Iranian Vulnerability Their nuclear progress can still be stopped. MAR 30, 2015, VOL. 20, NO. 28 • BY LEE SMITH  The Obama White House is enlisting all its allies to make its case for the bad nuclear deal with Iran that, say administration allies, is better than no deal. The alternative, they claim, is war. And to what purpose? Many nuclear experts, Middle East analysts, and journalists argue, after all, that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would set the program back only two to three years. Indeed, Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, asserted last week that setting Iran back “only a couple of years” is “the best-case scenario.” However, it’s not entirely clear where that assessment—a couple years, or a few years, or two to three years—comes from. “When U.S. government officials have given specific estimates, like two to three years, these are for an Israeli attack on Iranian facilities,” says Matthew Kroenig, a former Pentagon official. “They’re not talking about a U.S. attack, which would obviously be more than what an Israeli strike could accomplish.” Even then, says Kroenig, author of A Time to Attack: The Looming Iranian Nuclear Threat, these estimates regarding American strikes are based on worst-case scenarios. “That is, if after a strike Iran decides to rebuild immediately, encounters no significant difficulties, and is able to get whatever it needs in the international marketplace. But that’s hard to imagine.” Kroenig, who worked on defense policy and strategy against Iran in the office of the secretary of defense, says it’s misleading that many experts claim the American estimates are the best-case scenarios when actually they’re worst-case scenarios. “Either these experts don’t know,” says Kroenig, “or they do know and they’re trying to make a case that is not intellectually honest.” The larger point, say advocates of the White House’s proposed agreement and opponents of a military strike, is that once a nuclear program reaches a certain stage, you can’t undo the know-how that has already been acquired. That is, you can’t bomb knowledge. Even proponents of a military strike concede there’s something to that argument. “The longer we go without doing something, the bigger Iran’s edge becomes,” says Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “For instance, the closer they get to perfecting advanced centrifuges, the efficacy of any military strike goes down. More people will have the necessary knowledge to continue.” During his speech to Congress earlier this month, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed this very issue, noting the argument that “Iran’s nuclear know-how cannot be erased, that its nuclear program is so advanced that the best we can do is delay the inevitable.” But as Netanyahu then suggested, “nuclear know-how without nuclear infrastructure doesn’t get you very much.” Here “infrastructure” is perhaps best understood to mean not only the facilities, equipment, and personnel necessary to run a nuclear weapons program, but also any given nation’s industrial and technological culture, its economy, and perhaps most important the society that produces them. The Islamic Republic of Iran comes up short in all these vital areas. And that’s why it has taken Tehran 25 years to buy, steal, and smuggle a nuclear weapons program from the outside world. The notion that it would take Iran only two to three years to restore a program it has taken more than two decades and tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars to build does not add up. The idea that you can’t bomb knowledge is correct, says the journalist David Samuels. “But it also signals a larger misunderstanding about what part of making nuclear bombs is difficult.” A few years ago, Samuels, a contributing editor to the left-leaning Harper’s, wrote a profile for the New Yorker of John Coster-Mullen, a truck driver who reverse-engineered Fat Man and Little Boy, the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. “All the leading scientists at Los Alamos say he got it right,” says Samuels. “He’s a very bright man, but he has no recondite knowledge of physics.” Rather, it was Coster-Mullen’s experience as a commercial photographer that allowed him to reconstruct the two bombs by decoding old documents. “What people get wrong about nuclear weapons,” says Samuels, “is [they think] that the knowledge is impossibly difficult. In the popular imagination, how you make a nuclear weapon is considered a great secret, akin to magic. And once you have figured it out, then physically producing the bomb would be easy. In fact, it’s entirely the opposite. It’s not hard to figure out how to build a bomb. My friend the truck driver figured it out. He gave me the plans for a nuclear bomb, which I have here in my desk at home. Anyone can order his book from Amazon.” What’s really difficult is building and maintaining the industrial, technological, and economic complex required to sustain a nuclear weapons program. The capacity to produce a nuclear weapon is a good index of a country’s general level of development. “It’s not a big deal for the United States, the U.K., or France, for instance, to support that kind of endeavor,” says Samuels. “Same with Germany, which if it wanted a bomb would get there within a matter of months. Germany, the land of precision machinery, has an economy and the industrial and technological culture that can sustain a national project of that scale. Same with Japan. Iran is a very different matter.” Samuels breaks nuclear states down into indigenous and non-indigenous atomic powers. “The United States, U.K., and France’s bombs are indigenous nukes; so are Russia and China’s. These countries have the resources and capacity, the command and control structures to build and sustain a vast industrial apparatus. Countries like Iran and Pakistan fall into a different category. It’s not to say there aren’t plenty of talented Iranian engineers and chemists, but, for example, the Iranian economy is a mess, based solely on oil, and a fraction the size of Germany or Japan’s economy. All you have to do is land at [the] airport in Karachi or Tehran and you see very quickly you are not in Germany.” Indeed, the sanctions regime on Iran follows this logic precisely. The point of sanctions is not just to seize Tehran’s cash, and punish those European or Asian nations and industries tempted to do business with a rogue regime—rather, it is to deny Iran access to the foreign industrial base without which it could not build a nuclear weapon. Sanctions relief doesn’t just mean that Iran gets huge infusions of cash and plenty of attention from foreign investors—it means Iran has a much easier time shopping for its nuclear weapons program. This is how A. Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s bomb, did it. “His was an act of mind-boggling organizational genius,” says Samuels, “in which a single man was able to use the industrial base of Western Europe to supply all of the finely machined parts and tools necessary to produce a nuclear bomb, which Pakistan was unable to produce on its own.” The question of knowledge, then, is trivial. It can be bought on the open market. You can buy the truck driver’s book online. What’s important is the infrastructure—very little of which Iran produces on its own. “The idea that Iran has developed a fully indigenous capacity to produce nukes and has mastered all these engineering and chemical disciplines is very far from true,” says Samuels. “What Iran really has is a 25-year-long campaign of smuggling, stealing, borrowing, and hiring everything that the society can’t generate for itself. I don’t know where the certainty it would only take them a few years to rebuild comes from. There are obviously a lot of other assumptions baked in there. It seems to me more likely that the enormous amount of energy and money they’ve spent the last 25 years is not replicable. Either you can make nukes all on your own or you can’t. The Iranians, unlike industrialized Western powers, can’t.” The White House’s mantra that you can’t bomb knowledge is simply evidence that it has already accepted an Iranian nuclear bomb. Consequently, the idea that a military strike would set the program back only two or three years is not an assessment based in fact, but a political slogan meant to rally support for the president’s policy decision. Whether a nation’s nuclear program is indigenous or not, the program is much more vulnerable before it actually produces a bomb. Once it has built a bomb, it is less vulnerable. Which is why it feels safe in producing more bombs. Lee Smith is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

