Joe Biden Versus the Israeli People

JONATHAN S. TOBIN  COMMENTARY APR. 19, 2016

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/israel/joe-biden-versus-israeli-people/

President Obama sent Vice President Joe Biden to address a J Street dinner last night and the message delivered to the left-wing lobby wasn’t subtle. After a diatribe blasting the government of Israel, Biden praised a young left-wing member of the Knesset in attendance at the event. Turning to Labor MK Stav Shaffir, Biden compared her to a young version of himself and then expressed the following wish:

May your views begin to once again become the majority opinion in the Knesset.

While it is a curious thing for one government of a democratic nation to express an opinion about the verdict of the people in another democratic nation, it was nevertheless a rare moment of honesty from the Obama administration about Israel. As much as the problems between Washington and Jerusalem have been hyped as the product of the dysfunctional relationship between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, the truth is that the disconnect between the two governments isn’t really about two men that don’t like each other. The administration’s problem isn’t so much with Netanyahu as it is with the Israeli people who continue to reject their advice about policy and who should run their country.

To be fair, these criticisms were couched in terms that reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to Israeli security and the maintenance of the alliance between the two nations. But when coupled with the sort of even-handed approach to the Middle East conflict that Biden — who has traded on his claims of decades of friendship with Israel in order to bolster Obama’s criticisms of Netanyahu — it’s easy to see that what really bothers Washington about the situation.

According to Biden, the problem in the region is that “there is no will for peace” among Israelis or Palestinians. His argument was that both the Netanyahu government and the Palestinian Authority were equally responsible for the lack of progress. Their actions, he said, meant, “the trust that is necessary for peace is fractured on both sides.”

Feeding the liberal J Street audience what they wanted to hear, Biden excoriated settlements in the West Bank as “counterproductive” and a threat to Israel’s continuance as both a Jewish and democratic state.

The wisdom of placing some settlements in heavily Arab areas in the West Bank is one on which Israelis are divided. But the notion that the settlements as a whole or any building going on inside them are the real obstacles to peace is a myth. Even the Obama administration has made it clear that it expects that the bulk of the settlement population located in blocs near the ’67 lines and, in Jerusalem, will remain inside Israel in any theoretical peace agreement. Almost all of the “new settlements” construction that Washington deplores is going on inside those areas, making population growth there as irrelevant to an accord as building in Arab towns about which nobody cares.

The problem with Biden’s thinking and that of his J Street cheering section is that the reason why there is no peace has nothing to do with settlements and everything to do with the Palestinians’ refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders might be drawn.

Three times in the last 16 years, Israel offered the Palestinians a state that would include almost all of the West Bank, Gaza, and a share of Jerusalem. Three times they turned it down. Even the Netanyahu government that Biden and Obama deplore, agreed to a two-state solution and offered to pull back from the West Bank in the negotiations sponsored by Secretary of State John Kerry (who was also at the J Street dinner). But PA leader Mahmoud Abbas refused to negotiate seriously and then blew up the talks by making a unity pact with Hamas and seeking to evade the U.S.-led talks by going to the United Nations to get recognition without first making peace with Israel.

Of course, Biden is right that there is a “lack of will” on the part of the overwhelming majority of Israelis to do as Obama demands and to withdraw from the West Bank without the Palestinians declaring an end to the conflict for all time. But it is not because they want peace any less than Biden or the liberal American Jews who support J Street. It’s because, unlike Biden and J Street, they have been paying attention to what has happened in the last 23 years since the Oslo Accords initiated the peace process.

The Israeli people know their governments have taken the risks for peace that Obama urges on them and about which Biden claims to feel “overwhelming frustration.” But instead of trading land for peace, they bartered territory for terror. It’s not just the fact that Yasir Arafat answered Ehud Barak’s first two offers of statehood with a terrorist war of attrition and that Abbas rejected a similar offer from Ehud Olmert in 2008. Rather, the precedent that looms over every Israeli discussion about the Palestinians is that of Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.

Sharon did what every critic of Israel has always urged the Jewish state to do. He pulled every soldier, settler, and settlement out of Gaza and handed it all over to the Palestinians. But instead of becoming an incubator peace and development (aided by the purchase of Israeli greenhouses by American philanthropists), Gaza descended into chaos and was soon taken over by Hamas. It is now an independent Palestinian state in all but name and one that is dedicated to one proposition only: continuing the war against Israeli “occupation.” In this case “occupation would seem to be meaningless since the Israelis left Gaza but what Hamas wants is to end the “occupation” of not just the West Bank but that of pre-1967 Israel. As surveys of Palestinian opinion have shown, the majority of West Bank residents shares the same goal and agrees that bloody terror attacks on Jews, whether settlers or cosmopolitan Tel Aviv city-dwellers are justifiable and laudable.

