An Anti-Israel President, by Bret Stephens

Say what you will about President Obama's approach to Israel—or of his relationship with American Jews—he sure has mastered the concept of chutzpah.

On Thursday at the State Department, the president gave his big speech on the Middle East, in which he invoked the claims of friendship to tell Israelis "the truth," which to his mind was that "the status quo is unsustainable, and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace." On Friday in the Oval Office, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered his version of the truth, which was that the 1967 border proposed by Mr. Obama as a basis for negotiating the outlines of a Palestinian state was a nonstarter.

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Must Read! May 23, 2011

I don’t know what strategic purpose Obama had in mind for addressing the Middle East impasse when last Thursday he made the first of a series of speeches on the subject. Whatever this may have been, that speech produced one satisfactory result. The Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, for once started to tell the west a few home truths about what it was doing.

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Imagine if every year on the 7th of May, Germans held an annual commemoration of the defeat of the Nazi state, complete with Swastikas, anti-Jewish chants and slogans, and a historical narrative claiming that the Volksdeutsche expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were the real victims of WW2. That disgusting spectacle is exactly what takes place on May 15th as Arab Muslims chant and riot to protest their unsuccessful genocide of a regional minority.

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Must Read!

Mark Steyn: The unzippered princeling and the serving wench

Back when he was still the officially designated Next President of France and not an accused rapist, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was glimpsed at the annual IMF soccer tournament wearing a T-shirt emblazoned "YES, WE KAHN!" (Monsieur le directeur was not participating in the game: The field he likes to play requires more horizontal exertions, as even the deferential and protective French media have begun belatedly to acknowledge.) In consciously mimicking the slogan of another and very successful presidential candidate, the IMF boss and Socialist Party candidate improved upon it – or, at any rate, made it more accurate. "Yes, We Can"? Er, no, actually, you can't. But yes, he Kahn!

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Thomas Friedman is one of journalism’s greatest celebrities, the single most famous US interpreter of the Middle East and the liberal columnist who has the most influence on the way Americans understand Israel. His 1989 book “From Beirut to Jerusalem” has been a best-seller, as was “The world is flat.”

Friedman also plays a major role in shaping Obama’s rhetoric about Israel’s return to the pre-1967 armistice line, which the late Abba Eban dubbed the “Auschwitz borders.”

For the first time now, the four digits (1967) have become formal American policy. It was also a Friedman victory. It was he, after all, who invented the so-called “Saudi plan for peace in the Middle East.” And it was Friedman who wrote that the White House is “disgusted” with Israeli interlocutors.

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A Tale of Two Betrayals, by Steve McCann in The American Thinker

The President of the United States has willingly and with forethought placed our long term ally, Israel, whose existence America has guaranteed since 1948, in an untenable situation by his attempt to impose a course of action that, if not followed by Israel, will further inflame the Muslim world and cause international sentiment to turn against Israel.

President Obama is attempting to force a settlement on terms dictated by the Arabs in the Middle East. By setting as a pre-condition the surrender of territory commensurate with the pre-1967 boundaries in any negotiations with the Palestinians, he has instead guaranteed further conflict.

Mr. Obama, the smartest and ablest person to ever occupy the Oval Office (as confirmed by his demeanor and sycophants in the media), either is naive and overweening (synonymous with the Left) or unaware of the failures throughout history caused by intimidating one's ally into giving up land in exchange for peace with someone bent on their destruction.

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Must Read! May 21, 2011

Former ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, explains in the Wall Street Journal  why the 1967 borders are indefensible.

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Must Read for May 20, 2011

Charles Krauthammer.  Brilliant as ever, he discusses Obama's Middle East speech. 

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Caroline Glick gives us the best analysis of Obama's speech on the Middle East and what it signifies not only for Israel, but for the United States.

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Raymond Ibrahim on Obama's Middle East speech.

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Efraim Karsh responds to Abbas's fable in a New York Times op-ed.

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Robert Satloff looks at Obama's departure from positions of previous administrations concerning Israel and peace negociations.

