Uncontested and Contested Arrivals

by Clarice Feldman

In a juvenile bureaucratic effort to disguise the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, the administration airbrushed it as an “uncontested arrival”. I suppose that might make some not very bright people think the customs and immigration desks in the Crimean ports of entry were unmanned. Or was the  administration simply signaling it  would provide cover for a later claim by Russia that (as  Russia claimed in Syria ) it had  intervened  at the behest of the local government  to protect lives and peace? To me it is obvious that Sarah Palin was right when she warned after watching Obama’s lame response to the Russian invasion of Georgia that if he were elected Russia would invade the Ukraine. It is amazing what and who the media thinks is stupid, isn’t it? To add to the egg in their faces almost no sooner than Christiane Amanpour said the Russians would not invade they did.

This week as we are forced to watch yet again the horrible global consequences of putting a sophomoric luftmensch in the oval office twice, Congress seems to be stirring  to life. Fox News reports that CIA Acting Director Mike Morell and his old boss David Petraeus, may be recalled to testify respecting the White House’s role in the Benghazi disaster, with Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Congressman Mike Rogers, indicating that at least Morell, and possibly both men, misled Congress on this critical point.

And as hard as the press has tried to drive a stake in the heart of the IRS scandal, the monster will not stay dead.

This week, former IRS official Lois Lerner, who initially proclaimed her innocence of the charge that she hamstrung and harassed Tea Party and conservative opponents of the president before the 2012 election and then pled the Fifth, will be recalled to testify.  The committee chair thinks she waived her right to plead the Fifth once she made that statement, and her counsel William Taylor responds that she will not testify unless she’s granted immunity from prosecution or a court orders her to testify.  It is hard to reconcile her protestation of innocence with her demand for immunity from prosecution, but as several commentators have ably demonstrated it is clear she was following orders from the White House when she infringed on the exercise of the First Amendment rights of the president’s political foes. If the committee accepts that they should grant her immunity from prosecution for everything but lying to it. Let it rip and quit the minuet.

At Pajamas Media, J. Christian Adams makes a compelling case that White House Counsel Robert Bauer directed the attacks on the tea party and conservative groups. Read it all, but here is the beginning of his persuasive argument:

When the FBI finally fires up its criminal investigation of the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups, there is one person the special agent in charge better be sure to interview -- former White House Counsel Robert Bauer. The FBI may discover the whole IRS mess leads through the land of campaign finance “reform” and an obsession with speech regulation, an obsession shared by Bauer.
Any criminal investigation identifies for further scrutiny those with motive, opportunity, and means, and Bauer deserves no quarter from FBI investigators on those three counts.
Robert Bauer
The Crimes
Without any doubt, crimes were committed by IRS employees, not the least of which was the fact that IRS employees disclosed confidential information from IRS forms to the political enemies of the groups seeking tax-exempt status.
[snip]
The bigger question the FBI must get to the bottom of is who hatched the policy of targeting Tea Party groups that led to these crimes?  For that they should turn back to Robert Bauer.
The Motive
Robert Bauer had the motive to direct IRS policy against Tea Party groups. He is a longtime opponent of First Amendment freedoms and an advocate of government-speech regulation. He also can’t stand the work the Tea Party is conducting to monitor and eradicate voter fraud, work the Republican Party and national campaigns have utterly failed to perform.
During the 2008 election, while representing the Obama campaign, Bauer sent a threatening letter to the Justice Department demanding criminal investigations of people who had the audacity to speak about voter fraud. Bauer even singled out Sarah Palin in the letter. Anyone who “developed or disseminated” information about voter fraud, to Bauer, deserved the heavy boot of a criminal investigation.  Read the letter; it reveals a nasty, thuggish, and lawless attitude toward political opposition.
To Bauer, those merely speaking about voter fraud were worthy of criminal investigation. Sound familiar?

At the Wall Street Journal, Bradley A. Smith, former Chair of the Federal Election Commission also connected some dots and insists there’s a smoking gun in the IRS unconstitutional overreach. As I did here at AT, he sees the program of silencing the president’s opponents through the IRS as a reaction to the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United and lays out a compelling timeline in support of his assertion that “The political pressure on the IRS to delay or deny tax-exempt status for conservative groups has been obvious to anyone who cares to open his eyes. It did not come from a direct order from the White House, but it didn't have to.”

While they are at it, the House committee might take a look at the fact that at least five Jewish groups which had earlier been targeted by Palestinians and left-wing anti-Israeli groups aligned with the Obama Administration and J Street, Obama’s anti-Israeli Jewish front were targeted for IRS audits, further evincing the use of the IRS as administration Brownshirts stifling opposition. Rick Richman detailed in Commentary how the Palestinian Authority and Obama targeted pro-Israel groups.

A Wall Street Journal editorial notes the Obama administration gave special scrutiny to the tax-exempt status of certain pro-Israel organizations and cites a front-page, 5,000 word article in the New York Times published July 6, 2010 as a possible signal to the IRS:
“Why the special scrutiny for pro-Israel groups? A New York Times article in July 2010 provided a clue: Tax-exempt groups were donating to West Bank settlers, and State Department officials wanted the settlers out. ‘As the American government seeks to end the four-decade Jewish settlement enterprise and foster a Palestinian state in the West Bank,’ the Times wrote, ‘the American Treasury helps sustain the settlements through tax breaks on donations to support them.’
“Did the T-men take their political cues from such stories, or did Administration officials give them orders? Either explanation would be a violation of public trust.”

