicide.

The Boko Haram of Nigeria are ideologically and behaviorally similar, and there are similar groups in Somalia, Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Indonesia and other places. All Islamist jihadists, all vicious, all evil.

It is a scandal that the ‘civilized’ world hasn’t yet seriously taken on the task of snuffing them out. US President Obama won’t even say “radical Islam.”

Hamas and Hizballah are slightly less barbaric, at least in their relations with other Muslims. But only slightly, and for Jews or Christians there’s little difference. Unfortunately for Israel, we are almost entirely surrounded by these beings. Some are employed by our more traditional enemies (Iran). Some live inside our country, even our capital, where, like Amalek, they strike at soft targets. Some sit on our borders, and some tunnel under them or launch rockets over them.

This is the most fundamental fact of life in Israel. Survival in this neighborhood requires constant vigilance and a massive allocation of resources to defense. It requires careful gathering of intelligence and bold action when required to interdict the plans of the jihadists, who never cease to plan. It means that everybody’s kids have to postpone their lives for several years of military service. It means that for the foreseeable future, Israelis can never let down their guard, never concern themselves only with ‘normal’ things (this is why the emphasis placed on social issues by PM Netanyahu’s electoral opponents seems surreal).

If you pay attention to what Islamists say, you understand that Israel only seems to be their primary target because it is in the Middle East, an outpost of civilized resistance to the tide of barbarism that is rapidly rising. Israel is an outlying fortress that stands in the way to radical Islam’s real objective, destruction of the Western world order, led by the Great Satan, the United States.

But Barack Obama apparently doesn’t believe that the US is seriously threatened by Islamic jihadism:

Obama emphasized [in an interview with Fareed Zakaria] that while he is mindful of the “terrible costs of terrorism,” terror groups aren’t an “existential threat to the United States or the world order.”

He’s wrong. Until the West recognizes its adversary and commits itself to a long-term and difficult struggle, the jihadists will grow stronger and escalate their atrocities. Unless they are stopped, it is only a matter of time before a (possibly nuclear) mass casualty attack surpasses the horror of 9/11.

Islamic jihadism comes in various flavors, and the Iranian-based Shiite version is at odds with the Sunni Wahabi style of the Muslim Brotherhood and Da’esh. Today Da’esh and Hizballah exemplify this conflict on the killing fields of Syria. But at the same time, the Brotherhood-linked Hamas is trying to regain the Iranian support that it lost when it opposed Assad’s murderous oppression of Sunnis in Syria.

This makes our policy options appear limited. But the truth is that we can’t side with one jihadist faction against another, when all of them are fundamentally opposed to our way of life and just waiting until the day that they can get their hands on our, the West’s, throat. We need to oppose — and crush — them all.

Unfortunately, Obama’s recent turn toward Iran, the ‘bad deal’ that even the Europeans are uncomfortable with that will result in Iran becoming a nuclear threshold state, his apparent support for the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood against the Sisi regime in Egypt, his tacit acceptance of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, and his lack of support, even sabotage, of Israel’s attempt to defend itself against its enemies — all of these show that US Middle East policy is to assist, rather than defeat, its true enemies.

I’m sure that Obama’s words about the costs of terrorism are a comfort to the family of al-Kasasbeh, or to any of the hundreds of thousands who have lost loved ones to jihadists of all stripes.

Posted in Islam, Terrorism | 1 Comment