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A come-to-Moses moment at hand, by Wesley Pruden

The State Department, which has never been particularly friendly to Jews, is getting a little cover for its unrelenting deference to the enemies of Israel. The Jews eager to cover for the diplomats are the weak, the naive and, alas, the familiar.

They’re the liberal, mostly Democratic, Jews offended by the “aggressive” Israelis who understand what’s at stake in the Middle East. They’re embarrassed by and resentful of the “righteous Gentiles” eager to help Israel prevent a second Holocaust, this one in the Middle East, rather than to contribute to building another Holocaust museum later. Israel once united the contentious factions of American Jews, but now the mere existence of Israel exacerbates tension between the realists and the deaf, blind dreamers.

Nevertheless, a “come-to-Moses” moment is approaching. Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, fresh from his kiss-and-make up session with the terrorists of Hamas, is coming to New York City in September to press the United Nations to recognize an independent Palestinian state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be in Washington next week to address a joint session of Congress and to meet President Barack Obama. Maybe they’ll talk about that. The occasion will give Messrs. Obama and Netanyahu, in diplo-speak, “an opportunity for the United States and Israel to review the full range of issues, from Iran to the regional change to the peace process.”

If the past is the usual reliable guide, the White House and the State Department will actually see this as an opportunity to pressure Israel to submit to further accommodation to those who want to “wipe Israel off the map,” in the vow of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran and the chief enabler of Hamas. Mr. Obama himself is all aquiver working on his speech, probably to be delivered next week, eager to speak softly and carry small convictions made of strawberry Jell-O. The Wall Street Journal reports that he will urge Muslims to “reject Islamic militancy in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death and embrace a new era of relations with the United States.” Ah, if only.

But it’s not just the Jews who get the back of his hand. There hasn’t been a peep out of the White House since a dozen Egyptian Christians were killed and scores injured by violent Muslims last weekend. Christian homes and businesses were trashed and burned. The pope condemned it; Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper condemned it. Nothing from the president, though there’s White House precedent for condemning burning churches. (Bill Clinton once condemned the burning of black churches in Arkansas even when nobody had burned any churches in Arkansas.)

Some American Jews who are fed up with the passivity, or worse, of well-established advocacy groups are splitting to establish new organizations with an appetite for the red meat that is the diet of everyone else in the Middle East. One particular target is the confederation of local Jewish Federations that, no doubt well-meaning, offer aid and comfort to those who mean Israel nothing but ill. In New York City, writes Jonathan Rosenblum, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post and the Hebrew daily Maariv, a Jewish Federation affiliate on the Upper West Side supports organizations promoting boycott, divestment and sanction of Israel. In Washington, the Federation funds an anti-Jewish theater troupe called Theater J, whose recent offerings include a play about Israelis as modern Nazis. A Southern California chapter contributes money to send students to Israel to be treated to scolding lectures by Hamas speakers.

This Jewish cover for anti-Israel initiatives is no doubt welcomed by Arabists in Foggy Bottom, where skepticism of Jews is part of the established old order. In his biography of Harry S Truman, David McCullough tells of the fierce and bitter State Department resistance to recognizing the state of Israel at its founding in 1948. “The striped-pants conspirators,” Mr. Truman called the men just below George C. Marshall, the secretary who the president regarded as something of a saint. “Some White House men . . . believe that a number of positions taken by career men on this matter were based on anti-Semitism, not diplomacy,” wrote one prominent pundit. Men at the State Department accused the president’s men of being more concerned about Israel than American security.

Six decades later, some things have changed, but not all. One thing that has changed is that there’s no one remotely like Harry S Truman, a president fully at ease with the true character of the country he leads, in charge at the White House.

My Favorite Articles -- May 17

Mark Stey on entitlements:
Recently, in the London Telegraph, Liam Halligan bemoaned the way commentators focus on America’s $14 trillion of debt — i.e., the “debt ceiling” debt — without factoring in the entitlement liabilities of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. That makes America’s real debt some $75 trillion, or five times GDP. Our own Kevin D. Williamson puts the FDR/LBJ entitlement liabilities a little north of $100 trillion. Once you add in state and municipal debt, you need to add a zero to that reassuringly familiar $14 trillion hole. The real hole goes ten times deeper: $140 trillion — or about twice as much as America’s total “worth.”

