Obama Is Politically Raping The Jewish People

The U.S.-Israeli Divergence

Two countries, two sets of priorities.
from The National Review
By Meyrav Wurmser

Today, at one of the most dramatic moments in Israel’s short history, U.S. and Israeli officials view the purpose and spirit of their bilateral relationship differently. That much was confirmed by Monday’s meeting between Pres. Barack Obama and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at which the two leaders seemed to operate off two different scripts.

At the top of the agenda for Washington is the Palestinian issue. The Obama administration has made it clear that, notwithstanding the most recent Israeli elections — in which Israelis voted strongly to depart from past policies of restraint and conciliation toward the Palestinians — it expects Israel to aggressively pursue the “peace process.” Little is being asked right now of the Palestinians. As Washington sees it, the ball is in Israel’s court.

For Israel, negotiating with the Palestinians is a dead-end diversion from the existential threat posed by Iran. Split between Hamas and Fatah, and marked by internal violence and weak political institutions, the Palestinians are in no position to forge a lasting agreement with Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu, along with most other Israel politicians, believes the Palestinian question cannot be solved at the current moment.

Moreover, many Middle Eastern actors have recently reevaluated the Palestinian issue. Across the region, it is a significantly lower priority than curbing Iranian power. Not only is Tehran funding its terrorist clients Hamas and Hezbollah; it is also threatening to foment Islamist unrest that could bring down the regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, and possibly even Saudi Arabia. For these countries, as for Israel, the Palestinian issue is important, but Iran comes first. This is why Netanyahu decided to visit Egypt and Jordan before visiting Washington: to emphasize that for those living in the region, Iran takes precedence over the Palestinian morass.

On arms control, the United States has already begun to shift its tone, which probably suggests a shift in substance. The Obama administration is pressuring Israel to sign both the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, which could lead to Israeli disarmament. Before the summit, U.S. officials asked Israel to come prepared with ideas on how to implement this dramatic new vision. Again, for Washington, the ball is in Israel’s court.

On Iran, the Obama administration signaled before the summit that it would consider an Israeli strike on Iran to be an impetuous and useless act. From the defense secretary to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the message was clear: Do not strike Iran — it will not help and it will inflame the world. Even at the summit, while President Obama suggested that he will give diplomacy a chance until the end of the year, he said the next move after that will be tougher sanctions. Israel, on the other hand, says that time is running out and all options are on the table — which is diplomatic code for “We may strike.”

Washington views Israel’s mere discussion of striking Iran as an aggressive act that will incite the Middle East and make an Arab-Israeli peace even more remote. Hence the alacrity with which U.S. officials express their opposition to an Israeli strike — a unique historical spectacle of a nation publicly criticizing an ally over a decision that it has not yet made.

And yet, the Obama administration has offered no clear strategy for preventing a nuclear Iran. Israel — and not just its Likud government — believes it is facing an existential threat from Iran’s nuclear ambitions. This sentiment runs deep in Israeli society. The core of Zionism is the principle of Jewish self-defense. A state built by the children of Holocaust survivors, Israel is grounded in the belief that Jews should never again find themselves vulnerable. This is the reason that Israel has developed a strong military: In some ways, the country has created for itself a fortress of protection. But Israel now faces the possibility that a messianic regime in Tehran aspires to annihilate the 6 million Jews of Israel. If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, it will finally have the means to do so. Israelis see no other response but to defend themselves. In Israel, the Iranian question is above partisan politics and not left to chance. The memories of the past resonate too strongly for that. The Israeli prime minister thinks that he faces a Churchill-like moment and that he must defend his nation.

Washington does not see Israel’s dilemma so starkly. The Obama administration believes that Iran can be persuaded to give up its nuclear pursuit, or at least be kept at bay. U.S. officials view a negotiated agreement between Israel and the Palestinians as the first step toward resolving some of the region’s thorniest questions. And they view strong progress on arms control by Israel as a precondition to winning Iran’s compliance with the NPT and its abandonment of a nuclear program.

The West’s response to Israel’s insistence on defending itself is ironic. Two generations after World War II, Washington is choosing to ignore and diminish the genocidal threat that Israel now faces. Israel is essentially being told that its concerns about Iran are exaggerated. It is being categorized as a nuclear hold-out like North Korea. It is being pressured to make concessions on the Palestinian issue, despite the fact that most in the region believe the Iranian threat is more important.