Richman links the drive to cut off support to the Israeli settlers to a suggestion by Dr. Mohammed Shtayyed, minister of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction, to Saeb Erekat head of the Palestinian negotiating unit:

“We should also focus on the government incentives to settlers: loans without interest, land for free, agricultural subsidies in the Jordan valley. We can’t stop a pregnant lady from having a baby, but look at what we can do. We should look at the 501(c)(3) organizations in the States that make donations to settlers. Let the US administration investigate this.”  [Emphasis added].

Is it a coincidence that the five Jewish groups targeted by the IRS for audits were also targeted by thirteen Palestinians and representatives of one mosque and one  Greek Orthodox monastery in mid 2013 claiming -- without factual basis -- that they were providing material support to terrorists?  The five defendants are the Hebron Fund, the Central Fund of Israel One Israel Fund, Christian Friends of Israel and American Friends of Ateret Cohanim. Ayda Husam Ahmad et al. v. Foundation for international Research et al, U.S. Dist Ct SDNY, 13 Civ 3376. These groups support Ariel University which educates Arab and Israel students, representatives of which Obama barred from his speech at the Knesset, Ir David which funds the archeology work at the City of David  excavation which proves the Jewish presence in ancient Jerusalem , and Aterat Ha-Cohanim, which studies the Temple Mount. No Jews in the Hood, is the apparent motto of this administration, still contesting along with the Palestinians the return of Israelis  to their ancient homelands of Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem, and the Temple Mount.

It is hard to imagine that the effort to join the Palestinian harassment of these benign institutions whose missions are peaceful but which are carried out in territories and on issues the Palestinians dispute could have come from anyone outside the White House, which views all tax-exempt free speech and political organization as unwelcome unless in support of its own candidates and policies.

Clarice Feldman

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/uncontested_and_contested_arrivals.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Class Warfare, An American Tradition

by Bruce Thornton

 

Originally published by Defining Ideas. 

 

Are we more “polarized” and “partisan” than we were in the past? Political commentators think so. In a recent Atlantic profile, conservative pollster Frank Luntz attributed his cynicism about American politics to the unprecedented polarization of the American people he has seen in his recent work with focus groups. They are “contentious and argumentative,” don’t “listen to each other as they once had,” and are not “interested in hearing other points of view.” The fault lies in Washington, where the people are “picking up their leads.”

Luntz blames both parties, but especially targets President Obama’s “message of class divisions, haves and have-nots, of redistribution.” But implication that class warfare rhetoric is something new in American politics is historically false. The clash of rich and poor has been a constant theme of American history since the Revolution, and was integral to the framing of the Constitution. For the Founders, the “haves and have-nots” were the two most important “factions” that in the Constitutional order would check and balance one another so that neither could threaten the freedom of the other.

The concern with class warfare was part of a broader fear of extreme democracy, which, going back to ancient Athens, was seen as the instrument of the poor’s attack on the rich. It would lead to the redistribution of property, what the Founders called a “leveling spirit.” Many of the attacks on Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, for example, which called for a more democratic political order, emphasized the danger to property. Churchman and loyalist Charles Inglis warned, “All our property throughout the continent would be unhinged” if Paine’s democratic government was created. It’s worth remembering that among John Locke’s natural rights were life, liberty, and property.

In the months before the 1787 Constitutional convention, the armed outbreak in western Massachusetts known as Shays’ Rebellion, a protest against debt and taxes, was a powerful reminder of the dangers of what Founder Benjamin Rush called “mobocracy.” Revolutionary War hero General Henry Knox in a letter to George Washington explained the outbreak in terms of class warfare. The rebels, Knox wrote, “have never paid any, or but very little taxes––But they see the weakness of government; They feel at once their own poverty, compared with the opulent, and their own force, and they are determined to make use of the latter, in order to remedy the former.” As Knox interpreted their beliefs, private property “ought to be the common property of all. And he that attempts opposition to this creed is an enemy of equity and justice.”

For the delegates gathering in Philadelphia, the fear of class warfare and attacks on property were an important concern in designing the government. Given that those with property and those without comprised two clashing factions, the government had to create institutions that allowed each faction to check and balance the other. In arguing for the “mixed government” that limited both the democratical and oligarchical elements, Pennsylvania delegate Gouverneur Morris highlighted the clashing private interests of the poor and those of “great personal property” and the “aristocratic spirit.”

And what is the “interest” of the rich? “The Rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did. They always will. The proper security against them is to form them into a separate interest. The two forces will then control each other . . . By thus combining and setting apart the aristocratic interest, the popular interest will be combined against it. There will be a mutual check and mutual security.” In the end, the “aristocratic” Senate, chosen by the state legislators and serving longer terms, would check and balance the democratic House of Representatives directly elected by the people.

