Tag: Barack Obama

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As Trump Charts New Mideast Policy, White House Contemplates Sabotage

Originally published under the title “Trump Is No Obama on Middle East Policy.”

After their first meeting, with cameras broadcasting their every word across the globe, President Obama turned to Donald Trump and pledged “to do everything we can to help you succeed.” Media outlets across the spectrum fawned over his magnanimity.

Guess again. Washington DC insiders widely expect the president to launch a bold effort to constrain the president-elect’s options in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by supporting unilateral international recognition of Palestinian statehood, possibly in the UN Security Council.

U.S. policy has long maintained that a Palestinian state should be established in conjunction with a comprehensive peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA).

While Israel has said time and time again that it is eager to live alongside a Palestinian state, the Palestinian leadership has remained unwilling to make the necessary concessions for a final status agreement, such as accepting the existence of a Jewish state alongside their own. Indeed, PA President Mahmoud Abbas has steadfastly maintained that millions of Palestinians must have the “right of return” to Israel – a move that would effectively eviscerate a Jewish Israel.

Instead of pursuing a peaceful path to statehood, Palestinian leaders have incited violence against Israel, while trying to persuade the rest of the world to recognize Palestinian statehood in the absence of peace.

Amid surging anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, European governments have come under intense pressure to recognize a Palestinian state. Sweden was the first Western European government to do so in 2014. Legislatures in the United Kingdom, Spain, and France have passed (largely non-binding) resolutions doing so.

Successive U.S. administrations have vocally opposed unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood by the United Nations and other international actors, maintaining correctly that it would irreparably damage the prospects for a viable, secure two-state solution.

In a position paper released last week, the Trump campaign emphasized that “the U.S. cannot support the creation of a new state where terrorism is financially incentivized, terrorists are celebrated by political parties and government institutions, and the corrupt diversion of foreign aid is rampant,” pledged to veto any UN action that unfairly targets Israel, and affirmed that Palestinians must first “renounce violence against Israel or recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state” before being granted statehood.

In seeking to overturn longstanding precedent and thwart the expressed policy positions of his successor, Obama presumably hopes that supporting (or not vetoing) a UN Security Council resolution on Palestinian statehood will create an irreversible fait accompli that will eventually spur Israel to make concessions, like a settlement freeze, which will in turn strengthen moderates on the Palestinian side.

It’s the same thinking that led the United States to make concession after concession in the Iran nuclear deal, and it is likely to backfire in the same way. Unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state will communicate to Palestinian leaders that they do not need to concede anything and validate the use and incitement of violence, vindicating hardliners.

Until the Palestinian leadership can recognize and accept a Jewish state in the land of Israel, the United States must continue working to prevent international recognition of a Palestinian state.

A Trump national security adviser warned the Obama administration last week not “to try to push through agenda items that are contrary to the president-elect’s positions.” President-elect Trump should follow up by publicly reaffirming that his administration will vigorously oppose unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood and will not be bound by commitments the current administration has made or will make regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The rest of us should do our part by calling on President Obama to respect the will of voters and allow his duly-elected successor to chart a new course in Mideast policy without any impediments.

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Obama Does Not Plan on Stepping Down

After January 20th Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States, but that won’t stop Barack Hussein Obama from stepping in to course correct the Trump administration if needed.

Real Clear Politics reports:

At a press conference Sunday in Lima the president said he does not believe he will be the last Democratic president, for a while, and made no promise to not speak up if he feels it to be “helpful” and “necessary” for him to comment on President-elect Trump’s proposals.

“Look, I said before, President Bush could not have been more gracious to me when I came in and my intention is to certainly for the next two months, finish my job and after that to take Michelle on vacation, get some rest, spend time with my girls and do some writing, some thinking,” Obama said in Peru.

“I want to be respectful of the office and give the president-elect an opportunity to put forward his platform and his arguments without somebody popping off in every instance,” Obama said.

“As an American citizen who cares deeply about our country, if there are issues that have less to do with the specifics of some legislative proposal but go to core questions about our values and our ideals, and if I think that it is necessary or helpful for me to defend those ideals, I’ll examine it when it comes,” the president said.

The fact is, the stage is being set for Obama to be in permanent president mode.  In a sense he will be more powerful without the shackles of law to hold his bully pulpit.  The media will back his statements and 50% of the country will view Obama as the real leader no matter who sits in the White House. Times are changing. Two Americas will unfortunately be forced to duke it out.

Take a look at the video from the interchange:

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The Obama Era is Over

Originally published on Sultan Knish.