If Israelis don’t trust the Palestinians, it is because of that precedent and the fact that the moderates of the PA, upon whom Jewish leftists and the likes of Biden regularly fawn, also applaud and encourage terror. During Biden’s recent visit to the region, a non-Jewish American army veteran was murdered during a rampage by a Palestinian terrorist in Jaffa not far away from whether the vice president was dining. But not even that was enough to force Abbas to issue a condemnation of the attack. To the contrary, the PA and its official media continue to foment violence by lauding terrorists and spreading canards about Israel seeking to harm the mosques on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

As Biden ought to know, there were majorities in the Knesset for concessions to the Palestinians in the past. Indeed, the Israeli people supported the Oslo Accords and would probably embrace any new agreement if it indicated that the Palestinians were offering real peace. But those majorities evaporated after the second intifada and the disastrous retreat from Gaza. The latest intifada and Abbas’s support for terror have marginalized the views embraced by Biden and J Street within Israeli politics. Indeed, even the head of the Labor Party opposition in the Knesset — the leader of Shaffir’s party — has indicated that the two-state solution is impossible for the foreseeable future because there is no Palestinian partner for peace.

Why can’t J Street and the administration see what the overwhelming majority of Israelis see? Perhaps they are too blinded by political bias and by their illusions about the Palestinians. Perhaps they are also too ideologically committed to their critique of Netanyahu to be able to realize that his three consecutive election victories is the consequence of Palestinian choices — which were illustrated yesterday by a bus bombing in Jerusalem and the discovery of a new terror tunnel that reached into Israel from Gaza — about which Israelis have no control. Israelis understand that until a sea change in Palestinian political culture occurs, there is nothing to do but to manage the conflict, and many Americans can’t seem to be able to forgive them for this realistic attitude or to understand that the verdict of Israeli democracy deserves as much respect as U.S. elections.

As Biden’s speech indicated, U.S. policy and the views of people like Bernie Sanders and J Street are out of touch with the reality of the Middle East when it comes to their critique of Netanyahu. More importantly, they are angry with Israelis for preferring common sense to the advice of American liberals who have the hubristic notion that they can save Israel from itself. Until these liberals sober up and accept reality, Israelis will have to live with their disdain.

B'TSELEM: King David should be court-martialed for killing Goliath..."

TRIBUTE TO A TRUE AMERICAN HERO: 

COLONEL EMMETT SMITH "CYCLONE" DAVIS  1918 - 2015 

1.     From the Deseret News ,Nov. 6, 2015

Colonel Emmett Smith "Cyclone" Davis  1918 - 2015 

 A great warrior has "slipped the surly bonds of earth" and left this mortal sphere behind. How the heavens must be rejoicing to receive this man! Cyclone endured many health trials in his later years but met them all with the same courage and fortitude with which he lived his entire life. Finally, in the wee hours of the morning on November 3rd, his great heart gave out and he passed into the loving arms of his wife who had visited him earlier in the day. 

Cyclone, the fifth of eight children, was born on December 12, 1918 in Roosevelt, Utah to John Henry Davis and Nora LaRena Smith Davis. His first few summers were spent living in a tent near the Avintaquin Canyon as his father herded cattle and sheep. The family moved to Duschesne and then to Salt Lake City where Cyclone graduated from East High School and attended the University of Utah. In 1939 the family moved to California and settled in Compton. 

In March of 1939, Cyclone met and fell in love with the beautiful Marjorie Gwen Poulton. Their courtship was interrupted by World War II, but Cyclone carried her picture on his kneepad throughout the war. After the war, Marjorie and Cyclone were married in Salt Lake on January 23rd, 1946.

Cyclone joined the U.S. Army Air Corps on April 5. 1940 and was stationed at Wheeler Field, not far from Pearl Harbor. It was Col. Davis's prowess as a dogfighter that earned him the nickname, "Cyclone." When Wheeler was bombed during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Cyclone pulled four planes out of the fire, broke down the door to the armament depot to get guns and ammunition for his plane, and was one of the few pilots to get airborne during the attack.

 He commanded the 35th Squadron and the 8th Fighter Group during World War II. Both were known as "Cyclone's Flying Circus." Cyclone may have been the only pilot to fly missions the first day of the war as well as one of the last missions of the war. On August 10, 1945, the day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, he led 62 P-38s to bomb Kumamoto. Col. Davis and the 8th Fighter Group escorted the Japanese envoy to Manila to arrange the surrender protocol and were later part of the Army of Occupation in Japan. 

After the war, he was a test pilot for the Air Force at Eglin Field in Florida. In November of 1950, he commanded the Air Proving Ground Test Team in Korea. In 1951 he flew in the fabled Bendix Trophy Race, finishing second. During his career, he served as a base commander, commanded five different squadrons, he was a group or wing commander six times, he commanded an air division, and held several high level staff positions. He piloted over one hundred different types and models of aircraft, flying everything from bi-wings to mach 2 jet aircraft. He was decorated forty-five times, including the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross with one oak leaf cluster, the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters, the Air Force Commendation Medal with two oak leaf clusters, and the Presidential Unit Citation with two oak leaf clusters. 

