Tag: Barack Obama

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ISRAEL AND OBAMA’S POLITICAL WAR

Eli Lake from Bloomberg set off a firestorm in the US this week with his revelation on Monday that in the last six months of the Obama administration, Susan Rice, former president Barack Obama’s national security adviser, requested that the US intelligence community enable her to use foreign intelligence collection as a means of gathering information about Donald Trump’s advisers.

According to Lake’s story, during the course of the US presidential campaign, and with steadily rising intensity after President Donald Trump won the November 2016 election, Rice used her access to intercepted communications of foreign intelligence targets to gather information on Trump’s advisers. Some of those reports were then leaked, injuriously, to the media in violation of US criminal statute.

Whereas in the normal course of events, the identities of American citizens whose conversations with foreigners are intercepted by the US intelligence community are shielded, in the final months of the Obama administration, Rice repeatedly – on “dozens of occasions” – asked that the identities of Americans who conversed with foreigners be exposed.

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The Americans in question were Trump’s advisers.

Lake’s scoop both confirmed and expanded House Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes’s charges from two weeks ago against the Obama White House. Nunes said that he had seen evidence that the Obama administration collected information on incoming Trump administration officials that had no intelligence value. In other words, Nunes alleged that the data gathering was not for national security purposes.

This week’s discovery that Rice played a central role in the intelligence collection regarding Trump’s advisers brings Nunes’s allegations that the outgoing Obama administration conducted surveillance of the Trump team to the highest reaches of the administration. Now that Rice has been exposed, it is impossible to claim that in the event such surveillance occurred, it did not reflect the Obama administration’s concerted policy.

With the exceptions of Obama and his top adviser and confidante Valerie Jarrett, Rice was the top official in the White House.

Lake’s story and subsequent stories have obvious implications for the public’s assessment of Trump’s March 4 allegation on Twitter that Obama spied on him. But the Rice story is equally, if not more, important for what it teaches us about Obama’s mode of governing.

The Rice story strengthens the assessment that for eight years, Obama and his associates weaponized the federal government to wage a political war against their domestic political opponents in a manner that is simply unprecedented.

On Wednesday, Lee Smith noted in Tablet online magazine that the Obama administration’s apparent exploitation of intelligence reports to harm the Trump team was not the first time that the Obama administration acted in this manner.

As Smith recalled, in December 2015 The Wall Street Journal reported that during the domestic political battle surrounding the nuclear deal the Obama administration struck with the Iranian regime, the administration used intelligence intercepts of conversations of Israeli officials to spy on its domestic opponents inside the pro-Israel community and on Capitol Hill.

In the latest iteration of the Obama White House’s abuse of intelligence data, administration officials collected and leaked information about members of the incoming Trump administration to undermine its ability to chart a new course in foreign affairs.

The Obama administration’s campaign against the incoming Trump administration was wildly successful.

Due to their efforts, Trump’s national security adviser Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Mike Flynn was forced to resign in a cloud of controversy just three weeks after Trump took office.

Revelations by Lake and others exposed that Flynn was targeted in the Obama White House’s abuse of intelligence. The administration used its intelligence intercepts and unmasking of Flynn to cultivate the sense – with no evidence – that Flynn was a Russian plant.

On January 12, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius published that Flynn had spoken numerous times to Russia’s US Ambassador Sergei Kislyak after Obama levied sanctions on Russia on December 26.

Ignatius reported that in their conversations the subject of those sanctions arose, but that Flynn made no policy determination regarding how the Trump administration would view the sanctions upon entering office.

In other words, Flynn did nothing wrong. He did his job.

But immediately after the story was published, Flynn was tarred and feathered as a Russian agent. He entered office with Trump on January 20, but was declared “controversial,” “embattled” and “compromised” from his first day in office.

The innuendos followed Flynn like a cloud until he was forced to resign, less than three weeks after entering the White House.

Regardless of whether or not Flynn did anything wrong – and no evidence has been proffered to suggest that he did anything wrong – his loss was a severe blow to the Trump administration. In one fell swoop, the Obama administration’s weaponization of foreign intelligence intercepts had brought down the national security adviser.

This brings us to 2015, and the fight in Washington and throughout the US about Obama’s nuclear deal with Tehran. In the 2015 operation, the White House allegedly used intercepted communications between US citizens and Israeli diplomats and between Israeli diplomats in Washington and Jerusalem to defame opponents of the nuclear deal. Lawmakers and private citizens were repeatedly subjected to condemnations in the media where unnamed administration sources questioned their loyalty, alleged that they were serving the interests of a foreign power against the US, and that in the case of lawmakers, they were bought and paid for by rich Jewish donors.

