Caroline Glick – The Conservative-Patriot Christian Right

Benny Gantz and the pyromaniacal cockpit

It is apparent to me – an American – that Israel’s Left have become stupendous understudies of America’s Left. As America’s Left (Dem-Marxists) have developed Trump Derangement Syndrome to keep transforming America, so has Israel’s Left developed Netanyahu Derangement Syndrome that could very likely lead to the destruction of Jews in Israel to bow down to Jew-hating Muslim pseudo-Palestinians. Caroline Glick has the write-up.

JRH 3/22/20

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Benny Gantz and the pyromaniacal cockpit

Cockpit Gantz Coalition

By Caroline B. Glick

03/22/2020

CarolineGlick.com

Originally Israel Hayom

If Blue and White Party leader MK Benny Gantz forms a minority government with Avigdor Liberman’s Israel Beitenu Party and the Labor-Meretz party, based on the outside support of the Joint Arab List, Gantz’s success will torpedo Israel’s relations with the United States.

This week, a senior official who was present during Gantz’s meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in late January revealed: “Gantz committed in the Oval Office that, if he became prime minister, he would form a government of people that would support the president’s peace deal.”

The Trump peace plan includes applying Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan Valley and the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria. Labor-Meretz and the Joint Arab List are both violently opposed to the Trump plan. A Gantz government that includes them will be a government that is hostile to the Trump plan.

The only way for Gantz to keep the promise he made to Trump is to join a coalition government led by Netanyahu with Likud and its right-religious coalition partners. And that is an option that Gantz and his partners in the Blue and White “cockpit” – fellow former IDF chiefs of General Staff Moshe Yaalon and Gadi Ashkenazy and former media star Yair Lapid – will not support.

They are working feverishly to cobble together a radical government with the post-Zionists in Labor-Meretz and the anti-Zionists in the Joint Arab List. All of which will be hard-pressed to work with the Trump administration.

How can Trump or his administration trust a man who flat out lied to the President in the Oval Office?

What can explain Gantz’s irresponsible behavior?

Did he lie to Trump – and the Israeli public – because he and his colleagues are secretly radical leftists who seek power to undermine everything Israel stands for? They wouldn’t be the first leftist politicians to do so.

In 1999, their commander, former IDF chief of General Staff Ehud Barak ran against Netanyahu by presenting himself as ideologically indistinguishable from him. Barak insisted that he would implement Netanyahu’s center-right policies, but that he would do so with the support of the media and the leftist elite.

The public bought his act. Barak – the centrist – defeated Netanyahu and Barak – the leftist – offered PLO chief Yasser Arafat Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and the Temple Mount as well as the Golan Heights to Syrian dictator Hafez Assad.

Israel is a center-right country. Barak understood the only way for a leftist to win an election in Israel is to pretend to be a center-rightist.

Gantz’s willingness to effectively surrender Israel’s rights in Judea and Samaria to win the parliamentary support of politicians that seek Israel’s destruction as a Jewish state – shared by his partners in the Blue and White leadership – seems to indicate that they are rabid post-Zionists. But a brief consideration of their other positions and actions suggests that something else is motivating them.

Gantz and his colleagues present themselves as champions of the rule of law and democracy, which they insist, Netanyahu is destroying.

But consider their actions: Presently, Blue and White is viciously attacking Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein for refusing to convene the Knesset’s Arrangements Committee, which is responsible for convening the rest of the Knesset committees. They insist that in acting as he is, Edelstein is colluding with Netanyahu to destroy Israeli democracy. But as Simcha Rothman, from the Movement for Governability and Democracy, explained in Israel Hayom Thursday, it is Blue and White that is blocking the Arrangements Committee from convening.

The Knesset rules provide that membership in the committee is determined by the size of each party. The parties in the Knesset receive one member in the committee for every four members in their Knesset faction. Under the prevailing rules, the blocs working with Netanyahu and Gantz would have equal representation in the committee.

Blue and White wants to break the rules in order to receive a majority of Arrangement Committee members. Edelstein insists on following the rules.

Why are Gantz and his colleagues fighting so hard to break the rules? Because they need a majority on the committee in order to have the procedural power to pass laws that will undermine Israeli democracy and the rule of law.

Blue and White and Israel Beitenu have submitted bills explicitly directed towards achieving one goal: Preventing Netanyahu – and only Netanyahu – from forming a government. These bills, if passed, would overturn Israel’s rule of law twice.

First, they are personal legislation – directed at Netanyahu alone. Personal laws are a concept antithetical to the rule of law and liberty. They open the door for full-scale repression and authoritarianism.

Second, if they succeed in passing their anti-Bibi laws, they will retroactively nullify the votes of 2.5 million Israelis who voted for parties that want Netanyahu to remain in office.

Blue and White wages its war against parliamentary rules to pass vindictive, anti-democratic laws at a time where Israel is facing the gravest health and economic crisis it has ever confronted.

The Wuhan coronavirus epidemic presents Israel with a choice between terrible and terrifying options.

Tuesday, Netanyahu announced that in a bid to lower the infection rate, Israelis should stay home and only go out to buy food and medicine and other critical activities. Schools are closed. Most government offices are closed. Businesses are closed. The only people still working are the ones who can work from home.

Netanyahu and his colleagues in the government enacted this policy with the understanding that, if forced to treat thousands of coronavirus patients at once, the health system will collapse. Everything must be done to slow the infection rate.

But the quarantine strategy holds its own terrible risks. Israel can handle an economic shutdown for a few weeks. If the current situation goes on for months, the economy will collapse and bring the health system with it. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis are being laid off. They will not be paying taxes. Without taxes, the government will be unable to maintain the health system or any other system for that matter.

What can be done? It appears that the only way to suspend the quarantine and so salvage the economy is by conducting universal coronavirus testing. Only universal testing can limit the quarantine to people who need to be isolated and enable the restoration of economic activity.

How quickly can Israel achieve the capacity to undertake such a program? What would it involve?

What other options are available?

Netanyahu, his ministers, the Health and Treasury Ministry officials and the National Security Council members have been working around the clock to try to come up with solutions.

Where are Gantz and his partners – Lapid, Yaalon and Ashkenazy – in their brandishing “cockpit” on these issues?

Blue and White has offered no recommendations for fighting the epidemic. Although Tuesday night, Gantz was nice enough to retweet Netanyahu’s warning to the public to stay home. His partners Yaalon and Lapid were not so disposed.

Instead, the two would-be national leaders belittled the threat – each in his own way – and insinuated that Netanyahu is colluding with the Coronavirus to destroy Israeli democracy.

Yaalon tweeted that Netanyahu is using the Coronavirus to avoid his criminal trial and destroy the Knesset. He later threatened Likud parliamentarians with legal probes for supporting Netanyahu’s efforts.

In a Facebook chat, Lapid insinuated that Netanyahu’s move to quarantine the public was unlawful and self-serving. In short, that Netanyahu isn’t interested in protecting the public from mass death. All he cares about is staying in power.

Blue and White has offered no solution on how to save the economy from collapse. But they can be counted on to blame Netanyahu for the high unemployment rates and negative economic growth if Israel finds itself in a fourth election.

Yaalon, who seeks to serve as Education Minister, has offered no suggestions for how to educate the 1.3 million schoolchildren who are at home with parents trying to keep up with their own work while homeschooling their children.

Then there is Iran. As the coronavirus rages through Iran, experts warn that the risk of an Iranian strike against Israel rises with the death toll. The theology of Iran’s ruling clerics holds that the Shite messiah, the Mahdi, is supposed to return at the end of days. To hasten his arrival, Iran’s ayatollahs believe that they need to start Armageddon.

Do the three former IDF chiefs at the helm of Blue and White have any concern over this? Do they have any suggestions for how to handle the threat as Iranians dig more and more mass graves for coronavirus victims?

Which brings us back to Washington: Three weeks ago, I traveled to Washington to speak on a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) – the largest conservative gathering in America. Most of the discussions were related to U.S. domestic issues. But Israel is so important to conservatives that organizers chose to hold a panel devoted to Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.

There were no calls for the partition of Jerusalem and the expulsion of Jews from Judea and Samaria either on the panel or from the audience. On the contrary, the sentiment shared by the audience and the panelists alike was that Israel should assert its sovereign rights in Judea and Samaria wherever it deems necessary.

This salutary state of affairs will be turned on its head if the Democrats win the presidency in November. In that event, Israel will find itself under assault from a hostile president who heads a party hostile to Israel. How would a Blue and White government handle such a challenge? Dependent on the Joint Arab List – which openly seeks Israel’s destruction as a Jewish state – for its survival, there can be little doubt that Blue and White would surrender to even the slightest pressure emanating from Washington.

Gantz, Lapid, Yaalon and Ashkenazy are not ideologues – unless detesting Netanyahu with the single-minded venom of a rabid dog is an ideology. They accuse Netanyahu of caring only for himself and pledge to put the country first. But we see that, as Netanyahu labors to save the country from medical and economic collapse, all they can think about is destroying him. Even at the expense of torching Israel’s relations with the U.S., endangering the lives and financial stability of its citizens, and disregarding strategic threats and opportunities. They accuse Netanyahu of destroying democracy as they contemptuously ignore Knesset rules in order to pass laws that would nullify both the rule of law and the votes of 2.5 million citizens.

So no, Gantz and his colleagues aren’t ideologues.

They are pyromaniacs.

Originally published in Israel Hayom.

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About Caroline B. Glick

Caroline B. Glick is a senior columnist at Breitbart News and the senior contributing and chief columnist for The Jerusalem Post. She is also a senior columnist for Maariv. She is the author of The Israeli Solution: A One State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, (Crown 2014) and of Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad (Gefen 2008). The Israeli Solution was endorsed by leading US policymakers including Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Ted Cruz and National Security Advisor John Bolton. Shackled Warrior was endorsed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former CIA director James Woolsey.

Glick is the adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and directs the Israeli Security Project at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. She travels frequently throughout the world to brief policymakers on issues related to Israel’s strategic environment and other related topics. She lectures widely on strategic and political issues affecting global security, Israel and the Jewish people, US-Israel relations, Israel-Diaspora affairs and Israel’s changing strategic landscape.

In 2008 Glick founded Latma, the Hebrew language satirical media criticism website. She served as editor in chief of the site until it ceased operations in 2015.

Latma changed the face of Israel’s social media and revolutionized the Israeli entertainment industry by bringing an alternative voice to the popular culture. Latma launched “Hakol Shafit,” a primetime, half hour satirical newscast on Israel television Channel 1. Glick served as the editor in chief of the program.

Glick was born in Houston, TX and grew up in Chicago, IL. She moved to Israel in 1991, two weeks after receiving her BA in Political Science from Columbia University. She joined the Israel Defense Forces that summer and served as an officer for five and a half years.

From 1994-1996, as an IDF captain, Ms. Glick served in the Defense Ministry as a core member of Israel’s negotiating team with the Palestinians.

In 1997 and 1998 Ms. Glick served as Assistant Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

From 1998-2000 Ms. Glick studied at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and received a Master’s in Public Policy in June 2000.

In the summer of 2000 Ms. Glick returned to Israel and … READ MORE

Intro to ‘Israeli sovereignty and the fate of the Trump plan’

Intro by John R. Houk

Title by Caroline Glick

Intro © February 7, 2020

The topic: the Trump Administration’s The Deal of the Century as laid out in the White House preliminary framework entitled, “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People”.

For me there is no getting around the 181 page document’s declaration that a Palestinian State would have its capital city in an Eastern portion of Jerusalem. I have read advocates of the peace deal claim it will be parts of Jerusalem already dominated by Arabs. If that geographical Arab domination includes the Temple Mount those physical dimensions MUST BE rejected by Jews and Christians.

Jerusalem – 1948 Quarters and Divided 1949-67

BUT the part of the plan I am beginning to slowly inch toward maybe is the part that is driving Islamic terrorist leadership Arabs calling themselves Palestinians nuts is a significant swath of Jewish Settlement areas of Judea-Samaria (labelled the West Bank by conquering Jordanians in 1948) becoming a part of sovereign Israel which must be recognized for the plan to move forward.

The God Plan for Israel

On a personal level it is my belief for Israel is God’s plan of the Promised Land to the descendants Abraham, Isaac and Jacob/Israel. That means Arabs who refuse accept God’s plan should leave to Arab lands that practice hateful and intolerant Islam.

BUT I live in America and really don’t have a vote.

Caroline Glick tackles the duplicity of the Israeli Left which she indicates might be taking cues from the American Dem Party. If accurate, God have mercy on Israel and its probably brainwashed Left-Wing voters.

JRH 2/7/20

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BLOG EDITOR: I’ve apparently been placed in restricted Facebook Jail! The restriction was relegated after criticizing Democrats for supporting abortion in one post and criticizing Virginia Dems for gun-grabbing legislation and levying protester restrictions. Rather than capitulate to Facebook censorship by abandoning the platform, I choose to post and share until the Leftist censors ban me completely. Conservatives are a huge portion of Facebook. If more or all Conservatives are banned, it will affect the Facebook advertising revenue paradigm. SO FIGHT CENSORSHIP BY SHARE – SHARE – SHARE!!! Facebook notified me in pop-up on 1/20/20: “You’re temporarily restricted from joining and posting to groups that you do not manage until April 18 at 7:04 PM.”

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Israeli sovereignty and the fate of the Trump plan

Trump-Kushner-Bibi

By Caroline Glick

02/07/2020

Originally published at Israel Hayom.

CarolineGlick.com

On Wednesday morning, NeverTrump propagandist Bill Kristol told his MSNBC audience that Democratic chances of victory over US President Donald Trump will rise if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is defeated in Israel’s elections on March 2.

Along the same lines, if Netanyahu fails to apply Israeli sovereignty to the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria before the election, not only will he almost certainly lose those elections, his defeat will bury Trump’s peace plan and harm Trump’s reelection chances.

To understand why this is the case it is first necessary to understand the nature of the Blue and White party and its relationship to Trump and his peace plan.

After Trump’s peace plan was published, Israelis discovered significant problems with the map attached to the plan. Among other things, the map places large sections of Highway 60, which crosses Judea and Samaria from south to north outside Israeli jurisdiction. If left uncorrected, the designation will endanger the security of tens of thousands of Israelis whose communities will be rendered isolated enclaves. Since ensuring Israel’s ability to defend itself and its citizens on a permanent basis is a major goal of the plan, this omission was obviously an oversight. Netanyahu announced this week that he has assembled a team to work on the map.

So long as the map is not adjusted, members of Likud and other parties in the right-religious bloc Netanyahu leads will be unable to vote in favor of the plan, despite their support for Trump and for the plan overall.

This then brings us to Benny Gantz and his party.

