Category: Politics

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Ban Ki-moon Does Not Deserve a Prize

(Originally published on Israel Hayom)

Some things just do not make any sense, whichever way you look at them. Tel Aviv University’s award of ‎the George S. Wise Medal, its highest honor, to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is one of those things. ‎

When I first heard about it, I thought someone had come up with an excellent piece of satire, because ‎what could possibly make less sense than Israelis giving the U.N. chief, who presides over the most Israeli-‎bashing organization (granted, in close competition with the European Union), an honorary award? Perhaps if it were an honorary award for passing the most anti-Israeli ‎resolutions in any given year, while ignoring every tyranny and dictatorship in the world — sorry, not ‎ignoring, appointing them to important positions on the U.N. Human Rights Council.‎

There was a tragicomic undercurrent to Ban’s acceptance speech, in which he said that he ‎‎was accepting it “in the name of all the women and men of the United Nations working to advance peace, ‎development and human rights around the world and around the clock.” Never have the U.N.’s de facto goals ‎and efforts been more mischaracterized.‎

Never missing a chance to mischaracterize events on the ground in Israel as well, Ban encouraged ‎Israel to “not allow the extremists on either side to further fuel the conflict. Palestinian and Israeli leaders ‎must stand firm against terror, violence and incitement,” again giving credence to the lie that there is a ‎reciprocal “cycle of violence” instead of one-sided Palestinian Arab terrorism and PA incitement to kill Jews. ‎He also rehashed the old tropes about Israeli “occupation,” essentially repaying the honor Tel Aviv ‎University had bestowed on him with the customary insults that Israel has grown sadly used to when it ‎comes to the U.N. ‎

Ban concluded that “I strongly believe that members of the international community must ‎exercise their collective and individual influence to help reach the common destination: an end to the ‎occupation which will soon enter its 50th year, and the establishment of two states for two peoples living ‎side by side in peace, security and mutual recognition.” He even spoke of “responsibility,” using the Hebrew ‎word, “achrayut.” ‎

Yet it is hard to imagine a less responsible actor than the U.N. and the international community. It is precisely ‎the collective effort of the international community, particularly the U.N. and the EU, that keeps the PA ‎incitement and terrorism alive by giving it credibility and treasure and ceaselessly singling out Israel for blame. ‎Without the international community, this conflict would have ended long ago. As is customary in all things ‎U.N., Ban had bleached out all references to PA-instigated terrorism — the murderous stabbings, ‎shootings and car ramming attacks on Israeli civilians — from his speech. Clearly, according to Ban, ‎there is complete moral equivalence between Israel and the PA. ‎

During his visit, Ban went to visit a school in Gaza, where he boldly stated that “the closure of ‎Gaza suffocates its people, stifles its economy and impedes reconstruction efforts. … It’s a collective ‎punishment for which there must be accountability.”

It is these kinds of manipulative and statements, falsely implying that there is a blockade of Gaza affecting civilians, which Ban apparently considers a “responsible” exercise of his high office for the purpose of resolving the conflict. His statements, after all, are reproduced by media and quoted as truth. His remark about “reconstruction efforts” is particularly heinous. As of November 2015, 25 million tons of construction materials had been brought in, 2,733 homes had been rebuilt, and 100,513 homes had been repaired or were in the process of being repaired. In addition, 241 international large-scale projects were under construction.

The blockade is for one purpose only: stopping Hamas from rebuilding its abilities to launch missiles and terror attacks against Israel, and as such, its de facto a weapons embargo. Israel has provided and continues to provide Gaza with millions of tons of humanitarian supplies, including food, medicine and water. What Ban said is factually untrue.

However, Ban also spoke in complete disregard of his own organization’s legal judgment: In a ‎report from 2011 in which the U.N. reviewed Israel’s response to the Turkish-based flotilla to Gaza in 2010, ‎the U.N. noted: “Israel faces a real threat to its security from militant groups in Gaza. The naval blockade was ‎imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea and its ‎implementation complied with the requirements of international law.”

The blockade is legal under ‎international law. By pretending it is not and peddling the kind of false statements that he did in Gaza ‎the other day, the only thing Ban achieved was the further erosion of the rule of international law. ‎

The question that remains as a bad aftertaste is why an Israeli university, of all places, found it appropriate ‎to bestow on this man its highest honor.

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The Hypocrisy of Brexit and the Rise of the Developing World

When the colonial powers gave up on their empire building schemes in Africa and the East, they transferred their physical control to one that was far more “humane,” economic control.  The Europeans decided that battling determined independence movements in Africa and the East just wasn’t worth it.  From the late 1940’s to the 1970’s Africa and the East gained their Independence from Britain and other European countries. However, neocolonial policies of economic servitude through corrupt local leadership continued into the present decade.  

Only now, with the rise of leaders like Modi in India, Uhuru Kenyatta in Kenya, and Paul Kagame in Rwanda indigenous stability has grown to the point where Europe does not have carte blanche over these growing economies.

This is what is so hypocritical about the Brexit vote. Yes, the British regained their sovereign rights over their island, but it is in fact the British themselves that were some of the greatest offenders of controlling indigenous peoples around the world.  The Middle East and Africa are messed up due to the colonial aspirations of the British and their European counterparts. Israel, Kurdistan, and Arab tribes throughout the Middles East were played off each other and moved from one area to another in order to placate the need for control by the Europeans.

In Africa, boundaries were drawn in order to break strong tribes and when necessary these tribes were enslaved and deported to the new world. The Europeans created artificial states and instead of supporting indigenous peoples in these areas they encouraged migrations of Arabs and fundamentalist Muslims both into the Sub-Sahara in Africa and into the Levant and Northern Iraq.  The hypocrisy of the British disconnecting from Europe as these populations flow throughout the mainland, because they don’t want them entering their Kingdom is obvious. At the end of the day the end of the EU is due to the very same forces these powers applied to the colonial areas under their control.

Remember, chaos breeds the need for order. The neo-colonial powers of Europe and America desired to decimate locals in order to exert perpetual control.  Now their centuries’ old experiment of utilizing the Arab hordes for this work has finally caught up to them. It is true, the British might have slowed it down with Brexit, but until they come clean on the cause of all of this, slowing down will only defer the end result a little longer.  

The irony now is that Europe’s death spiral appears to be irreversible, while those former areas of colonial control such as the Sub-Sahara, Middle East, and Near East are coming of age.  With the pendulum swinging against their historical impediments Israel has become the central pillar in an emerging world order that resets the formerly subjugated into beacons of growth and development.  Unfortunately, the ravaging of these areas perpetuated by neocolonial policies of forced conversions (in the case of west Africa), slavery, and an eradication of indigenous cohesive cultures created a vacuum that has taken the developing world longer to rebound from.

Europe will break up and Britain too.  Yet, in the darkness of their cultural zenith the blame should remain close to home.

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UN Makes World Peace With Yoga

(Originally published on Israel Hayom)

Tuesday was International Yoga Day, an initiative of the United Nations. Irina Bokova, the UNESCO director general, gave a speech on the occasion to those who had been waiting in breathless anticipation. “This is a day of peace and harmony, with ourselves, with others and with the planet that is our home,” Bokova said, completely straight-faced.

Nothing less. I am sure this came as a bit of a surprise to the Yazidis, the Kurds, the Biafrans and the millions of persecuted Christians in the world. But Bokova probably did not have them in mind as her primary audience.

Bokova continued to list the beneficial geopolitical benefits of the ancient practice, saying yoga builds “mutual bridges of dialogue, mutual respect and understanding between cultures and peoples. … Yoga is a transformative force that can provide us with the strength and vision we need for more just and harmonious societies. Societies of solidarity, societies in balance with nature.” Impressively, she kept a straight face throughout, but then she has probably done this sort of thing before.

She continued undeterred: “This resonates powerfully with UNESCO’s core message … to deepen the moral and intellectual solidarity of humanity through mutual respect and understanding as the basis for lasting peace.”

She must have been alluding to UNESCO’s erasing of 4,000 years of Jewish culture and history on the Temple Mount in April this year, when UNESCO’s Executive Board adopted a resolution referring to the Temple Mount area solely as Al-Aqsa mosque/al-Haram al-Sharif, except for two references to the Western Wall plaza that were put in parenthesis. The text also referred to the plaza area by the Western Wall as al-Buraq Plaza. That was indeed an exquisite example of intellectual and moral solidarity with the Jewish people and an expression of deep respect and understanding, which truly only the United Nations could have pulled off.