Associated Press Deceit

Sunday, March 22, 2015 |  David Lazarus

It is estimated that the Associated Press (AP) news content is seen by half the world’s population, according to the wire agency’s website. Yet even this most highly respected of news agencies used staged pictures and omitted information in a reckless attempt to paint Israel as a rogue nation indiscriminately slaughtering women and children during last year’s Gaza war.

For example, to the left is an emotionally stirring photo that provoked the world’s anger against Israel’s military operations against Hamas. It was picked up by more than 280 AP affiliates worldwide, 1,400 daily newspapers in America and thousands of TV and radio broadcast stations.

AP now admits, after an investigation by The Mideast Reporter, that the picture is staged and that they were using children to pose for this and many other photographs they distributed about the war in Gaza.

There are strict rules prohibiting news agencies from staging pictures, especially using children, but the AP had no problem breaking those rules while assuring their subscribers, customers and audience that their photos tell the unbiased truth.

Staged photographs are in direct violation of even AP’s own statement of News Values and Principles: “We don’t stage or re-enact events for the camera or microphone. We do not ask people to pose for photos unless we are making a portrait and then we clearly state that in the caption.”

This photo is certainly not a portrait, but a powerful piece of anti-Israel propaganda designed to stir condemnation of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Nor did the original caption tell anyone that this picture was staged.