Just before Gantz traveled to Washington to meet with Trump at the White House last Monday, it came out that his top campaign strategists, Ronen Tzur and Joel Benenson had both separately published multiple posts on Twitter viciously attacking Trump. Both men compared him to Hitler, called him a Russian agent and a racist. In other words, both men parroted Democratic talking points against Trump. (After his posts were reported, Tzur claimed that he no longer believed the things he had written.)

Whereas Tzur – like every garden variety Israeli leftist politico – apparently follows the Democrats on everything related to American public affairs automatically, Benenson shapes Democratic positions. Benenson served as Barack Obama’s senior political strategist in the 2008 and 2012 elections and as Hillary Clinton’s senior political strategist in 2016.

In 2015, Wikileaks published Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta’s emails. Several email chains included internal campaign discussions in which Benenson participated. In two discussions, Benenson advised Clinton not to mention Israel in public events.

Now Benenson is directing Blue and White’s campaign, and there is little reason for surprise at the seamlessness of his move from Obama and Clinton to Gantz. The Israeli left has been intertwined with the Democratic Party.

In 2016 when Gantz was still a private citizen, he was strongly encouraged to enter the political fray by a public service company called Darcheinu, or “Our Way.”

Darcheinu is the successor to two organizations – V-15 and One Voice. One Voice was established in 2003 by Daniel Lubetsky, a Mexican-American Jewish businessman with close ties to the Obama administration. Lubetsky founded One Voice at the height of the Palestinian terror war to advance the establishment of a Palestinian state and an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines. PLO Chief and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s son Yasser Mahmoud Abbas is a member of One Voice’s Trustees Advisory Council.

Ahead of the 2015 Knesset elections, One Voice formed V-15 as a spinoff to run a campaign to “change the government” – that is, to bring down Netanyahu. V-15’s campaign was directed by Jeremy Bird, Obama’s field director in his presidential races. It came under scrutiny from the US Senate when it was discovered that the Obama’ State Department funded its efforts.

Establishing a Palestinian state and fomenting an Israeli evacuation of Judea and Samaria replete with the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews from their homes is a goal all three groups share with the Democratic Party. And like the Democrats, the goal places all three groups in opposition to Trump. Trump’s plan makes the establishment of a Palestinian state contingent on significant changes in Palestinian actions and positions. It also foresees Israel retaining permanently all Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria and the areas surrounding them as well as the Jordan Valley.

In recent years, Darcheinu continued V-15’s efforts to bring down Netanyahu. In 2017-18, it sponsored the weekly leftist protests outside Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit’s home demanding he indicts Netanyahu. Darcheinu also funded and promoted the 2018 campaign by the far-left Commanders for Israeli Security calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state and an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines.

Until 2019, Darcheinu was led by Israeli businessman Kobi Richter. Richter was one of the central activists responsible for forming the Blue and White Party last year. In an interview with Globes, Richter said that he paid for the polls that convinced Gantz to join forces with Moshe Yaalon, Gabi Ashkenazy and Yair Lapid.

According to officials with knowledge of the events, Gantz was well-aware of the substantive problems with the map attached to the Trump peace plan when he left Washington. And it is with this knowledge in mind that we need to consider what he did when he got back.

Upon returning to Israel Gantz declared that he intended to introduce the Trump plan to the Knesset for approval. Some commentators portrayed his move as proof that he supported Trump’s peace plan. But given his awareness of the problems with the map and the implications for the political right, the opposite appears to be the case. Gantz’s announcement can better be seen as a bid to subvert and discredit Trump’s plan and to discredit Netanyahu and Trump personally.

Without corrections to the map, Likud and other right-wing lawmakers who otherwise support the plan and enthusiastically support Trump will be unable to vote in favor of it in a Knesset vote. Forcing them to oppose the plan publicly would serve several interests shared by both Blue and White and the Democrats. It would provide cover for the majority of Blue and White lawmakers who, like the Democrats wish to bury the plan. With the media scope-locked on right-wing opponents of Trump’s plan, they will avoid scrutiny of their own views.

The sight of Likud lawmakers opposing the Trump plan would discredit Netanyahu in the eyes of his voters. They would view him as incompetent and treacherous and many will avoid voting on March 2 as a result.

In light of joint opposition to the Trump plan from Likud and Blue and White lawmakers alike, center-right voters will perceive the parties as indistinguishable and follow the media’s urging to vote for Gantz.

For Trump, a Knesset defeat of his plan, followed in all likelihood by the defeat of Netanyahu would demoralize and anger Trump’s evangelical Christian base. Blue and White would move quickly to bury Trump’s plan. The Democrats would use the Knesset’s opposition to the plan and Gantz’s support for their positions as proof that Trump’s pro-Israel bona fides are skin deep and that Trump’s overall Middle East policy is misguided.

In short, advised by Benenson, after enjoying Trump’s hospitality, and benefiting from the prestige a meeting at the Oval Office confers, Gantz raised an initiative that would cause grievous political harm to Netanyahu and Trump and destroy any prospect of implementing any part of Trump’s peace plan.

And so we return to the issue of applying Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.

In light of the need to correct the mistakes in the map, it is clear that full implementation of Israeli sovereignty over the areas the Trump deal recommends will take time and will be impossible before March 2. But it is still possible to implement a significant component of the plan in a manner that will avert the damage Gantz and Benenson are seeking to cause.

Gantz has studiously worked to prevent his party from being identified with the ideological left. To achieve this goal despite the fact that the majority of his Knesset faction holds leftist and far-leftist views, Gantz has used the two center-right lawmakers from his party’s minority Telem faction as his campaign’s primary spokesmen on television. Whereas Yoaz Hendel and Zvika Hauser are pushed in front of microphones to extol the virtues of extending Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan Valley, the majority of Blue and White lawmakers, who share Obama’s views, are hidden in the shadows.

Without changing the maps, and while postponing approval of the Trump plan itself, the Netanyahu government can pass a government decision to apply Israeli law to all Israeli cities, towns, and villages in Judea and Samaria immediately in accordance with the Trump peace plan. Doing so will energize right-wing voters. And it will also expose Blue and White.

Applying Israeli law to the Israeli communities will arouse strenuous opposition from the majority of Blue and White faction members. Their opposition to a move that the majority of Israelis support would demonstrate that despite its right-wing fig leaves, Blue and White is a leftist party. Swing voters from the center-right would get the message.

This then brings us to the Democrats. For years, despite their protestations of support for Israel and commitment to Israel’s security, the Democrats have adopted a policy towards Israel that revolves obsessively around their demand to destroy the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria and transfer the areas Jew free to the PLO. The Obama administration was so hateful towards these communities that it pushed through UN Security Council resolution 2234 that slanderously called them “illegal” after Donald Trump was elected president.

By applying Israeli law to these areas while avoiding a Knesset vote until after the map is corrected, the Netanyahu government will deny Democrats the ability to use Trump’s peace plan against him. It will also demonstrate Trump’s commitment to Israel to his evangelical base. Most importantly, applying Israeli law to the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria will take the issue of their future off the table and ensure that the Trump peace plan will survive into the next government, regardless of who wins next month.

Senior presidential advisor Jared Kushner has said that it would be best to wait until after the election to begin applying Israeli sovereignty to areas in Judea and Samaria. Under normal circumstances, he would be right. But given the larger context in which this issue must be judged, it is fairly clear that delaying the move until after the elections will cause great harm to President Trump, and effectively bury his peace plan while elevating the Israeli left and the Democrats.

Originally published at Israel Hayom.

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Intro to ‘Israeli sovereignty and the fate of the Trump plan’

Intro by John R. Houk

Intro © February 7, 2020

______________________________

Israeli sovereignty and the fate of the Trump plan

ABOUT Caroline B. Glick

In 2008 Glick founded Latma, the Hebrew language satirical media criticism website. She served as editor in chief of the site until it ceased operations in 2015.

From 1994-1996, as an IDF captain, Ms. Glick served in the Defense Ministry as a core member of Israel’s negotiating team with the Palestinians.

In 1997 and 1998 Ms. Glick served as Assistant Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

From 1998-2000 Ms. Glick studied at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and … READ THE REST

The reign of the prosecutors

Caroline Glick provides a snapshot of Israel mirroring the U.S. Left among Dems, MSM and unelected government bureaucracy blowing up miniscule policy disagreements into unsubstantiated crimes to get rid of a Conservative oriented Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. President Trump, the Israeli Left is doing to its Prime Minister what the American Left is attempting to do to you.

JRH 11/22/19

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The reign of the prosecutors

By Caroline Glick

November 22, 2019

CarolineGlick.com

Originally published in Israel Hayom

Israel AG Avichai Mandelblit & PM Benjamin Netanyahu

In Israel Thursday morning, the politicians were the big story. Israel Beitenu chairman Avigdor Liberman was the villain who had held the country hostage for nearly a year as he fed his narcissistic personality disorder.

The left’s latest flagship, the Blue and White party is all the once vibrant political camp can put together now that it has lost its ideology. With its god of peace killed by suicide bombers and missiles, and its socialism statues crushed under the weight of bankrupt government companies, all the left has left is Blue and White. The party stands on two planks – destroying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and eternalizing the regime of Israel’s unelected bureaucrats.

The party’s figurehead – Benny Gantz – was tempted to join a unity government with Netanyahu that would guarantee he would serve as prime minister in a rotation agreement. But his comrades wouldn’t let him. Joining a government with Netanyahu would be a betrayal of their very reasons for existing. So, unhappily, he walked away.

And then there was Netanyahu himself. Thursday morning, his supporters shook their heads in frustration and his enemies clapped their hands in glee at the sight of Israel’s greatest stateman, the leader the public wants to keep in office, unable to form a government,

The conversation about Israel’s politicians lasted less than 24 hours.

At 4 in the afternoon, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit’s office announced that at 7:30 in the evening he would announce he his decision to indict Netanyahu. The underlying message was crystal clear: The day after Benny Gantz returned his mandate to form a government to President Rueven Rivlin after he failed to get a sufficient number of coalition partners to build a government, Mandelblit said that there’s no point in talking about whether or not Israel is going to new elections in March.

Voters don’t decide anything. The lawyers do. Politicians are irrelevant. The only people who count in Israel today are the unelected attorneys who run the country.

But then we already knew that. And the fact that – as expected – Mandelblit announced sternly that he is indicting Netanyahu on three charges of breach of trust and one charge of bribery was at best anticlimactic. The game was up – if it was ever in play – in February.

Last February, at the height of the first election campaign of the year, when Netanyahu and his right wing coalition partners were leading in all polls by a wide margin, Mandelblit took the unprecedented – and legally dubious – step of announcing his intention to indict Netanyahu of those charges – pending a pre-indictment hearing. The moment he made his announcement, the right began to slide in the polls. The Leader had spoken. And we had no right to question him. Blue and White’s scattershot campaign converged around Mandelblit’s “recommendation.” The left had a rallying cry and a reason to vote. Netanyahu’s neck was on the chopping block.

Ever since Mandelblit gave his “recommendations,” he and his comrades have been the only political actors with any power to speak of. Our actual elected leaders were rendered bit players in the lawyers’ regime. Mandelblit’s announcement Thursday just made it official.

To the cheers of Israel’s corrupt media, for the past three years our legal overlords have gnawed away at all aspects of political power in Israel, and in the process – not that they cared – they corrupted Israel’s legal system from top to bottom. From beginning to end, their criminal persecution of Netanyahu has been a travesty of every norm in democratic societies governed by the rule of law. Carefully edited and wholly distorted recordings and transcripts of police interrogations of Netanyahu, his wife, son, and advisors were systematically leaked to the media. The fact that every such leak was a felony offense was of no matter. Netanyahu’s attorneys submitted request after request for Mandelblit to order an investigation of the criminal leaks. All were summarily and scornfully rejected.

As the probes escalated, overseen by State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan, police investigators extorted Netanyahu’s closest advisors to coerce them into becoming state witnesses against the most successful and admired prime minister Israel has ever had. Investigators threatened Netanyahu’s former spokesman Nir Hefetz that they would destroy his family and bankrupt him if he didn’t turn on Netanyahu. They finally succeeded in breaking him after incarcerating him in a flea infested jail cell for 15 nights, denying him sleep and medical treatment and bringing a young woman he knew into an interrogation room next to him and then threatening to destroy his family.

In the earlier stages of the probes, then police inspector general Roni Elshech spun wild, unsubstantiated and frankly insane conspiracy theories about Netanyahu, including the claim that he hired private investigators to tail police investigators. Elshech then went out of his way to prevent the government from appointing a successor for him as he approached the end of his term of service. Still today, more than a year later, Israel has no police inspector general.

Then of course, there is Mandelblit himself. Mandelblit who claims not to have known about the abuse of witnesses – but then refused to investigate the allegations. And Mandelblit who promised – after publishing his “recommendations” for indictment at the height of the election campaign – that he would approach Netanyahu’s pre-trial hearing with an open mind. That promise was exposed as a lie when the chief prosecutor Liat Ben Ari left the hearing two days early to take her family on a safari in South Africa. Wouldn’t want a little thing like the Prime Minister’s legal fate to ruin her chance to see the elephants.

The same Mandelblit refused to investigate Ben Ari when recordings emerged last month showing that she submitted a false deposition to a court in relation to a lawsuit submitted against her by a former subordinate attorney.

Then of course there is the substance of the charges themselves. The charge that Netanyahu accepted a bribe is based on an invented notion that positive media coverage of a politician is bribery. The notion that press coverage can be considered bribery exists nowhere in the democratic world. No prosecutor in the world has ever indicted – or investigated – a politician or media organization of having committed bribery involving the provision of positive coverage. Senior American jurists appeared before Mandelblit in Netanyahu’s (self-evidently unserious) pre-indictment hearing to warn him that pursuing bribery charges against politicians for receiving positive coverage is a recipe for destroying freedom of the press and democracy itself.

But then, that is the entire point of going after Netanyahu with invented crimes. Now that Netanyahu has been charged for bribery – and incidentally, he never even received positive coverage from the media organ accused of providing it – every politician that gets on the lawyers’ bad side will be sweating bricks any time a reporter writes something nice about him.

After Mandelblit made his primetime announcement, Netanyahu pledged to fight for his freedom and for the restoration of Israeli democracy and the rule of law. In his speech Thursday night, he made an impassioned appeal to his “decent” political rivals to join him in this fight.

If any politicians doubt that Netanyahu’s struggle is their struggle, they should look no further than the prosecution’s announcement last week that it was opening a review, ahead of a criminal probe – of Gantz’s role in the so-called “Fifth Dimension Affair.” The Fifth Dimension was a start-up Gantz headed. Its sale for $14 million allegedly violated standard procedures.