Obama and his supporters loved talking about history. His victory was historic. They were on the right side of history. History was an inevitable arc that bent their way.

The tidal force of demographics had made the old America irrelevant. Any progressive policy agenda was now possible because we were no longer America. We Were Obamerica. A hip, happening place full of smiling gay couples, Muslim women in hijabs and transgender actors. We were all going to live in a New York City coffee house and work at Green Jobs and live in the post-national future.

The past was gone. We were falling into the gorgeous wonderful future of dot com instant deliveries and outsourced everything. We would become more tolerant and guilty. The future was Amazon and Disney. It was hot and cold running social justice. The Bill of Rights was done. Ending the First and Second Amendments was just a clever campaign away. Narratives on news sites drove everything.

Presidents were elected by Saturday Night Live skits. John Oliver, John Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee were our journalists. Safe spaces were everywhere and you better watch your microaggressions, buddy. No more coal would be mined. No more anything would be made. The end of men was here. The end of the dead white men of the literary canon. The end of white people. The end of binary gender and marriage. The end of reason. The end of art. The end of 2 + 2 equaling 4. This was Common Core time. It was time to pardon an endless line of drug dealers. To kill cops and praise criminals. To be forced to buy worthless health insurance for wealth redistribution to those who voted their way to wealth.

This was Obama’s America. And there was no going back. We were rushing through endless goal posts of social transformation. The military fell. Then the police. Now it looks as quaint as anything from the 50s, the 70s or the 80s. A brief moment of foolishness that already appears odd and awkward. And then one day nostalgic. It wasn’t the future. It’s already the past. It’s history.

Scalia died. Hillary Clinton was bound to win. And she would define the Supreme Court. Downticket races would give her a friendly Senate. And then perhaps the House.

But there is no right side of history. There is only the side we choose.

The Obama era was permanent. It was history. Now it is history.

Its shocking ascendancy has been paired with an equally shocking descent. The Obama era is done. It’s gone. It’s over. It was wiped from the pages of history in one night that left Congress and the White House in Republican hands.

It would have been bad enough if Jeb Bush had succeeded Obama. That would have been inconvenient, but not a repudiation. Instead Obama’s legacy was dashed to pieces. His frantic efforts to campaign for Hillary did no good. The public did not vocally reject him. What they did was in its own way even worse. They brushed past him. They sidelined him. They gave him passable approval ratings while dismissing his biggest accomplishments. They forgot him. They made it clear that he did not matter.

And that is in its own way far more brutal and wounding. They didn’t just destroy the Obama era. Instead they dismissed it as if it never existed.

Obama didn’t make history after all. He wasn’t a teleprompter demi-god standing athwart of history. He was Carter and Ford. He was there to be forgotten. He didn’t change the world. He wasn’t the messiah. He was merely mortal. Just another politician who will sag and age. Who will, in the end, be photographed like Bill Clinton, lonely and lost in a world that has passed him by.

The Obama era ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. With a national consensus that maybe he didn’t really matter so much after all. And those to whom he mattered the most were his enemies determined to undo everything he did.

Obama once thought that he belonged to the ages. Now he belongs in the rubbish bin.

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Checkmating Obama

In one of the immortal lines of Godfather 2, mafia boss Michael Corleone discusses the fate of his brother, who betrayed him, with his enforcer.

“I don’t want anything to happen to him while my mother is alive,” Corleone said.

Message received.

The brother was murdered after their mother’s funeral.

Last week it was reported that the Obama administration has delivered a message to the Palestinian Authority. The administration has warned the PA that the US will veto any anti-Israel resolution brought before the UN Security Council before the US presidential elections on November 8.

Message received.

Open season on Israel at the Security Council will commence November 9. The Palestinians are planning appropriately.

Israel needs to plan, too. Israel’s most urgent diplomatic mission today is to develop and implement a strategy that will outflank President Barack Obama in his final eight weeks in power.

Lobbying the administration is pointless. Obama has waited eight years to exact his revenge on Israel for not supporting his hostile, strategically irrational policies. And he has no interest in letting bygones be bygones.

Before turning to what Israel must do, first we need to understand what Israel can do.

A good place to begin is by considering what just transpired at UNESCO, where twice in a week, UNESCO bodies resolved to erase 3,000 years of Jewish history in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.

The fight that Israel waged at UNESCO is not the fight it needs to wage at the Security Council. The stakes at the Security Council are far higher.