In Federalist 10, the most influential case for the Constitutional order, James Madison made the same argument for the clash between rich and poor as the most dangerous factional strife the Constitution was designed to limit. “The most common and durable source of factions, has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold, and those who are without property, have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination.” The mixed government of checks and balances, and the sovereignty of the states enshrined in federalism, would prevent these factions and their conflicting interests from concentrating power in the federal government and thus threatening the freedom of the whole.
Subsequent American political history has been driven by this same dynamic of rich and poor, democracy, and oligarchy. In Washington’s second term, politics began to divide into two parties, the antidemocratic Federalists, and the Democratic-Republicans, which eventually became the Democratic Party. In 1792, James Madison defined these two parties explicitly in class warfare terms: The Federalists are “those, who from particular interest, from natural temper, or from the habits of life, are more partial to the opulent than to the other classes of society; and having debauched themselves into a persuasion that mankind are incapable of governing themselves, it follows with them, of course, that government can be carried on only by the pageantry of rank, the influence of money and emoluments, and the terror of military force.” Madison’s party, which would take the White House under Thomas Jefferson in 1800, comprised the people who opposed rule by an elite of wealth or birth.

Such class warfare rhetoric continued throughout the nineteenth century. In 1824 Andrew Jackson thundered against “a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country,” and argued against the Constitutional “filters,” such as the Supreme Court and the Electoral College, which lessened the power of the people. Yet Jackson was suspicious of a federal government dominated by the wealthy and prone to corruption, and supported state sovereignty as a check on the overweening power of elites. With the rise of the Progressives in the late nineteenth century, the demand for greater democracy and equality was harnessed to the expansion of the federal government as the instrument for achieving these goals. This meant reconstructing the Constitution and changing its internal order of the balance of power and the autonomy of the states.

Government regulation of the economy and redistribution of wealth through national taxation became the means for curtailing the power of the rich and elevating the status of the rest. It is no surprise, then, that class warfare rhetoric was common during this period. At the 1912 nominating convention for the Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party, former Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge orated, “We mean not only to make prosperity steady, but to give to the many who earn it a just share of that prosperity instead of helping the few who do not earn it to take an unjust share. The Progressive motto is ‘Pass the prosperity around.’”

President Obama would echo that sentiment in October 2008 when he said, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” Arguments for legislation to increase the income tax struck the same note. The 1916 Revenue Act doubled most income tax rates of the Sixteenth Amendment, passed three years earlier, to a top rate of 13 percent. The law also created an inheritance tax. At the time, The New Republic called it “a powerful equalitarian attack upon swollen incomes.” Progressive economist E.R.A. Seligman praised the 1917 tax act, which raised the top rate to 77 percent, as “fiscal justice.”

Big government—and its regulation of business, wealth redistribution, and social welfare transfers—has been sold with a class warfare argument that some unfairly have too much while many have too little. Franklin D. Roosevelt and his party mastered such rhetoric in gaining support for New Deal legislation. In 1932 Roosevelt proposed that government should now be  “modifying and controlling our economic units” and “adjusting production to consumption [and] distributing wealth and products more equitably,” though “it may in some measure qualify the freedom of action of individual units within the business.”

The 1936 Democratic platform warned, “We shall continue to use the powers of government to end the activities of the malefactors of great wealth who defraud and exploit the people,” and Roosevelt condemned “the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power.” Such remarks are not that much different from the rhetoric of Barack Obama decrying “a dangerous and growing inequality” and calling on the rich to “pay their fair share.”

Class warfare rhetoric is not the problem we should focus on. Nor should we complain about our “divisive” politics and “polarization.” Such political angst bespeaks a misunderstanding of the Constitutional order, which assumed such divisive factional politics to be unavoidable given human nature, and sought only to keep a minority from tyrannizing a majority, or a majority from tyrannizing a minority. What we call “gridlock” was the Constitutional version of the medical maxim, “First do no harm.”

Moreover, the bipartisan worry that our polarized politics keeps “problems from being solved” reflects how successful the Progressive movement has been in changing our perception of the proper role of the federal government. The Founders created the political order they did to limit the federal government, and they assumed that local and state government, those closest to the people and more knowledgeable about local conditions, should solve the problems beyond the abilities of individuals, families, and civil society. National defense, regulation of interstate trade, and most important, protecting the freedom and rights of the people were the primary functions of the federal government, which was restrained precisely because the Founders feared concentrated power. The notion that the national government should expand by creating bureaus and agencies staffed with unelected and unaccountable technocrats charged with “solving problems” is the legacy of Progressivism, not the Constitution.

Class warfare, and the partisanship and polarization it serves, have always been part of the American political tradition. They reflect a healthy competition lacking with one-party dominance, the same political rivalry Madison intended when he wrote in Federalist 10, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Rather than fret over partisan rhetoric, we should focus on restoring the Constitutional vision of limited government so we can slow the growth of the federal Leviathan whose ruinous costs and encroaching power are the real danger.

Bruce Thornton

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/class-warfare-an-american-tradition/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

What Gutting the U.S. Military Means

by Richard Winchester

When I was growing up in a Midwestern farming village, several World War I, World War II, and Korean War vets lived there.  As a teenager, I worked for some of those men.  I was struck by their opinions about military strength.  They unanimously supported a strong military and rued America’s military weakness before December 7th, 1941. 