Speaking to Smith, a pro-Israel activist who had participated in the battle against the nuclear deal explained how the White House operation worked.

“At some point, the administration weaponized the NSA’s [National Security Agency’s] legitimate monitoring of communications of foreign officials to stay one step ahead of domestic political opponents….

“We began to notice that the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.”

Weaponizing intelligence reports was only one way that the Obama administration abused its power to weaken, silence and criminalize its domestic opponents.

Weaponizing the IRS was another way.

And just as Obama’s IRS was used to hound conservative groups that opposed Obama’s domestic agenda, so it was used to discriminate against pro-Israel groups that opposed Obama’s Middle East policies.

The most well-known case of such abuse was the IRS’s failure to approve the request for nonprofit status submitted by Z Street, a pro-Israel educational organization.

After being told by the IRS that its application for nonprofit status was being subjected to “special scrutiny” due to its Israel-centric agenda, and the fact that it advocated views that “contradict those of the administration,” Z Street sued the IRS for viewpoint discrimination.

The IRS attempted to get the case dismissed, but a panel of three irate federal judges rejected its request.

After slow rolling its response to the lawsuit, ahead of Obama’s departure from office, the IRS suddenly approved Z Street’s request for nonprofit status, seven years after it was first requested.

At the same time, the IRS continued to refuse to provide Z Street with the documents that informed its decision to discriminate against it. And it refused to explain how its decision to discriminate against US citizens in its tax policies on the basis of their political opposition to the administration’s policies was legal.

There are several aspects of the story of Obama’s abuse of power, and the fact that Israel and its US allies were key targets of that abuse, that are important beyond the domestic discourse in the US.

First, the Obama administration’s abuse of foreign intelligence to wage political warfare against pro-Israel activists and lawmakers who support Israel during the Iran battle tells us that the Obama administration viewed supporters of a strong US-Israel alliance as its political enemies. This is remarkable.

Moreover, the fact that Z Street and other US nonprofit groups that espouse positions on Israel at odds to the Obama administration’s views were specifically targeted for discrimination by the IRS indicates that the Obama administration’s political war against US support for Israel was all-encompassing. It wasn’t limited to the realm of foreign policy. It related as well to the ability to Americans to educate their fellow citizens on the need for a robust partnership with a strong Israel.

The second thing that we learn from our deepening understanding of the Obama administration’s apparent weaponization of the federal bureaucracy as a means to defeat and undermine its political opponents is that apparently, Obama’s top aides deliberately acted to undermine Trump’s ability to govern. This is particularly apparent in everything related to foreign policy.

As Adam Kredo from The Washington Free Beacon has documented, in its last months, the Obama administration ensured that the National Security Council’s budget would be depleted, in order to deny the Trump administration the ability to hire new staffers. It hired political appointees into the civil service and then burrowed them in the National Security Council and other key government departments, to undermine and discredit the Trump administration from within.

For instance, in its waning days, the State Department extended Yael Lempert’s tenure at the National Security Council for two years. Lempert is a foreign service officer notorious for her rabid opposition to Israel.

In another example, last July, Obama moved Sahar Nowrouzzadeh from his National Security Council, where Nowrouzzadeh served as Iran director, to the State Department, where he is now in charge of policy planning on Iran and the Persian Gulf.

As professional foreign service officers, both Lempert and Nowrouzzadeh are essentially impossible to fire or move.

In an interview with PBS following Nunes’s revelations, Susan Rice falsely denied that the Obama White House had “unmasked” incoming Trump administration personnel whose conversations with foreigners were intercepted by the intelligence community.

After denying the charges, Rice was asked her view of Trump’s foreign policy so far. Rice responded derisively.

She noted that despite Trump’s criticism of the Obama administration’s lackadaisical and stalled campaign against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the policy the Trump administration is enacting against ISIS on the ground is essentially the same policy that the Obama administration implemented, “as it should be,” she added, with a smirk.

In reality, if indeed Trump is implementing Obama’s ISIS policy, his failure to enact a new policy there, and indeed, the perceived chaos and disarray of his foreign policy across the board, is not a function of Trump’s incompetence or of the inexperience of his advisers. To the extent that Trump has failed to date to enact a clear foreign policy, this week’s disclosures strengthen the sense that his failure owes primarily to the deliberate subversion of his administration by his predecessor.

Originally Published in the Jerusalem Post.