He served in the Air Force for 23 years, his last tour of duty being at the Pentagon. He retired in 1962 and moved to Palos Verdes, CA where he began his second career working for Hughes Aircraft Company. There he helped develop the first smart bombing systems and implemented the installation of the new Hughes radar into the F-15. He became reactivated in the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and in 1966 he and Marjorie and their three children were sealed in the Los Angeles Temple. He served his church as a Sunday School teacher, ward and stake missionary, high councilman, and temple worker. In 1972, the family moved to Westlake Village, CA where Cyclone and Marjorie lived happily for many years. In 2005, Cyclone finally fulfilled his lifelong promise to his adored wife to return to her beloved Utah. They built a home in Highland with their oldest daughter and lived there the rest of their lives.

Cyclone is an American hero, a national treasure. It is because of him and people like him that we are a free country. He lived a life that most could only imagine. He met with presidents, royalty, heads of state and many other dignitaries. He led multitudes, influenced thousands, and saved and changed lives. He has given everything he has, spiritually, physically, and temporally, to any and all who were ever in need. He is truly a great disciple of Jesus Christ. He loves fiercely and deeply. And he derived immeasurable joy from his beautiful wife, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He was always singing a song, doing a little dance, telling a story, composing a poem, holding a child, and loving and cherishing Marjorie. He will be desperately missed by his family. He was the strong one who would always pick you up, lift you high, and hold you for as long as you needed it. 

Cyclone was preceded in death by his beloved Marjorie who died December 4, 2014, and by his parents and siblings: Thelma (Ted), Lela, Jack, Con, Red (Rainy), Zeke (Erlene), and K. He is survived by his devoted children, Dr. John Tucker Davis, Pamela Lyn Mull (Gary), Kimberlee Davis Richards (Bob) and K's wife, Mary. He has 11 grandchildren here and one beyond the veil, 11 great grandchildren, as well as many beloved nieces and nephews. 

2.     From The Salt Lake Tribune November 4, 2015 1

Emmett 'Cyclone' Davis, Utahn who flew from Pearl Harbor through Korean War, dies at 96

Davis commanded a flight group at age 25 and retired as a colonel.

Emmett Davis, an eastern Utah native who was one of the first American pilots in the air during the attack on Pearl Harbor, bombed Japan shortly before its surrender and then flew jets in the Korean War, died Tuesday. He was 96.

Davis' son, Tucker Davis, said his father died at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray where he had been receiving treatment for circulation problems. Emmett Davis, who retired from the Air Force in 1963 with the rank of colonel, had lived in Highland.

Davis joined the Air Force's predecessor, the U.S. Army Air Corps, in 1940. The next year, he was assigned to Wheeler Field on the island of Oahu. There, he invented a spiral maneuver to flummox his airborne adversaries.

A training opponent said flying against him was like flying against a cyclone. "Cyclone" would be painted on the side of Davis' aircraft, and comrades and admirers called him by that name for the rest of his life.

The night of Dec. 6, 1941, then-2nd Lt. Davis and his comrades had gone to a dance and stayed up late partying and playing poker. When Japan struck, Davis was asleep on a friend's daybed at Wheeler Field, about 16 miles north of Pearl Harbor.

According to a 2011 account he gave The Tribune, Davis' roommate shook him and said, "Cyclone, wake up, the Japanese are here."

Davis looked out a window and saw a Japanese dive bomber. Davis and another officer raced in a convertible toward the airfield. On the way, they were strafed by a Japanese plane.

At the airfield, personnel began moving U.S. fighters, lined up wingtip to wingtip, out of the flight line to keep them from burning in a spreading fire. Davis used an ax to break into the armory and load his plane with machine guns.The battle was largely over when Davis took off in a P-40 fighter only to be shot at by the U.S. Navy. Davis radioed to whoever was listening to quit firing at him.

Davis flew the duration of World War II in multiple fighters. He became a lieutenant colonel at just 25 years old. He was credited with three kills, though he claimed seven, and earned the Silver Star and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

The same day or the day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki — there's a discrepancy as to which — Davis lead 62 P-38s that dropped napalm on Kumamoto.

"The two big bombs got their attention, and my 62 P-38s brought them to the table," he told The Tribune in 2012.

In his last mission of World War II, Davis flew among the aircraft that escorted the Japanese delegation to surrender to Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Emmett Smith Davis was born Dec. 12, 1918, in Roosevelt, the fifth of eight children born to John Henry Davis and Nora LaRena Smith. His father had joined Torrey's Rough Riders, the Wyoming infantry that went to the Spanish-American War. The family moved to Duchesne when Davis was in the third grade.

The husband of Davis' fourth grade teacher flew a mail plane.

"I used to go up and watch him fly that old airplane, and I guess that was really when I got struck with being an aviator," Davis told KUED in 2006.

After the seventh grade, the family moved to Salt Lake City. Davis went to Roosevelt Junior High School then East High School and the University of Utah. He joined the Air Corps cadet program in April 1940.

After Pearl Harbor, Davis was sent to Australia and New Guinea. In New Guinea, he survived a bout of malaria that ravaged his squadron.

When he took control of the 8th Fighter Group, comprised of three squadrons and about 4,000 men, "Cyclone's Flying Circus" was painted on a sign at the group's base.