Maybe Gantz did nothing wrong. But then, Netanyahu is being indicted for crimes that don’t actually exist. So it doesn’t matter. The message is clear. Every politician is at the mercy of the prosecutors. Fall out of line, and you will become a criminal suspect before you can say, “prosecutorial abuse.”

It’s certainly true that the left shares the prosecutors’ hatred of Netanyahu. Blue and White exists to destroy him. But all the leftist politicians – and Liberman – who are celebrating today need to understand that the Netanyahu they love to hate is their best friend and defender today. If Netanyahu is found guilty of crimes that were invented for the purpose of destroying him, then their goose will be cooked along with his.

Politicians may make us happy or sad, frustrated or infuriated. But today, in post-democratic Israel it hardly matters. Netanyahu called last night for an “investigation of the investigators.” Unless our elected officials join forces to heed his call, they – and the voters who elected them — will never be relevant again.

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Israel’s flailing democracy

Caroline Glick views parallels between the Marxist-Dems fabricating allegations against President Trump and Israel’s Left loosely examining Israeli statute law to render Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a criminal to question his legitimacy as a Prime Minister. It’s an interesting read for both Americans and Israelis.

JRH 9/27/19

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Israel’s flailing democracy

President Trump & PM Netanyahu

By Caroline B. Glick

September 27, 2018

CarolineGlick.com

Originally published at Israel Hayom.

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement Tuesday that she is opening an official impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump struck many Israelis as yet another sign that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump are in the same boat. Both are hounded by legal elites who will stop at nothing to oust them from office.

There are parallels between the two leaders.

Pelosi’s move followed the leak of a whistleblower complaint to the US intelligence community’s inspector general. The complainant alleged that during a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July, Trump sought the Ukrainian leader’s assistance in advancing his 2020 reelection prospects. This is arguable.

During the course of the phone call, Trump asked Zelensky to speak with US Attorney General William Barr about the private cybersecurity company Crowdstrike. Crowdstrike is the private contractor that was hired by the Democratic National Committee in the spring of 2016 to investigate the alleged hack of the DNC’s computer server.

Crowdstrike concluded that the DNC’s server was hacked by entities related to the Russian government. The DNC never permitted federal investigators to take possession of the breached server, or receive Crowdstrike’s full report. Despite the fact that they were never given the opportunity to verify Crowdstrike’s claims, those claims were the basis of the US intelligence community’s assertion in December 2016 that the Russian government hacked the DNC server to interfere in the 2016 election. It was also a foundation of the claim that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia against the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.

In his conversation with Zelensky, Trump said, “Our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike…the [DNC] server, they say Ukraine has it…I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.”

Trump also talked with Zelensky about Democratic presidential aspirant, former vice president Joe Biden.

During his tenure in office, Biden was responsible for US ties with Ukraine. As investigative journalist Peter Schweitzer reported, in April 2014, Biden’s son Hunter was appointed to the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. Over the next 16 months, Bursima paid Hunter Biden $3.1 million. Biden joined the company while Burisma was under criminal probe by British and Ukrainian investigators.

In a post-vice presidency appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations, Biden bragged that he had conditioned the provision of $1 billion in US loan guarantees to the Ukrainian government – loan guarantees that had already been approved by Obama – on the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor carrying out the investigation against Burisma. Given the stakes, the Ukrainian government bowed to his demand. The prosecutor was fired and the loan guarantees were extended.

Speaking of Biden’s admitted intervention with the Ukrainian prosecution, Trump said, “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it…It sounds horrible to me.”

Democrats claim that Trump’s discussion with constitutes an illegal solicitation of foreign assistance for his 2020 campaign for reelection. Republicans counter that Trump was reasonably trying to understand what happened to the DNC server in 2016. The story has served as a basis for claims that his presidency is illegitimate, and continuous investigations of his campaign.

Leaving aside the weight of the opposing claims, the fact is that there is nothing unique about Trump’s actions. As Mark Thiessen noted in the Washington Post, in 2018, three Democratic senators urged the Ukrainian government to continue investigations into Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.

National Review noted that during the 2016 campaign, the Obama administration asked the Ukrainian government to open a criminal probe against Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort. So too, revelations regarding the origins of the Trump-Russia probe which fomented the nearly two-year Special Counsel investigation showed that the Obama Justice Department based wiretap requests against Trump campaign officials on a dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, and compiled by a former British spy on the basis of contacts with Russian operatives.

Democrats braying for impeachment have never shown the slightest interest in investigating the Obama administration’s actions. No Democratic lawmakers has called to impeach Obama or members of his administration.

The criminal probes against Netanyahu relate to actions he took to secure positive media coverage that are similar, if not identical to routine political behavior. The two major probes against Netanyahu – dubbed Case 2000 and Case 4000 allege that Netanyahu acted criminally when he met with media owners in bids to secure more positive coverage.

In Case 2000, Netanyahu is accused of having breached the public faith when he met with Yediot Ahronot publisher Arnon Moses in an effort to secure positive media coverage. Yediot Ahronot’s coverage of Netanyahu has been unstintingly negative. In Case 4000, prosecutors allege Netanyahu accepted a bribe in the form of positive media coverage on Walla news portal from Walla owner Shaul Alovich. Like Yediot, Walla coverage of Netanyahu has almost uniformly hostile.

Leading jurists from Prof. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard University to Prof. Avi Bell from Bar Ilan University agree that the legal proceedings against Netanyahu are political and based on prejudicial and selective enforcement of statutes which prosecutors are interpreting inventively.

As is the case with the allegations related to Trump’s dealings with Zelensky, the first problem with the probes against Netanyahu is that his actions were far from unique – although less successful than similar actions by other politicians.

In just one striking example of the inherent bias of the charges against Netanyahu consider the behavior of the prosecutors in relation to Blue and White party co-chairman, and Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid.

While serving as finance minister in 2013 and 2014, Lapid held regular meetings Mozes. Government ministries controlled by Lapid’s party colleagues provided millions of shekels in government advertising to Yediot Ahronot. And Lapid and his Yesh Atid party received unstintingly positive coverage in Yediot Ahronot.

Lapid has never been investigated for his actions.

Today, post-election wranglings in Israel over governing coalitions are guided by varied assessments of the likelihood that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit will indict Netanyahu. During the campaign leading up to the April elections, Mandelblit cast legal norms distinguishing politics from law to the seven winds. He took the unprecedented step of announcing that pending the outcome of Netanyahu’s pre-indictment hearing, which is scheduled for next week, he intends to indict the premier on bribery and breach of trust charges over his dealings with Mozes and Alovich.

Now, as Netanyahu prepares for his pre-indictment hearing, the prosecution has leaked its intent to indict Netanyahu by mid-November. In other words, they have no intention to consider Netanyahu’s defense claims. The outcome is preordained.

For many Israelis, Pelosi’ decision to begin an impeachment investigation parallels moves by Mandelblit and State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan to fast track the probes against Netanyahu. But the opposite is the case.

Pelosi’s impeachment bid is a sign that America’s legal system and indeed its democracy is far healthier than Israel’s.

For nearly two years, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his partisan investigators spent millions of dollars on a massive, and barely veiled bid to find a legal excuse to oust Trump from office. But in the end, they failed. The evidence of collusion between Trump and his campaign and Russia, simply wasn’t to be found.

Mueller could have kept going. The media wanted him to. The Democrats wanted him to. But after feeding the media prejudicial leaks against Trump and aggressively prosecuting Manafort and other Trump officials on unrelated issues, Mueller ran out of steam. Although in his final report Mueller tried to provide Democrats with the means to continue the Russia probe on the political level, he closed down his investigation and went home. US practice doesn’t permit the indictment of a sitting president. But even if it allowed for indictments, the materials he had assembled were too weak to justify and indictment.

In other words, Mueller walked his prosecutors to the brink of political interference, and then he walked them back. He did not replace politicians with prosecutors.

Until Mueller submitted his report, Pelosi used his ongoing probe to fend off pressure from the increasingly powerful radical members of her Democratic caucus to initiate impeachment proceedings against Trump. Since then, Pelosi argued, rightly, that impeachment proceedings require a huge political investment and hold little chance for success. Most Americans oppose impeaching Trump. The Republicans control the Senate. If the House votes to impeach Trump, chances of getting the two-thirds majority of Senators required to convict an impeached president and remove him from office are effectively non-existent.

Unfortunately for Pelosi – the Democratic base, including the media and the empowered radical faction of her Democratic caucus – have become deaf to reason. According to a Politico poll, whereas 70 percent of Democrats support impeachment, only 37 percent of the public does. The likes of Anastasia Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, like the New York Times and the Washington Post live in an echo chamber. Members of the echo chamber are so cut off from those outside it that just as they cannot fathom anyone objecting to socialism, so they cannot imagine that anyone supports Trump or accepts the validity of the 2016 election results.

It is hard to know how the impeachment proceedings will play out. But a likely scenario is that the proceedings will damage Democrats more than they will damage Trump.

This then brings us back to Israel.

Like Pelosi and her colleagues, Blue and White leaders Benny Gantz and Lapid and their colleagues on the Left claim that the very fact that Netanyahu is under investigation renders him illegitimate. They refuse to form a unity government with Likud unless Netanyahu is first ousted as Likud leader.

But unlike Pelosi, Gantz and Lapid don’t need to make their claims themselves. Lapid, whose ministers gave preferential treatment to Yediot through government advertising contracts and received glowing coverage in the paper, does not have to argue the case for impeaching Netanyahu. He stands behind the ostensibly “objective” state prosecutions.

Pelosi’s decision to open impeachment proceedings against Trump despite the great political risk involved going into an election year indicates that the radical faction of the Democratic party has swallowed the party. But more importantly, her move is a testament to the abiding power and fortitude of American democracy. The difference between the situation in Israel, where the prosecutors happily abuse their legal power for transparently political aims and the US, where politically motivated prosecutors backed away from the brink and compelled politicians to take over their political investigations, is the difference between a flailing democracy and a resilient democracy.

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About Caroline B. Glick

In 2008 Glick founded Latma, the Hebrew language satirical media criticism website. She served as editor in chief of the site until it ceased operations in 2015.

From 1994-1996, as an IDF captain, Ms. Glick served in the Defense Ministry as a core member of Israel’s negotiating team with the Palestinians.

In 1997 and 1998 Ms. Glick served as Assistant Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

From 1998-2000 Ms. Glick studied at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and received a Master’s in Public Policy in June 2000. … READ MORE

Who is betraying America?

Caroline Glick has written an outstanding essay relating to former Obama comrades, Dems and the Leftist MSM are losing their minds on who can accuse President Trump louder of treason. In wondering who was more actually treasonous, Glick goes on to list Obama actions that actually benefitted Russian National Interests.

JRH 7/20/18

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Who is betraying America?

Pelosi & Schumer

By Caroline Glick

07/20/2018

CarolineGlick.com

Did US President Donald Trump commit treason in Helsinki when he met Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin? Should he be impeached?

That is what his opponents claim. Former president Barack Obama’s CIA director John Brennan accused Trump of treason outright.

Brennan tweeted, “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki [with Putin] rises to and exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’ It was nothing short of treasonous.”

Fellow senior Obama administration officials, including former FBI director James Comey, former defense secretary Ashton Carter, and former deputy attorney general Sally Yates parroted Brennan’s accusation.

Almost the entire US media joined them in condemning Trump for treason.

Democratic leaders have led their own charge. Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen from Tennessee insinuated the US military should overthrow the president, tweeting, “Where are our military folks? The Commander-in-Chief is in the hands of our enemy!”

Senate minority leader Charles Schumer said that Trump is controlled by Russia. And Trump’s Republican opponents led by senators Jeff Flake and John McCain attacked him as well.

Trump allegedly committed treason when he refused to reject Putin’s denial of Russian interference in the US elections in 2016 and was diffident in relation to the US intelligence community’s determination that Russia did interfere in the elections.

Trump walked back his statement from Helsinki at a press appearance at the White House Tuesday. But it is still difficult to understand what all the hullaballoo about the initial statement was about.

AP reporter John Lemire placed Trump in an impossible position. Noting that Putin denied meddling in the 2016 elections and the intelligence community insists that Russia meddled, he asked Trump, “Who do you believe?”

If Trump had said that he believed his intelligence community and gave no credence to Putin’s denial, he would have humiliated Putin and destroyed any prospect of cooperative relations.

Trump tried to strike a balance. He spoke respectfully of both Putin’s denials and the US intelligence community’s accusation. It wasn’t a particularly coherent position. It was a clumsy attempt to preserve the agreements he and Putin reached during their meeting.

And it was blindingly obviously not treason.

In fact, Trump’s response to Lemire, and his overall conduct at the press conference, did not convey weakness at all. Certainly he was far more assertive of US interests than Obama was in his dealings with Russia.

In Obama’s first summit with Putin in July 2009, Obama sat meekly as Putin delivered an hour-long lecture about how US-Russian relations had gone down the drain.

As Daniel Greenfield noted at Frontpage magazine Tuesday, in succeeding years, Obama capitulated to Putin on anti-missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, on Ukraine, Georgia and Crimea. Obama gave Putin free rein in Syria and supported Russia’s alliance with Iran on its nuclear program and its efforts to save the Assad regime. He permitted Russian entities linked to the Kremlin to purchase a quarter of American uranium. And of course, Obama made no effort to end Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.

TRUMP IN contrast has stiffened US sanctions against Russian entities. He has withdrawn from Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. He has agreed to sell Patriot missiles to Poland. And he has placed tariffs on Russian exports to the US.

So if Trump is Putin’s agent, what was Obama? [Bold text Blog Editor’s]

Given the nature of Trump’s record, and the context in which he made his comments about Russian meddling in the 2016 elections, the question isn’t whether he did anything wrong. The question is why are his opponents accusing him of treason for behaving as one would expect a president to behave? What is going on?

The answer to that is clear enough. Brennan signaled it explicitly when he tweeted that Trump’s statements “exceed the threshold of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’” The unhinged allegations of treason are supposed to form the basis of impeachment hearings.

The Democrats and their allies in the media use the accusation that Trump is an agent of Russia as an elections strategy. Midterm elections are consistently marked with low voter turnout. So both parties devote most of their energies to rallying their base and motivating their most committed members to vote.

To objective observers, the allegation that Trump betrayed the United States by equivocating in response to a rude question about Russian election interference is ridiculous on its face. But Democratic election strategists have obviously concluded that it is catnip for the Democratic faithful. For them it serves as a dog whistle.

The promise of impeachment for votes is too radical to serve as an official campaign strategy. For the purpose of attracting swing voters and not scaring moderate Democrats away from the party and the polls, Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer say they have no interest in impeaching Trump. Impeachment talk, they insist, is a mere distraction.