Years later I visited the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.  The museum’s first exhibit shows the relative size of America’s military and those of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan prior to Pearl Harbor.  That exhibit consists of plastic figurines intended to depict the size of the three nations’ armed forces.

The exhibit’s message is simple:  relative to the armed forces of either Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan -- let alone both -- the U.S. military’s size was incredibly tiny.  Viewing that exhibit, one wonders how America won against such odds, even allowing for the fact that we had allies.

The disparity between America’s military preparedness prior to Pearl Harbor and that of Hitler’s Germany or Hirohito’s Japan was not limited to numbers.  Thanks largely to Congress’ niggardly funding of our military during the 1920s and 1930s, there were qualitative weaknesses of our tanks, naval torpedoes, and warplanes.  Sadly, public opinion during those decades buttressed Congress’ stinginess vis-à-vis the military.

No one should underestimate U.S. military personnel’s valor.  American soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen were as good as or better than those they met on the ground, on the sea, or in the air. 

Getting back to the military veterans I interacted with when young, my memory is how insistent they were that America never again tempts aggressors by military weakness. 

Those veterans are almost all gone now. 

I can’t help wondering, however, how they would react if they had heard U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, who announced on February 24th that a combination of the Obama Administration’s policy decisions and budget cuts mandated by the Sequester -- the idea for which originated in Obama’s White House -- would leave the U.S. military smaller and weaker than it has been in 74 years.  The National Guard will also be reduced.  Hagel went on to say that the U.S. would no longer be the world’s foremost military power.  He also noted, apparently with equanimity, that reducing U.S. military capacity would likely entail risks to our military personnel and to the nation.

There are also revelations that the Obama Administration will reduce benefits paid to America’s military and the nation’s veterans in order to increase spending on an already bloated welfare state.  The Obamians’ antipathy to America’s serving military personnel and our veterans is a national disgrace.

It shows once again that America’s national security cannot be entrusted to left-wing Democrats.

Once the budgetary savagery Hagel outlined for the military is in place, the U.S. will have a Navy with the fewest ships at sea since before World War I, the smallest Air Force ever, and an Army and Marine Corps smaller than at any time since 1940.  Weapons systems that would modernize and upgrade our military capability will be canceled, and older weapons systems, such as the A-10, will be eliminated.

Furthermore, if budgetary cutbacks necessitate curtailment of training, that means additional degrading of America’s military capabilities.

In addition to severely reducing America’s conventional military capability, Obama has drastically curtailed the country’s nuclear weapons capacity. 

The upshot of Obama’s budgetary butchery is that America is following the pattern set by Europe’s nanny states:  huge expenditures for welfare programs necessitate spending a pittance for national defense.

These drastic defense cutbacks come at a time when the U.S. faces potential threats from terrorism and from totalitarian regimes such as North Korea, mainland China, Vladimir Putin’s irredentist Russia, and Iran.

The Obama Administration plans to end military action in Afghanistan, possibly as soon as December 31st, 2014.  (Obama has already admitted defeat in Iraq.)  If the Taliban regains control of Afghanistan, all the brave men and women who have sacrificed their lives and health will have done so in vain.

What does the end of America as a superpower mean?  Several things, of course; none good.  Limitations of space preclude mention of more than just two.

First, one wonders if people in the U.S. and what used to be referred to as “the West” fully comprehend what the end of America’s role as superpower will mean.  The last time one hegemonic nation was replaced by another, the U.S. supplanted the United Kingdom as the Western world’s foremost military power. 

When the U.S. assumed the role of Western superpower, most people barely noticed.  West Europeans could “enjoy” their nations’ political and military decline secure in the knowledge that America would keep the forces of evil at bay.

As American military power fades, however, the next superpower-- be it mainland China, Putin’s Russia, or an Islamic Caliphate -- people, especially in the West, will notice.  The new world order will be starkly different from the by-then long gone era of Anglo-American dominance.  The subtitle of Mark Steyn’s After America:  Get Ready for Armageddon (2011) conveys the likely consequences of gutting America’s military.

There is another aspect of America’s coming military weakness that should be considered.  Once before since 1945 -- beginning with the “Vietnam Syndrome,” but especially during Jimmy Carter’s presidency -- reductions in America’s military budgets, which were far less deep than Obama and his minions envision, the U.S. was left with a hollow military.

Not only was America’s military weak in the late 1970s, the nation’s leaders lacked the will to protect our national interests.  The U.S. had truly become the “paper tiger” that Mao Zedong had speculated about in an earlier era.

We saw some of the consequences of the post-Vietnam, Carter-era reductions in the Pentagon’s budget in the 1979 Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and the collapse of the Shah’s regime in Iran, which was soon followed by the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Teheran and the imprisonment of American diplomatic personnel.  Add the failed rescue mission in April, 1980, and you get a sense of what the wages of weakness entailed.

With Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, and the restoration of American military capabilities during his administration, the U.S. reasserted its status as the West’s dominant power. 

Finally, recall that congressional starvation of America’s military between the world wars occurred by and with public opinion’s support.  Will the public acquiesce in Obama’s gutting of the U.S. military now? 