Davis knew Marjorie Gwen Poulton, of Salt Lake City, before he left for the Air Corps. They married Jan. 23, 1946.

Davis remained in the military as the Air Corps became the Air Force. He commanded a team that was to introduce and evaluate the new F-84 and F-86 in Korea. Tucker Davis said his father wasn't supposed to fly combat missions himself, but he sneaked into a few missions in the F-86.

In 1957, Tucker Davis said, Davis crash-landed an F-100 in New Mexico and was nearly killed. When Davis retired, he had a post at the Pentagon.

Davis and his family moved to Southern California, where he was employed by Hughes Aircraft Co. working on bombing and radar systems. In 2005, Marjorie and Emmett Davis moved to Highland.

Marjorie Davis died in December. Besides Tucker Davis, Davis is survived by two daughters, Pamela Lyn Mull and Kimberlee Davis Richards, and seven grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren.

Davis told KUED that he remembers being a leader from the time he began playing with neighborhood boys."I don't know if I was natural born, but I always assumed [leading] was my job," Davis said.

• 
  

3.     From youtube “plane talk” {a talk by “Cyclone”  Davis 2004}

Plane Talk - Colonel Emmett "Cyclone" Davis 1/3 2004 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CznGMd1Mi8c&ab_channel=AerospaceUtah

Plane Talk - Colonel Emmett "Cyclone" Davis 2/3 2004

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1_kRifB6TY&ebc=ANyPxKprvzx87IxP_jp2ECSIJeF_gcD3zvw322KiXVT_XzpbXlrkVOeas8MYpFL4HkMaJnTorhf5Dc7mXffNG4UDfe6L7YD_8A&ab_channel=AerospaceUtah

Plane Talk - Colonel Emmett "Cyclone" Davis 3/3 2004

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8drG2G03Eo&ebc=ANyPxKqTjMIoDtpDTzx9agdOnAu1Fd34mtwgc0eJVf-ebuQ29Em6-A_szcMru_YEBVrcSbkwPdrQ118Hib2nZOgQ7qBUvD5pPw&ab_channel=AerospaceUtah

Column One: Inconvenient genocide

By Caroline B Glick, JPOST

The Christian communities of Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon are well on the way to joining their Jewish cousins. The Jewish communities of these states predated Islam by a millennium, and were vibrant until the 20th century. But the Arab world’s war on the Jewish state, and more generally on Jews, wiped out the Jewish populations several decades ago.

And now the Christian communities, which like the Jews, predate Islam, are being targeted for eradication.

The ongoing genocide of Middle Eastern Christians at the hands of Sunni jihadists is a moral outrage. Does it also affect Israeli national interests? What do we learn from the indifference of Western governments – led by the Obama administration – to their annihilation? True, after years of deliberately playing down the issue and denying the problem, the Obama administration is finally admitting it exists.

Embarrassed by the US House of Representatives’ unanimous adoption of a resolution last month recognizing that Middle Eastern Christians are being targeted for genocide, the State Department finally acknowledged the obvious on March 25, when Secretary of State John Kerry stated that Islamic State is conducting a “genocide of Christians, Yazidis and Shi’ites.”

Kerry’s belated move, which State Department lawyers were quick to insist has no operational significance, raises two questions.

First, what took the Obama administration so long? Persecution of Christians in Iraq began immediately after the US-led coalition brought down Saddam Hussein in 2003. With the rise of Islamic State in 2012, the process of destroying the Christian community went into high gear. And now these ancient communities are on the brink of extinction.

In Iraq, Christians comprised 8 percent of the population in 2003. Today less than 1% of Iraqis are Christians. In Syria, the Christian community has lost between half and two-thirds of its members in the past five years.

One of the appalling aspects of ISIS’s deliberate, open targeting of Christians for destruction is how little resistance it has received from local Sunni populations. As Raymond Ibrahim from the David Horowitz Freedom Center has scrupulously documented, the local Sunnis have not stood up for their Christian neighbors, who have lived side-by-side with them for hundreds of years. Rather, in areas that have been conquered by ISIS, the local Sunnis have collaborated with their genocidal masters in raping and murdering Christian neighbors, plundering their property, destroying their churches, and driving them from their ancestral homes.

Although precise data is hard to come by, it is clear that thousands of Christians have been slaughtered. Thousands of Christian women and girls have been sold as sex slaves in ISIS slave markets, subjected to continuous, violent rape and beatings. Nuns and priests have been enslaved, crucified, mutilated, kidnapped and held for ransom, as have lay members of Christian communities. Christians have been burned alive.

For years, the administration said that the persecution doesn’t amount to genocide because according to ISIS’s propaganda, Christians are allowed to remain in their homes if they agree to live as dhimmis – that is, without any human rights, and subjected to confiscatory taxation.

But as Nina Shea from the Hudson Institute has reported, these claims were shown to be false in Mosul, Nineveh and other places where ISIS has claimed that such practices were instituted.