What the caption did state was even more deceptive. “The attack killed his father, a Hamas policeman.” The sign in Arabic reads, “House of martyr Mostafa Jamal Malakeh.”

But Malakeh was no “policeman.” He was a well-known Hamas militant. He was the local commander of the “Al-Zeitoun Battalions” of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. This is the same group that had fired more than 8,000 rockets into Israel since 2005.

All of this is public information and can be seen on a YouTube video memorializing Malakeh. The AP chose to ignore these well known facts in reporting on Malakeh’s death in order to make it sound as though Israeli soldiers had killed a civilian policeman.

Associated Press Deceit

Sunday, March 22, 2015 |  David Lazarus

It is estimated that the Associated Press (AP) news content is seen by half the world’s population, according to the wire agency’s website. Yet even this most highly respected of news agencies used staged pictures and omitted information in a reckless attempt to paint Israel as a rogue nation indiscriminately slaughtering women and children during last year’s Gaza war.

For example, to the left is an emotionally stirring photo that provoked the world’s anger against Israel’s military operations against Hamas. It was picked up by more than 280 AP affiliates worldwide, 1,400 daily newspapers in America and thousands of TV and radio broadcast stations.

AP now admits, after an investigation by The Mideast Reporter, that the picture is staged and that they were using children to pose for this and many other photographs they distributed about the war in Gaza.

There are strict rules prohibiting news agencies from staging pictures, especially using children, but the AP had no problem breaking those rules while assuring their subscribers, customers and audience that their photos tell the unbiased truth.

Staged photographs are in direct violation of even AP’s own statement of News Values and Principles: “We don’t stage or re-enact events for the camera or microphone. We do not ask people to pose for photos unless we are making a portrait and then we clearly state that in the caption.”

This photo is certainly not a portrait, but a powerful piece of anti-Israel propaganda designed to stir condemnation of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Nor did the original caption tell anyone that this picture was staged.

What the caption did state was even more deceptive. “The attack killed his father, a Hamas policeman.” The sign in Arabic reads, “House of martyr Mostafa Jamal Malakeh.”

But Malakeh was no “policeman.” He was a well-known Hamas militant. He was the local commander of the “Al-Zeitoun Battalions” of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. This is the same group that had fired more than 8,000 rockets into Israel since 2005.

All of this is public information and can be seen on a YouTube video memorializing Malakeh. The AP chose to ignore these well known facts in reporting on Malakeh’s death in order to make it sound as though Israeli soldiers had killed a civilian policeman.

No peace in our time

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Charles Krauthammer March 20, 2015

84 Views

Of all the idiocies uttered in reaction to Benjamin Netanyahu’s stunning election victory, none is more ubiquitous than the idea that peace prospects are now dead because Netanyahu has declared that there will be no Palestinian state while he is Israel’s prime minister.

I have news for the lowing herds: There would be no peace and no Palestinian state if Isaac Herzog were prime minister either. Or Ehud Barak or Ehud Olmert for that matter. The latter two were (non-Likud) prime ministers who offered the Palestinians their own state — with its capital in Jerusalem and every Israeli settlement in the new Palestine uprooted — only to be rudely rejected.

This is not ancient history. This is 2000, 2001 and 2008 — three astonishingly concessionary peace offers within the past 15 years. Every one rejected.

The fundamental reality remains: This generation of Palestinian leadership — from Yasser Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas — has never and will never sign its name to a final peace settlement dividing the land with a Jewish state. And without that, no Israeli government of any kind will agree to a Palestinian state.

Today, however, there is a second reason a peace agreement is impossible: the supreme instability of the entire Middle East. For half a century, it was run by dictators no one liked but with whom you could do business. For example, the 1974 Israel-Syria disengagement agreement yielded more than four decades of near-total quiet on the border because the Assad dictatorships so decreed.

That authoritarian order is gone, overthrown by the Arab Spring. Syria is wracked by a multi-sided civil war that has killed 200,000 people and that has al-Qaeda allies, Hezbollah fighters, government troops and even the occasional Iranian general prowling the Israeli border. Who inherits? No one knows.