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The World’s Largest Anti-Israel Organization

Have you ever wondered why the United Nations is so anti-Israel? Did you know the UN Human Rights Council has passed more resolutions against Israel than all other countries combined?

Take a look at the rest of the world. The Syrian civil war has been raging since 2011 with close to 500,000 deaths by various estimates. Hezbollah has built up an arsenal of approximately 150,000 rockets in Southern Lebanon. This is a flagrant violation of UN resolution 1701, to which the UN has turned a blind eye. ISIS is terrorizing and murdering people in the Middle East and is responsible for numerous attacks in Europe and elsewhere. North Korea continues its rogue behavior, with provocative missile launches. Iran is a threat to the entire Middle East, especially Israel. It launches missiles with “Israel must be wiped out” painted on them. It’s also the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. Again the UN is silent.

In perspective these are but a few of the highly significant issues plaguing much of the world. Yet the UN seems to have a permanent case of tunnel vision when it comes to Israel.

Keep in mind Israel is a mere 8,000 square miles in size, or roughly the size of New Jersey. Its total population, including more than 1 million Arabs is just over 8,000,000. The Jewish population of Israel is approximately 6.5 million. Contrast that against the world population of 7.5 billion, Jewish Israel represents less than one tenth of one percent of the entire world.

So why is a tiny country like Israel and its ongoing conflict with the Arab Muslim ‘Palestinians’ standing head and shoulders above much more important issues as far as the UN is concerned? This question may have people scratching their heads trying to come up with an answer. Yet a closer look inside the make-up of the UN provides the answer.

Obsessed with Resolutions

For example let’s examine the most anti-Israel body within the organization- the UN Human Rights Council. Since 2006 when the United Nations Commission on Human Rights changed its name to the United Nations Human Rights Council, it has passed no less than 60 resolutions against Israel. That’s a sustained average of almost one every other month during the past 10 years. In 2016 alone there were no less than 20. Incredibly 10 were passed on a single day! A total of 4 were passed against the rest of the world in 2016. This seems almost absurd, until you break down the UNHRC.

There are 47 member nations that comprise the UNHRC. Keep in mind the focus of it is “human rights.” Yet look at some of its members- China, Cuba, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Qatar, Burundi, Bangladesh, UAE, etc. Shouldn’t members be beacons of protecting human rights? Yet these countries are some of its worst offenders.

Unfair Playing Field

Now let’s look at the actual structure of the UNHRC which is quite telling. They divide the nations of the world into five regions:

  1. Africa (including Middle East)
  2. Asia
  3. Latin America/Caribbean
  4. Western Europe
  5. Eastern Europe

In case you are wondering the US is part of the Western Europe region.
The African and Asian regions each have 13 members. Latin America/Caribbean has 8 members, Western Europe 7 and Eastern Europe 6. Now here’s where the rubber meets the road…. Every nation where Muslims make up 50% or more of the general population is in one of two regions- the African or Asian region. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize when those two regions vote as a block, their 26 votes comprise an automatic majority of the UNHRC’s 47 members.

Another noteworthy  point is how the US is positioned. Keep in mind it’s the home of the United Nations, and puts up roughly 22% of the overall UN budget. Yet on the UNHRC the US doesn’t even have its own region. It’s buried as a member of the Western Europe region which has a mere 7 member nations. It can be easily outvoted by the Muslim dominated African and Asian regions.

Back to the question of why the UNHRC has been so ardently anti-Israel for many years; once you understand how the UNHRC is structured with the Muslim nations in control, it becomes clear why they ignore many other obvious problematic areas, and devote so much attention to Israel. It sits smack dab in the heart of the Middle East, and has been a thorn in the side of the Arab Muslim world since the moment it was reborn in 1948.  The existence of a sovereign Jewish state on land which most of the Muslim world considers holy, especially Jerusalem, represents a huge obstacle to their goal of ‘liberating’ all of Israel in favor of “Palestine.”

Multiple Fronts of World’s Largest Anti-Israel Organization

The UN Department of Political Affairs has an entire division devoted to Palestinian affairs. No other people or nation enjoy such a distinction. Plus, there are other anti-Israel UN agencies.  UNESCO for example is in the business of revising history by passing resolutions reclassifying obvious Jewish holy sites such as the Cave of the Patriarchs, and Temple Mount as Muslims holy sites. This is in outright contradiction to documented historical fact.

There’s also UNRWA, which is the only UN refugee agency created exclusively for a single group of people- the Arab Palestinians. It runs schools in the Gaza Strip and in Judea/Samaria. This virulently anti-Israel agency openly teaches students jihad against Israel and the Jews.