The jihadist genocide of Christians isn’t limited to Iraq and Syria. Boko Haram – ISIS’s affiliate in Nigeria – is undertaking a systematic campaign to annihilate Christianity in Africa. ISIS’s affiliates in Sinai and Libya have similarly targeted Christians, staging mass beheadings and other monstrous acts.

And of course, a region needn’t be under direct ISIS control for Christians to be targeted for destruction. The Easter massacre in Pakistan was further evidence that wherever radical Islamists gain power, they use it to murder Christians.

And as Larry Franklin from the Gatestone Institute noted in a recent article, the exodus of Christians from the Palestinian Authority is the direct consequence of deliberate persecution of Christians by the PA.

Given the prevalence of Christian persecution, why is the West – which is overwhelmingly Christian – so reticent about mentioning it? And why are Western leaders loathe to do anything to stop it? There are two ways to end genocide. First, you can defeat those conducting it on the battlefield.

If you destroy the forces conducting the genocide, then the genocide ends.

The second way you can stop genocide is by evacuating the targeted population and providing its members with refuge.

After stipulating that ISIS is carrying out a genocide, Kerry made clear that the US will not defeat ISIS to end it. Instead, Kerry said, “We must bear in mind… that the best response to genocide is a reaffirmation of the fundamental right to survive of every group targeted for destruction. What Daesh [ISIS] wants to erase, we must preserve. That requires defeating Daesh, but it also requires the rejection of discrimination and bigotry.”

Kerry then explained that the US’s plan is to cultivate the formation of a multicultural society in Syria. Given the brutal nature of the war, Kerry’s plan is tantamount to saying the US intends to defeat ISIS and rescue those it is currently exterminating by bringing unicorns and leprechauns to the slave markets of Raqqa. Substantively, Kerry’s plan is to deny Christians refuge, and to abandon them to the mercy of their murderers.

While delusional, Kerry’s statement was in line with the Obama administration’s timid, feckless military campaign against ISIS. Everyone knows that the US military could take down ISIS in a matter of weeks if Obama ordered it to do so.

But rather than act decisively, the US has limited its operations to timorous aerial bombing.

By conducting a barely there campaign, Obama tells the world that although he will be happy to take credit for any defeat ISIS suffers, he will not allow the US to lead the fight against the jihadist death machine.

As for providing refuge to the populations targeted with genocide, the raw data make clear that Obama does just the opposite. He is providing refuge for Sunni Muslims, who are not being targeted for genocide, which is being conducted by Sunni Muslims.

As Ibrahim has documented, although Christians made up 10% of the Syrian population in 2011, they comprise a mere 2.7% of the Syrian refugees the Obama administration has allowed into the US. And when presidential hopeful Senator Ted Cruz called for the US to provide refuge to Christians, who pose no security threat and are targeted with genocide and persecution while banning Muslim immigration, Obama accused him of bigotry.

Despite the fact that FBI Director James Comey told Congress that the US lacked the capacity to effectively screen Muslims from Syria for ties to jihadist groups, Obama said that a policy of saving those marked for extinction over those who come from the population conducting the genocide is “shameful,” and “not American.”

Beyond refusing to take the necessary steps to ensure that persecuted Christians are rescued from annihilation, the State Department has been rejecting visa requests from Christian activists and leaders from persecuted communities to visit the US to share information about their suffering with the American public. This, at the same time that the administration has welcomed Muslim jihad sympathizers, including Muslim Brotherhood members, to Washington.

For instance, last May, the State Department denied a visa to Sister Diana Momeka, an Iraqi nun and ISIS survivor. Momeka was the only Christian member of a delegation of persecuted minorities. Representatives of every other group received visas. It took a public outcry to force the State Department to reverse its decision.

Also last year, the State Department gave visas to all Muslim regional governors in northern Nigeria to participate in a conference sponsored by the US Institute of Peace. They denied a visa to the region’s only Christian governor, Jonah David Jang. Christian activists alleged that Jang was denied a visa because he spoke up to US officials about anti-Christian persecution in 12 states in northern Nigeria that have instituted Sharia law.

What accounts for this behavior? The answer is not ignorance, but ideologically- motivated bigotry. The Aid to the Church in Need organization explained in its 2015 report on Christian persecution, “Christians have been targeted [because]… Christianity [is seen] as a foreign ‘colonial’ import. Christians are seen as linked to the West, which is perceived as corrupt and exploitative.”

In another report, the group explained that the Western media has avoided covering the story of the Islamic genocide of Middle East Christians because of “misplaced embarrassment about the 19th-century colonial powers evangelizing ‘the natives’ in far flung places.”

In other words, Middle Eastern Christians, whose communities predate Islam, are targeted because they are perceived as Western implants.

And the West ignores their suffering, because the Left in the West perceives them as Western implants.

In both cases, prejudices, rooted on the one hand in jihadist Islam, and on the other hand in Western self-hatred and post-colonialism, reach the same bigoted conclusion: the only “authentic” people in the Middle East are Muslims.

Everybody else is a colonial implant. And as such, they deserve what they get.

This then brings us back to Israel, and the Jews.