In the last four years, Egypt has had two revolutions and three radically different regimes. Yemen went from pro-American to Iranian client so quickly the United States had to evacuate its embassy in a panic. Libya has gone from Moammar Gaddafi’s crazy authoritarianism to jihadi-dominated civil war. On Wednesday, Tunisia, the one relative success of the Arab Spring, suffered a major terror attack that the prime minister said “targets the stability of the country.”

From Mali to Iraq, everything is in flux. Amid this mayhem, by what magic would the West Bank, riven by a bitter Fatah-Hamas rivalry, be an island of stability? What would give any Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement even a modicum of durability?

There was a time when Arafat commanded the Palestinian movement the way Gaddafi commanded Libya. Abbas commands no one. Why do you think he is in the 11th year of a four-year term, having refused to hold elections for the last five years? Because he’s afraid he would lose to Hamas.

With or without elections, the West Bank could fall to Hamas overnight. At which point fire rains down on Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport and the entire Israeli urban heartland — just as it rains down on southern Israel from Gaza when it suits Hamas, which has turned that first Palestinian state into a terrorist fire base.

Any Arab-Israeli peace settlement would require Israel to make dangerous and inherently irreversible territorial concessions on the West Bank in return for promises and guarantees. Under current conditions, these would be written on sand.

Israel is ringed by jihadi terrorists in Sinai, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Islamic State and Iranian proxies in Syria, and a friendly but highly fragile Jordan. Israelis have no idea who ends up running any of these places. Will the Islamic State advance to an Israeli border? Will Iranian Revolutionary Guards appear on the Golan Heights? No one knows.

Well, say the critics. Israel could be given outside guarantees. Guarantees? Like the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in which the United States, Britain and Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s “territorial integrity”? Like the red line in Syria? Like the unanimous U.N. resolutions declaring illegal any Iranian enrichment of uranium — now effectively rendered null?

Peace awaits three things. Eventual Palestinian acceptance of a Jewish state. A Palestinian leader willing to sign a deal based on that premise. A modicum of regional stability that allows Israel to risk the potentially fatal withdrawals such a deal would entail.

believe such a day will come. But there is zero chance it comes now or even soon. That’s essentially what Netanyahu said Thursday in explaining — and softening — his no-Palestinian-state statement.

In the interim, I understand the crushing disappointment of the Obama administration and its media poodles at the spectacular success of the foreign leader they loathe more than any other on the planet. The consequent seething and sputtering are understandable, if unseemly. Blaming Netanyahu for banishing peace, however, is mindless.

France balks at US plan for phased lifting of Iran nuclear sanctions 

Julian Borger & Dan Roberts 3-20-15

POSTERS' NOTE:

The article  (France balks at US plan for phased lifting of Iran nuclear sanctions byJulian Borger & Dan Roberts 3-20-15) confirms the public release of the concept that France is perturbed by what they regard as potentially too lenient US demands.

The existence of these additional articles does not confirm the truth of these articles, only that there is a consistent planting of this information in the media.

Some of the background speculation chatter is interesting. 

One line of approach is that, when the French approve of the final arrangements, this “public confrontation will help establish in the public mind that the  terms that the Obama  administration demanded of the Iranian regime were indeed sufficiently rigorous.”

There are many unrecorded and unpublicized side deals that grant various concessions to the Iranians.  Another area of speculation is that the Obama administration is stimulating  European actions to sanction or otherwise punish Israel as a diversionary effort to create a cloud of confusion to provide a cover while these negotiations are finalized.

 A 3rd area of speculation is   the various  reasons for the Administration's assault on Prime Minister Netanyahu (which began well before his speech to Congress and is completely detached from his actual remarks concerning Arabs  being bussed to vote (they were) and the 2 state solution  would not been feasible for foreseeable future (which it isn't). {http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/03/20/a-complete-timeline-of-obamas-anti-israel-hatred/       http://talk.baltimoresun.com/topic/259224-a-complete-timeline-of-obama-anti-israel-hatred/   }

France balks at US plan for phased lifting of Iran nuclear sanctions 

Julian Borger & Dan Roberts 3-20-15

Negotiations are set to resume next week, only five days before deadline for agreement

Negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme will adjourn in Lausanne amid disagreements between the US and France over a common negotiating position with Tehran, according to diplomats at the talks.

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, is due to meet his counterparts from the UK, France and Germany on Saturday, somewhere in Europe, to try to mend the rift – largely over the lifting of sanctions on Iran – and restore a united front. On Friday night, Barack Obama spoke by telephone to François Hollande about the talks.

The talks with Iran are due to resume in Switzerland on Wednesday, which would leave just five days before a deadline for reaching a framework agreement.

“We’ve had a series of intensive discussions with Iran this week, and given where we are in the negotiations, it’s an important time for high-level consultations with our partners in these talks,” US spokeswoman Marie Harf said. “Therefore, Secretary Kerry will travel tomorrow to meet in Europe with German foreign minister Steinmeier, British foreign secretary Hammond, and French foreign minister Fabius to discuss the ongoing … discussions with Iran.”

Meanwhile, Republicans in the US Congress have also not given up their fight to block any agreement they believe is too lenient by refusing to lift certain sanctions.

Despite criticising more hawkish Senate colleagues who sent a warning letter to Iran, foreign affairs chairman Bob Corker predicted on Friday that he will still be able to assemble enough support from Democrats to pass legislation forcing Obama to consult Congress.

The official reason for the adjournment is the need for members of Iranian delegation to attend the funeral on Sunday of President Hassan Rouhani’s mother, who died on Friday aged 90. But the talks had already stalled because of differences over sanctions, and the emergence of splits within the group of six major powers on how tough a position to take. 

The sharpest split is between the US, which had proposed a scheme for a phased lifting of UN sanctions in return for concrete Iranian actions to limit its nuclear programme, and France, which wants to offer only a symbolic easing of the punitive measures imposed over the past decade.

Diplomats say the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, telephoned the French delegation in Lausanne to ensure it did not make further concessions, and to insist that the bulk of UN sanctions could only be lifted if Iran gave a full explanation of evidence suggesting it may have done development work on nuclear warhead design in the past. 

“We have been negotiating with Iran for 12 [years]. We shouldn’t be rushed into an agreement which will have to be comprehensive,” the French ambassador to Washington, Gerard Araud, tweeted during the talks. “For France, any agreement to be acceptable will have to give concrete guarantees on all issues. We won’t bypass any of them.”

The French position is unacceptable to the Iranians, who argue they would never be able to prove a negative, and disprove evidence of a weapons programme they say is forged.

“They don’t like it. They say it’s a deal-breaker. They don’t want it at all,” said a European diplomat involved in the talks. But the diplomat added there was “no way” France would relax its position.

The US offer on sanctions is to lift UN sanctions in layers in return each “irreversible” step Iran makes to scale down and limit its nuclear programme. There would be mechanisms in place by which sanctions would “spring back” if Iran violated the agreement, without the need for consensus in the UN security council. It is broadly supported by the UK and Germany, while Russia and China, the other members of the six-nation group, would offer more generous terms.

Tehran is reluctant to accept sanctions relief based on milestones, but diplomats say the French position would be a complete deal-breaker. They say the Iranians would be very unlikely to admit past weapons work, which if revealed would demonstrate that the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, had misled the world. Better, US diplomats argue, to focus on limiting the current Iranian programme and worry about allegations about the past a few years down the road.

US and French officials have also clashed in Lausanne over contrasting briefings their delegations have provided to the press.

“Either there are real differences between the American and French positions or the French are posturing here in a way that is not helpful. So this meeting on Saturday will be helpful if it lets the Americans and French settle their differences,” said Reza Marashi, the research director at the National Iranian American Council. 

“Either the French are going to have to budge or the Americans are. But if the Americans budge that increases the likelihood that the Iranians are not going to be able to get to yes as an answer. 