But by embracing Brennan’s claim of treason, Pelosi, Hoyer, Schumer and other top Democrats are winking and nodding to the progressive radicals now rising in their party. They are telling the Linda Sarsours and Cynthia Nixons of the party that they will impeach Trump if they win control of the House of Representatives.

The problem with playing domestic politics on the international scene is that doing so has real consequences for international security and for US national interests.

Consider, for instance, Europe’s treatment of Trump.

Europe is economically dependent on trade with the US and strategically dependent on NATO. So why are the Europeans so open about their hatred of Trump and their rejection of his trade policies, his policy towards Iran and his insistence that they pay their fair share for their own defense?

Why did EU Council President Donald Tusk attack Trump with such contempt and condescension in Brussels? Tusk, who chairs the meetings of EU leaders, is effectively the EU president. And the day before last week’s NATO conference he chided Trump for criticizing Europe’s low defense spending.

“America,” he said with a voice dripping with contempt, “appreciate your allies. After all you don’t have that many.”

That of course, was news to the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East that depend on America and work diligently to develop and maintain strong ties to Washington.

Leaving aside the ridiculousness of his remarks, where did Tusk get the idea that it is reasonable to speak so scornfully to an American president?

Where did EU’s foreign policy commissioner Federica Mogherini get the idea that it is okay for her to work urgently and openly to undermine legally constituted US sanctions against Iran for its illicit nuclear weapons program?

The answer of course is that they got a green light to adopt openly anti-American policies from the forces in the US that have devoted their energies since Trump’s election nearly two years ago to delegitimizing his victory and his presidency. Those calling Trump a traitor empowered the Europeans to defy the US on every issue.

Trump’s opponents’ unsubstantiated allegation that his campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 elections has constrained Trump’s ability to perform his duties.

Consider his relations with Putin.

If there is anything to criticize about Trump’s summit with Putin it is that it came too late. It should have happened a year ago. That it happened this week speaks not to Trump’s eagerness to meet Putin but to the urgency of the hour.

After securing control over the Deraa province along Syria’s border with Jordan last week, the Assad regime, supported by Iranian regime forces, Hezbollah forces and Shiite militia forces began its campaign to restore regime control over the Quneitra province along the Syrian border with Israel.

As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and all government and military officials have stated clearly and consistently for years, Israel cannot accept Iranian presence in Syria. If Iran does not remove its forces from Syria generally and from southern Syria specifically, there will be war imminently between Israel, Iran and its Hezbollah, Shiite militia and Syrian regime allies.

Israel prefers to fight that war sooner rather than later to prevent Iran and its allies from entrenching their positions in Syria and make victory more difficult. So, in the interest of preventing such a war, Trump had no choice but to bite the political bullet and sit down to discuss Syria face to face with Putin to try to come up with a deal that would see Russia push Iran and Hezbollah out of Syria.

From what the two leaders said at their joint press conference it’s hard to know what was agreed to. But Netanyahu’s jubilant response indicates that some deal was reached.

Certainly their statements were strong, unequivocal signals to Iran. When Trump said, “The United States will not allow Iran to benefit from our successful campaign against ISIS,” he signaled strongly that US forces in eastern Syria will support Israel in a war against Iran and its allied forces in Syria just as it fought with the Kurds and its other allies in Syria against ISIS.

When Putin endorsed Israel’s position that the 1974 Syrian-Israeli disengagement agreement must be implemented along the border, he told the Iranians that in any Iranian-Israeli war in Syria, Putin will not side with Iran.

Time will tell if we just averted war. But what we did learn is that Israel’s position in a war with Iran is stronger than it could have been if the two leaders hadn’t met in Helsinki.

And this is exceedingly important.

Trump is being condemned for adopting a conciliatory tone towards Putin while employing a combative tone towards the Europeans and particularly Germany at the NATO summit. This criticism ignores how Trump operates in the international arena.

Trump views his exchanges with foreign leaders as separate engagements. He has goals he wishes to advance with China; with North Korea; with Russia; with Canada; with Mexico; with Europe; with Britain; with US Arab allies. In each separate engagement, Trump employs a combination of carrots and sticks. In each engagement he adopts a distinct manner that he believes advances his goals.

So far, unlike Obama’s foreign policy by this point in his presidency, none of Trump’s exchanges have brought disaster on America or its allies. To the contrary, America and its allies have much greater strategic maneuver room across a wide spectrum of threats and joint adversaries than they had when Obama left office.

Trump’s opponents’ obsession with bringing him down has caused great harm to his presidency and to America’s position worldwide. It is a testament to Trump’s commitment to the US and its allies that he met with Putin this week. And the success of their meeting is something that all who care about global security and preventing a devastating war in the Middle East should be grateful for.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

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John R. Houk, Blog Editor

About Caroline B. Glick

In 2008 Glick founded Latma, the Hebrew language satirical media criticism website. She served as editor in chief of the site until it ceased operations in 2015.

From 1994-1996, as an IDF captain, Ms. Glick served in the Defense Ministry as a core member of Israel’s negotiating team with the Palestinians.

In 1997 and 1998 Ms. Glick served as Assistant Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

From 1998-2000 Ms. Glick studied at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and received a Master’s in Public Policy in June 2000.

In the summer of 2000 Ms. Glick returned to Israel and began … READ THE REST

More Defense Favoring Steve Bannon

Edited by John R. Houk

Posted November 20, 2016

I voted for Donald Trump for President. Although I am not surprised, I am a bit annoyed the Left Stream Media is still printing propaganda and disinformation on the Trump team even though his election is a done deal. I am convinced the desperate Dems and their Leftist friends in the Mainstream Media (MSM – aka Left Stream Media) will character assassinate every single Cabinet and Advisor appoint from President-Elect Trump.

Here are a collection of Pro-Bannon posts defending him from the false accusations and false narratives of White Nationalism and Antisemitism.

JRH 11/20/16

Please Support NCCR

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Character assassination of Stephen Bannon is an attack on all Trump supporters

By Robert Romano

11.17.2016

NetRightDaily

Stephen Bannon, former Breitbart News Chief Executive is one of the true Donald Trump supporters in the incoming Trump administration.

Bannon was an incredibly effective force for the successful Trump campaign as its CEO, which he was appointed to in August. Now he has been named chief strategist and senior counselor by Trump, a top-tier position in the White House.

Bannon will be the conscience of the White House. As an outsider Bannon will serve as a counterweight to Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff, who is now the outgoing Republican National Committee Chairman. He will likely provide advice to Trump that will differ from that given by Washington, D.C. establishment types. It will help keep Trump honest and remind him of the commitments he made to his political base. Nothing wrong with that.

And so, it is no surprise then that the long knives are now out to take Bannon out. Now, there is the unproven charge being pushed by a few media outlets that Bannon is a white supremacist and anti-Semitic. Total nonsense.

This attempt at character assassination of Bannon is no less than an attack on all Trump supporters, who backed Trump’s message on America first, trade and illegal immigration regardless of race. This deplorable attack on a man who did nothing wrong must not stand.

“That’s just folks that are bitter the election’s over,” Jason Miller, Trump campaign spokesman, said to reporters outside Trump Tower on Wednesday. “They didn’t get the result that they wanted.”

Miller said Bannon is of “very high character” and is “someone who’s been a fantastic example of really being inclusive” and “who’s embraced diversity at every step.”

Miller added, “I think he’ll do a great job working with chief of staff Reince Priebus… to implement President-elect Trump’s vision.”

In fact, at a talk to the Vatican from 2014, Bannon actually dismissed anti-Semitic and racist elements in European nationalist movements as “fringe” that “all gets washed out,” according to a transcript released by Buzzfeed: “I’m not an expert in this, but it seems that they have had some aspects that may be anti-Semitic or racial. Some that are fringe organizations. My point is that over time it all gets kind of washed out, right? People understand what pulls them together, and the people on the margins I think get marginalized more and more.”

In the meantime, top Democrat and emeritus law professor at Harvard University Alan Dershowitz defended Bannon in a telephone interview, saying, “I think we have to be very careful before we accuse any particular individual of being an anti-Semite. The evidence certainly suggests that Mr. Bannon has very good relationships with individual Jews. My former researcher, Joel Pollak, is an Orthodox Jew who takes off the Jewish holidays, who is a committed Jew and a committed Zionist, and he has worked closely with him. He has been supportive of Israel.”

Dershowitz added, “I haven’t seen any evidence of personal anti-Semitism on the part of Bannon,” and “it is not legitimate to call somebody an anti-Semite because you might disagree with their policies.”

Of course, there being no evidence has not usually been a problem for media. Just run with the narrative and find some facts later.

“This is no different than the fake protests being organized by George Soros. It’s all theater being produced by the globalist hard left and certain media outlets,” Bill Wilson, a member of Americans for Limited Government’s board of directors commented.

“Having the media in collusion with the left is nothing new, as we recently learned from the election campaign via Wikileaks. They will do anything to undermine the Trump administration,” Wilson added.

In other words, this is just the latest drive-by hit squad attack by the media that hates Trump and hates the people who voted for him, and hates Bannon. If it is necessary to assassinate Stephen Bannon’s character to undermine the incoming Trump administration, then that is the price to be paid. The only thing that’s not news here is that the media has it in for Trump and his supporters.

Robert Romano is the senior editor of Americans for Limited Government.

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The Ellison Challenge

By Caroline Glick

November 18, 2016

CarolineGlick.com

The Democratic Party stands at a crossroads today. And so do the Jewish Democrats.

Out of power in the White House and both houses of Congress, the Democrats must decide what sort of party they will be in the post-Obama world.

They have two basic options.

They can move to the center and try to rebuild their blue collar voter base that President-elect Donald Trump captivated with his populist message. To do so they will need to loosen the reins of the political correctness and weaken their racialism, their radical environmentalism and their support for open borders.

This is the sort of moderate posture that Bill Clinton led with. It is the sort of posture that Clinton tried but failed to convince his wife to adopt in this year’s campaign.

The second option is to go still further along the leftist trajectory that President Barack Obama set the party off on eight years ago. This is the favored option of the Bernie Sanders’ wing of the party. Sanders’ supporters refer to this option as the populist course. It is being played out today on the ground by the anti-Trump protesters who refuse to come to terms with the Trump victory and insistently defame Trump as a Nazi or Hitler and his advisors as Goebbels.

For the Democrats, such a populist course will require them to become more racialist, more authoritarian in their political correctness, angrier and more doctrinaire.

It will also require them to become an anti-Semitic party.

Anti-Semitism, like hatred of police and Christians are necessary components of Democratic populism. This is true first and foremost because they will need scapegoats to blame for all the bad things you can’t solve by demonizing and silencing your political opponents.

Jews, and particularly the Jewish state, along with evangelical Christians and cops are the only groups that you are allowed to hate, discriminate against and scapegoat in the authoritarian PC universe.

From the party’s initial post-election moves, it appears that the Democrats have decided to take the latter path.

Congressman Keith Ellison from Minneapolis is now poised to be selected as the next leader of the Democratic National Committee. This position is a powerful one. The DNC chairman, like his Republican counterpart, is the party’s chief fundraiser. When a party is out of power, the party chairman is treated like its formal leader, and most active spokesman.

Ellison is the head of the Democrats’ Progressive caucus. His candidacy is supported by incoming Senate minority leader Senator Chuck Schumer and outgoing Senate minority leader Harry Reid. Obama has indicated his support for Ellison. Senator Bernie Sanders is enthusiastically supporting him.

Ellison made history in 2006 when he was elected to serve as the first Muslim member of Congress. As the representative of an overwhelmingly Democratic district, once he won the Democratic primary in 2006, he was all but guaranteed that he could serve in Congress for as long as he wishes.

As Scott Johnson, a prominent conservative writer who runs the popular Powerlineblog website reported extensively in 2006, Ellison is an anti-Semite. He also defends cop killers.

As Johnson reported, Ellison was a long standing member of the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam. During his 2006 Congressional campaign, the local media gave next to no coverage to this association. But when it did come up, Ellison soothed concerns of Minneapolis’s Jewish community by sending a letter to the local Jewish Community Relations Committee.

In the letter Ellison claimed that he had only been briefly associated with Louis Farrakhan’s outfit, that he was unfamiliar with its anti-Semitism, and that he had never personally expressed such views.

The local media and the Jewish community were happy to take him at his word.

But as Johnson documented, his was lying on all counts.

Ellison’s association with the Nation of Islam dated back at least since 1989 and stretched at least until 1998. During that period, he not only knew about the Nation of Islam’s Jew hatred, he engaged in it himself.

As Johnson noted, in 1998, Ellison appeared at a public forum as a spokesman for the Nation of Islam. He was there to defend a woman who was under fire for allegedly referring to Jews as “among the most racist white people.”

Whereas the woman herself denied she had made the statement, Ellison defended and justified her alleged statement. Referring to her slander of Jews he said, “We stand by the truth contained in [the woman’s] remarks…Also it is absolutely true that merchants in Black areas generally treat Black customers badly.”

As Johnson reported, aside from engaging in anti-Jewish propaganda and actively promoting anti-Semitic messages and leaders, decades before the Black Lives Matter was formed, Ellison was a prominent defender of murderers of policemen.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Ellison likened the attacks to the Reichstag fire in 1933, intimating that the al Qaeda strike was an inside job. He then agreed with an audience member who said that “the Jews” gained the most from the attacks.

As a member of Congress, Ellison has been among the most hostile US lawmakers towards Israel. He has close relations with Muslim Brotherhood related groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Islamic Society of North America. Both groups were unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terror funding trial, implicated in funding Hamas and al Qaida.

And now, Sens. Schumer, Sanders and Reid and President Obama along with the Democratic grassroots activists and other party leaders are supporting Ellison’s bid to serve as chairman of the DNC.

As Ellison’s statement about “merchants” makes clear, the Democrats’ Jew hatred may not be of the “Jews are the sons of apes and pigs,” variety. In all likelihood, it will be propagated through angry rhetoric about “bankers” and “financiers,” and “the rich.”

Ellison, a supporter of the anti-Semitic BDS movement, has libeled Israel by likening the Jewish state to apartheid South Africa. Under his leadership, we can expect for Democratic politicians to veer even further away from Israel and to embrace the slander that Zionism is racism.

The populist Sanders’ route seems more attractive to the Democrats than Bill Clinton’s moderate path because the notion is taking hold that Sanders would have been a stronger candidate in the general election than Clinton was.

This view is hard to accept. Most Americans reject socialism, and populist or not, it is difficult to see how Sanders would have sold his radical positions to an uninterested public.

The other problem with the “Sanders would have won,” argument is that it misses the distinction between Trump’s populism and Democratic populism.