The same ideological prejudice that refuses to recognize that the Islamic State is Islamic, refuses to recognize that jihad is unique to Islam, refuses to recognize that Christians as religious minorities are being targeted for annihilation, and refuses to recognize that the Christians of the Middle East are ancient peoples who have lived in their communities since the dawn of Christianity, also refuse to recognize the rights of the Jewish people as the indigenous people of the land of Israel.

This is the reason that Western governments, led by the Obama administration, are unwilling to defeat ISIS. This is why they are giving preference to Muslim asylum-seekers, who they are incapable of screening, over Christians, who it is unnecessary to screen.

This is the reason that the same governments are far more willing to attack Jews for living beyond the 1949 armistice lines, in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria – the cradle of Jewish civilization and the heartland of the land of Israel, than they are willing to end their support for the PA which sponsors and celebrates terrorism. This is why the same governments eagerly embrace every allegation of Israeli racism, real or imagined, while they ignore, or even fund racist Palestinian efforts to deny Jewish history, a history which leads to the inevitable conclusion that the Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel.

The reason Obama refuses to protect Middle East Christians from extinction is because he cannot rescue them – either on the ground or by ensuring they can flee to safety – without abandoning his ideological faith that the only “natives” of the Middle East are the Muslims.

Ted Belman - "How and why Obama screwed Israel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsWdKWEQI38&ab_channel=EladPessach

The Costanza Approach: President Obama should adopt the Costanza approach in matters of national security and simply do the opposite of what his instincts tell him to do

By Michael Makovsky and William Kristol - 4/1/16

http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-costanza-approach/article/2001794

In a famous episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza concludes that every instinct he's had, every decision he's made, has been wrong and that he should henceforth do the opposite of what he had routinely been doing. He implements this new philosophy and promptly manages to entice an attractive woman to go out with him by introducing himself as unemployed and living with his parents. He then gets a job with the New York Yankees by telling off its imperious and temperamental owner, George Steinbrenner.

We've long thought President Obama should adopt the Costanza approach in matters of national security and simply do the opposite of what his instincts tell him to do, since his policies toward Iran, Israel, ISIS, Russia, and others seem textbook studies of how not to conduct foreign policy. But Jeffrey Goldberg's recent Atlantic article, "The Obama Doctrine," relating a series of interviews with the president, makes it clear that a form of "Oppositism" or "Antitheticalism" (if you will permit a slight butchering of the English language) already defines Obama's foreign policy. For Obama's foreign policy is less about what he stands for than what he rejects-namely, much of what America has stood for and done over many decades. Obama's doctrine, such as it is, consists of a few simplistic ideas that emerge from a shallow and ideological disdain for the American past. It marks a radical departure from the outlook of every recent American president, Democrat and Republican.

In December 2013, after the president had announced the interim nuclear agreement that paved the way for last July's Iran deal, we compared Obama to Clement Attlee, the British Labour party leader and prime minister following World War II. Attlee believed that the history of British foreign policy constituted a "mess of centuries." He thought a new era had dawned, in which guidelines derived from a study of history no longer applied and the old power politics were anachronistic. Attlee quickly sought to move beyond the "mess of centuries" by putting most of his faith in the new United Nations while withdrawing troops precipitously and pell-mell from much of the world.

The Goldberg article makes abundantly clear that Obama is following in Attlee's footsteps. Consider this passage from Obama: "We have history. We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be a mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening, and understand the source of other people's suspicions."

Obama has always betrayed a slim and selective knowledge of American history, but what he does know, or thinks he knows, involves American sins abroad. In his view, American foreign policy for decades has been too aggressive and militaristic and has been on what he considers the wrong side of history, whether in overthrowing Mossadegh in Iran in the 1950s, waging war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, or intervening in Iraq in the 2000s. American foreign policy has been, Obama thinks, counterproductive to U.S. interests and bad for the world. And it has created unnecessary suspicions and enemies.

And so President Obama has sought from the very beginning to reverse many aspects of American foreign policy. He believes it vital that we seek to reassure enemies (made, as he sees it, unnecessarily), while focusing almost exclusively on diplomacy, without resort to threats such as sanctions and military action. The key is to reassure enemies: With Russia that meant a "reset"; in South America it meant reaching out to leftist thug regimes in Venezuela and Cuba; and in the Middle East it meant embracing radical Shiite and Sunni Muslim regimes, whether the Erdogan government in Turkey or its sister Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt headed by Mohamed Morsi or the Khamenei regime in Iran. It has meant a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq and virtual withdrawal after a brief intervention in Libya.

The flip side of this has been Obama's disregard of America's traditional allies, about not one of whom he has a kind word to say. The Europeans and Arabs are "free riders," the Sunni Arabs help foment anti-American terrorism and can't get their own houses in order, a former French prime minister is a braggart, the British prime minister David Cameron became distracted after the Libyan war, the Israeli prime minister was condescending in trying to explain Israel's strategic challenges to a man who rose up from humble roots to become president, and indeed he no longer likes the demagogic Turkish leader Erdogan (whose country is, if not exactly an ally, a NATO member).