Last, but not least, Bokova did not fail to mention the primary threat to the world today: No, not Islamic and state-sponsored terrorism — climate change. Apparently, yoga even has the power to solve that.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also chimed in with a statement on the global benefits of yoga: “Yoga is a sport that can contribute to development and peace. Yoga can even help people in emergency situations to find relief from stress.”

If only Islamic State, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and all the rest would engage in a class or two of vinyasa or hatha yoga and get their breathing techniques right. The Head to Knee Forward Bend combined with the Cobra pose should do the trick.

I am the last to dispute the beneficial mental and physical effects of yoga. However, as I listened to Bokova’s truly extraordinary speech, it dawned on me that only the U.N., specifically UNESCO, could have come up with such a genius idea (well, to be fair, I think that the U.N. Human Rights Council might also have come up with it, given its extraordinary record). If only the U.N. would extend International Yoga Day to the remaining 364 days of the year and then every day would be “a day of peace and harmony with ourselves, with others and with the planet that is our home.” What a beautiful and noble thought and a brilliantly holistic and organic shortcut to that elusive goal of world peace.

Meanwhile, in the real world, especially in those parts where people less fortunate than well-fed and over-privileged U.N. bureaucrats are too busy fighting for their own and their children’s most basic survival to engage in the luxuries of Yoga Day, people are still being tortured, raped, beheaded and murdered, just for existing.

Unctuous U.N. bureaucrats wax lyrical about peace, humanity and other terms that this corrupt organization has rendered completely meaningless through its deliberate disregard for the most basic principles of international law. These thousands and thousands of bureaucrats are squandering taxpayer dollars on ridiculous self-congratulatory initiatives that serve no purpose whatsoever.

The U.N. continues to fraternize with the worst human rights violators in the world, while it singles out one country — guess which one — on every single one of its agendas, stubbornly pretending that it is the root cause of evil. And still this institution has the Orwellian audacity to lecture humanity on principles of “mutual understanding and respect.”

Imagine there’s no U.N.

It’s easy if you try

No UNESCO below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today … .

It is a vain but noble hope.

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Defeating Foggy Bottom in Israel

History will mark Israel’s election last year as a watershed moment.  Whether the country fully identifies and supports Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu really doesn’t matter. As Minister Zeev Elkin said yesterday, “Likud’s victory saved Israel.”

The State Department dispatched countless operatives to insidiously inject themselves into last year’s election campaign on behalf of the Zionist Union, in an operation that can only be described as meddling and string pulling. The Israeli electorate rebuffed these actions by handing Likud an enormous victory.

With the revelation of a secret deal between Herzog and Abbas now publicized, the V15 and Foggy Bottom’s strategy becomes even more gross.  Essentially, the State Department under directives from the Obama administration sought to unseat and defeat Prime Minister Netanyahu. By doing so their aim was to place a puppet government in charge of Israel in order to sign a final status agreement with the Arab Palestinians.  This agreement would have divided Jerusalem and created a sovereign terror entity in most of Judea and Samaria.

“In my contacts with the Palestinian Authority chief during 2014 I made efforts with the goal of reaching an understanding that would have prevented the wave of terror which I saw coming,” Herzog responded to the report.

The idea that any agreement, especially one that is a product of Western covert force would have prevented the current wave of terror is ludicrous. The Palestinian Authority has no ability to stop the terror as it is.  Placing Abbas and his Western supported mafia in charge of even more land would have spelled complete destruction for the State of Israel.

By voting for Likud last year the Israeli populace was sending a message to the American government. “Stay Out!” It is true, billions of dollars in US aid flows into Israel annually and although many in Israel rightly claim, we no longer need it, the fact is even when we take the money the US gets a tremendous return on it.  Unlike other countries that actually survive solely because they are being propped up by American aid, Israel provides the American military with forward intelligence and details from multiple fronts in the Middle East it cannot collect on its own. This intelligence sharing comes at a price and that is military aid.

