by David Horowitz & Jacob Laksin
3rd part of 3
Obama’s acquiescence in the Iranian regime’s brutal suppression of the opposition during its presidential election demonstrated how far the White House was willing to compromise its values in the interests of an elusive “dialogue” that it had come to value above all else. As pro-democracy protesters shouting, “Death to the dictator!” were being brutally crushed on the streets of Tehran, the Obama administration maintained a deafening silence. There was no official message of solidarity with the demonstrators, no serious admonition to the regime about the right of free assembly, no support for changing a regime that was killing its own citizens while threatening its neighbors. There was no stern warning to an aggressive power that was brazenly defying the international community in racing to acquire nuclear weapons.
After a week of bloodshed and arrests, the closest the administration would come to an official reproach was when Vice President Biden suggested that there was “some real doubt” about Iran’s official election results — in itself a generous understatement. Prior to the election, the victor had run close to his principal opponent in the polls, but when the ballots were counted, Ahmadinejad won in a landslide, claiming more votes than any politician in Iran’s history. However, so that Iran’s thugs would not mistake Biden’s remark for a policy statement, the vice president made it clear that neither the fraudulent election results nor the continuing repression would sway the Obama administration from its single-minded wooing of the regime. “We are ready to talk,” Biden said. Without conditions.
But the Iranian mullahs were in no mood to compromise. And why should they be? A year of defiance had cost them nothing, while gaining them precious time to carry out their designs. Ahmadinejad responded to Biden’s wrist slap by attacking America as a “crippled creature” while asserting that it was still an “oppressive system ruling the world.” Spurning Washington’s outstretched hand of friendship, he baited Obama with an invitation to take part in a debate about “the injustice done by world arrogance to Muslim nations.” Speaking at a staged “victory” rally, Ahmadinejad vowed that he would never negotiate with the United States or any foreign power over his country’s nuclear ambitions: “That file is shut, forever.”
Although it was not clear when Iran would finally be able to produce enough enriched uranium for an operational nuclear weapon, the U.S. military warned in April 2010 that the time frame could be as short as a year. Besides its illicit work on a nuclear weapon, Iran continued to develop a range of missiles that made it a regional and even a global threat. For instance, an unclassified Defense Department report released this April estimated that by 2015 Iran could have a missile capable of striking the United States. With a nuclear arsenal, Iran at last will have a chance to realize its apocalyptic dream of a holy war that will destroy the two countries it calls the source of evil in the world, “the Great Satan and the Little Satan.”
Confronted with fresh evidence of Iran’s defiance, the Obama administration did not so much stick to its guns as offer to lay them down. In April, Obama announced that the United States was no longer going to develop new nuclear weapons and would not use nuclear weapons to retaliate against non-nuclear countries that attacked the U.S. — even if they had used biological or chemical weapons. The president’s policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament did include an exception for rogue states like Iran, but given the administration’s track record of backing down in the face of Iranian intransigence, it is difficult to imagine that the warning struck fear into the hearts of the mullahs.
With Obama’s charm offensive failing, Washington was left without a strategy, a fact that Obama’s own secretary of defense conceded. Also in April, the press leaked the contents of a memorandum written by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to the White House four months earlier. According to the press reports, the memorandum conceded that the U.S. possessed no effective policy to stop Iran from building a nuclear bomb.
Obama’s multiple overtures, his apologies for America’s actions in the past, and his deference to her enemies in the present have not made the world a safer place. His attempts to make Israel — America’s most loyal ally in the Middle East and the region’s only democratic state — the culprit in the dramas engulfing the region have encouraged the jihadist cause both here and abroad.
It is hardly coincidental that Obama’s tenure in office has been accompanied by a rash of terrorist assaults within the United States (though only one has been successful so far). In September 2009, the FBI foiled a plot by three American al-Qaeda recruits to plant homemade bombs in the busiest subway stations in Manhattan during rush hour. According to Attorney General Eric Holder, the attacks would have been the “most serious” since 9/11. In November, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist and a jihadist, went on a shooting rampage at the army base in Ford Hood, Texas, killing 13 people and wounding 32 others. In December, a 23-year-old jihadist from Nigeria was disarmed by fellow passengers as he tried to blow up Northwest flight 253 over Detroit using explosives he had snuck aboard the plane in his underwear. In May, a Pakistani-born naturalized American citizen, Faisal Shahzad, almost succeeded in turning New York’s Times Square into a fiery inferno when he abandoned an SUV rigged to explode there.