Trump’s populism stemmed from his willingness to say things that other politicians and authority figures more generally wouldn’t dare to say. Trump’s allegation that the political system is rigged, for instance, empowered Americans who feel threatened by the authoritarianism of the politically correct Left.

Trump’s opponents insist that his populism empowered white power bigots. But that was a bug in his ointment. It wasn’t the ointment itself. Trump’s willingness to seemingly say anything, and certainly to say things that were beyond the narrow confines of the politically correct discourse, empowered tens of millions of voters. It also empowered white bigots at the fringes of the Right.

Whereas empowering white bigots was a side effect of Trump’s populism, empowering bigots is a central feature of leftist populism. And this is where it gets dicey for Jews.

As Obama – and Ellison – have shown, when Democrats channel populism, they use it to demonize their opponents as evil. They are “fat cats on Wall Street.” They are “racists,” and other deplorables.

There are scattered voices on the Left that are calling for their fellow leftists to revisit their authoritarian practice of labelling everyone who doesn’t walk lockstep behind them as racists and otherwise unacceptable. But for the most part, the populists are winning the argument by essentially demanding more ideological radicalism and more rigidity.

This policy is completely irrational from a political perspective. It’s hard to see the constituencies that will be swayed to support an angry, hateful party.

But this brings us to the Jews, who voted 3:1 for the Democrats, and to the American Jewish leadership whose support for Clinton was near unanimous.

When anti-Semitic, populist voices like Ellison’s began taking over Britain’s Labour Party, British Jews began heading for the exits. When push came to shove they preferred their individual rights and their communal rights as Jews above their partisan loyalties.

So far, this doesn’t appear to be the case among Jewish Democrats.

Consider the Anti-Defamation League’s unhinged onslaught against Trump’s chief strategist, former Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon.

While ignoring Ellison’s record of anti-Semitism and support for Israel’s enemies, as well as his ties to unindicted co-conspirators in funding Hamas, the ADL launched a scathing assault on Bannon accusing him of being an anti-Semite.

The ADL’s assault on Bannon follows its absurd claim in the final days of the campaign that Trump’s ad criticizing George Soros was anti-Semitic. It also follows the group’s bizarre condemnation of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s recent video clip in which he stated the plain fact that the Palestinian demand that Jews be ethnically cleansed from the territory they wish to take control over is an anti-Semitic demand.

As many prominent US Jews on both sides of the partisan divide have made clear, the accusation that Bannon, whose Breitbart website is one of the most pro-Israel websites in the US, is anti-Semitic is appalling on its face. The allegation is simply unsubstantiated.

So why do it? Why allege that a friend of the Jews is a Jew hater while ignoring the actual anti-Semitism of another man?

The answer is depressingly easy to discern.

The ADL appears to be trying to give cover to the rising forces of anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party. By falsely accusing Bannon and through him Trump of anti-Semitism, the ADL defuses the real problem of Democratic anti-Semitism. And if the ADL doesn’t think there is a problem with Ellison taking over the DNC, but alleges that Republicans hate them, then rank in file Jews will stay put.

The ADL of course isn’t alone in sending this message.

Following the election, Conservative and Reform congregations in major cities throughout the US organized communal “shivas,” to mourn Clinton’s defeat as if it was a death in the family. Such actions, along with characterizations of Trump and his advisors as Nazis or Hitler or white supremacists work to bind Jews to a party that is inhospitable to their communal interests while blinding them to the fact that Republicans do not hate Jews or the Jewish state.

For decades, American Jews have been at the forefront of every major social movement on in the US. But the Democratic Party’s move towards anti-Semitism, a move made apparent through Ellison’s rise, is one movement the Jews mustn’t lead.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

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MSM Hypocrisy: Pounds Bannon Appointment, Lets Ellison’s Radicalism Off The Hook

Can You Spot the Hypocrisy?

By Rich Noyes

November 18, 2016

The Realistic Observer

Since Sunday evening, ABC, CBS and NBC (along with a host of other establishment media outlets) have been engaged in a feeding frenzy over Donald Trump’s appointment of Steve Bannon, with reporters relentlessly employing phrases such as “white nationalist,” “white supremacist,” “extremist,” “racist” and “anti-Semitic” to solidify the image of Bannon as a dangerous pick for a top White House position.

But since Friday, those same networks have been blind to the controversies surrounding the top candidate for Democratic National Committee Chairman, Rep. Keith Ellison. Ellison has been accused of ties to the radical Nation of Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood, and once suggested the 9/11 terrorist attacks were akin to the infamous Reichstag fire used to propel Hitler’s Nazi party into absolute power in 1933 Germany.

From Sunday night through Wednesday morning, MRC analysts found the Big Three had already churned out 41 minutes, 46 seconds of coverage devoted to Bannon’s appointment. An analysis finds that nearly three-fourths (74%) of all references to Bannon were negative; the only positive comments viewers heard came from interviews or soundbites with other Trump campaign officials or Republican officeholders……

The coverage has been so ridiculously excessive, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro — who dislikes Bannon — said it was evidence the media had “gone nuts” over the appointment:

They claim that he’s personally anti-Semitic and racist and a white nationalist and anti-Israel, without evidence. This is ridiculous. And all it does is provoke defense from the right. For God’s sake, I’m now defending Steve Bannon! The media can’t stop their overreach, because everybody on the right is Hitler to the media, which means that Bannon must be Super-Duper-Hitler.

Contrast that with news coverage of a Democrat accused of radicalism. Since he was first mentioned as a potential candidate on Friday, Rep. Ellison’s bid to take over the DNC has received only two minutes, nine seconds of network airtime, and none of it has focused on his controversial comments or associations.

The only spin network viewers heard was positive. On NBC’s Today show on Sunday, MSNBC’s Joy Reid was brought on to sing his praises: “Keith Ellison as a young legislator, as a Muslim, as an African-American, he really feels like sort of an ideal candidate.”

Ellison has been endorsed by incoming Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer, a move which has led to protests against the New York Senator. While CBS has not mentioned those protests, their New York affiliate has done the reporting:

On a trip to Israel last summer, Ellison posted a photo of a sign in Hebron declaring Israel to be an apartheid state. He also proudly defended Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan against accusations of being anti-Semitic.

“(H)is vile beliefs… ought to disqualify him outright,” said Joel Mowbray, a consultant to Jewish groups. “If Chuck Schumer actually did his due diligence and is supporting Ellison anyway, that’s shameful.”…

Longtime terrorism expert Steve Emerson in 2010 documented that Ellison had financial “donors with a history of Muslim Brotherhood connections.” And in March 2010, according to Emerson, “Ellison attended a private fundraiser at the northern Virginia home of a man who led a group tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Add it all up, and Ellison sounds at least as controversial as Bannon. So, if charges of extremism against a potential Republican White House aide are worth massive network coverage, where is the similar coverage of the radical ties of a Congressman who hopes to lead the Democratic Party?
continue

Dr. Bill Warner gives an insight into Islamism

A jihadi said that beheading Kafirs, non-Muslims, is like killing chickens so he has no remorse. And why would he feel nothing? Could it be that he believes that Kafirs are worse than animals? Allah says:

Koran 25:44 Do you think that most of them hear, or understand? They are just like animals; no, they are far worse.

The jihadi has the moral right to behead the Kafir. He is following Allah’s commands:

Koran 8:12 Then your Lord spoke to His angels and said, “I will be with you. Give strength to the believers. I will send terror into the Kafirs’ hearts, cut off their heads and even the tips of their fingers!”

In the early Koran of Mecca, Allah condemns Kafirs to hell 146 times. Of these 146 condemnations, only 9 involve moral wrongs such as greed and lying. The other 137 times are because the Kafir did not think that Mohammed was the prophet of Allah. Kafirs reject Mohammed as a prophet and deny the Koran. Killing them by beheading is jihad. Raping them is jihad. The jihad advances Islam.

There are other chickens (cowards), as well. Chicken religious leaders do not stand up for persecuted Christians. There is a chicken media that does not tell the truth about Islam or criticize it. And there are chicken professors who do not teach the truth of the suffering in history caused by jihad over the last 1400 years.

We must stop being chicken cowards. We may have fear, but we must speak out. Only then can we prevent our civilization from being annihilated.
Source: Political Islam

VIDEO: Bill Warner, PhD: Just Like Killing Chickens

Posted by Political Islam

Published on Nov 1, 2016

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Character assassination of Stephen Bannon is an attack on all Trump supporters

About NetRightDaily

NetRightDaily.com is a project of Americans for Limited Government. The project, launched in August of 2008, offers liberty-minded thought on the federal government as well as the threats that exist to individual liberty at all levels of government.

You can connect with NetRightDaily on Twitter at @NetRightDaily. We are also on Facebook at Americans for Limited Government.

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The Ellison Challenge

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MSM Hypocrisy: Pounds Bannon Appointment, Lets Ellison’s Radicalism Off The Hook

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Answering John Kerry

Intro to Glick’s ‘Answering John Kerry’

Edited by John R. Houk

12/13/15

Caroline Glick posted an essay about John Kerry’s speech at the Brooking Institute’s Saban Forum. This is the same forum that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu video streamed a speech to the Saban Forum from Jerusalem. To comprehend just how idiotic Secretary of State John Kerry is (and by extension President Barack Hussein Obama), let me share some excerpts from Netanyahu’s speech that addresses Islamic terrorism internationally and the terrorism of Arabs calling themselves Palestinians who refuse to accept the existence of the Jewish State of Israel:

I want to thank my friend Haim for giving me the opportunity to address you. This comes at a time when the United States has experienced a terrible and savage attack in San Bernardino, and I wish to offer the condolences of the people of Israel to the families, the aggrieved families, and of course send our wishes for a speedy recovery to the wounded. [Blog Editor: a sentiment rarely shared from Obama and Kerry to Israeli-Jewish victims of Palestinian Islamic terrorism.]

…

And these values are what makes the bond between Israel and the United States, the American people and the people of Israel, so strong. It’s that identity of values, those very values that are under such fierce attack today. …

…

Insofar as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is concerned, I think there is another misunderstanding. People have long said that the core of this conflict is the acquisition of territories by Israel in the 1967 War. That’s an issue that needs to be addressed in any peace process, as is the question of settlements, but it’s not the core of the conflict. In Gaza, nothing changed. In fact, instead of getting peace, we gave territory and got 15,000 rockets on our heads. We took out all the settlements; we disinterred people from their graves; and did we get peace? No. We got the worst terror possible.

… Why has this conflict not been resolved for a hundred years? Why has it not been resolved after successive Israeli prime ministers, six in fact after the Oslo Agreement, have offered to make peace, have offered the Palestinians the possibility of building a state next to Israel – it’s because the Palestinians have not yet been willing to cross that conceptual bridge, that emotional bridge, of giving up the dream not of a state next to Israel, but a state instead of Israel.

And that’s why they persistently refuse – not only Hamas in Gaza, but the PA – they consistently refuse to accept that in a final peace settlement, they will recognize the Jewish state, they will recognize a nation-state for the Jewish people. They ask that we recognize a nation-state for the Palestinian people, but refuse to accord that same right to us. I have said and I continue to say it, that ultimately the only workable solution is not a unitary state, but a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes the Jewish state. That’s the solution. But the Palestinians have to recognize the Jewish state and they persistently refuse to do so. They refuse to recognize a nation-state for the Jewish people in any boundary. That was and remains the core of the conflict. Not this or that gesture or the absence of this or that gesture, but the inability or unwillingness of the Palestinian leadership to make the leap.

You got a hint of that the other day when Abu Mazen spoke about the “occupation of Palestinian lands for the last 67 years”. Did you hear that? Occupation of Palestinian lands? For the last 67 years? Sixty-seven years ago was 1948. That’s when the State of Israel was established. Does Abu Mazen mean that Tel Aviv is occupied Palestinian territory? Of Haifa? Or Beer Sheba? He refuses to fess up to his people and say it’s over, from their point of view what they say are the borders they wish, the final borders they wish. They refuse to recognize that they will have no more claim on the territory of the Jewish state, that they will not try in any way to flood it with the descendants of refugees. After all, we in Israel took in an equal and even larger number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands. You should READ the ENTIRE Speech (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Remarks to the Saban Forum; By PM Benjamin Netanyahu; Release by Israel GPO posted at SlantRight 2.0; posted 12/7/15)

Now as you read Glick’s essay you will notice that Secretary Kerry acts like he is completely deaf and blind about the intentions of the Arabs that call themselves Palestinians to not only establish a state out of some territory of Jewish heritage but also the complete destruction of Israel to be replaced by an Arab State. In case you haven’t been paying attention to what ISIS is doing to the Christians that have lived in Syria and Iraq that means a brutal genocide against the Jews of Israel.

JRH 12/13/15

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Answering John Kerry

By Caroline Glick

December 11th, 2015

CarolineGlick.com

On Saturday, US Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech before the Brookings Institute’s Saban Forum. Kerry focused on the Palestinian conflict with Israel and sought to draw a distinction between the two-state policy model, which he supports, and the one-state policy model, which he rejects.

To justify his rejection of a policy based on Israeli sovereignty over areas beyond the 1949 armistice lines, Kerry raised a series of questions about what a one-state policy would look like.

I answered all of his questions, as well as many others, in great detail in my book The Israeli Solution: A One- State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. I will do so again here, albeit with the requisite brevity.

But before discussing the specific questions Kerry raised with regard to the one-state model, it is important to discuss the nature of the policies Kerry described in his speech.

Kerry argued Israel should deny civil and property rights to Jews beyond the 1949 armistice lines, and ignore the building and planning laws of both Israel and the military government in Judea and Samaria in order to allow unrestricted Arab construction in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.

Such steps, he argued, will advance the cause of peace because they will pave the way for an Israeli withdrawal from the vast majority of these areas. Such a withdrawal in turn will bring about the desired two-state solution.

Since the two-state solution is supported by the whole world, Kerry argued that once Israel withdraws from the areas, it will gain the support of the world, peace with its Arab neighbors as well as the Palestinians, and become more prosperous and happy than it is today. It will also secure its democracy.

On the other hand, Kerry argued, if Israel respects the civil and property rights of Jews and continues to enforce the law toward Arabs as well as Jews, and if it eventually applies its laws to any or all of Judea and Samaria, Israel will enter a state of perpetual war with the Palestinians and the wider Arab world. Israel will cease to be a democracy. Israel will be impoverished.

Israel will be isolated internationally even more than it is today.

If Kerry’s options were real options, then Israel would have a clear and easy choice, just as he argues it has.

But unfortunately, they aren’t real options. They are fantasies.

Today Israel has three options. As Kerry advocates, it can withdraw from Judea and Samaria and partition Jerusalem. But if it does so, there is no reason to believe that the outcome will be a Palestinian state, let alone peace.

