Category Archives: Politics – international

Obama and the Israeli election

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Obama has only one enemy in the world, American’s closest ally in the Middle East. From Drudge today:

BIBI BE BAD…
White House ratchets up criticism of Netanyahu…
Inside HQ of ex-Obama staffers’ campaign…
Iran Targets Netanyahu Children for Assassination…

In case you are not keeping up with the latest from the White House, this is where we are:

A U.S. State Department-funded group is financing an Israeli campaign to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and has hired former Obama aides to help with its grassroots organizing efforts.

U.S.-based activist group OneVoice International has partnered with V15, an “independent grassroots movement” in Israel that is actively opposing Netanyahu’s party in the upcoming elections, Ha’aretz reported on Monday. Former national field director for President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign Jeremy Bird is also reportedly involved in the effort.

He would probably send in the troops if he thought he could. We are dealing with such insanity that it is hard to understand why this remains so low key. Is this now how things are. The stories that the CIA brought on the dismissal back in 1975 is a story that won’t go away, but that, at least, was supposed to have been clandestine. This is right out in the open, and as public as you could wish.

MORE ALONG THE SAME LINES: From Victor Davis Hanson: Can Israel Survive?

The Jewish state has always depended on three unspoken assumptions for its tenuous existence.

First, a democratic, nuclear Israel can deter larger enemies. In the Cold War, Soviet-backed Arab enemies understood that Israel’s nuclear arsenal prevented them from destroying Tel Aviv.

Second, the Western traditions of Israel — free-market capitalism, democracy, human rights — ensured a dynamic economy, high-tech weapons, innovative industry, and stable government. In other words, 8 million Israelis could count on a greater gross domestic product, less internal violence, and more innovation than, say, nearby Egypt, a mess with ten times more people than Israel and nearly 50 times more land.

Third, Israel counted on Western moral support from America and Europe, as well as military support from the United States.

Israel’s stronger allies have often come to the defense of its democratic principles and pointed out that the world applies an unfair standard to Israel, largely out of envy of its success, anti-Semitism, fear of terrorism, and fondness of oil exporters.

Why, for example, does the United Nations focus so much attention on Palestinians who fled Israel nearly 70 years ago but ignore Muslims who were forced out of India, or Jews who were ethnically cleansed from the cities of the Middle East? Why doesn’t the world worry that Nicosia is a more divided city than Jerusalem, or that Turkey occupies northern Cyprus, or that China occupies Tibet?

Unfortunately, two of these three traditional pillars of Israeli security have eroded.

When the United States arbitrarily lifted tough sanctions against Iran and became a de facto partner with the Iranian theocracy in fighting the Islamic State, it almost ensured that Iran will get a nuclear bomb. Iran has claimed that it wishes to destroy Israel, as if its own apocalyptic sense of self makes it immune from classical nuclear deterrence.

Obama is not expected to meet with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will address Congress in March. An anonymous member of the Obama administration was quoted as calling Netanyahu, a combat veteran, a “coward” and describing him with a related expletive. Another nameless administration official recently said Netanyahu “spat in our face” by accepting the congressional invitation without Obama’s approval and so will pay “a price” — personal animus that the administration has not directed even against the leaders of a hostile Iran.

Obama won’t meet with Netanyahu, and yet the president had plenty of time to hold an adolescent bull session with a would-be Internet comedian decked out in Day-Glo makeup who achieved her fame by filming herself eating breakfast cereal in a bathtub full of milk.

Jews have been attacked and bullied on the streets of some of the major cities of France and Sweden by radical Muslims whose anti-Semitism goes unchecked by their terrified hosts. Jewish leaders in France openly advise that Jews in that country immigrate to Israel.

A prosecutor in Argentina who had investigated the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 — an attack widely believed to have been backed by Iran — was recently found dead under mysterious circumstances.

Turkey, a country whose prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was praised by Obama as one of his closest friends among world leaders, has turned openly non-secular and is vehemently anti-Israel.

Until there is a change of popular attitudes in Europe or a different president in the United States, Israel is on its own to deal with an Iran that has already hinted it would use a nuclear weapon to eliminate the “Zionist entity,” with the radical Islamic madness raging on its borders, and with the global harassment of Jews.

