December 30, 2016
Analyzing Obama's treachery
By Joan Swirsky
After watching all the pomp and circumstance of the presidential inauguration of January 20, 2009, I remember turning to my husband Steve and saying: "The sole mission of Barack Obama and his henchmen is to destroy Israel."
Steve reminded me that there was a mountain of domestic issues awaiting the new, far-left regime, and I agreed. And sure enough, Mr. Obama and his minions proceeded to wreak havoc on job creation and on the American military, inflict strangulating regulations, amass crushing national debt, foist horrific healthcare and education systems on our citizens, seed every government department with operatives from the Nazi-inspired terrorist organization Muslim Brotherhood, and then hand over control of the Internet to the United Nations – the most corrupt, tin-pot-dictator-driven, anti-American, anti-Semitic, American-resource-draining cesspool in our country.
But all that still left them plenty of time to enact a foreign policy that genuflected to our enemies and spit in the face of our most faithful allies, most particularly Israel.
Writer Mona Charen has said that Mr. Obama has a "genocidal hostility toward Israel." As if to reinforce that opinion, he just engaged in his longtime habit of spitting on Jews – and also Christians – by launching his poison dart on December 23rd, right in time for Chanukah and Christmas.
After the first vote proposed by Egypt to condemn Israeli "settlements" – meaning housing on Israeli land – was canceled after President-elect Trump intervened, the vote was rescheduled in the United Nation's Security Council when New Zealand (10,000 miles from Israel), Malaysia (where the official religion is Islam), Senegal (which is 90-percent Muslim), and Venezuela (so impoverished that people are now scrounging for toilet paper) reinstituted the anti-Israel measure, and the United States, reversing decades of U.S. policy, refused to veto it.
Resolution 2334 demands that Israel "immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the [so-called] occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem." It also advised all states "to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967" – what former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called "Auschwitz borders."
Despite White House denials that it had anything to do with creating the resolution, there is no doubt that this sneak attack was hatched and orchestrated directly from the Oval Office and involved Mr. Obama himself, Secretary of State John Kerry, Susan Rice, and other of his Jew-hating acolytes. Israel says it has "iron-clad evidence" of direct involvement, and leaked documents already confirm that claim.
Team of Jew haters
Samantha Power is Obama's Ambassador to the U.N., and it was she who delivered the curare-tipped pronouncement to not veto the vote. Her involvement is rich with irony, wrote Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author of The Israel Warrior: Standing Up for the Jewish State from Campus to Street Corner (2016): "For the duration of the seemingly endless Syrian civil war [Power] has figuratively fiddled while that country burns. Now, with one foot out the door from a tenure that has all but obliterated her once formidable reputation as an anti-genocide activist, she's decided to kick Israel in the teeth. Earth to Samantha: 500,000 Arabs died in Syria. Do you really think the problem in the Middle East is Jews building extra bedrooms in communities in Beit-El? You couldn't pass even one United Nations Security Council Resolution condemning Russia, Syria, and Iran for the slaughter in Syria. But you passed this motion condemning peace-loving Jews who live in the ancient Biblical lands of Judea and Samaria?"
Power, as far back as 2002, advocated an end to all U.S. military aid to Israel and wrote of her willingness to "alienate a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import [American Jews]...." She also advocated, Ed Lasky writes, "that America send armed military forces," "a mammoth protection force" and an "external intervention" to "impose a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians." Nice.
Power joins a long list of Jew haters that Mr. Obama has surrounded himself with. This is the short list and does not count the teeming swamp of anti-Semites like Israel- loathing Islamist professors Rashid Khalidi and Edward Said and others going back to his childhood:
Why was I was confident that Obama's burning mission – his obsession – was to destroy Israel?
The first reason is that I trust what I see and hear.
Who can forget Mr. Obama's claim that in the 20 years he sat in the pews of "Reverend" Jeremiah Wright's church," he heard not one of the uncountable instances of virulent anti-American and anti-Semitic rants. But unless he was clinically deaf, of course he both heard and tacitly agreed with Wright – especially when it came to the Jews.
Impossible to forget the interview with George Stephanopoulos when Mr. Obama referred to "my Muslim faith" – which he did not correct but his host rushed to correct. I'm Jewish and I can promise you of the 14 million Jews in the world, not one would ever refer to "my Buddhist faith," just as not one of the 1.3-billion Christians in the world would ever refer to "my Zoroastrian faith." Plain and simple, it appeared that Mr. Obama experienced what old Sigmund would call a Freudian slip, i.e., when you accidently blurt out the truth.
