5/9/10
Obama's Plan to Destroy Israel
by Daniel Greenfield
If there's one thing that the Carter Administration can be given credit for, it's creating the new wave of Islamist terrorism, both Sunni, operating out of Afghanistan, and Shiite, operating out of Iran. The Carter Administration cracked down on Israel and put its "faith" in Muslim terrorists, who then went on to wage war on America, even while Carter was in office. 28 years after Carter was removed from office, we're in reruns again with the Obama Administration, which is not only following the Carter line, but whose plans greatly exceed it.
Twenty-eight years ago, Wahhabi Sunni and Shiite terrorists were generally an afterthought when compared to the standard USSR backed Marxist terrorist groups, such as the PLO. Today, thanks in part to the Carter Administration, they control several countries and have designs on several more. From Pakistan to Afghanistan, from Gaza to Lebanon, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, the threat is very real and bigger than ever particularly as the race by both Sunni and Shiite groups to build and deploy nuclear weapons continues.
Like Carter before him, Obama has chosen to cut backdoor deals with the Mullahs in Iran, offering them power over Iraq and Afghanistan, in exchange for quieting things down enough to let him hang up a Mission Accomplished banner and pull the troops out. "Peace with honor", preferably before the next election. The rape law for Shiites in Afghanistan, the push for a US funded Hamas/Fatah Unity government in the territories and the rising expansion of the Taliban are all fruits of this arrangement.
If Iran is to be our new best friend under this arrangement, Israel is to be our new best enemy. Obama stacked the deck by deploying Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State in a position that gave her an important title, but absolutely no power to go with it, while stacking the National Security Council and even the Pentagon with oil appointees in the pockets of the Saudis or his own left wing radical friends.
Israel electing a conservative government really put the ball into play, freeing up even more resources for attacking Israel. The strategy runs something like this. The Obama Administration has broken down the Israel problem into two subsections, Israel itself, and American Jews. Obama's people have studied the problem and understand where Carter went wrong. Obama does not want to have the same image problems as Carter in the Jewish community. Should that happen, the Beloved Leader and his lapdog press are fully prepared to unleash a Chavez style hate-on targeting American Jews. But that would be inconvenient and messy. Even with the changing face of America, there are significant differences between the average American and European or Venezuelan, and what kind of ugliness they are willing to tolerate. So Obama's people have split their attention in handling the two factors as two different problems.
American Jews - Obama has been clever about putting his Jewish appointees front and center. Like many minorities, some American Jews suffer from self-esteem problems that are soothed when they see a seeming acceptance. Of course what they fail to realize is that exploitation is not acceptance. And that Obama's appointees are creatures of his backers, Nazi collaborators like Soros, who have nothing but contempt for Jews, individually or collectively. While outwardly courting Jews, Obama's people have also been quietly shoving Jewish organizations and their leaders into a corner. Within the Jewish organizational world there has been a silent but deadly takeover of major Jewish groups by left wing radicals. Former alumni of the far left wing and anti-Israel groups like Breira or Coname in the 70's have been elevated to key positions in such organizations as the UJA Federation. Behind the scenes any Jewish leaders who expressed even doubts about Obama during the primaries were intimidated and silenced.
Much as with conservatives, a list has been drawn up of those figures who can be won over, and those who cannot. The ones who can be won over are described as "moderates", the ones who cannot be won over are described as "extremists". Meanwhile a bevy of left wing Jewish In Name Only groups have been organized to play their part. Key among them is the Soros funded J Street, a group created as an anti-Israel lobby meant to eventually replace AIPAC. Meanwhile AIPAC itself has been kept on the ropes with such things as the well timed Harman leak. The message once again is fairly clear, cooperate and keep quiet, or we'll destroy you. The multi-layered approach to American Jews can then be summed up as follows:
1.) Co-opt existing Jewish organizations and swing them to the left using old school 70's leftists.
2.) Create new "progressive" organizations to appeal to a younger generation of ethnically Jewish youth detached from any actual identity. Have these organizations generate attacks on the Israeli government and pro-Israel Jews, while creating phony polls indicating that most American Jews are behind them and Obama.
3.) Silence and intimidate remaining Jewish organizations and leaders behind the scenes. The overall idea is to keep a happy face pasted on American Jewry while the knives are out in the dark.
The basic understanding in the Obama Administration is that Israel must go. In the worldview of the more moderate Obama appointees, Israel is a destabilizing factor in the Middle East. To the more left wing Obama advisors, Israel is a Western imperialist colonialist state that must be destroyed in the name of revolutionary justice. To the Islamist mindset, Israel is a Kufir state that has no right to exist in the Dar Al Islam. While intractably hostile to Israel, the Obama Administration wants to avoid the kind of public confrontations that marked the Carter and Bush Sr administrations. Instead they would much rather model the way that the Clinton Administration waged a quiet war against Israel, removing one government, and forcing extensive concessions to terrorists, all the while keeping a happy face pasted on the whole affair.
On the one hand that means avoiding harsh public attacks on Israel, but keeping the pressure up for Israel to make extensive far reaching one sided concessions, to accept Saudi and Arab League "peace plans", to legitimize Hamas as the new government of the Palestinian Authority, and to insure that Israel does not reply to any rocket or terrorist attacks.
There are two forms of quiet leverage that the United States has on Israel, the first is financial and the second is military. On the financial side, the goal will be to bring down the Netanyahu government coalition by destabilizing Israel economically. This is the surest and most direct path to bringing down Israel's conservative government and replacing it with a left of center coalition. The Obama Administration has a wide variety of tactics at its disposal for doing so, from the overt, such as targeting Israeli exports and imports, to the covert, that would involve targeting the Shekel. Additionally, fundraising in the US could be investigated and groups such as the Jewish National Fund, prevented from raising money in the US. All of these have been in play before at one time or another.