In the midst of these attacks by Islamic fanatics, the Obama administration refuses even to recognize the religious nature of the enemy we face. In testimony before Congress, Attorney General Holder repeatedly refused to make a connection between those terrorist acts and any religious belief, although the perpetrators themselves proclaimed their fealty to Islam and the Koran. On a separate occasion, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, John Brennan, explained the administration’s political correctness: “Nor do we describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women, and children” — even though many Islamic imams are on record as proclaiming that there is.
Obama insists that the United States is not at war with Islam. But it is clear that many Muslims, including the leaders of al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Iranian government, believe that Islam is at war with the United States and Israel. The name “Hamas” stands for “Islamic Resistance Movement.” While the Obama administration maintains that Israel’s enemies are not engaged in a religious war, the Hamas charter declares in the clearest possible terms that it is engaged in one mandated by the Prophet Mohammed, whose goal is the destruction of Israel and a genocide of its Jews: “The Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. When the Jew hides behind the stones and the trees, the stones and trees will say, O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”
And further: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
And: “There is no solution for the Palestine question except through jihad.”
Because of its diminutive size, Israel is a country with little margin for error. Confronted by 300 million hostile Muslim neighbors, its security depends in no small measure on the perception that it has the inalienable support of the world’s lone superpower. It is this perception that has been gravely undermined by the Obama administration, with consequences that are already apparent. It is hardly coincidental, for example, that the United Kingdom chose the precise moment of the row over housing in Jerusalem to expel unnamed Israelis from its territory for an alleged connection to the death of a notorious Hamas arms dealer in Dubai. But it is the regional ramifications of this suddenly weakened U.S.-Israel alliance that are truly worrisome.
It is only because Israel has had an American security umbrella that there has been no conventional war against it since 1973. If Israel’s enemies perceive the country to have been cast adrift by America, they will be emboldened to try once more the methods that have failed to destroy it in the past. Hezbollah is now operating bases and arms depots on Syrian territory, where it is stockpiling long-range Syrian-supplied Scud missiles capable of striking Israeli cities like Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Egypt has begun staging war games in the Sinai Peninsula using large numbers of infantry and artillery units as well as warplanes. While Egypt has justified the maneuvers as essential to maintain the readiness of its armed forces, many observers see them as a dress rehearsal for war.
The shift toward Islamic militancy and war preparations on Obama’s watch is even more pronounced in Turkey. Turkey was once a staunch NATO ally and a friend to Israel, but it has been moving for several years in a radical direction under Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Ignoring this development, Obama chose Turkey as the final stop on his first overseas visit as president, and praised it as a “model for the world.” Said Obama: “I’m trying to make a statement about the importance of Turkey, not just to the United States but to the world. I think that where there’s the most promise of building stronger U.S.-Turkish relations is in the recognition that Turkey and the United States can build a model partnership in which a predominantly Christian nation [and] a predominantly Muslim nation — a Western nation and a nation which straddles two continents — that we can create a model international community that is respectful, that is secure, that is prosperous, that there are not tensions — inevitable tensions between cultures — which I think is extraordinarily important.”
At the very moment Obama was expressing this vapid hope, his Turkish host was moving his NATO country closer to the mullahs of Iran. While Obama had been wooing and being rejected by Iran, the mullahs had been forming an entente with Turkey that would undermine his efforts to keep them from building a nuclear weapon. This May, the Turkish prime minister met with his opposite number in Brazil to conclude a fuel-swapping deal. The deal effectively allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium for a nuclear weapon. With this newly formed alliance, the mullahs would be able to avoid even the ineffective sanctions that the Obama administration had finally come around to considering.
Turkey’s embrace of the Middle East’s Islamist axis — Syria, Iran, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza — occurred simultaneously with an international conference to review the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. With the United States standing idly by, the conference ignored the chief proliferator, Iran, while singling out Israel as the principal nuclear threat.
These ominous developments were the immediate background to the brazen attempt by Hamas and its new patron, Turkey, to break the arms blockade of Gaza, which was a joint effort by Israel and Egypt to prevent weapons from being smuggled into the terrorist state. The six ships that attempted to run the blockade departed from Istanbul and flew under Turkish flags. The flotilla’s political camouflage — it described its mission as “humanitarian” — was provided by a Turkish nongovernmental organization associated with the United Nations and known by the acronym IHH. Posing as a humanitarian aid group, the IHH is a well-documented ally of Hamas and al-Qaeda, and was identified in the trial of the “millennium bomber” as playing a key role in the plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. The real mission of the flotilla — to break the weapons blockade — was made transparent when it refused Israel’s offer to unload any humanitarian aid it was carrying at the secure port of Ashdod.