The message from Washington is becoming clear. Israel is expected to pursue a two-state solution with the Palestinians, to join America’s ambitious disarmament agenda, and to refrain from striking Iran. The Obama administration, which is energetically soliciting our enemies’ friendship, is at the same time putting the onus on Israel, our strongest regional ally, to prove its worthiness to us.

When in the winter of 1177 the Holy Roman emperor Henry IV visited Pope Gregory VII at his temporary residence in Canossa, Italy, his journey became a symbol of humiliation and degradation. The pope, angered by Henry’s attempt to independently appoint bishops, had excommunicated him. When Henry went to seek the pope’s forgiveness, he was made to wait outside the city gates for three days, during which time he fasted and prayed for the opportunity to see the pope.

This is the script the Obama administration seems to be bringing to U.S.-Israeli relations. It’s time for Washington to change course. Otherwise, the West will have morally and politically failed the Jews once more, as they face another leader bent on their destruction.

— Meyrav Wurmser is director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the Hudson Institute
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Hey Obama, read this: 'No peace while Hamas rules Gaza'

from The Jerusalem Post
May 19, 2009

Here's a great comment on the article:
4. As long as Hama lives, peace will be impossible. Compromise to Islamic fascists equals weakness, something they can never show. Hamas will defeat Fatah either through elections as Hezbollah is about to do in Lebanon or with a gun. There will be no peace until Hamas and Hezbollah are destroyed. Until that happens, everything else is "much to do about nothing!"
John Profit - (05/19/2009 16:17)

'No peace while Hamas rules Gaza'

A day after US President Barack Obama informed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of his intention to launch a new regional peace effort, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) head Yuval Diskin told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Tuesday morning that there was "no chance for an effective peace process so long as Hamas rules the Gaza Strip."

"A joint [Fatah-Hamas] government can only be formed through firm international pressure," the Shin Bet head said. "Hamas will never voluntarily give up its rule in the Strip, and the Palestinian Authority will never cede its control over the West Bank."

"If ballots were cast in the West Bank today, there is a good chance Hamas would win," he added.

Diskin said that there was no need to continue construction of the security barrier, as Israel possesses good intelligence and military capacity to prevent terror groups from launching attacks from the West Bank. He warned, however, that Israel should not transfer authority of all counter-terror operations to PA security forces, as the IDF was currently responsible for the majority of preventive arrests.

Praising Egyptian security forces for their increasing successes in uncovering munition caches intended for Hamas in Gaza, Diskin warned against the illusion of a peaceful tranquility in the Strip.

"Hamas wants to maintain the calm in order to win the time it needs to reinforce and improve its standing on the ground," he said, estimating that some 300 smuggling tunnels were currently active on the Egypt-Gaza border.

Meanwhile, according to Army Radio, Diskin also told the FADC that he was opposed to IDF plans to open Hebron's Zion Route to Palestinian traffic.

The route was set to be opened for Palestinians on Wednesday for the first time in 15 years following a commitment made by the army to the High Court of Justice. However, it was postponed Tuesday until an unspecified date.

Right-wing parties have warned that the move is dangerous and will lead to terror attacks.
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Iran canceled air show upon Russian warning of Israeli plan to destroy all 140 warplanes

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report
April 24, 2009

Iranian warplanes did not take off

DEBKAfile's Iranian and intelligence sources disclose that Moscow warned Tehran Friday April 17 that Israel was planning to destroy all 140 fighter-bombers concentrated at the Mehr-Abad Air Force base for an air show over Tehran on Iran's Army Day the following day. The entire fleet was accordingly removed to remote bases and the display cancelled.

In the first week of April, Tehran announced it would stage its biggest air show ever to dramatize a ceremonial military parade in the capital on April 18. Iran would show the world that it is capable of fighting off an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities. Instead only four aircraft flew over the saluting stand.

Iranian media explained that the big show was cancelled due to "bad weather and poor visibility," when in fact Tehran basked in warm and sunny weather.

Moscow had informed the Iranians that its spy satellites and intelligence sources had picked up preparations at Israeli Air Force bases to destroy the 140 warplanes, the bulk of the Iranian air force, on the ground the night before the display, leaving its nuclear sites without aerial defense. A similar operation wiped out the entire Egyptian air fleet in the early hours of the 1967 war.
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Another Betrayal of Israel - UK May Cut Arms Sales to Israel

from Israel National News
April 22, 2009

Britain is warming up to Hamas and blowing chilly winds towards Israel. Its government is considering a ban on arms exports to the Jewish state after legislators had demanded that British weapons parts not be used against Arab terrorists.