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Brett Stephens has written an excellent article about the new developments in the Middle East in the aftermath of the border crossings into Israel by Arabs. It's about time we came to the realization that there will never be peace in the region. 
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Newt Gingrich throws House GOP under the bus.  Good analysis of the former speaker rejection of Congressman Ryan's Medicare reform.  This article clarifies why my fellow conservatives will vote for the Republican nominee in 2012, but will work very hard to defeat Gingrich in the primaries.

Click here to read the article in The Wall Street Journal

On the subject of Newt Gingrich, here is Krauthammer predicting that Gingrich will not recover from the comments he made.

Bin Laden's Defender: Noam Chomsky by Alan M. Dershowitz

Noam Chomsky has shown his true colors in his recently published "reaction" to the targeted killing of Osama Bin Laden. He apparently thinks Osama Bin Laden is the innocent victim of a cold-blooded murder that is worse than if George W. Bush were to be assassinated in his "compound." He doesn't believe Bin Laden's own admission of complicity in the murder of 3,000 people on 9/11, writing that it is about as credible as Chomsky's "confession that I won the Boston Marathon." Nor does he believe the evidence gathered by the 9/11 Commission, the grand jury that indicted Bin Laden, the numerous confessions and claims of responsibility by Al Qaeda operatives, and the video showing those who flew the planes in the presence of Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. He believes there is absolutely no "evidence"—"nothing serious"—that Bin Laden played any role in 9/11. He also accuses President Obama of "simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that 'we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by Al Qaeda.'" To avoid any appearance of partisanship and to show that he is an equal opportunity despiser of all American presidents, he writes that "uncontraversally" President Bush's "crimes vastly exceed bin Laden's." (Guernica. My Reaction to Osama bin Laden's Death. Noam Chomsky. May 6, 2011.)

If Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were not responsible for 9/11, who was? The United States? The Zionists? Maybe it never happened at all, as some hard left "intellectuals" have claimed. After all, Chomsky is agnostic with regard to the Nazi Holocaust and believes that Holocaust denial is not anti-Semitic. Writing in defense of the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson's claim that the so-called Holocaust was a fraud perpetrated by the Jewish people, Chomsky assured his readers that "nobody believes there is an anti-Semitic connotation to the denial of the Holocaust . . . whether one believes it took place or not." Chomsky is himself guilty of genocide-denial, having assured his readers (at the height of the Cambodian genocide) that the Khmer Rouge—which he admired—was being falsely accused of mass murder.

The real question is why any reasonable person pays any attention to the ignorant rants of this America-hater, Israel-basher and conspiracy theorist. I can understand why Osama Bin Laden himself was, according to the Wall Street Journal, "a fan of Noam Chomsky." Bin Laden said that "Chomsky was correct when he compared U.S. policies to the Mafia." (See, Bin Laden wasn't an anti-Semite after all, since he liked at least one Jew, though he named one of his daughters Safiyah after Mohammad's aunt, because, he proclaimed, "Safiyah killed Jews.") I can even understand why radical anti-American zealots like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro admire him. But he has been described on his own book jacket as "arguably the most important intellectual alive." He has also been called the most influential academic in the world. What does this say about today's consumers of intellectual and academic wares?

I have debated Chomsky on several occasions and have found that he simply makes up facts and then characterizes them as "uncontroversial." This tactic works with sycophantic college audiences on the hard left, but for anyone who bothers to check "Chomsky facts," as his critics aptly dub them, will find that the source is often conspiratorial websites and hate propaganda. "Chomsky facts" bear little relationship to real facts, except on "Planet Chomsky," where a different reality governs.