A tiny democratic beacon in the Middle East should inspire and rally Westerners. Instead, too often, Western nations shrug and assume that Israel is a headache — given that there is more oil and more terrorism on the other side.

Obama is what he is. A leftist anti-Semite who ruins anything he goes near. It is the Jewish “anti-Zionists” I find the most disgusting, and they truly do disgust me.

A dangerous fool in our midst

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It is such a criminal administration that it no longer even tries to hide what it does. The one unforgivable act that Netanyahu achieved was to demonstrate for anyone to see what an ignoramus Obama was about the Middle East. The smoking ash of that confrontation has flamed into a hatred that will not go away under any circumstance. The President seeks to assist the most radical element within Middle Eastern politics, but my guess, and certainly my hope, is that everything will turn out similar to Obama’s undying support for Morsi after the “Arab Spring”. From my perspective, it could not have turned out better.

So now Obama is meddling in the Israeli election. How is this even remotely tolerable?

Haaretz reporter Roi Arad revealed in an article in the Hebrew edition today [January 26] that the foreign funded organization, “One Voice”, is bankrolling the V-2015 campaign to defeat Binyamin Netanyahu’s national camp in the March 2015 Knesset Elections.

One indication of the generous financing is that it has now flown in a team of five American campaign experts (including Jeremy Bird, the Obama campaign’s national field director) who will run the campaign out of offices taking up the ground floor of a Tel Aviv office building.

V-2015 is careful not to support a specific party – rather “just not Bibi”. As such, the foreign funds pouring into the campaign are not subject to Israel’s campaign finance laws.

It may be OK according to campaign finance laws, but I suspect the Israeli electorate will have a more clear-eyed view of what’s afoot, and who is, and is not, genuinely interested in their welfare. He is such a dangerous fool that we will be lucky to see the end of him in two years without many more horrors than we have seen already.

Iraqi sniper

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We went to see American Sniper when it first came out and I would have written on it right at the time but there was something about it that remained suspended in mid-air that I couldn’t quite pull down. Today I discovered that Clint Eastwood had opposed both the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan (which I found out here in a really excellent take on the film). I now see the movie more clearly, and also see why it did not blow me away as I had been by Unbroken.

The movie is the Iraqi war without the politics. There are two sets of soldiers, each side fighting for the values it believes in. Chris Kyle, the American sniper, is matched by an Iraqi sniper who is equally committed to his own side, and is as patriotic as Kyle. There is no difference in bravery on the two sides. If anything separates them, it is technology. It is a patriotic film in the tradition of “my country, right or wrong”.

Except that it is Chris Kyle’s country that is right and not wrong, although that would not be the view of the soldiers on the other side, nor of the thousands of young Muslims going off from their homes to fight in the Middle East.

It is welcoming to see a film in which the bravery and honour of the American soldier is shown so clearly. And I have to assume that Kyle is more or less as he is portrayed, which is brave beyond any possibility of my ever understanding how someone can do what he did. And he is no more brave than the others who fight along side of him. But then he is no braver, either, than the Iraqis who attack him in numbers even though the American army is armed with technologies, such as armoured cars and helicopters, unavailable to their side.

What the film surprisingly did not do was dwell on why we are fighting this war, but perhaps that wasn’t its purpose. It did show 911, and it identified some barbarities by the Iraqis. But without the purpose, without an explanation about why the fighting is and was necessary, there was little in the film to make it clear why Chris Kyle and the others had been putting their lives on the line, and what difference it would make if we lost and pulled out. I, of course, bring this understanding along to the film on my own. I only wish there were more of it in the storyline. It seems that most Americans already understand the point which is why the film has broken box office records. But since the reason why this war is necessary never seems to get explained anywhere else, it’s a shame it was not more fully explained here. It is not a film designed to change anyone’s mind. The only marker for me is how much the left hates the film. It may therefore be a better film than I have been able to understand for myself.

The trailer, by the way, shows the opening sequence of the film. You will have to go yourself to see what happens next. As for the ratings, as per usual in a film like this, the audiences have liked it more than the critics.