President Obama called his French counterpart, Hollande, on Friday afternoon to discuss the talks, the White House said. According to a statement, the presidents “reaffirmed their commitment to achieving a long term comprehensive deal that fully and verifiably addresses the international community’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear program, while noting that Iran must take steps to resolve several remaining issues.”

Kerry went to pay personal condolences to the president’s brother, Hossein Fereydoun, who had been attending the negotiations on the shores of Lake Geneva, but the gesture did not overcome the downbeat atmosphere overhanging the negotiations 11 days before a deadline to produce a framework agreement.

Overnight, Obama issued a message marking the Iranian new year, Nowruz, saying: “We have the best opportunity in decades to pursue a different future between our countries.” But he added that it was up to Iran’s leaders to choose between two paths.

“If they cannot agree to a reasonable deal, they will keep Iran on the path it’s on today – a path that has isolated Iran, and the Iranian people, from so much of the world,” Obama said. “On the other hand, if Iran’s leaders can agree to a reasonable deal, it can lead to a better path – the path of greater opportunities for the Iranian people.”

Zarif quickly tweeted a riposte, saying it was the west that had to make the hard choices necessary for an deal. “Iranians have already made their choice: Engage with dignity. It’s high time for the US and its allies to chose: pressure or agreement,” he said.

The latest session in the 18 months of negotations had begun hopefully. The central issue of Iran’s uranium enrichment capacity had been largely settled. Over the lifetime of a decade-long arrangement, it would have operating capacity equivalent to 6,000 of its current model centrifuges, a 40% reduction.

However, that left unresolved what Iran would get in return. The EU is offering to lift its oil embargo and Iran’s exclusion from Swift electronic banking, while Obama is offering to suspend US congressional sanctions by presidential waiver. However, the Iranians see UN sanctions as crucial, because they declare the country’s nuclear programme to illegal and therefore justify all the other sanctions.

“They consider it insulting and unfair that they would stay on the agenda of the security council, saying Iran is a threat to international peace and security,” a European negotiator said. “They say if we have a deal, we are not a threat any more.”

The White House also still has an uphill battle back in Washington too. Administration officials insisted on Thursday it would refuse to sign any bill requiring Congressional approval of the deal, but senator Corker now claims he would be able to assemble a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate to override such a presidential veto.

“I believe, in spite of some of the drama we have had over the last two weeks internally, we will have a veto proof majority to make that happen,” he told of meeting of Republican lawyers.

“Some of my senator friends are being lobbied heavily by the administration but this is the sort of role that Congress should be playing,” added the Tennessee senator, who says he pushed back a planned vote until after the deadline for the Geneva talks to bring more Democrats on board.

Speaking after his remarks on Friday, Corker acknowledged only certain US sanctions would be affected by Congressional disapproval but insisted this would remain a significant blow to any deal that fell short of what lawmakers felt was necessary.

‘We have got to have other countries involved for us to be most effective, but I still think the United States not being part of a deal going forward would have significant impact,” he told The Guardian.

 TIMELINE OF OBAMA’S ANTI-ISRAEL HATRED

By Ben Shapiro, BREITBART 3-21-13

On Thursday, the press announced that the Obama administration would fully consider abandoning Israel in international bodies like the United Nations.

According to reports, President Obama finally called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to congratulate him – but the “congratulations” was actually a lecture directed at forcing Netanyahu to surrender to the terrorist Palestinian regime.

For some odd reason, many in the media and Congress reacted with surprise to Obama’s supposedly sudden turn on Israel. The media, in an attempt to defend Obama’s radicalism, pretend that Netanyahu’s comments in the late stages of his campaign prompted Obama’s anti-Israel actio

But, in truth, this is the culmination of a longtime Obama policy of destroying the US-Israel relationship; Obama has spent his entire life surrounded by haters of Israel, from former Palestine Liberation Organization spokesman Rashid Khalidi to former Jimmy Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, pro-Hamas negotiator Robert Malley to UN Ambassador Samantha Power (who once suggested using American troops to guard Palestinians from Israelis), Jeremiah Wright (who said “Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me”) to Professor Derrick Bell (“Jewish neoconservative racists…are undermining blacks in every way they can”). Here is a concise timeline, with credit to Dan Senor and the editors of Commentary:

February 2008: Obama says while campaigning, ‘There is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel.” At the time, as Dan Senor pointed out in The Wall Street Journal, Israel was run by the Kadima government run by Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, and Shimon Peres, and was attempting desperately to bring the Palestinians to the table. Instead, the Palestinians launch war, as always.