The time has come to dump Noam Chomsky into the wastebasket of history. He has been proved wrong—factually, morally, politically and in every other way—by the verdict of history. He was wrong about the Nazi Holocaust, the Communist genocides, the "peaceful" intentions of Hezbollah, and the alleged "war criminality" of every American president in recent memory. Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal correctly characterized Chomsky as "a two-nickel crank" with "paranoid notions of American policy." Christopher Hitchens has called him a charter member of the "paranoid anti-war 'left'" who believes that "America is an incarnation of the third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations."

Chomsky has no credibility among serious people who care about truth. He would be a joke if he were not so influential among the unthinking hard left and the anti-intellectual academics who propagandize their naïve students to move to Planet Chomsky, where they can live their paranoid lives devoid of any contact with the reality of planet earth. Nor would he have any credibility on political issues were he not a famous linguist—famous despite his absurd semantic claim that there is no "anti-Semitic connotation" to denying the Holocaust and calling it a fraud perpetrated on the world by the Jews! Even if his linguistic accomplishments were not controversial, they would not qualify him as a guru on the political, legal and military matters on which he regularly opines.

Chomsky will continue to hurt America and decent values so long as his political rants continue to be taken seriously by some of the intellectual elite who help to manufacture consent and create the illusion of credibility on the part of a hateful crackpot.

Hypocrisy

"Internationally, we've gone through a Teutonic shift in the Middle East that could have enormous ramifications for years to come."--President Obama, May 10, quoted by USA Today, which reports the White House says he meant "tectonic."

If Bush were president, this sentence would have been used as an example of his stupidity.

In the case of Obama, he just misspoke.

We Must Protect the Children

It never fails. I wake up optimistic and in a great mood, I read the headlines and am transformed into a manic pessimist. Today’s transformation was triggered by news from Baltimore, where two students, members of their high school lacrosse team, were arrested for possession of a two-inch pen knife and a lighter. The school, acting under the zero tolerance policy instituted by liberal politicians, had no choice but to report this incident and the police had to place handcuffs and fingerprint the students. The lighter was described as an “explosive device.”

This is another example of the insanity of the nanny state and cowardly administrators who could have confiscated the knife and the lighter and avoided the stigmatization of two kids who will have a permanent record, and will have to write yes in every employment application that asks if the applicant has ever been arrested.

Let me act now as devil’s advocate. Let’s assume that the two kids were carrying these dangerous weapons for nefarious reasons. The lighter to obviously smoke a cigarette, thus leading to the destruction of our healthcare system and pollution of the planet leading to global warming, and the other carrying a two-inch penknife for the purpose of hurting someone. Should such violent kids be allowed to carry lacrosse sticks? What about a five-inch sharp number two pencil?

And so it goes. Some imbecile politician ( Senator Schumer comes to mind) introduces legislation to “protect the children.” Who would dare to vote against it? The legislation passes and metastasizes into a monstrosity that criminalizes penknives, lighters, aspirin or medication for menstrual cramps, drawing of guns, pointing a finger with the thumb up in imitation of guns, toy guns, plastic soldiers who have a gun, and any other element deemed politically incorrect. Lacrosse sticks, baseball bats, golf clubs, tennis rackets, are okay. After all, no one has ever been hurt by a baseball club, but we all know of the dangers of a lighter. Sorry. Explosive device.

Ubiquitous Explosive Devises

Did you hear that the passenger yelled Allah U Akhbar?

So you are watching or listening to the news provided by the mainstream media (MSM). The reporter mentions that an unruly passenger attempted to open the door of the cockpit and had to be subdued by courageous passengers. So far so good. Another story about a nut in a plane.

What was left out of the story tells us more about the MSM than about the story. Passengers aboard the plane report that the unruly nut was a Yemenite who shouted Allah U Akbar as he attempted to open the cockpit. Almost no one reported this last part. After all it might paint members of the religion of peace in a bad light. Another example of editorializing instead o news reporting.

Watch the following vignettes. Only the first reports about the yelling of Allah U Akbar.

I might disagree with what you say...

"I disagree with what you have to say but will fight to the death to protect your right to say it." Voltaire

I disagre with what you have to say, and I will beat you if you dare say it. The Arabs