If a recent Gallup poll (2/6-9/14) is any indication, there are grounds for concern.  When Gallup asked a random sample of adults if they thought the U.S. was spending too much, too little, or just about the right amount of money on “defense and military purposes,” only 28% opined it was “too little,” 32% said it was “about right,” and 37% answered that it was “too much.” 

(Most people haven’t a clue about the defense budget’s amount, but that’s another story.)
This poll occurred before Hagel spoke.  I’ve not seen public reaction to his announcement, but, assuming we can credit Gallup’s figures, one ought to worry.

Richard Winchester

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/02/what_gutting_the_us_military_means.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Amnesty International Has No Charity for Israel

by Michael Curtis

We all thought Oxfam was the most bigoted international charity organization but along has came Amnesty International to displace it from the pinnacle of shame. What is it about these supposedly good will international organizations that makes them so disproportionately obsessed with and so biased against the State of Israel and its citizens? What makes them so little aware, in any consistent way, of issues in the other 192 countries in the world?
Amnesty International (AI) describes its mission as undertaking research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of human rights. Indeed, it has drawn attention to some abuses in a number of countries. It also claims to be independent of “any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion.” But this claim is spurious because AI’s main focus has been on one government and its alleged deficiencies, Israel and its behavior towards Palestinians.

Over the last twenty years, activities of AI have shown a persistent attitude of criticism and even hostility towards Israel. Its official statements have referred to the “ethnic cleansing” in Israeli society, to the racial supremacy of Israel, to the expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians, and to the “current structure” of Israel as an apartheid state. It has no genuine title to neutrality.

AI has supported the movement to boycott Israel. In a manner familiar from the diatribes of antisemites, it has criticized Israel for exploiting the memory of the Holocaust in order to oppress the Palestinian people. It defended the anti-Israeli, and implicitly antisemitic, remarks of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he was President of Iran. It hosted in January 2012 a book party to launch a book, Palestinians in Israel: segregation, discrimination, and democracy, written by Ben White, a relentless critic of Israel. AI also hosted In November 2010 a meeting of the Russell Tribunal which then discussed “Israel’s violations of international law.” It published in October 2009 an inaccurate report on water resources in the Gaza Strip: it held that Israel’s “control of water is a tool of apartheid.”
Some of the pronouncements of AI have been over the top. It declared that the Israeli blockade of Gaza prevented “thousands of Palestinian students” in Gaza from pursuing higher education in the West Bank.  AI seemed totally unaware of the considerable number of Palestinians who attend universities in Israel as well as in Palestinian areas. It demanded that the Israeli government stop limiting access to education for Palestinian students in the Gaza Strip, as well as for Israel to lift completely the blockade of the Strip. It also charged Israel with “war crimes” during the Operation Cast Lead in July 2009 in Gaza. AI disregarded the fact that the blockade was started to prevent the smuggling of weapons and rockets used against Israeli citizens.

In June 2012 AI issued a report , Starved of Justice: Palestinians detained without trial by Israel, which was in fact a strong attack on the Israeli legal system. Curiously the report was issued without the names of any authors, though two people, Deborah Hyams and Saleh Hijazi, were listed as researchers or “media contacts.” Both are ideologically motivated.

Hyams, who grew up in Oxford, is a constant critic of Israel. She agreed to be a “human shield” for Palestinians in Beit Jala in the West Bank to stop Israeli response to attacks of gunfire and mortars. She understood, without precisely approving of them, that suicide bombings against Israelis are “in response to the occupation.” She approved in 2008 of a letter stating that Israel was founded on terrorism and massacres. Hijazi, born in Jerusalem and raised in Ramallah, in a statement on December 8, 2007 called for a general boycott of Israeli products to begin on December 9. He had worked for a number of years for the Palestinian public relations office in Ramallah.
Other prominent members of AI staff have expressed similar critical statements of Israel. Kate Allen, the director of AI in the UK wrote on December 7, 2010 in Foreign Policy of “the harsh reality on the ground (in Gaza) for civilians trapped in this tiny enclave.”

A more outspoken individual, Kristya Benedict, listed as the crisis response manager for AIUK, has constantly referred to Israel as an apartheid state, called for a boycott, and declared, “the blockade of Israel has turned it into an outdoor prison.” Benedict has organized a number of events for anti-Israeli activists. He displayed both his wisdom of international politics as well as his character when he listed Israel, together with North Korea, Burma, Sudan, and Iran, as a “stupid dictatorial regime,” and threatened to assault physically a pro-Israeli individual. In equally bad taste he thought it a joke to remark on November 20, 2012 that three Jewish members of the British Parliament in a bar ordered a round of B52s to deal with Gaza. Was AI ever conscious of or did it ever mention the antisemitism evidenced by its staff?

Now on February 20, 2014,  AI  published a 87 page report, again without named authors, entitled Trigger Happy: Israel’s use of excessive force in the West Bank. It gave attention to specific deaths. The report accuses Israel of “war crimes and other serious violations of international law.” It is itself excessive, and trigger-happy, in stating, “Israeli soldiers have repeatedly committed serious human rights and humanitarian law violations.” It details carefully selected accounts of the killing and wounding of Palestinians who “do not appear to be posing a direct and immediate threat to life.” It finds Israel guilty of “a callous disregard for human life.” It therefore calls on the international community to “suspend all transfers of munitions, weapons and other equipment to Israel.”