Rather, it is far more likely that an Israeli withdrawal will lead to the establishment of a second independent Palestinian enclave that the Palestinians and the international community will insist is still under occupation, just as the Palestinians and the international community insist that Gaza remains under Israeli occupation 10 years after Israel vacated the Gaza Strip entirely.

Without Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, Israel will become a strategic basket case in an increasingly chaotic region. It will invite aggression from the Palestinians and from the east that it will be hard pressed to defend against.

Just as Israel is condemned for every action it has taken to defend against Palestinian aggression from Gaza, so it will be condemned for the actions it will be forced to take to defend itself from Palestinian aggression in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and beyond.

In other words, the so-called “two-state solution” is a recipe for war and expanded international isolation for the Jewish state.

The second option for Israel is to maintain the status quo. Today, Israel shares governing power in Judea and Samaria with the PLO. Sometimes the PLO cooperates with Israeli security forces, and sometimes it cooperates with terrorist groups.

The PLO rejects Israel’s right to exist. It uses every available platform to undermine Israel’s legitimacy and wage economic and political war against the Jewish state.

The advantage of the status quo is that under it, Israel has security control over Judea and Samaria. Consequently, it is able to prevent Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem from becoming strategically indistinguishable from Gaza, where Hamas is now openly collaborating with Islamic State forces in Sinai.

Israel’s third option is to apply its laws over all or parts of Judea and Samaria. The first benefit of this option is that it maintains Israel’s ability to defend itself against security threats emanating from the Palestinians and from the east.

Beyond that, under Israeli law, the civil rights of Palestinians and Jews in Judea and Samaria will be vastly improved. Israel’s liberal legal code is superior to both the military code governing the Jews and the Palestinian Authority’s law of the jackboot which governs the Palestinians.

Whereas the status quo invites and engenders politicization of Israel’s military commanders who serve as the governing authorities of the areas, the third option would end the politicization of the IDF. Generals would take a backseat to elected leaders and government ministries. Police would be responsible for law enforcement. Rather than deploy regular and reserve units to dispel rioters, police, who are better trained for such events, would be judiciously deployed in areas where they are most needed. The IDF’s operations would be limited to counterterrorism.

None of Israel’s actual three options will necessarily enhance its international standing. This is the case because, as we have seen, Israel’s international standing has little to do with anything Israel does.

But then again, by exhibiting strength, and forcefully asserting its rights, Israel may find itself winning the respect of some foreign governments that currently view it is weak and open to blackmail.

This brings us to Kerry’s questions about a one-state model.

Kerry asked, “How does Israel possibly maintain its character as a Jewish and democratic state when from the river to the sea there would not even be a Jewish majority?” The answer is easily. Israel will retain its strong Jewish majority, and its commitment to democracy, after it applies its laws to Judea and Samaria.

Kerry asked, “Would millions of Palestinians be given the basic rights of Israeli citizens including the right to vote, or would they be relegated to a permanent underclass?” The answer is yes, they would be given the basic rights of Israeli citizens, including the right to vote, and no, they would not be relegated to a permanent underclass.

Kerry asked, “Would the Israelis and Palestinians living in such close quarters have segregated roads and transportation systems with different laws applying in the Palestinian enclaves?” The answer is, no.

Kerry asked, “Would anyone really believe they were being treated equally?” The answer is that, as we have seen repeatedly, no matter what Israel does, and no matter what the Palestinians do, people like Kerry will always claim that Israel is mistreating the Palestinians.

Kerry asked, “What would the international response be to that, my friends, or to a decision by Israel to unilaterally annex large portions of the West Bank?” The answer, again, is that the international response to such a move would be about the same as the international response to the continuation of the status quo or to an Israel withdrawal. To wit, the response will be hostile to Israel.

Kerry asked, “How could Israel ever have true peace with its neighbors, as the Arab Peace Initiative promises and as every Arab leader I have met with in the last year reinforces to me as recently as in the last month that they are prepared to do?” The answer is that Israel can have true peace with the Arab world when the Arab world accepts the legitimacy and permanence of the Jewish state.

Kerry asked, “How will [Arab states make peace]… if there is no chance for a two-state solution?” The answer is that they will make peace when they decide they want peace and they rid their societies of Jew hatred.

Kerry asked, “How will the Arab street in today’s world let… [the two-state solution] go by?” The answer is that the Arab street doesn’t believe in the “two-state solution.” The Arab street wants the dissolution of Israel.

Finally, Kerry asked, “And wouldn’t Israel risk being in perpetual conflict with millions of Palestinian living in the middle of a state?” The answer is that Israel is at risk of perpetual conflict with the Palestinians and the Arab world as a whole for as long as the Arabs hate Jews. The millions of Palestinians living within Israel’s borders constitute a far smaller strategic danger to Israel than the millions of Jew-hating Arabs, who have terrorist armies, perched on its international borders.

At the outset of his remarks, Kerry explained that as far as US Middle East policy is concerned, “Our goal, our strategy is to help ensure that the builders and the healers throughout the region have the chance that they need to accomplish their tasks.”

Sadly, this is neither a goal nor a strategy. It is the sort of platitude you’re likely to find inside a Chinese fortune cookie.

If Kerry is interested in an actual strategy, he can fork out 20 bucks and buy my book.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

____________________

About Caroline B. Glick

America’s pathological denial of reality

San Bernardino Massacre

Caroline Glick writes about U.S. government idiocy on failing to label Islamic terrorism especially in the case of the San Bernardino Massacre.

JRH 12/4/15

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Column One: America’s pathological denial of reality

By CAROLINE B. GLICK

12/03/2015

Jerusalem Post

Police officers conduct a manhunt after a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California December 2, 2015.(Photo by: REUTERS)

In America of December 2015, natural conclusions are considered irresponsible, at best.

How much lower will America sink before it regains its senses? Wednesday, two Muslims walked into a Christmas party at a community service center in San Bernardino, California where one worked. They were wearing body armor and video cameras and carrying automatic rifles, pipe bombs and pistols. They opened fire, killed 14, and wounded 17.

The murderers, Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik were killed by police.

Speaking to the Daily News, Farook’s father said his son, “was very religious. He would go to work, come back, go to pray, come back. He’s Muslim.”

Farook’s neighbor told the paper that over the past two years, Farook exchanged his Western dress for Islamic gowns and grew a beard.

These data points lead naturally to the conclusion that Farook and his wife were jihadists who killed in order to kill in the name of Islam.

But in America of December 2015, natural conclusions are considered irresponsible, at best.

In an interview with CNN following the shooting, US President Barack Obama said the massacre demonstrates that the US needs stricter gun laws. As for the motives of the shooters, Obama shrugged. “We don’t yet know the motives of the shooters,” he insisted.

In other words, while ignoring what in all likelihood drove Farooq and his wife to murder innocent people, Obama laid responsibility for the carnage at the feet of his political opponents who reject his demands for stricter limitations on gun ownership.

Here is the place to note that California has some of the most stringent gun control laws in the US.

According to the victims, Farook and his partners were able to reload their weapons and shoot without interruption for several minutes until the police arrived because there was no one to stop them.

Obama wasn’t alone in deflecting attention away from the likely motivations of the murderers.

Wednesday evening, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), held a press conference at the Islamic Center of Orange County. Farook’s brother in law, Farhan Khan was carted out before the cameras to tell the world that he for one had no idea why his brother in law opened fire.

Two other speakers at the event were Hussam Auyloush, CAIR’s regional executive director and Muzammil Siddiqi, the director of the Islamic Society of Orange County.

Auyloush insisted that he had no idea would could have possibly prompted Farook and his wife to murder those gathered at the center. Auyloush raised the prospect that they could have been mentally ill, or perhaps they just didn’t like the victims, or maybe they were garden-variety extremists.

For his part, Siddiqi insisted that Islam had nothing to do with the shooters’ decision to murder innocent people, (how he could be so certain, is unknown).

Siddiqi added that he hopes law enforcement bodies will conduct a full investigation into the “people and motives,” behind the attack.

To a degree, the very fact that Siddiqi had no compunction about stepping in front of the cameras just hours after the attack is proof that the US has lost its way.

If American elites were even semi-competent, Siddiqi would have faded into the shadows, never to emerge again 15 years ago.

Siddiqi is a known jihadist sympathizer. His close ties to jihadists have been a matter of public record since 2000.

In October 2000, Siddiqi spoke at an anti-Israel rally in Lafayette Park in Washington, DC. There he warned the American people that they must abandon their support for Israel lest “the wrath of God” be unleashed against them.

According to a profile of Siddiqi compiled by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, (IPT) in the late 1990s Siddiqi gave a speech extolling jihad and foreseeing Israel’s replacement with an Islamic state.

Among other things, Siddiqi said, “In order to gain the honor, jihad is the path, jihad is the way to receive the honor.”

Siddiqi converted Osama bin Laden’s senior aide, American jihadist Adam Gadahn. Gadahn converted to Islam at the Islamic Center of Orange County in 1995. According to a 2007 New Yorker profile, Siddiqi employed Gadahn at the Center in the years following his conversion. It was during this period that Gadahn was radicalized. He then went to Pakistan and joined al Qaida.

In 1992 Siddiqi hosted a blind sheikh named Omar Abdel Rahman at the Islamic Center. He stood beside Rahman and simultaneously translated his lecture about jihad to the audience of worshipers.

The next year, Rahman masterminded the first jihadist attack on the World Trade Center.

During the 1990s, Siddiqi served as the president of the Islamic Society of North America, a known Muslim Brotherhood front group. In 2007, ISNA was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holyland terror financing trial.

Despite all of his connections to jihadists, US authorities insist that Siddiqi is a legitimate voice. In 2007 Stephen Tidwell, then assistant director of the FBI division in Los Angeles upheld Siddiqi as a moderate.

Speaking to the IPT, Tidwell said, “We have a very strong relationship with Dr. Siddiqi.”

Hours before Obama responded to the San Bernadino massacre by lashing out at gun control opponents, Col. Steve Warren, spokesman for US Operation Inherent Resolve – the US campaign against Islamic State – rejected Russian claims that the Turkish government is collaborating with the terror state.

Warren praised the Turks as “great partners to us.”

“We flatly reject any notion that the Turks are somehow working with Islamic State. That is preposterous,” he insisted, adding, “Any thought” the Turkish government would deal or collaborate with Islamic State is “completely untrue.”

Unfortunately, a wealth of evidence indicates that it is Warren’s statement that is preposterous and completely untrue.

For nearly five years, it has been an open secret that Turkey serves as Islamic State’s logistical base. Almost all the foreigners traveling to Syria to join IS transit through Turkey.

For nearly two years, we have known that Turkey is Islamic State’s major arms supplier. And for six months we have known that they are their partners in oil exports.

In an article published this past summer in Middle East Quarterly, Burak Bekdil reported in January 2014, Turkish prosecutors acting independently from the government, dispatched forces to a border province with Syria to intercept a convoy of trucks laden with missiles, rockets and ammunition making its way to Syria. One of the truck drivers testified at the time that he and his colleagues had “carried similar loads several times before.”

The forces charged with seizing the cargo were shocked to discover the trucks were being escorted by Turkish intelligence officers.

According to Bekdil, “all hell broke loose,” after the prosecutors ordered the men arrested and the cargo seized.

The provincial governor swooped in and insisted that the convoy was traveling on direct orders from Turkish leader Recep Tayip Erdogan. Months later, the military took over the case. And today, the men who executed the arrests and cargo seizure are on trial for “international espionage.”

Bekdil reported that two months after the cargo was intercepted, a meeting took place between then foreign minister and current Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, his deputy, Feridun Sinirlioglu, the head of Turkish intelligence, Hakan Fidan and deputy chief of the Turkish general staff, Gen. Yasar Guler.

A recording of the meeting was leaked to social media. In the recording, Fidan is heard saying that “he had successfully sent two thousand trucks into Syria before.”

As to Islamic State oil sales to Turkey, this past May, US special forces executed their first known raid inside Syria. The commandos descended on the home of Islamic State’s financial chief Abu Sayyaf. US forces killed Sayyaf and seized his computers and hard drives.

Sayyaf directed Islamic State’s oil, gas and financial operations.

Last July the Guardian reported that the computer data revealed close, direct dealings between Turkish officials and Islamic State members. According to one senior Western official familiar with the contents of the documents, just from what had been uncovered in the initial study of the material, “the links [between Islamic State and the Turkish government] are already so clear that they could end up having profound policy implications for the relationship between us and Ankara.”

Yet Wednesday, in the face of an overwhelming mountain of evidence, the Americans rejected out-of-hand Russians allegations that Turkey is the main consumer of oil exports from Islamic State.

This past July, two senior Defense Intelligence Agency analysts assigned to US Central Command submitted a formal complaint to the Defense Department’s inspector general. The two claimed that their intelligence reports on Islamic State were doctored and distorted as they made their way up the feeding chain to Obama. Fifty intelligence analysts have stated their agreement with the allegations in the complaint.

The doctored reports systematically rendered portraits of the US campaign against Islamic State as successful and Islamic State as a nearly spent force, along the lines of the narrative presented by Obama and his advisors. According to the analysts, the picture painted by the doctored reports bore little resemblance to their far more negative conclusions.

According to the Daily Beast’s report, intelligence analysts began complaining to their superiors about the distortion of their reports in October 2014. Some of those analysts were urged to retire early, and some did.

According to the publication, “one person who knows the contents of the written complaint… said it used the word ‘Stalinist’ to describe the tone set by officials overseeing CENTCOM analysis.”

Following the jihadist attacks on Paris on November 13, Obama maintained his insistence that climate change is a graver threat to US national security than terrorism. It could be that this prioritization of concerns is playing a role in the administration’s apparent determination not to seriously fight Islamic State.

In an interview with Charlie Rose last month, former CIA director Michael Morell explained that the administration decided not to bomb Islamic State’s oil infrastructure “because we didn’t want to do environmental damage.”

According to the Guardian, Islamic State makes between one to four million dollars per day from oil sales.

Perhaps the shooters in San Bernadino were just mad at their boss. Maybe Farooq suffered from clinical depression or ADD, or PTSD, or something.

And maybe Islamic State, with its new colony Sirte in “liberated” Libya, just 400 miles from Italy, is on the run. Maybe as well, Turkey is just a patsy and Russia is really Islamic State’s largest trading partner, or maybe Israel is, or Ireland.

But if facts are to be taken seriously, then the fact is that in December 2015, the US is acting with pathological devotion to ideological narratives that bear no relationship to reality.

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About Caroline B. Glick

I grew up in Chicago’s ultra-liberal Hyde Park neighborhood. Hyde Park’s most famous resident is Barack Obama.