Obama's policy toward Iran is fundamental to his radical approach. For decades, American policy toward the Middle East was founded on three main principles: the security of Israel; the secure flow of oil from the Persian Gulf and support for those key oil-producing Arab regimes; and weakening if not defeating radical Islam. An assertive Islamic Republic of Iran stood in the way of all these strategic objectives. So President Obama reversed course and sought to reassure Iran at the expense of our traditional allies. He sought daylight from Israel and expressed initial support for uprisings in Arab countries that had been aligned with us while opposing the mass antiregime demonstrations in Tehran. As he explained to Goldberg, he wanted Saudi Arabia and Iran "to share the neighborhood," which would suggest an effectively neutral U.S. approach.

Most of all, he sought a deal with Iran, without consultation with our traditional allies who were most threatened by a stronger Iran on a path to nuclear weapons. Obama's announcement of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and its implementation were telling. When he unveiled the deal last July, Obama declared in his very first sentence that the United States with its partners "achieved something that decades of animosity has not"-apparently ascribing as much blame to the United States and his own predecessors as to the Iranian regime.

The one enemy of the United States that Obama is willing to portray negatively is Vladimir Putin, but this appears more the disappointment of a scorned supplicant than a genuine dislike of a foe of the United States. So Obama emphasizes about Putin, "You don't see him in any of these meetings out here helping to shape the agenda. For that matter, there's not a G20 meeting where the Russians set the agenda around any of the issues that are important." Summit agenda-setting is, it seems, the key exercise of global power in this new age: "The fact is, there is not a summit I've attended since I've been president where we are not setting the agenda, where we are not responsible for the key results." Ceremonial summits are the key battlegrounds in Obama's mind.

Deploying military power, on the other hand, is a sign of weakness: "The notion that somehow Russia is in a stronger position now, in Syria or in Ukraine, than they were before they invaded Ukraine or before [Putin] had to deploy military forces to Syria is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power in foreign affairs or in the world generally." Of course, that Russian display of "weakness" helped save Bashar al-Assad's Syrian regime and strengthened it at the expense of opposition forces we supposedly supported, while making Moscow the go-to player in the region at our expense.

In the Goldberg article and elsewhere, Obama calls himself a "realist." But is it realistic to eschew considerations of strategy and power? Obama thinks so. Thus in 2009 at the U.N., he declared, "In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold."

And so when Obama says that Iran should get an equal share of regional influence, he sees no need for a strategy to ensure Iran doesn't become the predominant regional power. A true realist would note that Iranian ascendancy comes at the expense of the United States and would focus on how to check Iranian expansion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere. A true realist wouldn't invoke some meaningless "sharing" but would work on pushing Iran back to ensure greater regional stability, the security of our allies, and a restoration of American credibility. But that would require serious deliberation and the study of history.

When Winston Churchill returned to power by defeating Attlee and Labour in 1951, he managed to restore some measure of Britain's world position, through reversing Attlee's anti-Israel policy, restoring closer ties with the United States, and making Britain a nuclear power. But the damage of the Attlee years was essentially done, and the decline in British power was anyway probably irreversible. But at least-and Churchill saw and encouraged this-the United States was there to take the baton from Britain, to check the Soviet Union, and to help construct a liberal world order.

The bad news is that unlike Britain in 1951, there is no other nation to whom America could hand the baton. The good news is that, unlike Britain in 1951, our time need not be past. We can restore our world position-though it will not be easy, after the damage that Obama has wrought. It will take a president inspired by Winston Churchill rather than Clement Attlee-or at least one attentive to the lessons of George Costanza, and determined to do the opposite of what Barack Obama has done.

Michael Makovsky is President & CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA).

William Kristol is the editor of The Weekly Standard.

Islamic terrorism, the US and the Palestinian issue 
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
“Israel Hayom,” April 1, 2016, http://bit.ly/1Vfi5qD

6-minute-video #10 http://bit.ly/1T5WK2S in a mini-seminar http://bit.ly/1ze66dS

According to President Obama’s worldview the Palestinian issue is a principal Muslim concern and a major source of Muslim animation and frustration, which has fueled regional violence, intensifying Islamic terrorism.

However, irrespective of Obama’s far-reaching gestures to the Palestinian Authority, the number of Muslim terrorist cells in the US has increased, as have Islamic terrorist attacks on the US mainland, such as in San Bernardino (2015), Boston (2013), Times Square (2010), Ft. Hood, Texas (2009), Little Rock, Arkansas (2009), Dallas, Texas (2009), etc.

Moreover, in 1983, while President Reagan brutally pressured Israel to end its offensive against the PLO in Lebanon and withdraw to the international border, Islamic car bombs blew up the US embassy and the Marines’ headquarters in Beirut, murdering 300 US Marines.  In 1998 and 2000, while President Clinton pressured Israel to make dramatic concessions to the Palestinians, and made Arafat a frequent foreign visitor to the White House, Islamic car bombs hit the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, murdering 300 persons, and Islamic terrorists hit the “USS Cole” at the port of Aden, murdering 17 US sailors. Furthermore, “September 11” was planned while President Clinton pressured Israel to repartition Jerusalem, retreat to the pre-1967 lines and accept a limited version of the Palestinian “claim of return” to the pre-1967 area of Israel.