What is extraordinary is not only that this AI report minimizes or ignores the large number of attacks by Palestinians on Israeli forces and civilians in the West Bank. It also pontificates on the improper use of force by Israel in an area where the issue of security is paramount. The Secretary-General of AI, Salil Shetty, an Indian national formerly at the United Nations, himself admitted in an interview on February 10, 2014, “we are not experts on military matters. We do not want to pontificate on issues we really understand.” He might have criticized the AI statement that “petrol bombs pose little or no threat” to the lives of Israeli soldiers.

Certainly some abuses have occurred as Israel soldiers have tried to prevent or restain violent or even terrorist attacks. However, Shetty and other AI spokespeople should have been aware of the substantial increase in Palestinian violence. These included 5000 incidents when rocks were thrown and other incidents that caused harm to more than 130 civilians and soldiers, shootings, the planting of improvised explosive devices, and the murder of a soldier. The AI neglected the view of Colonel Richard Kemp that the IDF operates at the highest military standards. 
Certainly AI’s Middle East director Philip Luther is unaware of this. He is prone to excessive rhetoric about Israeli behavior. He speaks of a “harrowing pattern of unlawful killings and unwarranted injuries of Palestinian civilians.” Israeli forces he stated, “appear to have recklessly fired bullets at the slightest appearance of a threat.” Even more he believes that “the arbitrary and abusive force (by Israelis) against peaceful protestors… suggests that it is carried out as a matter of policy.”

Despite their proclaimed objectives of international assistance, the AI, like Oxfam, is a bigoted group, more interested, for reasons of its own, in criticizing Israel than in providing any real help for Palestinians or Arabs in general. At a moment when 120,000 have been killed in the brutal civil war in Syria and millions of its residents have been rendered homeless, and when 500 demonstrators were killed in a single day in August 2013 in Egypt, it appears incongruous for AI to issue a long, anonymous report on Israeli arbitrary and excessive force.
It is time to proclaim the truth. These so–called international charity organizations have an agenda of their own that has little to do with charity or justice in the Middle East or with accepted standards of morality. By its new report Amnesty International is pulling the trigger against resumption of peace negotiations between Israel and Palestinians.


Michael Curtis is author of Jews, Antisemitism, and the Middle East.

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/no_charity_for_israel.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

How Maddow’s MSNBC Takeover Dooms the Left

by Daniel Greenfield

Liberal media succeeds best when it isn’t identified as such. The reason for that can be seen in numerous polls where Americans of both parties identify themselves with conservative values.

The left is adept at selling its agenda through biased mainstream media coverage, but when it discards the disguise of objectivity on radio or television the end result is shrill, irritating and off-putting.

The playwright and director David Mamet achieved an epiphany while listening to NPR. Unfortunately for NPR the epiphany was that he was no longer a liberal. “I felt my facial muscles tightening,” he described, “and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f___ up.”

The unfiltered left with its onslaught of sanctimonious bleating often brings out that reaction.

It’s why Air America not only couldn’t compete with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other conservative talk radio hosts, but it couldn’t even remain solvent. MSNBC, the bastard child of a ridiculous union between Microsoft and NBC, spent years drifting in search of an identity only to become the new Air America.

Why does the left, which is so adept at putting its agenda across in mainstream media outlets fail spectacularly when it puts away the disguise and begins saying what it really thinks?

George Orwell described the phenomenon in his book The Road to Wigan Pier. The behavior he is describing is so familiar that it’s worth pausing to remember that it was written 77 years ago in 1937.

“I do not think the Socialist need make any sacrifice of essentials, but certainly he will have to make a great sacrifice of externals,” Orwell wrote, explaining why the left was failing to make headway with more sensible people. “If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaler… sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!”

Earlier, Orwell had denounced them as “vegetarians with wilting beards… earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control fanatics.”

Orwell would have found MSNBC familiar, not just because of its inversion of language and perpetual politicization of everything, but that same inbred club of irritating fanatics holding forth to a small audience that agrees dogmatically with their obsessions in every regard.

After drifting without an identity, MSNBC was reborn as a liberal news network and then finally as a network of sandal wearing transgender vegans and shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables.

Orwell was encouraging the left to get in tune with the working class, but MSNBC has gone in the opposite direction, shoving out hacks like Ed Schultz and Alec Baldwin, who for all their faults were somewhat more relatable than Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes and Ronan Farrow. Joe Scarborough is talking about running for office which will leave Chris Matthews and Al Sharpton as the only high profile MSNBC yappers who couldn’t be mistaken for Pajama Boy in a dark ObamaCare briefing.

MSNBC reinvented itself around Rachel Maddow. Its new talkers, Chris Hayes and Ronan Farrow, are cut from the same cloth, delivering nasal lectures with a tone somewhere between passive aggressive argument and ironic detachment. Imagine Air America crossbred with NPR and then mated with Pitchfork Magazine. Their horrible abortion would be MSNBC’s bland hipster ethos of earnest liberals earnestly talking down to their audience while Al Sharpton tries to figure out how a teleprompter works.