This aid has gotten to Foggy Bottom’s brain and instead of respecting the relationship, they have repeatedly abused it.  The Israeli voter used last year to move on and proved ready to redraw the relationship if needed.  Last year was not an expression of love for Bibi, but a rejection of American neo-colonial influence, along with those politicians in Israel willing to play the puppet to a foreign puppeteer.

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Making America Unsafe

(Originally published in Israel Hayom]

There is a deep and unacknowledged irony to the fact that U.S. President Barack Obama, of all people, has opined in the days since the terror attack in Orlando that how you term things makes no difference.

“What exactly would using this label [‘radical Islam’] accomplish? … Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction,” Obama said on Tuesday in response to the heavy criticism poured on him after he, once more, refused to use the term in connection with the mass shooting. Islamic State quickly claimed responsibility for the attack, perhaps frustrated that no one in the U.S. administration, nor the Democratic presidential candidate, will give it credit for it.

Positing that calling something or someone a particular name makes no difference is the very epitome of hypocritical dissembling, especially coming from the person at the very top of the Democratic echelons.

These are the same people who for decades fought to entrench political correctness into American society, making it impossible to call certain things by their rightful names without facing a barrage of vilification and personal smears. The American Left has fought ceaselessly to shape language according to its ideas and has succeeded so tremendously that Americans are now afraid to report suspicious activity out of fear of coming across as “Islamophobic.” This has already cost lives. Before the attack, the security company that Omar Mateen worked for was afraid of reporting him, despite his suspicious behavior, exactly because it feared being castigated as “Islamophobic.”

The U.S. has much to learn from Israel in this regard. Israel is so efficient at fighting terrorism precisely because it cannot afford the luxury of integrating political correctness into its security doctrines. The very idea is preposterous. Nevertheless, this is exactly what Obama has done.

Five years ago, Obama erased all references to Islam in the educational materials used to train the American law enforcement and national security communities. In 2011, U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Cole confirmed that the Obama administration was recalling all its training materials to eliminate references to Islam that some Muslim groups had claimed were offensive.

In 2013, The Washington Times also reported that countless experts on Islamic terrorism had been banned from speaking to any U.S. government counterterrorism conferences, including those of the FBI and CIA. Government agencies were instead ordered to invite Muslim Brotherhood front groups.

If it is only a matter of labels, then why has Obama endangered American lives by deliberately blindsiding law enforcement and national security communities on the nature of Islamic terrorism? How are they supposed to grapple with the urgent issue of jihad if they are prohibited from learning about the nature of jihad?

When Obama claims, as he did on Tuesday, that “there’s no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam.’ If someone seriously thinks we don’t know who we’re fighting, if there’s anyone out there who thinks we’re confused about who our enemies are, that would come as a surprise to the thousands of terrorists we’ve taken off the battlefield,” he is simply dissembling. You cannot know an enemy when you prohibit your law enforcement and intelligence personnel from studying or even mentioning them.

These are all relevant questions that the mainstream media has consistently refused to ask the administration — instead, dangerously dismissing them as conspiracy theories. The price is now being paid by innocent Americans, from a Christmas party in San Bernardino to a gay nightclub in Orlando.

Words matter tremendously, and you cannot fight an enemy that you are forbidden to name. Imagine Churchill telling the British that there was “no magic” in calling out the Nazi ideology and prohibiting his intelligence community from studying Nazi Germany’s strategy and tactics.

Hillary Clinton, feeling the backlash after publishing identical statements to those of Obama, has now opportunistically declared that she is ready to say those “magical words.”

But this is meaningless pandering, especially when you know she was part of the administration that purged training materials of all things Islam.

“In my perspective, it matters what we do, not what we say,” Clinton said. “To me, radical jihadism, radical Islamism, I think they mean the same thing. I’m happy to say either, but that’s not the point.”

The administration pretends there is no Islamist threat. This is what it has firmly projected to its law enforcement and intelligence communities, and Clinton is of course fully aware of the intricate details of this fact. Stating that it matters “what we do” then becomes an empty and even dangerous statement, because it deludes Americans into believing that there is a solid and credible intelligence effort underway to prevent future Islamist terror attacks in the United States, when this cannot logically be the case given that the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities are not allowed to study jihad or Islamic extremism.