President Obama was right when declaring in June, 2009, at Cairo University: “Islam has always been part of America’s story.” Indeed, Islamic (Barbary) terrorism targeted US ships between 1776 and the beginning of the 19^th century. John Quincy Adams, the sixth US president (1825-1929), researched the causes of anti-US Islamic terrorism, concluding that the core cause was Islam’s endemic hostility toward the “infidel” as expressed in the Quran.

The US is the role-model of democracy and civil liberties, and therefore, it is perceived as a lethal threat by repressive, rogue, anti-democratic Muslim regimes, which have terrorized their own people and other Muslim communities since the 7^th century.  They, also, consider the US to be the most effective hurdle on their way to regional and global domination. US prominence has made America the chief scapegoat, blamed by rogue Muslim regimes for their own social, economic and moral failures.

Islamic terrorists believe that their victory over the USSR, in Afghanistan, caused the disintegration of the Soviet Union. They are convinced that defeating the USA would be easier, in view of recent US retreats from Vietnam (1973), Iran (1979), Lebanon (1983), Somalia (1993) and Libya (2012), and the expected evacuation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Islamic terrorists assume that the US policy-makers and public tend to cave under intensified terrorism – increasingly on the US mainland – which will, therefore, trigger further US retreats.

Islamic terrorists have been emboldened by President Obama’s and CIA Director John Brennan’s claims – in defiance of 1,400 year old Islamic terrorism, Islamic tyranny and the absence of intra-Muslim peaceful coexistence - that there is no Islamic terrorism, since Islam promotes peace; that there is no Jihadist terrorism, since Jihad purifies the soul; that the US should engage rogue regimes diplomatically rather than militarily; that the Muslim Brotherhood (the largest transnational Islamic terrorist organization) is not a terrorist organization; that there is no military solution to terrorism; that terrorism should be contained rather than defeated; and that terrorist acts may be defined as “workplace violence,” etc. Thus, wrong US assumptions have produced wrong US policies and failed battle tactics.

According to the late Prof. Fuad Ajami , one of the leading Middle East scientists in recent years: "The sad truth is that the terror will continue – and continue to test the patience of an America that insists on its innocence and its distance from the feuds and passions of the Middle East…. A terrible wind was now blowing throughout the realm of Islam. Americans were caught there at a time when a large fight was breaking out – a fight for the soul and historic direction of that society…. Caught between the frightened privilege, on the one side, and the militant wrath, on the other.  And, America was inevitably on the side of the privilege…. The distant superpower was turned into a demon…. Decades of oil wealth and promise in the Moslem world was ending in failure and defeat. When the inevitable scapegoating came, America was the best kind of scapegoat….This amorphous world took America on the only way it could – with terror…. In reality, to talk of a peace process that would end this wave of terror is naïve.  If Americans can be sure of anything, they can be sure of this: Nothing would inflame the passions of extremists more than a major American diplomatic initiative…. No US diplomatic scheme would spare America the fury of those bent upon eradicating its presence in the Middle East. It is a false reading of Islam to say that terror springs from the impasse between Israelis and Palestinians....  It does not advance Israeli-Palestinian peace to pretend that it would solve a problem larger than their conflict…."

Is it realistic to assume that rogue Muslim regimes, which have employed terrorism - systematically and deliberately - since the 7^th century, in order to settle intra-Muslim conflicts with fellow “believers,” would not employ terrorism in order to settle their conflicts with the USA, “the big, arrogant, infidel Satan"?!  

Islamic terrorism constitutes a clear and present danger to the USA and the Free World, irrespective of the Arab-Israeli conflict, independent of the Palestinian issue and regardless of Israel's policies or the very existence of the Jewish State, which is only “the little Satan" as far as Muslim rogue regimes and terrorists are concerned.

Yoram Ettinger, Jerusalem, Israel, "Second Thought: US-Israel Initiative," 
www.TheEttingerReport.com 

*The YouTube 6 minute video series on US-Israel relations and the Middle East:

#1 The two-way-street, mutually-beneficial US-Israel: http://bit.ly/16FP01N
#2 The Jewish-Arab demographic balance: http://bit.ly/1I60R9h
#3 The US-Israel strategic partnership: http://bit.ly/1RniWWB
#4 The 400-year-old foundations of the US-Israel covenant: http://bit.ly/1TRiJes
#5 Is the Palestinian issue a crown-jewel of the Arabs? http://bit.ly/1T8Ob83
#6 Is the Palest’n issue the crux of the Arab-Israeli conflict? http://bit.ly/1LW4hKD
#7 The precariousness of Israel’s narrow waistline: http://bit.ly/1YDNIdJ
#8 America, be wary of a Palestinian state: http://bit.ly/1nRDOYD 
#9 Palestinian terrorism – Lone Wolves or institutional? http://bit.ly/1ZgzjnX
#10 Has the Palestinian issue triggered anti-US terrorism? http://bit.ly/1T5WK2S