Rotten Tomatoes: Critics 72% and Audiences 88%
IMDb: 7.6

I hope he didn’t stick it under his chair

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It’s in Hindi, but every so often you hear the words “chewing gum” and there’s no doubt what it’s about. Is he still a smoker? Does he need Nicorettes even after at least six years? Is the media in the US covering up even about this too? In India, apparently, it is GWB they prefer, which may be why this bit of disrespect was reported on.

“Indians are pro-Bush,” said Gurcharan Das, a prominent writer. “He saw that with China rising, America needed a big country to be an ally. He hyphenated India with China and de-hyphenated it with Pakistan and Indians loved that.”

Whatever the view may be of him elsewhere, in India the 43rd president is seen as a straight-talking statesman. In 2008, Modi’s predecessor as prime minister, Manmohan Singh, assured Bush: “The Indian people deeply love you.”…

The things that drive other foreigners nuts—the unshakable certitude, the folksy language—Indians like.

“George W. Bush occupies a special place in the minds of many Indian foreign policy elites,” Sadanand Dhume, an India-born specialist on the country at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. “In a nutshell, Bush took India seriously.”

Meanwhile, Obama takes nothing seriously, other than his amour-propre.

Greece opts for spending 120% of domestic output

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One more experiment in Keynesian economics. The politics of living within your means are what they are. The Greeks have reason to believe that they can blackmail the rest of the EU into funding their debts. But literally in this case, where will the money come from?

Syriza’s demands for a debt restructuring have raised the prospect of a stand-off between Athens and other European leaders that might lead to “Grexit” although financial markets were treating that as a marginal risk on Monday.

The potentially disastrous consequences of such a move for Greece and Europe were likely to force policymakers to find an agreement, analysts said.

So they’re beggars? So what do they care? You want to save your precious Euro, this is what you got to do? However as Daniel Hannan notes:

It would, indeed, be very difficult to make an economic case for euro membership.

The past six years have seen a greater depression in Greece than that of 1929 to 1935. Output is down by an almost unbelievable 25 per cent. A quarter of all Greeks – half of all youngsters – are unemployed, and tens of thousands more have emigrated in search of jobs.

Their currency is overvalued and market disciplines are almost invisible. If they leave the Euro, there are actually things they might be able to do.

You do need friends in this world

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canada israel stampjpeg

Obama, unlike anyone else in his position, is no lame-duck President. The ruin of the West is his deliberate aim and he has two more years to do no end of damage. He cares absolutely nothing about the Democrat Party or the effect his actions will have on Congress. He is a law unto himself, and will not be constrained by any of the normal considerations of party and country.

He would like nothing better as his final legacy of eight years of foreign policy than to see the destruction of Israel. The political calculation that undoubtedly lay behind Netanyahu’s decision to accept the invitation to address the American Congress in March with certainty factored in Obama’s furious response. The story heading is in no way an exaggeration: Obama fuming at Netanyahu invitation to Congress, plans retaliation

“Netanyahu spat in our face. There will be a price.” With these words, an unnamed Obama administration official declared war on Israel’s prime minister in an interview with the left0wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Smarting at being blindsided by the invitation to address a joint session of Congress and advocate a sanctions bill on Iran to kick in if the current round of negotiations fails, Obama is letting his anti-Israel feelings show more openly than ever before.

Haaretz also reports that Obama has been warning Netanyahu for ten days to not lobby Congress on the bipartisan sanctions bill:

U.S. President Barack Obama has demanded that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stop encouraging U.S. senators and congressmen to advance new sanctions legislation against Iran.

A senior American official, who asked to remain anonymous due to the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue, said Obama gave Netanyahu this message during a telephone call on Monday, January 12.

There is obviously no principle, only political convenience behind this demand, since Obama stood by as British PM Cameron announced to the world that he was lobbying U.S. senators on the same bill, only in the opposite direction.

That the Israeli cabinet chose to allow Netanyahu to speak to Congress shows how desperate they are. There is a war coming in the Middle East. How Israel will survive in the face of the active hostility of the American administration is the most delicate calculation. I hope they know what they are doing. I hope this is not desperation in the face of every other avenue having been followed. Canada’s friendship with Israel is a blessing, similar to Australia’s. But such friendships are transitory, with the left so fanatically anti-semitic, under the pretext of being anti-Zionist.