On board one of the vessels, the Mavi Marmara, were active Turkish terrorists who had been allowed to board without inspection in Istanbul and had vowed on departure to become jihadist martyrs. The terrorists armed themselves with steel pipes and knives, and were prepared to attack any Israeli soldiers who boarded the vessel to enforce the blockade. A principal organizer of the operation was the Free Gaza Movement, which had attempted to break the blockade the previous June. Among its leaders were two close friends and political allies of President Obama, former Weather Underground terrorists William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who paid a visit to the leader of Hamas after the effort failed. Also among its company were Jodie Evans, a major Obama donor, and British MP George Galloway, a supporter of Saddam Hussein and founder of the pro-Hamas group Viva Palestine.
Prior to the flotilla incident, the Obama White House had exerted serious pressure on Israel to exercise maximum restraint. Consequently, Israeli authorities did not equip the commandos who boarded the ship with riot gear and tear gas, and their sidearms were holstered. They descended from a helicopter armed with paint-ball guns, which proved ineffective against the steel bars and knives. They were quickly overwhelmed by what the media would insist on describing as “peace” activists, who stabbed them, beat them with the steel pipes, threw one of them off the deck, and stole two firearms, which they began shooting until the other soldiers were able to draw their sidearms and fight back. Nine of the belligerents aboard were killed and others wounded; also wounded were six Israeli soldiers, two of whom were in critical condition.
An attempt to run a wartime blockade would in other circumstances have resulted in a full naval assault. Israel’s restraint was rewarded by international media and governments alike describing the confrontation as a brutal attempt to block a humanitarian aid effort. Jihadists immediately seized on the event to further their campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state. This effort was led by Turkey, the very country behind the provocation and thus responsible for the deaths.
Prime Minister Erdogan denounced Israel as guilty of “state terrorism” and called the efforts of the Israelis to defend themselves a “bloody massacre.” He then claimed, “The heart of humanity has taken one of the heaviest wounds in history.” (This from a man who the previous year had defended Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir when he was indicted by the International Criminal Court for killing half a million Sudanese Christians and non-Arab Muslims.) Erdogan called for a jihad against Israel, and threatened that the Turkish navy would escort the next attempt to run the blockade. This threat was seconded by Iran, which vowed to send two “humanitarian aid” ships under escort by the Iranian navy. If carried out, this threat would be, in effect, a declaration of war.
In Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, a leader of the terrorist organization Fatah, Munir al-Maqdah, said, “The freedom flotilla brings a message of the beginning of the end of Israel.” He announced plans for a mass march across Israel’s northern border, using civilians as human shields. “It could be that they will just break through the border, with their children and their elderly,” he explained. “What will Israel be able to do? Even if they kill all those who take part in the march, the number of remaining Palestinians will still be more than all the Jews in the world.”
Far from voicing alarm at the jihadist threats or disapproval of Turkey’s aggression, the international community expressed its sympathy for the Islamist runners of the arms blockade. France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, deplored Israel’s “disproportionate use of force,” while Italy’s undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, Stefania Craxi, joined the Turks in condemning what she called “the massacre of Gaza.” U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon joined in, declaring himself “shocked” at Israel’s actions.
President Obama also failed to condemn Turkey’s role in the incident, and insisted instead that Israel allow an international body to investigate its actions. Obama then met with Mahmoud Abbas, to promise $400 million in economic aid to the West Bank and Gaza — in other words, to shore up the terrorist state and its ruling terrorist party. At the same time, senior officials of the Obama administration began telling representatives of foreign governments that the United States would support a U.N. resolution calling for a commission to investigate Israel’s (but not Turkey’s or Hamas’s) role in the incident.
This paved the way for a reprise of the Goldstone Report, which had relied on Hamas sources to condemn Israel’s defensive war in Gaza the previous year. It was essentially a demand that Israel’s right to self-defense be subject to international approval — something no sovereign country could be expected to tolerate. At the same time, the Obama administration was leaning on Israel to end its naval blockade in favor of some “new approach,” such as an international naval force. This was an even more direct assault on Israel’s right to self-defense. Not only did it challenge Israel’s fully justified efforts to keep arms and bomb-making materials out of the hands of the Hamas terrorists, but it shifted responsibility for Israel’s security to the same international community that was savaging the Jewish state for its efforts to stop the flow of arms into the hands of Hamas.
During the year and a half Obama has been in office, he has indeed brought change to America and to the world. He has transformed a nation that had been the world’s bulwark of democracy and freedom into an enabler of the very forces that are intent on destroying them. He has helped to isolate America’s only ally in the Middle East, its sole democracy and most vulnerable people. And he has brought the impending war of annihilation against the “crusaders” and the Jews, which the jihadists have promised, measurably closer to its nightmare fruition.
David Horowitz is the founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Jacob Laksin is managing editor of Frontpage Magazine. He is co-author, with Horowitz, of One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America’s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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