I made aliyah to Israel in 1991, two weeks after receiving my BA in Political Science from another radical liberal stronghold — Columbia University in New York, otherwise known as Beir Zeit on the Hudson.

I joined the Israel Defense Forces that summer and served as an officer for five and a half years.

From 1994-1996, as an IDF captain, I served as Coordinator of Negotiations with the PLO in the office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. In this capacity I was a core member of Israel’s negotiating team with the Palestinians.

In 1997 and 1998 I served as assistant foreign policy advisor Binyamin Netayahu [sic] during his first stint as Prime Minister.

From 1998-2000 I returned to the US for graduate school. I received a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Although I spent most of my free time hiking in New England, it did not escape my attention that much of the faculty at the Kennedy School was not particularly fond of America, (Alinsky’s organizing methods were taught in a required first year course for MPP candidates) — or of Israel.

The latter truth was exposed for all the world to see when my former professor Steve Walt co-wrote the updated version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with his friend from my childhood hometown – University of Chicago’s John Mearshimer.

After I finished graduate school I returned to Israel and began writing at … READ THE REST at CarolineGlick.com

Don’t Hate Jews – Fiercely Join Them against Terrorism

John R. Houk

VIDEO: Abbas: We won’t allow Jews with their “filthy feet” to “defile our Al-Aqsa Mosque”

Published by palwatch

Published on Sep 17, 2015

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas: “We bless you, we bless the Murabitin (those carrying out Ribat, religious conflict/war to protect land claimed to be Islamic), we bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing. Every Martyr (Shahid) will reach Paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah.

The Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is ours, and they have no right to defile them with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem.”
[Official PA TV, Sept. 16, 2015]

I have posted two Ari Bussel article about murderous Arab Muslim terrorists who call themselves Palestinians and attacked and killed Rabbi Eitam and Naama Henkin with their four children in their car: “A Blood Sacrifice” and “NO PLACE IS SAFE”. Just as some added info the media that covered the incident in Israel claimed the four children were spared because the Islamic terrorists have had unfavorable responses to past vicious murdering of children along with the parents. Eitam’s brother has said in essence that is a bunch of hooey. The children were spared because one of the Hamas murderers was shot and the Muslim focus was to get out of Dodge before the police and IDF showed up.

Yagil Henkin, the brother of Eitam Henkin, who was shot and killed in last week’s terror attack near the Itamar settlement in the West Bank, spoke out Tuesday in an interview with Army Radio, describing the moment he learned of the murder of his brother and his sister-in-law, Naama. Henkin also discussed the state of the Henkin’s four children, who were present in the vehicle when terrorists murdered their parents.

Henkin’s comments came a day after the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) announced that security forces had arrested members of a Hamas cell responsible for the attack. An investigation into the attack found that the four children were likely not hurt because one of the terrorists accidentally shot one of his partners, and they were forced to flee.

“Dealing with the question of whether the terrorists took mercy on the children seemed sick to me. There is a lot of history of terror in Israel, and there are many cases in which the children are the targets of the terrorists. The attempts to credit them for the fact that they only murdered the parents and not the children – that seemed ridiculous,” he told Army Radio.

…

The Shin Bet announced on Monday that a Hamas terrorist cell from Nablus was behind the murder of the Henkins as they drove near Itamar with their four children.

…

… After the [victims’] car stopped, two members of the cell got out of their car, and fired again, from very short range, on those in the vehicle,” the Shin Bet said.

At this stage, Razak was accidentally shot, dropping his handgun at the scene. It was recovered by security forces. The cell fled to Nablus, 5 km. away. (Brother of terror victim Henkin: It’s ‘sick’ to ask if terrorists took mercy on the children; By MAARIV ONLINE; Jerusalem Post; 10/06/2015 11:12)

And from Israel National News:

The ISA cleared for publication that five Hamas terrorists responsible for the murder have been arrested.

During the course of their interrogation, one – Karam Lutfi Fathi Razek – revealed that he was accidentally shot by a fellow terrorist in the hand during the attack. The two had been shooting at either side of the car’s front row, causing their line of fire to overlap. After the accidental injury, the terrorist dropped his rifle and the five fled back to Shechem.

This mistake may have saved the Henkin children, a senior IDF official stated to Yediot Aharonot Monday night.

“Friendly fire on one member of the group presumably led to the children remaining alive,” the unnamed officer stated.

Earlier in the investigation, another security official theorized that the terrorists never saw the four children in the back of the Henkins’ vehicle. (How One Terrorist’s Mistake Spared the Henkin Children; By Tova Dvorin; Israel National News – Arutz Sheva 7; 10/5/2015, 8:42 PM / Last Update: 10/5/2015, 10:10 PM)

And The Jewish Press:

The investigation revealed that one of the terrorists shot his friend by mistake during the attack, forcing them to flee the scene hastily, which explains why they left alone the children in the back seat of the Henkins’ car. The wounded killer was picked up by security forces from his hospital bed in Shechem.

The cell members, five Hamas operatives from Shechem, were picked up one day after the attack. Several Arabs suspected of helping the cell have also been arrested. The cell was under the command of a released prisoner, a Hamas member, who provided the weapons and planned the attack but did not participate in it personally. (Investigators: Henkin Children Saved by Killers’ Friendly Fire; By JNi.Media; The Jewish Press; 10/5/15)

The fact of the matter Islam directs Muslims to be merciful ONLY if an infidel (kafir) converts to Islam. The children were spared NOT out of mercy but rather out of an inconvenient moment of terrorist friendly fire.

THE ONE THING the American press seems to have ignored (if they even reported the Islamic terrorism at all) is that the murders of the Henkin couple were inspired by Palestine Authority President (also PLO Chairman) Mahmoud Abbas disavowing the Oslo Accords road to a fake Palestinian nation and speaking Jew-hatred against Jews who wanted to express their Judaism at the Temple Mount on Sukkot. Evidently the Muslims are so heartless against Jews that refuse Jewish access to their holiest piece of land in their faith. Yeah, Muslims desecrated the Temple Mount by building two Mosques on the Jewish holy spot after conquering the area from the Byzantines – Truthful but sanitized CBN version – A more graphic History of Jihad version (also briefly held by then Zoroastrian Persians).

Islamic terrorism has been ongoing by attacking Israeli Jews in brutish cowardly fashions that only the so-called Religion of Peace can justify. How can Obama and Establishment Republicans even conceive the formation of an independent Palestinian State? These people – young and old alike – ONLY desire a sovereign land as a base to destroy Israel and kill Jews. It is time to not only get tough with the Arabs that call themselves Palestinians but ALL Muslims who support such violent acts of terrorism and war crimes. It is time for America to develop the courage to approach these barbarians still stuck in a Middle Ages mentality to face a WWII victory goal with extreme prejudice. Thanks to Iran and Russia, the seeds of the next World War have been planted. For God’s sake let’s start preparing a win strategy that means collateral damage for foolish citizens not wise enough to get out of the way.

Below is the Caroline Glick article that shines a light on the circumstances facing Israel’s existence and partially inspired these thoughts.

JRH 10/9/15

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Column One: Abbas must be stopped

By CAROLINE B. GLICK

October 8, 2015

Jerusalem Post

“The man who propagates this murderous lie and orchestrates the death and mayhem that is its bloody harvest is none other than the West’s favorite Palestinian moderate.”

All the Palestinian terrorist attacks that have been carried out in recent weeks share one common feature. All the terrorists believe that by attacking Jews they are protecting the Temple Mount from destruction.

And why shouldn’t they believe this obscenity? Everywhere they go, every time they turn on their televisions, read the paper, go to school or the mosque they are told that the Jews are destroying al-Aksa Mosque. Al-Aksa, they are told, is in danger. They must take up arms to defend it from the Jews, whatever the cost.

One man stands at the center of this blood libel. The man who propagates this murderous lie and orchestrates the death and mayhem that is its bloody harvest is none other than the West’s favorite Palestinian moderate: PLO chief and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

On September 16 Abbas gave a speech. It was broadcast on PA television and posted on his Facebook page. In it, he incited the Palestinians to kill Jews. In his words, “Al-Aksa Mosque is ours.

They [the Jews] have no right to desecrate it with their filthy feet. We won’t allow them to do so and we will do everything in our power to defend Jerusalem.”

Abbas added, “We bless every drop of blood spilled for Jerusalem. This is clean and pure blood, blood that was spilled for God. It is Allah’s will that every martyr will go to heaven and every wounded [terrorist] will receive God’s reward.”

Two weeks later, Abbas opened his address before the UN General Assembly with the same lies, threats, and incitement.

Almost exactly a year ago, Abbas spewed the same bile in a speech, with the same murderous consequences. In a speech before Fatah’s executive committee last October, Abbas said, “We must prevent them [the Jews] from entering the holy site in every possible way. This is our holy site, this is our al-Aksa and our church [the Church of the Holy Sepulchre]. They have no right to enter them. They have no right to desecrate them. We must prevent them from entering. We must block them with our bodies to defend our holy sites.”

In subsequent weeks, Abbas’s words were rebroadcast 19 times on Palestinian television.

During that period, Arab terrorists massacred rabbis in prayer at a Jerusalem synagogue, attempted to assassinate human rights activist Yehudah Glick, and murdered Jews standing at light rail stops in the capital.

Eleven Israelis were butchered in that terrorist onslaught.

Then as now, Abbas and his lieutenants not only incited attacks, they incentivized would be perpetrators to kill Jews.

Every year, the same PA that claims perpetual poverty pays more than $100 million to terrorists imprisoned in Israeli jails. Their salaries range between four to seven times the average PA salary, depending on the lethality of the attacks they carried out.

Popular awareness of the financial benefits of terrorist activities has played a critical role in motivating Palestinians to attack Jews. This is made clear by the actions in recent weeks of several of the supposedly “lone wolf” attackers in the hours before they struck. Several of them – like their predecessors in last year’s onslaught – announced their intention to become martyrs to protect al-Aksa from the Jews on their Facebook pages immediately before they carried out their attacks.

Money may be the greatest incentive Abbas and his PA provide for potential terrorists. But it isn’t the only one. There is also the social status they confer on terrorists and their families. Every would-be terrorist knows that if he succeeds in killing Jews, he will be glorified by the Palestinian media and his family will be embraced by the PA establishment – first and foremost by Abbas himself, who has made a habit of meeting with terrorists and their families.

Presently, Israel’s security brass is embroiled in a bitter dispute with our elected leaders regarding the nature of the current terrorist offensive. The dispute bubbled to the surface Wednesday night when the generals used military reporters to criticize Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for blaming Abbas for the violence.

The generals insist that Abbas is a good guy.

He’s trying to calm the situation, they argue, and Israel needs to support him.

From the looks of things, the IDF seems to have the upper hand in this fight. This is the only way to read Netanyahu’s announcement Wednesday night that he is barring government ministers and members of Knesset from visiting the Temple Mount until further notice. Netanyahu’s move is nothing less than a signal that he accepts Abbas’s premise that there is something wrong with Jews exercising their right to visit Judaism’s holiest site.

The generals’ rationale for defending Abbas is fairly straightforward. Throughout the current Palestinian terror onslaught they have continued to cooperate with Abbas-controlled Palestinian security forces in Judea and Samaria.

These forces cooperate with the IDF in seeking out and arresting terrorists from Hamas and other groups that are not subordinate to Abbas. The fact that Abbas has ordered his men to work with the IDF has convinced the generals that he is a positive actor. So as they see it, he must be protected.

In their view, Israel must limit its counterterrorism operations to tactical operations against trigger pullers and their immediate commanders and ignore the overarching cause of the violence.

In behaving in this manner, our security brass is being willfully blind to the fact that Abbas is playing a double game. On the one hand, he orders his forces to be nice to IDF officers in Central Command when they fight terrorist cells from Hamas and other groups not loyal to Abbas, and so wins their appreciation.

But on the other hand, Abbas works with those same terrorist forces, incites them to attack, and rewards them for doing so.

Perhaps the most outrageous aspect of the IDF’s insistence that Abbas is critical to its counterterrorism efforts is that the IDF’s own data demonstrate that Abbas has played an insignificant role in quelling terrorist attacks against Israel.

As Jerusalem Post columnist Evelyn Gordon showed in an article in Commentary this week, according to official data, from 2002 when Palestinian terrorist activities in the areas were at their peak until 2007, when Israel began transferring security control over some Palestinian cities to Abbas’s forces, levels of terrorism went down 97 percent. Even after Israel began permitting Abbas to deploy his security forces to Nablus and Jenin, the IDF has continued to operate at will in these areas, often on a nightly basis.

As Gordon noted, the only place Abbas has exercised sole security control was in Gaza. From September 2005, when Israel removed its military forces from Gaza until Hamas expelled Fatah forces from the areas in June 2007, Abbas’s forces had full control over Gaza. During this time, his forces did nothing to prevent Hamas – and Fatah forces – from attacking Israel with thousands of mortars and rockets. His forces did nothing to prevent the massive transfer of advanced weaponry to Gaza from Egypt and Iran.

True, since his forces were routed in Gaza, Abbas has ordered them to work with the IDF in Judea and Samaria to prevent Hamas from overthrowing him. But at the same time, he continuously seeks to form a unity government with Hamas.

He funds Hamas. He glorifies its terrorists. And he refuses to condemn their attacks against Israel.

Moreover, while ordering his men to help the IDF to protect him from Hamas, he leads the diplomatic war against Israel internationally. The goals of that war are to harm Israel’s economy and deny Israel the right to self-defense.

Our political leadership’s reluctance to stand up to the army is understandable. It is nearly impossible to order the IDF to take action it opposes.

At some point though, the government is going to rein in our insubordinate generals. Fortunately, the government doesn’t need the IDF to deal with Abbas and destroy his capacity to foment and direct attacks against Israel.

Our elected officials have the authority to go after the twin foundations Abbas’s terrorist offensive on their own. Those foundations are the incitement and the financial incentives he uses to motivate Palestinians to attack Jews.

On the financial end, the Knesset should pass two laws to dry up the wells of terrorism financing.

First, the Knesset should pass a law stipulating that all property belonging to terrorists, and all property used by terrorists to plan and carry out attacks, will be seized by the government and transferred to the victims of their attacks.

Moreover, all compensation paid to terrorists and their relatives pursuant to their attacks will be seized by the government and transferred to their victims.

The second law would relate to Israel’s practice – anchored in the Oslo Accords that Abbas revoked last month at the UN – of transferring tax revenues to the PA. The Knesset should pass a law prohibiting those transfers unless the Defense Minister certifies that the PA has ceased all terrorism- related activities including incitement, organization, financing, directing and glorifying terrorist attacks and terrorists.

Until he so certifies, all revenues collected should be used to pay PA debts to Israeli institutions and to compensate victims of Palestinian terrorism.