In addition to his psychological inability to utter the words "Islamic terrorism," Mr. Obama has consistently lectured us about Islam's immense contribution to America (my history teachers strangely omitted this revelation). We know he was raised in his formative years in Indonesia, attended a Muslim madrassa, and even recalled as an adult that "the sweetest sound I know is the Muslim call to prayer." Of course, he also said that, "Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation" and, speaking at the U.N., "The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam." That may play well in Indonesia, but it's completely alien to those of us who believe in free speech.
Two other indelible events were when the Prime Minister of Israel came to the White House in 2010 and was left waiting for over an hour when Mr. Obama abruptly ended their meeting to eat dinner, sending the PM out the side door; and when he intrusively meddled in an Israeli election (while pontificating that there should be no meddling in the election that just repudiated his entire tenure in office). Just as indelible was the sight of Mr. Obama literally bowing deeply at the waist to the theocratic leader of Saudi Arabia and despots just like him.
We have good evidence that the Saudis paid for Mr. Obama's education at Harvard Law School. And that the Saudis, until the Iran deal went through, were sworn enemies of Israel. Could Mr. Obama have orchestrated U.N. Resolution 2334 to please his benefactors?
But most compelling is what the book Mr. Obama studied, the Koran, says about Jews, none of it good. For instance: "Oh Muslim...there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him."
This is a man who may call himself a Christian – in spite of the fact that when he spoke at Georgetown University, the nation's oldest Catholic and Jesuit school – he had the school cover up the name of Jesus Christ with black cloths – but it is clear that his heart and soul and politics lie squarely in the Muslim world – a world that loathes both Jews and Israel.
As I said, eyes and ears.
Behavior
The second reason for my conviction that Mr. Obama's mission was to destroy Israel derived from two powerful lessons I learned from being a psychotherapist for over two decades. The first, simply stated, is that you are what you do. Not how you describe yourself or your lofty plans, but what you actually do in this life. Your behavior.
Everything I've observed about Mr. Obama's behavior – what he does – from his affiliations with the anti-Israel, Jew-hating people he associated with in his past, to the anti-Israel, Jew-hating people he's chosen for high positions in his administration, to the pastor whose pews he sat in for 20 years (with ears wide open), to his indefensibly rude and contemptuous behavior toward the Prime Minister of Israel, to his anti-Israel benefactors – not only the Saudis but George Soros – to his latest treachery at the U.N., strengthens my conviction.
And second, I learned that the strongest human emotion is not hatred, not anger, and not vengeance, but jealousy! When you peel back the layers of emotion – whether it's in the commission of a crime like theft or even murder or hatred of Jews and Israel – jealousy is almost always the animating force.
Mr. Obama and his minions see the pathetic lack of creativity, of innovation, of an elevated standard-of-living, and of progress in the community of Arabs as maddening.
First, they were humiliated when at the founding of Israel in 1948, powerful Arab armies attacked the fledgling state and were annihilated by the bedraggled survivors of the Holocaust,
Second, the arch-terrorist Yassir Arafat decided in the late 1960s to name the disgruntled Arabs "Palestinians," effectively relegating them to perpetual victim status and allowing the world to watch them accomplish little more than sending their children on suicide-bombing missions and then naming a street after them and collecting a stipend for their "sacrifice."
Third, to this day they remain pathetically dependent on another ineffectual U.N. agency – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency [UNRWA], which has exploited them in the same way that Democrat politics has kept African-Americans in abject poverty for over 60 years, with high crime rates and inferior education, while promising them the moon.
When Mr. Obama & Co. contrast this embarrassing history with the jaw-dropping evolution of the Jewish state – its trailblazing technology and medical innovations, its symphonies, sports teams, booming economy and military might – it's infuriating to them. They get angry, crazed with anger, murderous with anger.
But under the fury is jealousy. They can't help it. What you see is the anger because anger feels good and jealousy feels bad. It's that simple.
Mr. Obama's impotence
In the case of the latest punishing U.N. resolution, however, it is pure conceit on the part of Mr. Obama & Co. to imagine that it will make any difference at all.
First and foremost, the powerful State of Israel does not take its marching orders from anyone except its democratically-elected officials, certainly not from a body like the U.N. that has seen fit to condemn Israel dozens of times while true monster states only once or not at all. In less than a month, Israel will have a true friend in the White House with President-elect Trump, Vice President-elect Pence, and virtually all of Mr. Trump's cabinet and staff choices.
Personally, if I could offer Mr. Trump one suggestion, it would be to throw the entire utterly useless, money-wasting United Nations out of the United States! This is exactly what Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer suggested the other night, to send this feckless excuse for an organization to Zimbabwe, and as for the "good real estate in downtown New York City...Trump ought to find a way to put his name on it and turn it into condos."
Vic Rosenthal, aka Abu Yehuda, describes yet more impotence. Is the resolution binding? No. Does it make settlements illegal? No. It is a Chapter VI resolution, defined as a "recommendation." Does it make settlements illegal? No. It justasserts that they are, but the legal case is weak. Does it mean that Israel is "occupying Palestinian territory? No...that is just the U.N.'s opinion. In fact, there is no such state or territory or entity called "Palestine" and declarations by the U.N. can't make it so.
How bad is this for Israel? The resolution has no significance in international law, it will not cause Israel to withdraw from the territories, and it might even spur Israel to build more in the territories and Jerusalem or even extend Israeli law to parts of Judea and Samaria. (Read Rosenthal's entire riveting article to see that every attempt by Mr. Obama to "put it" to Israel is the very definition of impotence.)
What now?
Writer and editor Ruth S. King says that her "proposal for a daring act by Israel [is to] leave the United Nations. Pack up, close the Permanent Mission to the United Nations and find real jobs for all the bureaucrats, pseudo diplomats and ancillary staff."
Writer Victor Sharpe asks: Is there any light in this bleak picture? He cites Professor Barry Rubin, director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center: "Israel is not going to allow a president with no credibility, who clearly doesn't understand what's at stake, fails to support his Arab allies, is soft on his Iranian and Syrian enemies, doesn't learn from his past errors, is sacrificing U.S. interests in the region, and pays no attention to what's happening in Egypt, to determine its future."
Lt. Col. Ralph Peters sums up Mr. Obama's Middle East policy quite nicely: "Praise Islam, ignore Christians, blame Jews."
It is fitting to end with the prescient words of Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens), the great American writer who penned the following words in 1899 in Harper's Magazine:
"The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away. The Greek and Roman followed, made a vast noise and they are gone. Other peoples have sprung up, and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out and they sit in twilight now or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal, but the Jew. All other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?"
© Joan Swirsky
After watching all the pomp and circumstance of the presidential inauguration of January 20, 2009, I remember turning to my husband Steve and saying: "The sole mission of Barack Obama and his henchmen is to destroy Israel."
Steve reminded me that there was a mountain of domestic issues awaiting the new, far-left regime, and I agreed. And sure enough, Mr. Obama and his minions proceeded to wreak havoc on job creation and on the American military, inflict strangulating regulations, amass crushing national debt, foist horrific healthcare and education systems on our citizens, seed every government department with operatives from the Nazi-inspired terrorist organization Muslim Brotherhood, and then hand over control of the Internet to the United Nations – the most corrupt, tin-pot-dictator-driven, anti-American, anti-Semitic, American-resource-draining cesspool in our country.
But all that still left them plenty of time to enact a foreign policy that genuflected to our enemies and spit in the face of our most faithful allies, most particularly Israel.
Writer Mona Charen has said that Mr. Obama has a "genocidal hostility toward Israel." As if to reinforce that opinion, he just engaged in his longtime habit of spitting on Jews – and also Christians – by launching his poison dart on December 23rd, right in time for Chanukah and Christmas.
After the first vote proposed by Egypt to condemn Israeli "settlements" – meaning housing on Israeli land – was canceled after President-elect Trump intervened, the vote was rescheduled in the United Nation's Security Council when New Zealand (10,000 miles from Israel), Malaysia (where the official religion is Islam), Senegal (which is 90-percent Muslim), and Venezuela (so impoverished that people are now scrounging for toilet paper) reinstituted the anti-Israel measure, and the United States, reversing decades of U.S. policy, refused to veto it.
Resolution 2334 demands that Israel "immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the [so-called] occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem." It also advised all states "to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967" – what former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called "Auschwitz borders."Despite White House denials that it had anything to do with creating the resolution, there is no doubt that this sneak attack was hatched and orchestrated directly from the Oval Office and involved Mr. Obama himself, Secretary of State John Kerry, Susan Rice, and other of his Jew-hating acolytes. Israel says it has "iron-clad evidence" of direct involvement, and leaked documents already confirm that claim.
Team of Jew haters
Samantha Power is Obama's Ambassador to the U.N., and it was she who delivered the curare-tipped pronouncement to not veto the vote. Her involvement is rich with irony, wrote Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author of The Israel Warrior: Standing Up for the Jewish State from Campus to Street Corner (2016): "For the duration of the seemingly endless Syrian civil war [Power] has figuratively fiddled while that country burns. Now, with one foot out the door from a tenure that has all but obliterated her once formidable reputation as an anti-genocide activist, she's decided to kick Israel in the teeth. Earth to Samantha: 500,000 Arabs died in Syria. Do you really think the problem in the Middle East is Jews building extra bedrooms in communities in Beit-El? You couldn't pass even one United Nations Security Council Resolution condemning Russia, Syria, and Iran for the slaughter in Syria. But you passed this motion condemning peace-loving Jews who live in the ancient Biblical lands of Judea and Samaria?"
Power, as far back as 2002, advocated an end to all U.S. military aid to Israel and wrote of her willingness to "alienate a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import [American Jews]...." She also advocated, Ed Lasky writes, "that America send armed military forces," "a mammoth protection force" and an "external intervention" to "impose a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians." Nice.
Power joins a long list of Jew haters that Mr. Obama has surrounded himself with. This is the short list and does not count the teeming swamp of anti-Semites like Israel- loathing Islamist professors Rashid Khalidi and Edward Said and others going back to his childhood:
- The "court Jews" who sold their souls to the devil in exchange for the seductive allure of access to power. One of many examples is Rahm Emanuel, who curried favor as White House Chief of Staff for his figurative 10-minutes of fame and effectively sold out his Israeli-born father and the land his father heroically fought for in the early years of Israel's existence.
- Robert Malley, longtime security adviser to Mr. Obama and now his new ISIS czar, who is a fan of Hamas and Hezbollah, and has often called for an end to all aid to Israel. Wikipedia says he's the son of Simon Malley, an Egyptian-born Jewish journalist, and Barbara Silverstein, a New Yorker who worked for the U.N. delegation of the Algerian National Liberation Front. Both loathed Israel and apparently passed their toxic DNA on to their son.
- Dennis Ross, Mr. Obama's former special adviser for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, which included Iran, who participated in 12 years of failed Israeli-Palestinian "peace" efforts. He once suggested a plan that translated today would mean listening to the 22 hostile states that surround Israel and saying "majority rules!"
- George Soros, the Hungarian-born Jewish multibillionaire who has devoted his entire life to far-left causes. Perhaps as a dress rehearsal for bringing down big bad America, he was responsible for breaking the bank of Englandand also implicated in the Asian financial crisis that broke the bank of Thailand, et al. He has also founded and funded numerous groups that work unstintingly to bring about Israel's destruction. He is known as Obama's "puppet master," meaning that his money essentially calls the shots on both America's domestic and foreign policies. According to Richard Poe's book, The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party, the Soros cabal is really "a network of radicals dedicated to transforming our constitutional republic into a socialist hive." Read about the vast scope of the radical organizations Soros funds here, and why he is considered the "godfather of the left" here.
- Hillary Clinton, who, says Dick Morris, has had "relationships with terrorists [that] began in the mid-1980s when she served on the Board of the New World Foundation – which gave funds to the Palestine Liberation Organization [when] the PLO was officially recognized by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization." As a lackey of and putative heir to Obama's, ahem, legacy, Hillary's rancid relationship with Israel is well known.
- Susan Rice, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and current National Security Advisor, who advocated ending all U.S. military aid to Israel and has inspired dozens of articles with titles like these in CommentaryMagazine.com: "Susan Rice Is Doing Something at the UN: Targeting Israel" and "What Was Susan Rice's Embarrassing Anti-Israel Tirade Supposed to Accomplish?"
- Lee Hamilton, former Indiana congressman, whom Ed Lasky calls the eminence grise of Obama's Mideast policy and who has suggested that the U.S. should pressure Israel to surrender the Golan Heights and leave the West Bank. Hamilton has said not a word about dismantling Hamas or Hezbollah!
- Zbigniew Brzezinski, an Obama advisor and longtime Israel loather, who suggested that the Obama administration should tell Israel that the U.S. will attack Israeli jets if they try to attack Iran.
- John Brennan, former Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and current head of the CIA, who suggested that Mr. Obama & Co. "reach out" to Hezbollah. He has also said that jihadists and Islamists are not enemies of America because "jihad is a holy struggle...."
- Valerie Jarrett, Iranian-born Muslim and Senior Advisor to Obama, who is described in a riveting article by Karin McQuillan in American Thinker as the power behind both Obamas. McQuillan also elaborates on Barack Obama's envy problem, which is central, I believe, to his Jewish problem. More on this below.
- And of course John Kerry, who on Wednesday, speaking directly for his boss, spent over an hour on TV engaging in egregious historical revisionism and fairytale bromides to essentially inflict a two-state solution on Israel, with partners who to this day do not – and have sworn they never will – accept a Jewish state in their midst. My favorite line was Mr. Kerry saying that Israel could be Jewish or democratic, but not both. Duh.
Why was I was confident that Obama's burning mission – his obsession – was to destroy Israel?
The first reason is that I trust what I see and hear.
Who can forget Mr. Obama's claim that in the 20 years he sat in the pews of "Reverend" Jeremiah Wright's church," he heard not one of the uncountable instances of virulent anti-American and anti-Semitic rants. But unless he was clinically deaf, of course he both heard and tacitly agreed with Wright – especially when it came to the Jews.
Impossible to forget the interview with George Stephanopoulos when Mr. Obama referred to "my Muslim faith" – which he did not correct but his host rushed to correct. I'm Jewish and I can promise you of the 14 million Jews in the world, not one would ever refer to "my Buddhist faith," just as not one of the 1.3-billion Christians in the world would ever refer to "my Zoroastrian faith." Plain and simple, it appeared that Mr. Obama experienced what old Sigmund would call a Freudian slip, i.e., when you accidently blurt out the truth.
In addition to his psychological inability to utter the words "Islamic terrorism," Mr. Obama has consistently lectured us about Islam's immense contribution to America (my history teachers strangely omitted this revelation). We know he was raised in his formative years in Indonesia, attended a Muslim madrassa, and even recalled as an adult that "the sweetest sound I know is the Muslim call to prayer." Of course, he also said that, "Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation" and, speaking at the U.N., "The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam." That may play well in Indonesia, but it's completely alien to those of us who believe in free speech.
Two other indelible events were when the Prime Minister of Israel came to the White House in 2010 and was left waiting for over an hour when Mr. Obama abruptly ended their meeting to eat dinner, sending the PM out the side door; and when he intrusively meddled in an Israeli election (while pontificating that there should be no meddling in the election that just repudiated his entire tenure in office). Just as indelible was the sight of Mr. Obama literally bowing deeply at the waist to the theocratic leader of Saudi Arabia and despots just like him.
We have good evidence that the Saudis paid for Mr. Obama's education at Harvard Law School. And that the Saudis, until the Iran deal went through, were sworn enemies of Israel. Could Mr. Obama have orchestrated U.N. Resolution 2334 to please his benefactors?
But most compelling is what the book Mr. Obama studied, the Koran, says about Jews, none of it good. For instance: "Oh Muslim...there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him."
This is a man who may call himself a Christian – in spite of the fact that when he spoke at Georgetown University, the nation's oldest Catholic and Jesuit school – he had the school cover up the name of Jesus Christ with black cloths – but it is clear that his heart and soul and politics lie squarely in the Muslim world – a world that loathes both Jews and Israel.
As I said, eyes and ears.
Behavior
The second reason for my conviction that Mr. Obama's mission was to destroy Israel derived from two powerful lessons I learned from being a psychotherapist for over two decades. The first, simply stated, is that you are what you do. Not how you describe yourself or your lofty plans, but what you actually do in this life. Your behavior.
Everything I've observed about Mr. Obama's behavior – what he does – from his affiliations with the anti-Israel, Jew-hating people he associated with in his past, to the anti-Israel, Jew-hating people he's chosen for high positions in his administration, to the pastor whose pews he sat in for 20 years (with ears wide open), to his indefensibly rude and contemptuous behavior toward the Prime Minister of Israel, to his anti-Israel benefactors – not only the Saudis but George Soros – to his latest treachery at the U.N., strengthens my conviction.And second, I learned that the strongest human emotion is not hatred, not anger, and not vengeance, but jealousy! When you peel back the layers of emotion – whether it's in the commission of a crime like theft or even murder or hatred of Jews and Israel – jealousy is almost always the animating force.
Mr. Obama and his minions see the pathetic lack of creativity, of innovation, of an elevated standard-of-living, and of progress in the community of Arabs as maddening.
First, they were humiliated when at the founding of Israel in 1948, powerful Arab armies attacked the fledgling state and were annihilated by the bedraggled survivors of the Holocaust,
Second, the arch-terrorist Yassir Arafat decided in the late 1960s to name the disgruntled Arabs "Palestinians," effectively relegating them to perpetual victim status and allowing the world to watch them accomplish little more than sending their children on suicide-bombing missions and then naming a street after them and collecting a stipend for their "sacrifice."
Third, to this day they remain pathetically dependent on another ineffectual U.N. agency – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency [UNRWA], which has exploited them in the same way that Democrat politics has kept African-Americans in abject poverty for over 60 years, with high crime rates and inferior education, while promising them the moon.
When Mr. Obama & Co. contrast this embarrassing history with the jaw-dropping evolution of the Jewish state – its trailblazing technology and medical innovations, its symphonies, sports teams, booming economy and military might – it's infuriating to them. They get angry, crazed with anger, murderous with anger.
But under the fury is jealousy. They can't help it. What you see is the anger because anger feels good and jealousy feels bad. It's that simple.
Mr. Obama's impotence
In the case of the latest punishing U.N. resolution, however, it is pure conceit on the part of Mr. Obama & Co. to imagine that it will make any difference at all.
First and foremost, the powerful State of Israel does not take its marching orders from anyone except its democratically-elected officials, certainly not from a body like the U.N. that has seen fit to condemn Israel dozens of times while true monster states only once or not at all. In less than a month, Israel will have a true friend in the White House with President-elect Trump, Vice President-elect Pence, and virtually all of Mr. Trump's cabinet and staff choices.
Personally, if I could offer Mr. Trump one suggestion, it would be to throw the entire utterly useless, money-wasting United Nations out of the United States! This is exactly what Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer suggested the other night, to send this feckless excuse for an organization to Zimbabwe, and as for the "good real estate in downtown New York City...Trump ought to find a way to put his name on it and turn it into condos."
Vic Rosenthal, aka Abu Yehuda, describes yet more impotence. Is the resolution binding? No. Does it make settlements illegal? No. It is a Chapter VI resolution, defined as a "recommendation." Does it make settlements illegal? No. It justasserts that they are, but the legal case is weak. Does it mean that Israel is "occupying Palestinian territory? No...that is just the U.N.'s opinion. In fact, there is no such state or territory or entity called "Palestine" and declarations by the U.N. can't make it so.
How bad is this for Israel? The resolution has no significance in international law, it will not cause Israel to withdraw from the territories, and it might even spur Israel to build more in the territories and Jerusalem or even extend Israeli law to parts of Judea and Samaria. (Read Rosenthal's entire riveting article to see that every attempt by Mr. Obama to "put it" to Israel is the very definition of impotence.)
What now?
Writer and editor Ruth S. King says that her "proposal for a daring act by Israel [is to] leave the United Nations. Pack up, close the Permanent Mission to the United Nations and find real jobs for all the bureaucrats, pseudo diplomats and ancillary staff."
Writer Victor Sharpe asks: Is there any light in this bleak picture? He cites Professor Barry Rubin, director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center: "Israel is not going to allow a president with no credibility, who clearly doesn't understand what's at stake, fails to support his Arab allies, is soft on his Iranian and Syrian enemies, doesn't learn from his past errors, is sacrificing U.S. interests in the region, and pays no attention to what's happening in Egypt, to determine its future."
Lt. Col. Ralph Peters sums up Mr. Obama's Middle East policy quite nicely: "Praise Islam, ignore Christians, blame Jews."
It is fitting to end with the prescient words of Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens), the great American writer who penned the following words in 1899 in Harper's Magazine:
"The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away. The Greek and Roman followed, made a vast noise and they are gone. Other peoples have sprung up, and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out and they sit in twilight now or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal, but the Jew. All other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?"
© Joan Swirsky
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/swirsky/161230
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