“Straight out of Tehran”

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Senate DEMOCRAT Blasts Obama Admin For Iran Talking Points “Straight Out Of Tehran” (January 21, 2015). There is a new world dawning, and it is arriving before January 2017. More on Obama and Iran from John Hinderaker at Powerline, where he concludes:

Barack Obama must love State of the Union speeches: once a year, he can describe the world as he wishes it were, and newspapers will report on it as though he were not delusional.

American sniper, female division, goes to Congress

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This is Joni Ernst’s reply to Obama’s State of the Union speech. It’s cornpone but effective. She is the newly elected Senator from Iowa and utterly Tea Party, Sarah Palin endorsed even. These are some rueful comments from The Washington Post:

By drawing on her uncommon, interesting personal story as an Iowa farmgirl and Army National Guard combat veteran, and relating to her fellow Iowans, Ernst captured one of the most reliably liberal Senate seats in the country — one that had been held by now-retired Democratic senator Tom Harkin for 30 years. While Ernst’s opponent ridiculed Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) for being a farmer, Ernst embraced her roots and produced one of the most memorable, viral campaign ads of the 2014 cycle.

But even more than losing a critical Senate seat, Democrats are frightened by Ernst because she is a woman who has a strong conservative philosophy and message that appeals to a lot of people. Democrats can’t dismiss Ernst as a token, because she didn’t run as one. Everything about her biography and style blunts the Democrats’ usual criticisms of conservative women.

Now when Hillary Clinton comes to visit Iowa, rather than having a friendly liberal trial lawyer senator by her side, she will be bracketed by Ernst — who no doubt will hold Clinton’s feet to the fire. It will be a woman-to-woman matchup, so the Democrats’ usual pablum about a GOP “war on women” just won’t work.

It need hardly be mentioned that Obama’s speech was deceitful from end to end, or that the media will pick him up on none of it. But this was an effective reply, given the nature of the politics of the US at the present time.

AND BY THE WAY: I have just discovered the following about Chris Kyle, the actual American Sniper:

Kyle also served as the personal bodyguard for Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor, at many points throughout her political career, including at the screening of Breitbart News Network Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon’s film about her political rise: “The Undefeated.”

If you really want to understand the political views of someone else, ask them about Sarah Palin. The most perfect political-moron detector I have yet discovered.

On the road to cultural euthanasia

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future we thought we would have

This is David Solway in the same observation mode that I find myself in as well: Watching the World Fall Apart. He writes what I think. The following para is a very grim start, but if you read the whole article, you can find more of what we both think about the future. It is a dark age, which can no longer be avoided, but it is hard to find anyone with a wide public audience to sound the alarm.

The name of the game today is denial of the undeniable all across the spectrum of the major issues that afflict us. Denial that temperatures have been stable for the last eighteen years and that the diminution of sunspot activity heralds an age of global cooling rather than warming, as John Casey, president of the Space and Science Research Corporation, has decisively established in his recently published Dark Winter. Denial that Israel is the only democratic, morally legitimate state in the Middle East and that the Palestinian narrative of historical and cadastral residence is demonstrably false. Denial that Islam is a totalitarian entity and a religion of war that has set its sights on the ruination of western societies; and denial of the fact that Judeo-Hellenic-Christian civilization, for all its flaws, marks the high point of human political, social, cultural and scientific development.

The political creed of our time is progressive internationalism: collectivist central direction in a world of open borders. It won’t last long, but in the meantime our generation gets to be entertained by watching what has been built fall apart. The next generation will get to live amongst the ruins.

Obama is being replaced even now though he will sit in the Oval office for two more years

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obama jesuischicken

The US is leaderless and rudderless, which means that the entire West is leaderless and rudderless. Nothing has made it more evident than the absence of Obama from any attempt to provide direction in the face of the rising tide of Islamist radicalism. The first of the Republicans to step into this leadership vacuum is Bobby Jindal, the Governor of Louisiana. This is from the speech he will be giving in London tomorrow, titled: Jindal to Bash Hillary’s ‘Mindless Naiveté’ in London Speech: And Declare ‘Islam Has a Problem.’