June 2008: Obama tells the American Israel Public Affairs Conference that Jerusalem ought to remain undivided, attempting to woo Jewish votes. He then walks that back the next day, saying only that the capital shouldn’t be divided by barbed wire.

March 2009: The Obama administration reverses the Bush era policy of not joining the United Nations Human Rights Council. Secretary of State Clinton said, “Human rights are an essential element of American global foreign policy,” completely neglecting the UNHRC’s abysmally anti-Semitic record. The Washington Post reported that the administration joined the Human Rights Council even though they conceded that it “has devoted excessive attention to alleged abuses by Israel and too little to abuses in places such as Darfur, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe.”

May 2009: Obama tells Netanyahu that “settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward.” Netanyahu announces a settlement freeze to comply. The Palestinians refuse to negotiate. Obama then slams Israel: “they still found it very hard to move with any bold gestures.”

June 2009: Obama tells the world in his infamous Cairo speech that Israel was only created based on Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. He then says that Palestinians have been similarly victimized by the Jews: “They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.”

July 2009: Obama threatens to put “daylight” between the United States and Israel. He tells Jewish leaders, “Look at the past eight years. During those eight years, there was no space between us and Israel, and what did we get from that?” Except for Israel forcibly removing thousands of Jews from the Gaza Strip, the election of Hamas, and the launch of war by the Palestinians and Hezbollah, nothing happened. Obama then lectures the Jews about the need for Israeli “self-reflection.” The same month, Obama tells CNN that the United States would “absolutely not” give Israel permission to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.

September 2009: Obama tells the United Nations that “America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.” Obama’s definition of Israeli settlements, as the world soon learned, included building bathrooms in a home already owned by Jews in East Jerusalem. Obama offers no serious criticism of the Palestinians.

March 2010: Obama follows up on his threatening language about settlements by deploying Vice President Joe Biden to Israel, where Biden rips into the Israelis for building bathrooms in Jerusalem, the eternal Jewish capital. Hillary Clinton then yells at Netanyahu for nearly an hour on the phone, telling him he had “harmed the bilateral relationship.” David Axelrod calls the building plans an “insult” to the United States. When Netanyahu visits the White House a week and a half later, Obama makes him leave via a side door.

April 2010: Obama refuses to prevent the Washington summit on nuclear proliferation from becoming an Arab referendum on the evils of Israel’s nukes.

June 2010: An anonymous “US defense source” leaks to the Times of London that Israel had cut a deal with the Saudis to use their airspace to strike Iran. The deal is scuttled.

May 2011: The State Department labeled Jerusalem not a part of Israel. The same month, Obama demanded that Israel make concessions to the Palestinians based on the pre-1967 borders, which Israelis call the “Auschwitz borders” thanks to their indefensibility.

November 2011: Obama and French president Nicolas Sarkozy are caught on open mic ripping Netanyahu, with Sarkozy stating, “I can’t stand him, he’s a liar,” and Obama replying, “You’re tired of him? What about me? I have to deal with him every day.”

December 2011: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rips into the State of Israel, stating that it is moving in the “opposite direction” of democracy. She said that Israel reminded her of Rosa Parks, and that religious people not listening to women sing – a millennia-long policy among some segments of the Orthodox – reminds her of extremist regimes, adding that it seemed “more suited to Iran than Israel.“

February 2012: Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta tells David Ignatius at the Washington Post that the possibility he worried about most was that Israel would strike Iran. The Post then adds, “Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June – before Iran enters what Israelis described as a ‘zone of immunity’ to commence building a nuclear bomb.” The goal: to delay any potential Israeli strike.