Like the UN General Assembly, UNESCO’s decisions are non-binding declarations that have no legal or operational significance. As such, there is no reason to expend great resources to fight them. For Israel, the goal of the fight at UNESCO is not to defeat anti-Israel initiatives. That is impossible given the Palestinians’ automatic majority.

The purpose of the fight at UNESCO is to humiliate European governments that side with antisemitic initiatives, and to weaken the congenitally anti-Israel body itself.

The government achieved both of these objectives. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s disavowal of his own government’s abstention from the vote on the first resolution – like the similar position taken after the fact by the Mexican government – was a diplomatic victory for Israel.

So too, the fact that UNESCO’s own Secretary-General Irina Bukova felt compelled to disavow her own agency’s actions by rejecting the resolution’s denial of the Jewish people’s ties to Jerusalem was a significant victory for Israel. Her statement was deeply damaging for UNESCO and its reputation.

Finally, the fact that Tanzania and the Philippines voted against the resolution was a testament to Israel’s capacity to convince other governments to abandon their traditional pro-Palestinian voting pattern.

The Palestinians won the vote at UNESCO because they are more powerful diplomatically than Israel. They have an automatic anti-Israel majority. But they weren’t empowered by their victory. To the contrary. They were bloodied by it.

In a sign of their weakening hold on member nations, the Palestinians and Jordanians felt compelled to send a threatening letter to the members of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee lest they dare to vote against the resolution. Powerful players don’t make threats. They don’t need to.

Israel’s experience at UNESCO teaches us that there are governments that are open to counteroffers. Israel doesn’t need to hide in America’s shadow. It is capable of working on its own to blunt the impact of the Palestinians’ automatic majority. And it will need to use all of its resources to fend off a US-backed assault at the Security Council.

Unlike UNESCO, the Security Council can pass legally binding resolutions. Israel needs to be prepared to bring all of its resources to bear to prevent such a resolution from being adopted against it. Obama’s intention to abandon Israel at the Security Council means that Israel comes to this battle severely hobbled.

But there is one advantage to the US’s betrayal.

Over the years, Israel’s ability to trust the US to veto anti-Israel resolutions at the Security Council was been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the US has secured Israel from diplomatic assaults. But on the other hand, our ability to trust Washington has made us diplomatically lazy and ineffective.

Safe in Washington’s shadow, we have behaved as through all diplomacy is public diplomacy. That is, we have pretended that statecraft begins and ends with making the moral or strategic case for our side against the other guys.

But public diplomacy is just one diplomatic tool.

The Syrian regime, for instance, has no moral case for securing international support. Bashar Assad didn’t convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to support him by arguing that he is better than alternative regimes. He bought Putin’s support by offering him permanent air and naval bases in Syria.

Then there is Morocco, another weak state with no public diplomacy case to make. Last March, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon outraged Rabat when he acknowledged the plain fact that Western Sahara, which Morocco occupies, is “occupied territory.”

Morocco quickly secured the support of Spain and France and launched an all-out onslaught against Ban. How did Morocco manage?

Morocco’s most powerful diplomatic resource is its control over migration flows from North Africa to Europe. Anytime it wishes, Rabat can open the migratory floodgates just as easily as it can keep them shut. And the French and Spanish know it.

In less than a month, Ban issued repeated abject apologies.

Game. Set. Match. Morocco.

From reports to date, it appears that shortly after the US elections on November 8, the Malaysians or Egyptians will submit a Palestinian-backed resolution that defines Israeli communities in united Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria as illegal. If the resolution is brought to a vote, the US will fail to veto it.

Such a resolution, or a resolution obligating Israel to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines, would cause Israel grave harm.

So what resources does Israel have to prevent this from happening?

Of course, we have public diplomacy. And that might work with some friendly nations. But it won’t get us over the top. We need to learn from the Syrian and Moroccan examples and consider what we have to offer Security Council members in exchange for their support in scuttling the approaching onslaught against us.

One such resource is the US Congress. Israel’s allies in Congress are sickened by the Obama administration’s devastating Middle East policies. A solid majority of lawmakers can be trusted to support actions that will reinforce Israel’s position.

 

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Israel has other resources as well that we can trade on. We have natural gas. And we have technologies that the governments of the world require to surmount the challenges of the 21 century. There is no reason to give these resources away when we can trade them for diplomatic support.

As for the Palestinians, as the UNESCO vote showed, they are less popular now than at any time in the past 40 years. All they have to offer is threats and antisemitism. Both are powerful weapons.

But they are no longer invincible.