Meanwhile, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal is to address the House of Lords via video despite objections by the British government. In a separate development, the Bloomsbury theatre acceded to demands from pro-Arab groups that it cancel an appearance by an IDF choir scheduled for Israeli Independence Day celebrations next week.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband told Parliament Tuesday that it will review weapons export licenses "in light of recent events in Gaza,” meaning the Operation Cast Lead counterterrorist campaign three months ago.

The statement came a day before Hamas’s top leader Khaled Mashaal was to address members of the House of Lords and Members of Parliament via video from Damascus. The address comes shortly after four British parliamentarians, led by British Labor party member Roger Godsiff, met with Mashaal in Damascus.
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Ahmadinejad thanks ElBaradei - for holding off UN while Iran finished Nuclear Program

Well, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad didn't actually thank ElBaradei directly, at least as far as I know. However, he probably should thank Mohamed ElBaradei and the IAEA, because without their help and incompetence, Iran may not have gotten this far.
Rees

"No one will dare attack Iranian nation"

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told his nation on Saturday that "no country in the region threatens Iran," just hours after The London Times published a report claiming that Israel was preparing to attack targets in Iran within hours of receiving a green light from the government in Jerusalem.

Speaking during a ceremony in Iran's Army Day, Ahmadinejad said Iran was one of the strongest countries in the region and that "the gall to threaten the Iranian nation was quashed forever."

"The Iranian nation is ready to become more involved in maintaining order and security based on justice in many regions of the world," Ahmadinejad said.

His speech on Saturday was much more toned down than Army Day speeches from previous years; in 2006 Ahmadinejad warned that Iran's army will "cut off the hand of whoever dares attack it." In 2007 he said "the resistance of the Iranian people will bring down world powers."

The parade of military equipment on Saturday was also more modest than in previous years. While announcements prior to the parade said 140 jets will fly in formation, only several dozen helicopters dotted the skies of Iran on Saturday. An official explained that weather conditions prevented the jet air maneuvers from taking place.

Shihab and Khader missiles, which are usually driven atop their launching vehicles in the streets of Teheran, were also missing.

But Zilzal missiles, armored personnel carriers, unmanned aircraft and even small submarines surrounded by marching soldiers in diving masks. The forces passed before a stage where Ahmadinejad and top brass were sitting.
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So who did bomb the Iranian arms trucks in Sudan?

from DEBKAfile Special Report
March 29, 2009

The only solid fact emerging from the fanciful "reports" traded between Western and Middle East media over the bombing of an Iranian arms convoy bound for Hamas in January is that Tehran's arms shipments to Hamas via Sinai and the Gaza tunnels continue at full spate.

Somehow, as the "reporting" unfolded, the US attacker morphed into the Israeli Air Force.
Western imagination outdid itself Sunday, March 28, when the London Sunday Times claimed that Israeli intelligence used drones to bomb the convoy in Sudan, possibly even Eitan UAVs, whose wing span is like that of a Boeing airliner, and that missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv were the target.

If this claim and reports in other Western media - asserting glibly that Israeli drones or warplanes had sunk an Iranian ship in the Red Sea - are correct, they would signify:

1. That Israel and Iran are at war;

2. That Tehran has decided to take Israeli attacks on the chin and not respond. Does this sound like the Iranian leaders we know?

3. Israel has declared war on Sudan with two attacks.

4. And, most importantly, Israel's armed forces have failed to stem the flow of Iranian arms to Gaza.

In the original disclosure which started the hare, an Egyptian newspaper Al-Shurooq Tuesday March 24, reported that in January, a US Air Force AC 130H taking off from Djibouti destroyed an Iranian arms convoy of 17 trucks in North Sudan on its way to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, killing 39 passengers.

The Egyptian paper ran the story the day before Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir arrived in Cairo. It stressed that the Sudanese authorities had conducted "a full blown dossier'" on the attack, consisting of "images, forensics as well as remains of weapons and satellite phones."
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U.S. Air Force C-130 Bombers destroy 17 Truck Weapons Convoy in Sudan

DEBKAfile Special Report
March 26, 2009

DEBKAfile's military sources: Sudanese and Egyptian security officials reported Tuesday, March 24, the day Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir arrived in Cairo, that in January, US Air Force C-130 bombers taking off from bases in Djibouti destroyed a 17-truck clandestine convoy carrying smuggled arms as it travelled through Sudan to the Egyptian border. All 39 passengers were killed, said those officials. Wednesday night, CBS TV News quoted unidentified US Pentagon officials as claiming the attack was not carried out by American but Israeli aircraft.