March 2012: NBC News somehow gains information from “senior Obama administration officials” that Israel had financed and trained the Iranian opposition group Mujahideen-e-Khalq, and adds that the Obama administration had nothing to do with hits on Iranian nuclear scientists. More daylight. More leaks. The same month, Foreign Policy receives information from “four senior diplomats and military intelligence officers” that the “United States has recently been granted access to Iran’s northern border.” Foreign Policy also reports that a “senior administration official” has told them, “The Israelis have bought an airfield, and the airfield is Azerbaijan.” Again, a potential Israeli strike is scuttled. The same day as the Foreign Policy report, Bloomberg reports a Congressional Research Service report stating that Israel can’t stop Iran’s nuclear program in any case. Columnist Ron Ben-Yishai of Yidioth Ahronoth writes that the Obama administration wants to “erode the IDF’s capacity to launch such strike with minimal casualties.”

June 2012: In an attempt to shore up the Jewish vote, top members of the Obama administration, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and then-CIA director Leon Panetta were quoted by David Sanger of The New York Times talking about the President’s supposedly deep involvement in the Stuxnet plan to take out Iran’s nuclear reactors via computer virus. Until that point, it had been suspected but not confirmed that Stuxnet was an Israeli project. The Obama administration denied leaking the information. A year later, the State Department released emails showing that Sanger had corresponded regularly with all the top Obama officials, including correspondence on Stuxnet.

December 2012: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks at the Saban Forum on US-Israel Relations, where she says that Israelis have a “lack of empathy” for Palestinians, and that the Israelis need to “demonstrate that they do understand the pain of an oppressed people in their minds.”

March 2013: Obama forces Netanyahu to call Islamist Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to apologize for Israel’s actions to stop a terrorist-arming flotilla from entering the Gaza Strip to aid Hamas. Erdogan had recently labeled Zionism racism.

May 2013: Members of the Obama Pentagon leak information that Israel attacked the Damascus airport to stop a shipment of weapons to terrorist groups. Obama officials actually had to apologize for this leak, since it endangered American lives. They blamed “low-level” employees.

June 2013: The Obama administration leaks specific information regarding Israeli Arrow 3 anti-ballistic missile sites. Weeks later, US sources tell CNN that Israel attacked a Syrian installation full of Russian-provided missiles. The same month, “American intelligence analysts” tell the New York Times that Israeli strikes had not been effective. All that information was classified.

June 2014: Three Jewish teenagers are kidnapped, including an American, and murdered by Hamas. The Obama administration immediately calls on Israel for restraint, and says it will continue to work with a Palestinian unity government including Hamas. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki says that the Obama administration wants “the Israelis and the Palestinians continue to work with one another on that, and we certainly would continue to urge that… in spite of, obviously, the tragedy and the enormous pain on the ground.” Throughout the ensuing Gaza War, in which Hamas fired rockets at Israeli civilians and tunnels were uncovered demonstrating Hamas’ intent to kidnap Israeli children, the Obama administration criticized Israel’s prosecution of the war.

August 2014: In the middle of a shooting war, Obama stopped weapons shipment to Israel. According to the Wall Street Journal, Obama found out that Israel asked the Defense Department for shipments of Hellfire missiles. Obama personally stepped in and blocked the shipments.

October 2014: Jeffrey Goldberg, court Jew for the Obama administration, releases an article in The Atlantic quoting Obama officials calling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “chickenshit.” Goldberg, naturally, blames Netanyahu (of course, he also wrote in 2008 that any Jew who feared Obama on Israel was an “obvious racist”).

January 2015: Obama deploys his campaign team to defeat Netanyahu in Israel. A group titled “One Voice,” funded by American donors, pays for the Obama campaign team, led by Obama 2012 field director Jeremy Bird. The announcement comes days after Speaker of the House John Boehner’s invite to Netanyahu to speak before a joint session of Congress. Obama quickly announced he would not meet with Netanyahu, making the excuse that the meeting would come too close to the election.

March 2015: Netanyahu wins. Obama refuses to call him to congratulate him for two days. When he does, he threatens to remove American support in the international community, even as he moves to loosen sanctions and weapons embargoes on Iran.

Nothing has changed. Obama is who he always was. The mask has simply been removed.