Israel’s goal must be to use our resources at the Security Council in a manner that will make it impossible for Obama to enable an anti-Israel resolution to pass.

A method for achieving this goal has two components. The first component is to convince a friendly country on the Security Council to propose a balanced resolution that would counter the Palestinian-backed Israel-bashing one.

Such a resolution could include four points. First, it could deplore efforts to deny Jewish history in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.

Second, it can condemn the PA/PLO for their continued unlawful funding of terrorists.

Third, it can urge Israel to restrain settlement construction in areas that in previous negotiations have been identified as likely territory for a future Palestinian state.

Fourth, it can call on Israel and the PA to reinstate negotiations immediately without preconditions.

Israel has friendly ties with a few Security Council members, among them Uruguay and New Zealand. In the final weeks of the Obama era, it is possible that Israel will be able to convince one of them to submit a balanced resolution along these lines.

Obama would be hard-pressed to oppose such a resolution in favor of one that singles Israel out for rebuke.

But that still is insufficient. Obama can make Uruguay and New Zealand a better offer if he wishes.

And so we move to the second aspect of the plan.

If we learn nothing else from the Obama era, we must recognize that the time has come for Israel to stop sufficing with just one Security Council veto. Most states have several. And we need a few more.

Russia today is the best place to start our search for a second veto.

Putin is a dealmaker. As his agreement with Assad showed, he is willing to consider attractive offers. Obviously, Israel won’t offer Russia bases. But we do have other things to offer Putin in exchange for a veto.

For instance, in exchange for a Russian veto at the Security Council, Israel can offer Putin to lobby the US Congress to cancel US sanctions against Russia over Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Israel has no dog in that fight. And the sanctions are not getting the US anywhere.

Putin might go for the deal for two reasons. First, by stepping into the breach and defending Israel against Obama, he will humiliate Obama.

Second, if Israel succeeds with the Congress, he will reap economic rewards.

For his part, Putin wouldn’t even have to openly side with Israel. All he would have to do is announce that in the interests of regional stability, Russia will not support an unbalanced resolution on Israel and the Palestinians.

If Putin supports a balanced resolution, Obama will be checkmated. His plan to take revenge on Israel for not following him off the strategic cliff will be foiled. Israel will have survived his presidency.

None of this will be easy. And success is far from assured. There are many more ways for Israel to fail than succeed. Our diplomatic weakness remains a millstone around our neck. But as the UNESCO resolutions showed, attacking Israel is no longer cost free. We are not powerless in the grip of circumstances. We have cards to play.

And now is the time to play them for all they are worth.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

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The Little Jewish Village That Makes Obama Boil

Originally Published on Sultan Knish

Halfway to the sky sits a tiny village of little white houses that has attracted the ire of the White House.

The village of Amona with its small white houses and red roofs could easily be mistaken for some lost Italian village or a dusty California town. But the White House would not have “boiled in anger”, as one anonymous official claimed, over the doings of some Italian village.

There’s only one place on earth that makes Obama’s blood boil. It isn’t Iran or North Korea. It’s Israel.

Amona’s small scattering of houses have a fraction of the square footage of the White House. The 40 families living there in defiance of Islamic terrorists and left-wing lawfarers would hardly be noticeable if they all crowded into the White House foyer. And yet they’ve been condemned by the State Department in more virulent tones than most Muslim dictators.

What is it about this handful of Jews caught between heaven and earth that outrages so many?

That may be the great question of history. It will not be solved among the sheep pens and orchards, the little white houses of Amona and their inhabitants, who despite the rage of the big White House, continue to go to work each day, to raise their children and to worship in the way of their ancestors.

In the official parlance of the media, Amona is a “settlement”. That is to say it dates back a mere 3,300 years to the time when Joshua, born a slave in Egypt, commanded the Jews, “’Go and walk through the land, and describe it, and come back to me, and I will cast lots for you here before the Lord in Shilo.”

Today Shilo is a city of some 3,500. Like Jerusalem, it is also deemed a settlement. But on the list of places described by Joshua’s men, the mere speck of Amona appears before Jerusalem.

But then Amona, unlike Jerusalem, vanished from history. For thousands of years the name would have only meant something to the most dedicated biblical scholars. And then the left went to war against Amona. And out of that hatred the forgotten town was raised up from its forgotten place in history.

The handful of families living in Amona have been the subject of more legal proceedings, international debates, threats and international outrage than most genocides. 3,000 feet above sea level, its residents look up at a kind blue sky and down at an angry world that is unwilling to let them live in peace.