On the military side, Obama's people will make their non-existent efforts to stop Iran's nukes conditional on more concessions to terrorists. Since Israel will never be able to make enough concessions and since Obama is working with Iran, rather than working to stop Iran's nukes, this is a hollow charade. Furthermore while Israel has already been locked out of the military technology pipeline for anything cutting edge, it still remains dependent on US military equipment for parts and supplies. The decades of US foreign aid have also served to create dependency. Unlike many other countries, including even Sweden, Israel does not have its own jet fighter. Israel's Air Force is heavily dependent on US weapons, parts and equipment. Cutting Israel off, would leave the Israeli military dangerously vulnerable in the case of a war.
This is an effective chokehold that has been used before to prevent Israel from attacking Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, as well as preventing Israel from carrying out a preemptive strike against its enemies before the Yom Kippur War. The overall Obama policy will be to push Israel to the brink, using financial and military blackmail against the Netanyahu government, while maintaining control over American Jews to prevent any protests or back talk. The more Israel will offer, the more the Obama Administration will tighten the screws. No offer will be good enough, and Israel will be blamed for every breakdown in talks and every bit of violence that takes place. The media will portray Israel and particularly Netanyahu as extremist and intransigent. Hamas will be slowly whitewashed in the media, the same way that Arafat's goons were, (assuming that they prove more willing to cooperate in creating a positive media image of themselves than Ahmadinejad is.)
The plan is to destroy Israel, and to do it by pushing Israel to the edge of the cliff and then over the cliff. Israel's enemies will be getting top of the line US military equipment. Israel will not. Israel will be squeezed economically until the Netanyahu government collapses, leaving a weak left wing leader like Livni in charge of Israel, and in charge of acceding to the new Pharaoh's demands. Meanwhile so-called American Jewish groups will support Obama all the way, some because they were created precisely for that purpose, e.g. J-Street, and others because they have been hijacked, cowed or subverted. That is the game plan and some of it's coming. The rest is already here.
05/11/10
The Purpose of the Proximity Talks
Evelyn Gordon - - 9:21 AM
The newly launched Israeli-Palestinian “proximity talks” have two remarkable features. One is the consensus, even among doves, that the talks have no chance of success. The other is the consensus that the onus for their success rests entirely on Israel.
Regarding the first, here are two of many examples: David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, once an enthusiastic peace-processor, warned last month that “whenever it is all-or-nothing in the Middle East, it is nothing. We should not set ourselves up for failure.” Avi Issacharoff, who covers Palestinian affairs for left-wing Haaretz, published an analysis whose title says it all: “Indirect Mideast peace talks – a highway to failure.”
Regarding the second, even Barack Obama’s media cheerleader-in-chief, Roger Cohen of the New York Times, noticed the embarrassing imbalance: “Israel will refrain from provocations of the Ramat Shlomo kind (those planned 1,600 housing units in East Jerusalem) and will promise to get substantive, on borders above all. Palestinians will promise to, well, show up.”
And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was explicit about it. Addressing the American Jewish Committee last month, she declared: “Israel must do its part by respecting the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people, stopping settlement activity, addressing the humanitarian needs in Gaza, and supporting the institution-building efforts of the Palestinian Authority.” The Arab states also have obligations, like helping to fund the PA and backing its negotiating efforts. And the PA’s obligations? About that, she hadn’t a word to say.
Putting these two facts together, what emerges? Noah suggested that the talks’ inevitable failure is actually the point, as it will give Obama an excuse for imposing his own peace plan. I agree with the first half of this conclusion. But if the goal were merely an Obama peace plan, it wouldn’t be necessary to place the onus on Israel in advance: any impasse, regardless of who was to blame, would provide an equally good excuse.
Therefore, I think the goal is simpler: to provide an excuse for putting more “daylight” between America and Israel — presumably entailing substantive sanctions rather than merely the hostile rhetoric employed hitherto — and thereby further Obama’s goal of rapprochement with the Arab world.
Why is the proximity-talks charade necessary? Because currently, Obama lacks both public and congressional support for moving beyond mere verbal hostility. If he didn’t realize this before, the backlash to his March temper tantrum over Ramat Shlomo would certainly have convinced him.
So he needs to up the ante by painting Israel’s government as responsible for torpedoing a key American foreign-policy initiative — one he has repeatedly framed as serving both a vital American national interest and a vital Israeli one. He could then argue not only that Israel deserves punishment but that such punishment would actually serve Israel’s interests.
To avoid this trap, Jerusalem must launch its own PR campaign in America now to put the focus back where it belongs: on Palestinian unwillingness to accept a Jewish state. For if Israel lets Obama control the narrative, the public and congressional support on which it depends may be irretrievably undermined.
5/5/10
Obama Wants To Take Israel's Nukes
Israel Today Staff
Wednesday, May
According to reports US President Barack Obama is working closely with Russia and Egypt on an effort to rid Israel of its supposed nuclear weapons arsenal, according to several mainstream media reports this week. Most prominently, the Wall Street Journal reported that Obama is keen to adopt an Egyptian proposal to declare the Middle East a nuclear-free zone. A follow-up regional conference would put heavy pressure on all nations to comply. Being the only country in the Middle East believed to possess nuclear weapons, Israel would be the clear target of such a move.
Washington is suggesting that by pressuring Israel to give up its nukes, it has a much better chance to convince Iran to halt its defiant nuclear program. That angle has become a major topic of discussion at the current Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference taking place at UN headquarters in New York. Arab and Muslim nations have enthusiastically joined and pushed the discussion on Israel's nuclear program in an effort to divert attention from Iran. Former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton warned that Obama was playing right into the Muslims' hands, and threatening Israel's long-term security. He said:
