.
7/29/14,
"Israel, Hamas and Obama's foreign policy," Caroline B. Glick, Jerusalem Post
"Americans need to be alarmed by what Obama’s actions on behalf of
Hamas reveal about the general direction of American Middle East policy
under his leadership.
When US President Barack Obama phoned Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday night, in the middle of a
security cabinet meeting, he ended any remaining doubt regarding his
policy toward Israel and Hamas.
Obama called Netanyahu while the
premier was conferring with his senior ministers about how to proceed
in Gaza. Some ministers counseled that Israel should continue to limit
our forces to specific pinpoint operations aimed at destroying the
tunnels of death that Hamas has dug throughout Gaza and into Israeli
territory.
Others argued that the only way to truly destroy the
tunnels, and keep them destroyed, is for Israel to retake control over
the Gaza Strip.
No ministers were recommending that Israel end
its operations in Gaza completely. The longer our soldiers fight, the
more we learn about the vast dimensions of the Hamas’s terror arsenal,
and about the Muslim Brotherhood group’s plans and strategy for using it
to destabilize, demoralize and ultimately destroy Israeli society.
The IDF’s discovery of Hamas’s Rosh Hashana plot was the last straw for
any Israeli leftists still harboring fantasies about picking up our
marbles and going home. Hamas’s plan to use its tunnels to send hundreds
of terrorists into multiple Israeli border communities simultaneously
and carry out a massacre of unprecedented scope, replete with the
abduction of hostages to Gaza, was the rude awakening the Left had
avoided since it pushed for Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.
In other words, in their discussion Sunday night, Netanyahu and his
ministers were without illusions about the gravity of the situation and
the imperative of winning – however defined.
But then the
telephone rang. And Obama told Netanyahu that Israel must lose. He wants
an unconditional “humanitarian” cease-fire that will lead to a
permanent one.
And he wants it now.
And by the way, the
eventual terms of that cease-fire must include opening Hamas-controlled
Gaza’s borders with Egypt and Israel and ending Israel’s maritime
blockade of the Gaza coast. That is, the cease-fire must allow Hamas to
rebuild its arsenal of death and destruction quickly, with US political
and financial support.
Until Obama made the call, there was
lingering doubt among some Israelis regarding his intentions. Some
thought that US Secretary of State John Kerry might have been acting of
his own accord last Friday night when he tried to force Israel to accept
Hamas’s cease-fire terms.
But then Obama made his phone call. And all doubts were dispelled.
Kerry is just a loyal steward of Obama’s foreign policy.
Obama is siding with Hamas, and its Muslim Brotherhood patrons in Qatar
and Turkey, against Israel, and its Sunni Arab supporters – Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.
It is Obama
who demands that Hamas have open borders so it can resupply, and receive
billions of dollars – starting with an immediate cash injection of $47
million from US taxpayers – so it can pay North Korea for more missiles
and import building materials to reconstruct its tunnels.
The
fact that the US’s current preference for genocidal, Jew-hating
jihadists over the only liberal, pro-American, stable US ally in the
Middle East is a White House position, rather than that of a rogue
Secretary of State was actually exposed even before Obama’s phone call.
Sunday CNN’s Candy Crowley interviewed Deputy National Security Adviser
Ben Rhodes. She asked him what the administration thinks Israel can do
to prevent civilians from being killed in Gaza beyond what it is already
doing. Rhodes replied, “I think you can always do more.”
In
other words, Rhodes said that no matter what precautions Israel takes to
try to minimize Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza, the administration
will never be satisfied. The White House will never acknowledge that
Israel is in the right, or that it is fighting a moral war against a
barbaric foe.
And since the administration will never be satisfied,
Israel can expect to be condemned by various UN bodies, including the
Security Council, because no matter what it does to try to earn the
support of the administration, it will never receive such support.
The discovery that the Obama administration is entirely in Hamas’s
corner hit all of Israel hard. But it hit the Left the hardest. Few on
the Right, which recognized Obama’s hostility from the outset of his
presidency, were surprised.
As for political leaders, the
government cannot risk giving the administration justification for its
anti-Israel policies, so senior ministers have all said nothing.
Consequently, the harshest criticisms of the administration’s pro-Hamas
position were heard from quarters where rarely a peep of criticism for
Obama has been heard.
The Israeli Left went ballistic.
Haaretz, the far-left broadsheet that has seldom taken issue with even
the harshest rejections of Israel’s rights, went bananas after its
reporter Barak Ravid received the details of Kerry’s cease-fire
agreement. As Ravid put it, Kerry’s document, “might as well have been
penned by Khaled Mashaal.
It was everything Hamas could have hoped for.”
Ravid continued, “What Kerry’s draft spells for the internal
Palestinian political arena is even direr: It crowns Hamas and issues
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with a death warrant.”
And
that is really the crux of the issue. The crowd at Haaretz is far more
wedded to the PLO and Mahmoud Abbas than it is to the government of
Israel. And the (Obama) administration’s support for Hamas exposed the PLO as an
irrelevance.
As the paper’s Amos Harel wrote the next day,
Kerry’s pro-Hamas behavior convinced the Egyptians and other actors that
the (Obama) administration is “continuing its secret love affairs with the
Muslim Brotherhood in the region.”
The Left understands that the (Obama) administration’s behavior has destroyed it.
Leftists can no longer say that Israeli territorial withdrawals will win it international support.
They can no longer say that Israel will receive US support if it places
the security of Palestinian civilians above the security of its own
civilians and military forces.
They can no longer say that the PLO is the answer.
The Israeli Left has been Obama’s ace in the hole since he first ran
for office, fresh from the pews in Jeremiah Wright’s anti-Semitic
church. They were the grease in the wheels that legitimized the
administration’s anti-Israel pressure group J Street. They were the ones
who could be counted on to tell the US media and the American Jews that
Netanyahu is to blame for Obama’s hostility.
Yet, rather than
backtrack, and try to save the Israeli Left, the (Obama) administration doubled
down on Monday, releasing a series of statements condemning the Israeli
media’s condemnations of Kerry’s pro-Hamas position.
By Monday
afternoon, the administration went so far as to say that by criticizing
Kerry, Israel’s media were endangering their country’s alliance with the
US.
In other words, through his actions, Obama demonstrated
that his “love affairs with the Muslim Brotherhood in the region,” are
so central to his foreign policy calculations that he is willing to
destroy the Israeli Left in order to strengthen the Brotherhood.
And this leads us to the larger point about Obama’s foreign policy,
which his Sunday night telephone call to Netanyahu revealed. As rattled
as Israelis are over Obama’s decision to support Hamas against Israel,
Netanyahu made clear in his remarks Monday night that Israel has no
choice but to keep fighting until we defeat this barbaric enemy.
Netanyahu didn’t mention Obama, but it was obvious that he was
respectfully refusing to hand Israel’s head on a platter to Hamas’s
friend in the White House.
And while it is hard for Israel to ignore Obama, it is impossible for Americans to ignore him. He runs their foreign policy.
Americans are the ones who need to be most alarmed by what Obama’s
actions on behalf of Hamas reveal about the general direction of
American Middle East policy under his leadership.
For the past
five years, Americans from all quarters have concluded that the manifold
failures of Obama’s Middle East policies – from
Iraq to Iran,
Libya,
Afghanistan,
Egypt,
Syria,
Israel,
the Palestinian Authority and beyond –
owe to a combination of Obama’s personal disinterest in foreign affairs
and his presumed preference for withdrawal and isolationism over
engagement.
Obama himself has often encouraged this perception with his endless golf games and his talk about fighting
“the war at home.”
Obama’s open, public engagement in Hamas’s war against Israel shows that
the popular assessment is wrong.
Obama is as involved in the Middle East as all of his immediate
predecessors were. He is personally leading US policy on every front.
Kerry is not an independent actor.
The problem is that in every
war, in every conflict and in every contest of wills that has occurred
in the Middle East since Obama took office, he has sided with Iran and
the Muslim Brotherhood,
against America’s allies.
.
Under Obama, America has switched sides."
"The writer is the author of The Israeli Solution: A One- State Plan for Peace in the Middle East." via Free Rep.
===============================
The UN Ambassador of Obama's heart:
6/6/13, "Samantha Power and the UN are a perfect match," UK Mail Online, Phillips Blog, Melanie Phillips
"And so it came to pass.
Samantha Power has finally made it into the top tier of the Obama administration.