The Maddow MSNBC is a leftist student newspaper stridently denouncing racism, sexism, homophobia, claustrophobia, transphobia, pipelines, microaggressions, white privilege, cherry pies, political incorrectness, model trains and obesity. Unlike the left’s highly successful mainstream media apparatus, it is overcrowded with professors of political correctness and Twitter activists who can’t talk to people, only at people, who assume that everyone who matters already agrees with them and that this self-important population is already watching MSNBC.

MSNBC has lost the ability to talk to ordinary people. Even other liberals are beginning to evince a distaste for it.

The hipster breakdown of MSNBC has bigger implications for the left. Behind the scenes, the Obama campaign looked a lot like MSNBC. The original Obama campaign was better known as the Howard Dean campaign, but even Democrats found Dean ridiculously irritating.

Obama was the perfect front man because he had the wiring of a Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes, but when audiences showed up, they didn’t see a man in retro glasses sneering at them because they don’t understand what the asterisk in trans* stands for.

In his time as community organizer, Obama had learned to do what Orwell had advised the left to learn to do and what the average progressive has never learned to do, talk to ordinary people without making them react as if they were listening to a particularly annoying NPR broadcast. Obama Inc. may have been indistinguishable from the new MSNBC behind the scenes, but it had a human face on it.

Obama’s victories have given the left an unreasonable degree of confidence in their ideology, but it wasn’t their ideology that won two elections. Polls show that most Americans are not especially fond of what the left stands for, but they do vote for candidates who appear to care about them. The left didn’t win on the issues. It won because it found a good front man for its bad issues who would keep finding entertaining ways to distract the public from the complete implosion of his progressive policies.

The left confused political victories with ideological victories. It assumed that because Americans had been manipulated into temporarily liking Obama, that they also liked everything that the left stood for. MSNBC is what the left actually stands for and it’s a miserable catalogue of petty fascism by control freaks whose only knowledge of life comes through the lens of their favorite pseudo-Marxist theories.

The undisguised left cannot win an election outside of its safe territories where its politicians huddle in padded corners with bearded activists deciding whether they should ban donuts, plastic bags or politically incorrect pop songs next. In these territories where the Subaru station wagon is king, where everyone wears outdoor hiking gear everywhere they go and talk about mulching and recycling as if these were spiritual activities; MSNBC streams over every Roku box.

Occasionally a parka wearer driving a Subaru will find his facial muscles twitching and the words beginning to form in his mind, “Shut the f___ up”; but then he will be taken away for a three week course of wheatgrass juice colonic therapy that will leave him a proper Pajama Boy again.

Outside MSNBCland, the left remains unlikable; its army of activists infiltrates and takes over, but without a charming front man to juggle some torches and distract the crowds from the unemployment rate and their staggering health care premiums, the campaign folds like Howard Dean after a bottle of tequila.

MSNBC has decided that it’s safe to go Full Rachel Maddow. That is a mistake for which the left will pay the price where it always does, in the hearts of its countrymen who frown and change the channel.

Americans do not care for the ideology that consumes the professional leftist because they know that a man cannot serve two masters. Either he is an elected official who answers to the voters or he is an ideologue who answers to his professors of political correctness. That is why even career leftists like Obama attempt to pass themselves off as practical men. They understand that to identify as a rigid fanatic is political suicide.

Americans find that type of Socialist, whether he calls himself a progressive or a liberal, about as appealing as they do MSNBC.

Daniel Greenfield

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/how-maddows-msnbc-takeover-dooms-the-left/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Netanyahu: We Won't Freeze Settlement Construction

by Shlomo Cesana, Mati Tuchfeld and Yoni Hirsch

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu departs on six-day U.S. trip • Netanyahu, U.S. President Barack Obama to discuss Iranian threat, Israeli-Palestinian peace process • PM to urge "zero enrichment" policy for Iran.

 

          

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu | Photo credit: Connect

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who departed Israel on Sunday for a six-day visit to the United States, told several ministers with whom he met over the past few days that the issue of freezing settlement construction in Judea and Samaria will not be discussed during the trip.

The comment followed several reports in the American media, suggesting that Washington plans to demand a construction freeze in the areas outside the main settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria, to facilitate its parallel demand of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to extend the peace talks by one year. The original nine-month window allotted for the current negotiations ends in April.

"I am now leaving on an important trip to the U.S. where I will meet with President Barack Obama," Netanyahu said on Sunday before taking off from Ben-Gurion International Airport. "We will discuss the Iranian issue and the diplomatic process [with the Palestinians]. I will stand steadfast on the State of Israel's vital interests, especially the security of Israel's citizens. In recent years, the State of Israel has been under various pressures. We have rejected them in the face of the unprecedented storm and unrest in the region and are maintaining stability and security. This is what has been and what will be."

Netanyahu is scheduled to meet Obama in Washington on Monday.

Netanyahu is expected to urge Obama to demand that any future nuclear deal reached with Iran entail a "zero enrichment" policy, to ensure Iran will be unable to pursue the development of a nuclear bomb.

CBS News reported on Saturday that the U.S. has put pressure on Israel to stop carrying out assassinations inside Iran. The Mossad has allegedly been responsible for a number of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists in recent years, as part of an effort to thwart Iran's nuclear plans. According to the report, Netanyahu has ordered the Mossad to focus on hunting for evidence that Iran is cheating on the commitments it made in the interim nuclear deal signed in Geneva last November.