As for the incitement, the government needs to go to the source of the problem – Abbas’s blood libel regarding Jewish rights to the Temple Mount.

As things stand, Abbas is exacting a price in human lives for his obscene anti-Jewish propaganda about our “filthy feet defiling” the most sacred site in Judaism. By barring elected officials from visiting the Temple Mount, not only is the government failing to exact a price for Abbas’ obscene propaganda. It is rewarding him and so inviting Abbas to expand his rhetorical offensive.

To remedy the situation an opposite approach is required. Rather than bar elected officials from visiting the Temple Mount, Netanyahu should encourage them to do so. Just as he sent a letter to Jordan’s King Abdullah telling him that Israel is preserving the status quo on the Temple Mount, so he should write a similar letter to our lawmakers.

In his letter, Netanyahu should say that in keeping with the status quo, which protects the rights of members of all religions to freely enter the Temple Mount, so he commits the government to protect the rights of all believers of all religions to ascend the Mount.

The Palestinian terrorist onslaught now raging against us is not spontaneous. Abbas has incited it and is directing it. To stop this assault, Israel must finally take action against Abbas and his machinery of war. Anything less can bring us nothing more than a temporary respite in the carnage that Abbas will be free to end whenever he wishes.

http://www.CarolineGlick.com

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Don’t Hate Jews – Fiercely Join Them against Terrorism

John R. Houk

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Abbas must be stopped

The Jerusalem Post Founded in 1932 by Gershon Agron. Is the leading Israeli English newspaper

About Caroline B. Glick

I grew up in Chicago’s ultra-liberal Hyde Park neighborhood. Hyde Park’s most famous resident is Barack Obama.

I joined the Israel Defense Forces that summer and served as an officer for five and a half years.

In 1997 and 1998 I served as assistant foreign policy advisor Binyamin Neta[n]yahu during his first stint as Prime Minister.

After I finished graduate school I returned to Israel and …READ THE REST

Iran Nuke Deal Hubris will Eventually Succumb to True American Spirit

John R. Houk

Yesterday I posted “Get on Board with Anti-Iran Nuke Deal Rally in DC”. I posted about the rally not realizing that on Wednesday it was reported that Maryland’s Sen. Barbara Mikulski became the 34th senator to support Obama’s nuclear deal. Not a few pointed out that out to me yesterday after I had posted. One detractor of whom I have immense respect for his analytical acumen conversed with me via a comment interaction over some Facebook groups.

All that my detractor share was categorically accurate. I was left only refuting him with a football analogy to wit: The game is never over until the clock hits zeros. I alluded in hope that a massive public outcry to the Senators selling America and Israel out to a nuclear armed Iran could change enough Senators or Congressmen to override Obama’s veto just as the clock ran out.

I called this thinking “hope”. My learned detractor probably correctly called the thinking a fantasy. Even if “fantasy” is a more apt description than “hope,” I was disturbed with the futility that hope was useless. I still finding hopeless futility disturbing.

Just think how futile many American colonialists and British lawmakers believed an American rebellion would work to change the oppression slowly overshadowing colonial British citizens. Indeed, I wonder how many signers of the Declaration of Independence felt they signed their own death warrant gloomily expecting the British military to brutally hunt down the minority rebellious colonialists and execute them for treason via the noose or firing squad. The last sentence of the Declaration of Independence:

“And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” (The Declaration of Independence; The Heritage Foundation (analysis on First Principles Series)

The 56 signers knew that death was probable but signed anyway.

Mark Folkertsma writes about how many of the signers and family members indeed met nefarious ends at the hands of the British during the fight for independence:

… Pretty heady stuff for a group of heroes who knew that their actions exposed them all to charges of treason, for which the penalty was swift and sure execution at the hands of the colonial masters whose authority they defied.

Indeed, during the revolutionary war that followed this event, almost all of the signers of the Declaration of Independence lost their property; many lost their families or saw them waste away in imperial prisons. More than a few died in infamy, penniless, and forgotten. All for the sake of the Declaration; all for the sake of their “sacred honor.”

…

Is there a way out? Yes, and that way is the Declaration of Independence. After all, a decent respect for its moral principles – God-authored rights, equality before the law, contract theory of government – demands our attention, claims our reverence. And, in the final analysis, our sacred honor. This truly is the Spirit of ’76. (A Decent Respect: Renewing the Spirit of ’76; By Marvin Folkertsma; The Patriot Post; 7/1/14)

It is my belief that the American Spirit birthed in 1776 is a part of our mental DNA. If that DNA fails to act in one of those Dem Senators and Congressmen that have committed themselves to the delusions (or worse – the nefarious intentions) of President Barack Hussein Obama pertaining to Iran. AND follows through with an idiotic commitment that will end in the nuclear warhead arming of Iran, then Americans who love their Liberty more than a Left Wing utopian illusions will again arise to a decent respect for moral principles willing to pledge their sacred honor even in war to correct the wrongs of America’s most Leftist President, then:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. (1st paragraph of Declaration of Independence 1776)

It is in light of this indomitable American spirit that I share the words of an Israeli citizen born in the USA – Caroline Glick.

JRH 9/4/15

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Column One: A glorious defeat

By CAROLINE B. GLICK

July 3, 2015

Jerusalem Post

Over the past seven years Washington has sent a steady stream of senior officials to “oversee joint Israeli-American efforts” regarding Iran.

Sometimes you have to fight battles you cannot win because fighting – regardless of the outcome – advances a larger cause.

Israel’s fight against the nuclear deal the major powers, led by US President Barack Obama concluded with Iran was such a battle.

The battle’s futility became clear on July 20, just six days after it was concluded in Vienna.

On July 20, the US administration anchored the deal – which paves the way for Iran to become a nuclear power and enriches the terrorism-sponsoring ayatollahs to the tune of $150 billion – in a binding UN Security Council resolution. Once the resolution passed, the deal became unstoppable.

Most of the frozen funds that comprise the $150 [billion] would have been released regardless of congressional action. And the nonproliferation regime the US developed over the past 70 years was upended the moment the deal was concluded in Vienna.

The fight in Congress itself probably couldn’t have succeeded even if the administration hadn’t made an end run around the lawmakers at the Security Council.

After Sen. Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, passed the law obligating Obama to secure the support of a mere third of the members of either House to implement his nuclear deal, its implementation was a foregone conclusion. The US Constitution gives sole power to approve international treaties to the Senate and requires a minimum of two-thirds approval for passage. Corker turned the Constitution on its head when he went forward with his bill. Far from curbing Obama’s executive overreach, Corker gave Obama unprecedented power to enact his radical, reckless nuclear agenda.

So if the fight against the deal was doomed to fail, why did the Israeli government decide to fight it for all it was worth? And why is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still fighting it even though there is no longer any way to stop Obama from enabling Iran to sprint across the nuclear finish line? By fighting Obama’s nuclear deal, Israel seeks to advance two larger efforts. First, it uses the battle to expand its capacity to act without the US to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Second, it is shaping its relations with the US both for the duration of Obama’s presidency and for the day after he leaves office.

As far as Iran’s nuclear program is concerned, Obama’s deal has not impacted Israel’s options for preventing the mullahs from getting the bomb.

Even before the US betrayed Israel, its Arab allies and its own national security interests and closed a deal that will transform Iran into a nuclear power and a regional hegemon, there was no chance that the Americans would take action to prevent Iran from developing atomic warheads.

That prospect was taken off the table in November 2007. The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program published that month falsely – and scandalously – asserted that Tehran abandoned its nuclear weapons program at the end of 2003.

The NIE was a bureaucratic coup. CIA analysts, notorious since the 1970s for their biased and politicized analyses, used the falsified NIE to block then-president George W. Bush from dealing with Iran. After losing the public’s support for the war in Iraq, and after failing to find Saddam’s WMD (which magically fell into the hands of Islamic State 11 years after the US invasion), Bush was powerless to oppose an official assessment of the intelligence community that claimed Iran was not a nuclear proliferator.

As for Obama, in early 2008, even before he secured the Democratic presidential nomination, he announced that he wanted to negotiate with then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

At no time since was there any evidence supporting the notion that Obama would lift a finger to prevent Iran from going nuclear.

In other words, for the past eight years it has been apparent to everyone willing to see that Israel has but option for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

By fighting so strenuously against Obama’s nuclear deal, Israel improved its ability to carry out a military strike against Iran’s nuclear installations in two ways.

First, it removed the most serious domestic obstacle to carrying out such a strike.

Last week’s publication of audio recordings of former defense minister Ehud Barak discussing of Iran’s nuclear program revealed that for the past several years, Israel’s military and intelligence brass have blocked operations against Iran’s nuclear installations three times. In 2010, 2011 and 2012 the IDF chief of General Staff and senior generals supported by hesitant cabinet members refused to carry out instructions they received from Netanyahu and Barak to prepare to carry out such a strike.

There is no doubt that one of the main reasons they opposed lawful instructions was their faith in Obama’s security pledges.

For their part, the Americans did their best to subvert the authority of Israel’s elected leadership.

Over the past seven years Washington has sent a steady stream of senior officials to “oversee joint Israeli-American efforts” regarding Iran. It is now obvious that this “unprecedented cooperation” was never aimed at strengthening Israel against Iran. Rather, its aim has been to erode the government’s power to make independent decisions regarding Iran’s nuclear installations.

Had Netanyahu kept his criticism of Obama’s decision to give Iran a free hand to develop nuclear weapons quiet, the generals might have shrugged their shoulders and expressed gratitude for the shiny new weapons Obama will throw at them to “compensate” for giving nukes to a regime sworn to annihilate the country.

By making his opposition public, Netanyahu alerted the nation to the dangers. The top commanders can no longer pretend that US security guarantees are credible. Now they will be forced to kick their psychological addiction to worthless American security guarantees, accept reality and act accordingly.

Better eight years late than never.

The Americans weren’t the only ones paying attention to Israel’s fight. Israel’s Arab neighbors also saw how Netanyahu and Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer left no stone unturned in their efforts to convince Democratic lawmakers to oppose it. And the regional implications are already becoming clear.

As the Saudis’ willingness to stand with Israel in public to oppose this deal has shown, our neighbors have been deeply impressed by the diplomatic courage Israel has shown. If and when Israel strikes Iran’s nuclear installations, our willingness to openly oppose the administration will weigh in our favor. It will impact our neighbors’ willingness to cooperate in action aimed at removing Iran’s nuclear sword from their necks and ours.

By fighting the deal, Israel has also worked to shape our relations with the US in a favorable way both in the short and long term.

Obama has another year and four months in office. (503 days, but who’s counting?) Even before the fight over his nuclear deal began in earnest, Obama made clear that he intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the US-Israel alliance and to weaken Israel internationally.

In the first instance, his Democratic and progressive surrogates’ anti-Semitic assaults against New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, and the Justice Department’s coincidental indictment of pro-Israel New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez communicated a clear message to Democratic lawmakers: Any Democrat who supports Israel against Obama will be targeted.

By acting in this way, Obama has communicated the clear goal of transforming support for Israel into the foreign policy equivalent of opposing abortion: a Republicans-only position.

Internationally, there can be little doubt that until Obama leaves office, he will seek to harm Israel and the UN. He may as well seek to harm our economy by quietly instituting administrative trade barriers with the US and Europe.

Israel’s fight against Obama’s nuclear deal has diminished Obama’s ability to use his full power to harm it while preparing the ground for relations to be repaired under his successor.

Until Netanyahu spoke before the joint houses of Congress in March, Obama’s nuclear deal was largely outside the American discourse. The fierce public debate began only after Netanyahu’s address. True, on Wednesday Obama got the support of his 34th Democratic senator and so blocked Israel’s efforts to convince Congress to vote down the deal. But his victory will be Pyrrhic.

Obama’s success will backfire first and foremost because thanks to Netanyahu’s move to spearhead the public debate in the US, today two-thirds of Americans oppose the deal. Since Iran will waste no time proving just how devastating a mistake Obama and his fellow Democrats have just made, Obama’s success makes him far less free to enact further steps against Israel than he was before the deal was concluded. The public no longer will give him the benefit of the doubt.

Moreover, since the deal is as bad as its opponents say it is, and given that most Americans oppose it, Obama’s successor will face no impediments in canceling the deal and adopting a new policy towards Israel and Iran.

Then there are Obama’s Democratic followers in Congress.

Today some commentators argue that Obama’s victory over opponents of his nuclear deal – first and foremost AIPAC – spells the demise of the pro-Israel lobby in the US.

Thankfully, they are mistaken.

Just as it failed to prevent then-president Ronald Reagan from selling AWACs to Saudi Arabia in 1981, so AIPAC had no chance of preventing Obama from moving ahead with his Iran deal.

AIPAC has never had the power to defeat a president intent on advancing an anti-Israel policy.

We will only be able to measure AIPAC’s power after the 2016 elections.

Given that the nuclear pact will fail, there will be plenty of Democrats challengers who will be eager to use their Democratic incumbent opponents’ support for Obama’s nuclear madness against them. AIPAC’s public fight against the deal has set the conditions for it to extract a political price from its supporters who preferred Obama to US national security.

If AIPAC extracts a price from key Democratic lawmakers who played crucial roles in approving the nuclear deal with Iran, it will prevent Obama from turning support for Israel into a partisan issue and emerge strengthened from the fight.

On Wednesday, after Maryland’s Sen. Barbara Mikulski became the 34th senator to support Obama’s nuclear deal, PBS’s senior anchorwoman Gwen Ifill tweeted, “Take that, Bibi.”

Obama’s win is Bibi’s loss. Bibi failed to convince 12 Democratic senators and 44 Democratic congressmen to vote against the head of their party. But by fighting against this deal, Netanyahu removed the main obstacle that kept Israel from taking action that will prevent Iran from going nuclear. He reduced Obama’s power to harm Israel.

The fight strengthened American and American- Jewish opposition to the nuclear deal, paving the way for a Democratic renewal after Obama leaves office. And finally, Israel’s public battle against Obama’s deal paved the way its abrogation by his successor.

All in all, a rather glorious defeat.

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Iran Nuke Deal Hubris will Eventually Succumb to True American Spirit

John R. Houk

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Column One: A glorious defeat

Caroline’s website: http://carolineglick.com/

About Caroline B. Glick

I grew up in Chicago’s ultra-liberal Hyde Park neighborhood. Hyde Park’s most famous resident is Barack Obama.

I joined the Israel Defense Forces that summer and served as an officer for five and a half years.

In 1997 and 1998 I served as assistant foreign policy advisor Binyamin Netanyahu during his first stint as Prime Minister.

After I finished graduate school I returned to Israel and began writing at Makor Rishon newspaper, (Hebrew). I served as … READ THE REST

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