Power is reputed to be one of President Obama’s closest advisers.
Until now, she was the relatively lowly director of multilateral affairs
at the National Security Council. With her
reported imminent
appointment as the US Ambassador to the United Nations, what I
predicted at the beginning of the Obama presidency
has now happened:
that in a second term, he would promote to the front rank those who were so extreme and so dangerous to the well being of America and the civilised world, that in his first term, so as not to frighten the
horses, he would keep them in the lower ranks out of sight.
Well, we should all be frightened by Samantha Power.
She is the living embodiment of the way in which ‘human rights’ have
morphed into their absolute opposite, and instead of providing a
protection against tyranny have been turned into the anvil upon which
freedom and justice are being smashed.
A supposed expert on genocide, having argued that nations have a
moral obligation to prevent it, she was asked
in 2002 as a ‘thought
experiment’ what she would advise the US President to do about the
Israel-Palestinian problem ‘if one party or another [starts] looking
like they might be moving toward genocide’.
She responded to this
already disturbingly loaded question:
‘...what we need is a willingness to put
something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the
line
might mean alienating a domestic constituency of
tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean
sacrificing — or investing, I think, more than sacrificing — billions of
dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military,
but actually investing in
the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of
dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a
mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful
military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is
true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights
abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you’re serious,
you have to put something on the line.
‘Unfortunately, imposition of a solution
on unwilling parties is dreadful. It’s a terrible thing to do, it’s
fundamentally undemocratic. But, sadly, we don’t just have a democracy
here either, we have a liberal democracy. There are certain sets of
principles that guide our policy, or that are meant to, anyway. It’s
essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than
a deference to [leaders] who are fundamentally politically destined to
destroy the lives of their own people. And by that I mean what Tom
Friedman has called “Sharafat.” [Sharon/Arafat] I do think in that
sense, both political leaders have been dreadfully irresponsible. And,
unfortunately, it does require external intervention’ [my emphasis].
Clearly, despite the careful nods to a (disgusting) moral equivalence
Power was not talking about invading the disputed territories beyond
Israel’s borders to prevent the Palestinians from committing genocide or
major human rights abuses against Israel by wiping out the Jewish
national homeland -- an aim to which their leadership remains committed
in word and deed.
No, she was talking about invading Israel to prevent a genocide, or
major human rights abuses, (her language wasn’t clear, but the point is
the same),
against the Palestinians -- something which, in any rational
universe, not only could not possibly be laid at Israel’s door but also
held out the possibility that Israel might commit atrocities against
people
who themselves make Israel the victim of precisely such atrocities (and indeed, commit them regularly against other Palestinians)
.
She also suggested that defending Israel was not a cause that should
be dear to all Americans and indeed all decent people everywhere,
nor
that the great majority of Americans do indeed thus support Israel, but
that the only people who might be alienated by invading Israel would be
American Jews who exercised tremendous political and financial power
over American politics.
Subsequently she said of these comments that she couldn’t remember what she had said and didn’t understand what she had meant.
Maybe a clue lies in what she told the New Statesman during Obama’s first presidential campaign:
'So much of it is about: "Is he going to be good for the Jews?" '
Or when she bemoaned the tendency of US policymakers
‘to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics…’
Failing to understand herself seems to be a persistent problem beyond
this amnesia about her own bigotry. In March 2008, she
called Hillary Clinton
‘a monster...the amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.’
Later she
said of these remarks:
‘Of course I regret them... I can’t even believe they came out of my mouth.’
Here are some of her other activities to date.
In April 2003 she signed a Statement on Cuba, initiated by the
Democratic Socialists of America member Leo Casey calling for the
lifting of trade sanctions against Cuba.
Along with Susan Rice (the former UN ambassador, now appointed
Obama’s National Security Adviser, heaven help us) and Hillary Clinton,
the former Secretary of State,
Power is considered a key architect of the disastrous Libyan intervention.
And despite her advocacy of attack or invasion to prevent threatened genocides,
she has sneered at
concerns about the race to build a nuclear bomb by Iran,
which has
repeatedly threatened genocide against the Jews of Israel, as a figment
of the war-mongering Republican imagination.
Samantha Power and the UN are thus a perfect match."
.