They meet the challenges of gravity and rage with simple faith. Asked about the threat of Islamic terror, a 5-year old girl answered, “As God helped Joshua, so he will also help us.”

Amona and its residents need all the help they can get. They have been under siege for decades. What the Islamic terrorists couldn’t do to the residents, lawyers and activists who receive funding from the Soros network and assorted international left-wing billion dollar organizations, strive to accomplish.

Demolition and eviction orders have been issued. Police have converged on the handful of buildings with clubs and yells. In one such battle a 15-year-old girl, whom we only know as Nili, stood in their way. The image of the teenage girl blocking the path of dozens of riot police in black became a Pulitzer Prize winning photo. “Anyone who looks today at the ruins of the houses in Amona – understands that in this operation there was no sense whatever, except destruction,” she said in an interview.

There is still no sense whatsoever to the war against Amona except destruction. It isn’t about the land.

Amona’s main antagonist is the extremist left-wing group Peace Now. There is nothing peaceful about Peace Now which seeks peace only with Islamic terrorists. One co-founder, Uri Avnery, declared, “The time has come to bury them.” Another Peace Now co-founder, Yigal Tumarkin weighed in, “My true contribution would be if I grabbed a sub-machine-gun, instead of a pen and pencil, and killed them.”

The children of Israel’s small towns and villages excite such unnatural fury from left-wing notables.

Under pressure from a radical left-wing judiciary, Israel’s government decided to relocate the families of Amona by building houses for them in Shilo. It is this which reportedly made Obama boil like a little teapot. The Jews of Amona are not to be permitted to live in their town. Or in any other.

According to some anonymous official, the plan to build houses for the evacuees in Shiloh is “of great concern” to the White House. Anyone wondering why Obama isn’t concerned about ISIS or the economy had better realize that his eye is firmly fixed on a small town in Israel up against the bulldozer.

And he’s determined to see to it that the bulldozer wins.

State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner claimed that building 98 homes would endanger peace. Peace in Israel is as dead as the dodo. But somehow it never seems to be endangered by any amount of Muslim suicide bombings, stabbings or rockets. The Palestinian Authority funds Islamic terrorism by paying salaries to terrorists using taxpayer money dispensed to them by Obama.

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And this butchery of Jewish families and massacres of Rabbis in no way endangers peace.

It is only the very real risk that the families of Amona might find some shelter that renders the glorious infrastructure of “a viable Palestinian state more remote”. Like Haman, the Islamic terrorist state cannot stand to see a Binyaminite, no matter how alone, standing tall in defiance of its hunger and malice. These handfuls of homes represent, according to the State Department, “perpetual occupation.”

State has a point. 3,300 years isn’t quite perpetual, but it’s a lot longer than Toner has been hanging around D.C. It’s a long longer than appeasers who know not to eat with their left hand and to curse Israel when visiting Muslim countries have been sliming their way around Foggy Bottom.

Can a few dozen families really “block” the rise of an Islamic terrorist state in Israel? During Israel’s War of Independence the small village of Kfar Darom held out against sustained assaults from the Muslim Brotherhood. Among the Muslim Brotherhood terrorists was an Egyptian Jihadist named Yasser Arafat.

Moral courage enables a handful of people to do what the massive array of government cannot.

Nili explained her actions by saying, “You see me in the photograph, one against many, but that is only an illusion. Behind the many stands one man… but behind me stands the Lord.” Today that man is Barack Hussein Obama. The residents of Amona stand in the way of his dream of an Islamic Palestine.

Who are the people of Amona? For the most part, they are children. Amona has nearly 200 of them. 5 children are on the small side for a local family. Today Amona could pass for a village, tomorrow it’s a town and the day after it’s a city. That has been Israel’s history. In a world where the great cities of civilization are overrun by the terrible tide of Muslim demographics, it is a place whose people still believe in the future. Such little villages full of white houses with red roofs are fortresses of hope.

In Amona, you will find deer meandering through the street. The Nizri family, with eight children, sees to the casks of French oak in the winery. There are raspberries to pick, tools to mend and a life to build.

It is not mere height above sea level that enables the people of Amona to tower above their enemies. It is their determination to live lives of ordinary courage. They have attracted the ire and enmity of some of the most powerful people in their country, their region and the world. And yet they go on.

Obama boils in his anger like a lobster in a pot. The UN Security Council has scheduled a special meeting where Israel will be denounced by the likes of Venezuela and Angola. And in Amona, the children play.

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