“Let me be blunt about this. I want America’s allies to trust us and respect us, and I want our enemies to fear us. Every day our enemies spend their time trying to avoid our justice is a day they are not plotting against us. And I fear that in recent years this has not been the case.

“The events of the past several years clearly suggest that America’s allies are often less than certain that they can count on us, and our enemies too often do not fear us. Of course, as Americans we want all people to live in harmony, and we do not desire to have any enemies. But the simple truth is that we do, but that is not of our doing.

“There are people in the world who mean us harm, who desire our downfall, and who simply detest us because we stand for freedom. I have no interest in coddling them, or pretending that bad is good. Sugar coating the reality of the situation serves no purpose, we must not be afraid to speak the truth.

“A wise man once said, ‘the truth will set you free.’ . . .

“Now, let’s talk very directly about the elephant in the room…that is, allow me to discuss the recent horrific events in France. I will warn you in advance that I’m going to say some things that are not politically correct, so brace yourselves.

“To be clear, I have no interest in defaming any religion, nor do I have any interest in assigning the maniacal acts of radical Islamists to millions of Muslims worldwide. I’m interested only in dealing with reality and facts. And the fact is that radical Islamists do not believe in freedom or common decency nor are they willing to accommodate it in any way and anywhere.

“We need to stop pretending otherwise. We are fools to pretend otherwise. How many Muslims in this world agree with these radicals? I have no idea, I hope it is a small minority. But it is clear that far too many do, and it is clear that they must be stopped.

“For example, note what radical Islamists do when given the chance in territories they control either in the Middle East or even in Europe. In Iraq, ISIS commits genocide, enslaves women and beheads opponents. And in the West, non-assimilationist Muslims establish enclaves and carry out as much of Sharia law as they can without regard for the laws of the democratic countries which provided them a new home.

“It is startling to think that any country would allow, even unofficially, for a so called ‘no-go zone.’ The idea that a free country would allow for specific areas of its country to operate in an autonomous way that is not free and is in direct opposition to its laws is hard to fathom.

“Another example is the rise of anti-Semitism in many places, even in continental Europe. Over the last couple of years we have been alarmed to see blatant and astoundingly bold acts of persecution and bigotry against Jewish persons and property, to such a degree that Jewish emigration from Europe is increasing.

“How does such evil rise again in democratic countries? I believe it is because radical Islamists have been given too wide a berth to establish their own nation within a nation. I am encouraged to see France’s Prime Minister speak out against this travesty.

“In America we are quite happy to welcome freedom loving people, regardless of religion, who want to abide by our laws allowing for freedom of expression and a host of other democratic freedoms. But we will never allow for any sect of people to set up their own areas where they establish their own set of laws.

“We have to stop pretending that right and wrong do not exist. For example – Sharia law is not just different than our law, it’s not just a cultural difference, it is oppression and it is wrong. It subjugates women and treats them as property, and it is antithetical to valuing all of human life equally. It is the very definition of oppression. We must stop pretending otherwise.

“In my country, Christianity is the largest religion. And we require exactly no one to conform to it. And we do not discriminate against anyone who does not conform to it. It’s called freedom. A so-called religion that allows for and endorses killing those who oppose it is not a religion at all, it is a terrorist movement.

“I do continue to believe and hope that most Muslims oppose these bloodthirsty acts of terror. But that is not the point. Whether they do or not, the point is that radical Islamists do advocate the slaughter of those who reject their views. Free peoples everywhere must not pretend otherwise and must not coddle those who hold these views. And they must have courage.

“I favor robust debate on everything – on religion, on policy, on politics, on everything. It is called freedom. But when debate stops, and when a movement decides that they no longer want to debate their ideas, but rather they want to simply subdue, silence, and kill those who disagree…that is called terrorism, barbarism, and inhuman behavior, and it cannot and must not be tolerated.

“Let’s be honest here, Islam has a problem. If Islam does not support what is happening in the name of Islam, then they need to stand up and stop it. Many Islamic leaders argue that these are the acts of a radical few. Ok, it is their problem, and they need to deal with it.

“Muslim leaders must make clear that anyone who commits acts of terror in the name of Islam is in fact not practicing Islam at all.