No official comment has come from Israel.

Our military sources report that Iran's main arms smuggling route to Hamas in Gaza runs through Sudan. The weapons are quietly unloaded from Iranian merchant vessels to convoys of trucks or camels at Port Sudan on the Red Sea. After crossing into Egypt, the supplies make their way to the Gulf of Suez where local smugglers' boats move the arms freight across Sinai.
The size of the convoy targeted for air attack, 17 trucks and 39 passengers, is the first tangible eye-opener to Iran's vast weapons-smuggling program for Palestinian terrorists in Gaza. The hardware transits Sinai and reaches its destination through their tunnel network on the Egyptian-Gaza border.

According to DEBKAfile's intelligence sources, the arms trucks have been plying the Sudan-Sinai route at the rate of two or three large convoys per month, tracked by US and Israeli spy satellites.

The supplies continue since the convoy was destroyed two months ago, only the smugglers are more careful, using various devices to evade satellite detection. For instance, the trucks no longer travel in convoys, but separately, or else they transfer the arms to different kinds of vehicles such as camels and small boats which hug the Sudanese and Egyptian coasts.

Last January, the US and Israel signed an agreement calling for an international effort to stem the flow of weaponry and explosives from Iran to Gaza. It covered intelligence coordination, maritime efforts to identify ships carrying the hardware, and the sharing of US and European technologies to detect and block weapons-smuggling tunnels between Sinai and Gaza.

One Cypriot-flagged Iranian arms ship was diverted in the Gulf of Aden, forced through the Suez Canal and finally had its illicit freight confiscated at Larnaca.

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Combat Brigades Will Remain In Iraq Despite Obama’s Campaign Promises

I completely agree with leaving combat brigades in Iraq after the majority of the troops leave. The United States lost too many lives removing Saddam Hussein, and and too many lives establishing the fragile peace that now exists in Iraq, to prematurely remove all troops and allow Iraq to fracture from within. That would be criminal.

Our troops will ultimately operate in the background of the Iraqi Society with little disruption. There are currently about 40,000 stationed in Germany doing the same thing. The U.S. bases provide jobs for the surrounding area, and the troops consume food and utilize the local services. The presence of our troops will present a long-term picture of stability and security for Iraq, which is essential if Iraq expects other Countries to begin to make investments in the future of Iraq.

The disappointing thing about this news is that Obama was either very naive about our military and the situation in Iraq, or he was being outright dishonest to those Americans who ultimately voted for him. He's in the White House now, so I hope that it wasn't the latter.
Rees

from IPS News
By Gareth Porter
March 25, 2009

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Despite Obama’s Campaign Promises, Combat Brigades Will Stay in Iraq

WASHINGTON, Mar 25 (IPS) - Despite President Barack Obama’s statement at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina Feb. 27 that he had "chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next 18 months," a number of Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs), which have been the basic U.S. Army combat unit in Iraq for six years, will remain in Iraq after that date under a new non-combat label.




A spokesman for Defence Secretary Robert M. Gates, Lt. Col. Patrick S. Ryder, told IPS Tuesday that "several advisory and assistance brigades" would be part of a U.S. command in Iraq that will be "re-designated" as a "transition force headquarters" after August 2010.



But the "advisory and assistance brigades" to remain in Iraq after that date will in fact be the same as BCTs, except for the addition of a few dozen officers who would carry out the advice and assistance missions, according to military officials involved in the planning process.



Gates has hinted that the withdrawal of combat brigades will be accomplished through an administrative sleight of hand rather than by actually withdrawing all the combat brigade teams. Appearing on Meet the Press Mar. 1, Gates said the "transition force" would have "a very different kind of mission", and that the units remaining in Iraq "will be characterised differently".



"They will be called advisory and assistance brigades," said Gates. "They won't be called combat brigades."



Obama’s decision to go along with the military proposal for a "transition force" of 35,000 to 50,000 troops thus represents a complete abandonment of his own original policy of combat troop withdrawal and an acceptance of what the military wanted all along - the continued presence of several combat brigades in Iraq well beyond mid-2010.



National Security Council officials declined to comment on the question of whether combat brigades were actually going to be left in Iraq beyond August 2010 under the policy announced by Obama Feb. 27.



The term that has been used internally within the Army to designate the units that will form a large part of the "transition force" is not "Advisory and Assistance Brigades" but "Brigades Enhanced for Stability Operations" (BESO).
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