Then there’s the UN Security Council which recently passed a resolution naming Israeli “settlements” as the main obstacle to peace. The resolution completely ignored Arab Palestinian terrorism.

It’s not as if the UN Security Council hasn’t made other efforts to pass anti-Israel resolutions. It has. However, unlike the UNHRC where the US influence is minimal, it’s one of 5 permanent members of the Security Council, and as such has veto power. Since 1970 the US has used its veto power on 39 occasions to thwart anti-Israel resolutions.

The United Nations as an organization is charged with upholding dignity and security for all the nations of the world big and small. Yet, is it acting with equal vigilance enforcing these noble principles when it comes to Israel? The answer is a resounding no! One could make a strong case that the UN has a separate anti-Israel agenda from its overall calling, effectively making it the largest anti-Israel organization in the world…. unofficially of course.

However, now that Donald Trump has replaced Barack Obama as President and Nikki Haley is the US Ambassador who sits on the Security Council, we are about to see Israel getting the support it rightfully deserves. Moreover, Trump has indicated the US may consider taking punitive action against the UN and some of its internal agencies, in the form of reducing or eliminating financial support.

We are in the early stages of a long overdue new era. It’s about time someone is ‘Trumpeting’ support for Israel.

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THE WAR WITHIN: Israel and the USA Now Share a Deep State

We often speak about the unique relationship the United States of America has with Israel.  No where has this been as beautifully expressed as John Winthrop’s City Upon the Hill speech, made nearly 350 years ago in new England, which saw America’s future as being bound with ancient Israel.

Yet, with all of the fanfare this special relationship has, the two countries share something antithetical to the foundation of freedom. Israel was founded in 1948 from the outgrowth of the partition plan of the British mandate. There were three main groups fighting for the control of the nascent State of Israel: The Haganah, the Irgun, and Lehi.  With British backing and the need for unity in face of five Arab armies, the latter two groups agreed to work under the leadership of Mapai and the Haganah.  Essentially they ceded power to Ben Gurion and his political apparatus.

The Mapai party was not a Western style political movement, but rather the most moderate of the socialist Zionist political movements.  From the very beginning Ben Gurion and those around him went out to assert their control over the State of Israel at all levels.  They created a bureaucracy so penetrative to the normal Israeli, the State could barely breathe.  In 1977, Menachem Begin surprised the establishment and became the Prime Minister of Israel.  He was the feared leader of the Irgun, demonized by Ben Gurion and the Mapai, but unlike his Mapai counterparts Begin believed in an open economy and the freedom of ideas.

With Begin’s victory and the changing demographics of Israel, the Left realized it could not overtly control the country anymore.  It had to rely on the bureaucracy created in the beginning of the state. The Left embedded itself within Israel’s Justice system, media, and education system.  Despite Begin’s victory and Shamir’s continuance of his legacy, the Left drove the narrative of the country until Bibi became the Finance Minister.  Netanyahu realized the battle is far more deep than appears and went out to unleash the economic potential of Israel thus circumventing the Left’s ability to control events unchecked.  The Deep State continues in Israel through the courts and the media.  It coordinates with its counterparts around the world and seeks only one thing, control of Israel’s future. Economic freedom has pushed back on the Left, but if cannot have contol, the Left is willing to bring the country down.

Trump is Battling an Israeli Style Deep State in America

Obama realized early on that he could be America’s shadow president through the injection of loyalists into the expanding bureaucracy his team was setting out to create. Regulation after regulation and federal job after federal job, Obama’s influence became ever lasting within the confines of Washington DC.  Like the Arabists in the State Department who have controlled Foggy Bottom from the shadows of their offices since World War 2, Obama remade the Federal bureaucracy to follow his orders whether he is in office or not.

This Deep State is real and has no loyalty to the constitution or nationalism.  The Deep State in Israel and the USA is concerned only with its own self-preservation.  It is this Deep State that both Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu are fighting.  The shadows are strong and they change location and tactics, but they must be removed for freedom to truly reign.

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J Street’s Dead End

At the end of 2017, the far-left Jewish advocacy group J Street will celebrate its 10th anniversary. At its inception, J Street promised to be the first political movement “to explicitly promote American leadership to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” However, the organization’s pursuit of this goal was an abject and damning failure.

Circumstances couldn’t have been more amenable toward J Street’s lofty goal. Within 14 months of J Street’s inception, Barack Obama swept to power in elections that also left both houses of Congress controlled by Democrats.

As president, Obama’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was groundbreaking in many ways, deviating from the positions and tone of his predecessors, both Republican and Democrat. J Street backed this shift with political cover, campaign donations, and organizational unanimity, providing a convenient panacea to American Jewish community outrage over Obama’s maneuvers.

The fledgling J Street found itself at the top table with veteran Jewish and pro-Israel organizations at the White House, with almost unprecedented access during Obama’s two terms.

It wasn’t merely a spectator: J Street saw itself as a vital part of the administration’s strategy and policy on Israel and the peace process. It prided itself on the puppeteer role it played in defending the White House or pushing its policy platform.

“We were the blocking-back, clearing space for the quarterback to do what we wanted him to do,” said J Street’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, in 2011. He added, Obama “hasn’t been able to push as aggressively as we would like,” and J Street has “switched from being out front and clearing the way, to pushing him to do something more.”

Something more turned out to be a lot less.

During the full eight years of the Obama administration, which set as one of its foreign policy goals a peaceful resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas never sat in the same room for more than a few hours in total.

While Netanyahu constantly repeated that he was willing to meet with the Palestinian leader at any place at any time, with no preconditions, Abbas made a series of impossible preconditions that pushed meaningful negotiations further and further away. J Street ended up blaming Netanyahu for Abbas’s intransigence.

Mutual distrust between the parties may not have been greater in a generation, and it could be argued that peace is as far away as it has been since the Oslo Peace Process began. J Street’s continued criticism of the Israeli government created a pseudo-Zionist political shield on the Jewish community’s left flank that the Obama administration used to blame Israel for actions largely caused by Palestinian obstinacy.

For eight years J Street supported Obama’s destructive policies toward Israel like the unilateral settlement freeze, nuclear détente with Iran, and his allowance for international condemnation of Israeli communities in the West Bank.

As a group that prided itself on its ability to make its voice heard in the American administration’s halls of power, J Street’s inability to influence must take a very heavy responsibility for the remission of the peace process.

Moreover, in its unrelenting vision of itself as chartering new territory, it lost many ideological allies.

At the end of 2008, when Israel decided to defend itself against incessant rocket attacks from the terrorist organization Hamas in the Gaza Strip, J Street attacked Israel’s defensive actions. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president emeritus of the Union for Reform Judaism, called J Street’s reaction to Israeli policy “morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve.”

In 2009, J Street initially tried to facilitate meetings between Richard Goldstone, lead author of a slanderous report on Israel’s war on terror in Gaza, and members of Congress.

In 2011, when it appeared to advocate for the U.S. not to veto a deeply problematic UN resolution condemning Israel, supporters like Democratic Congressman Gary Ackerman of New York cut ties with the organization.

J Street also placed itself out of mainstream pro-Israel circles when it invited prominent activists in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement to its conferences and claimed that George Soros had not funded the organization until it became a matter of public record that he had in fact provided significant donations, especially during its formative years.

All of these hits have left the reputations of J Street and its combative president battered and bruised.

However, the latest election results have delivered the knock-out punch.

If perhaps the only selling point J Street could offer its potential donors in recent years has been largely unfettered (if squandered and ineffective) access to the White House, this will now be completely removed from the equation by the victory of Donald Trump and continued Republican control of both houses of Congress.

J Street has now become an organization vilified by former friends, distanced from the Left in Israel, and distrusted by many more. It may reconstitute itself in some constellation or another, but its heyday has past.

Originally Published in the Hill

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[watch] Obama Took $221m of US Taxpayer Money and Gave it to a Terror Organization Before Leaving Office

It has been revealed that Obama took one last parting shot at Israel and the US Congress before leaving office by transferring $221m to the Palestinian Authority the US Congress was blocking.

Ari Lieberman writing in FrontPageMag wrote the following about where the money is going to go:

“Just as alarmingly, a whopping 10% of the PA’s budget goes to pay the salaries of convicted terrorists or is allocated to families of deceased terrorists, killed in “martyrdom operations,” the Palestinian euphemism for bloody terrorist carnage. Thus, the family of the terrorist who stabbed US Army veteran Taylor Force to death while he was touring Jaffa receives a stipend from the PA. Similarly, the family of the beast who broke into the house of Hallel Yaffa Ariel and butchered the 13-year-old while she was sound asleep in her bed also receives a portion of Obama’s taxpayer-funded aid money.”

Obama has proven time and again, that his allegiances as President was to his far left and radical Islamic supporting ideologies and not to what is best for America or her allies.