At their meeting on Monday, Netanyahu and Obama will discuss the framework peace proposal that the U.S. is formulating that would allow the ongoing negotiations with the Palestinians to continue to the start of 2015.While in the U.S., Netanyahu will also meet with congressional leaders, as well as other senior American officials.

The annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference, which Netanyahu will address on Tuesday, begins on Sunday in Washington. Justice Minister Tzipi Livni (Hatnuah) and Opposition Leader MK Isaac Herzog (Labor) will also deliver speeches at the conference. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will address AIPAC on Monday.

Herzog met with Kerry and U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice on Saturday and urged them not to be concerned by criticism from right-wing Likud and Habayit Hayehudi politicians regarding the peace talks with the Palestinians, saying that such criticism was not representative of the atmosphere on the streets of Israel.

Netanyahu will meet with the heads of Apple and WhatsApp in Silicon Valley on Wednesday, and will meet with the heads of the Jewish community in Los Angeles on Thursday. The prime minister is expected to return to Israel on Friday morning.

The prime minister's wife, Sara Netanyahu, is scheduled to meet with Jill Biden, wife of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, on Monday. The two will meet at an event hosted by Rhoda Dermer, wife of Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer, to which 25 women serving in positions of power in Washington have also been invited.

 

Intelligence, Strategic Affairs, and International Relations Minister Yuval Steinitz (Likud), Culture and Sport Minister Limor Livnat (Likud), Tourism Minister Uzi Landau (Yisrael Beytenu) and Deputy Foreign Minister Zeev Elkin (Likud) will be accompanying the prime minister during his visit to the United States and will meet with various officials.

Shlomo Cesana, Mati Tuchfeld and Yoni Hirsch

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=15839

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Putin's audacity, Obama's timidity

by David M. Weinberg

Russian brazenness in Crimea is a direct result of American fecklessness. More pointedly, Russian President Vladimir Putin's audacity is a direct result of U.S. President Barack Obama's timidity. The Russian invasion of the Ukraine is what happens when America is in global retreat.

 

In fact, what happened this weekend in Eastern Europe should come as no surprise to anybody who has followed the Obama administration's purposeful engineering of America's decline on the world stage.

 

You see, I have never believed that Obama's foreign policy is ham-handed or weak. I have never ascribed Obama's zigzagging on Libya, Egypt, Iran and especially Syria, along with his failed reset in relations with Russia, to indecision, inexperience or incompetence.

 

Obama is none of these frail things. He is neither naïve nor inept. He is quite decisive when he wants to be, and very able in advancing his agenda when he really wants to hit the goal.

 

Moreover, none of these descriptions explain his apparent indifference in the face of America's decline. Obama has care-freely allowed America's international reputation and awesome global power to waste away. Why?

 

The answer is that Obama is clearly out to emasculate America; to doggedly drag it down, purposefully so. He seeks the weakening of the United States on the global stage as a good and necessary outcome. He has set this as one of the key goals of his presidency -- and he is doing a very good, skillful job at hitting his target!

 

In short, the nonchalance of Obama as American global power and influence decays is doctrinaire. He ideologically intends it.

 

From day one, Obama has not been comfortable with American leadership in world affairs. He explicitly views America's past global performance to be arrogant and high-handed; to be militaristic and not completely moral. During his first campaign, he called America "overbearing."

 

Dozens of times, he has made it clear that he views America not as the leader of the world or the free world, but at best as a partner in the community of nations.

 

His path, then, has been to "fundamentally transform" America's place in the world; to denude the United States of its overwhelming global power; to strip the United States of its superior position; to drag America down from its imperious perch.

 

Obama very clearly believes that the humbling of America will bring healing to the world; that the diminishment of America's ability to throw its weight around will make room for other, just-as-moral powers to emerge (such as, perhaps, powerful Islamic actors or even Putin!); that the denouement of America will elevate world politics to a better sphere. Don Quixote-like, Obama thinks that he will be leaving the world a better place by cutting unexceptional America down to size.

 

Taking advantage of a war-weary American body politic, and camouflaging his retreat from leadership as a new form of global "engagement" (whatever that means), Obama has proceeded very nicely in wrenching the United States off its traditional, honorable moorings. In five short years, with three to go, he has succeeded in squandering centuries of American might, prestige and credibility.

In recent months, Obama has granted Russia's Putin and Iran's President Hassan Rouhani gargantuan international victories. He has given Syria's President Bashar Assad a new lease on life, emboldened Iran and its allies like Hezbollah, and re-energized the morally bankrupt U.N. All the while, Obama has played Hamlet about his own authority to strike Syria, and equivocated about the world's ability to deny Iran enrichment. All of which has trashed U.S. credibility.

 

It is no wonder, then, that Putin fears Obama not at all, and feels free to re-take the Ukraine without serious repercussion.

 

For the next 2½ years, until Obama's term comes to a blessed end, we can expect more of the same effrontery from Putin. Alas, we can expect similar impudence and defiance from the Iranians and Turks, too.

 

There is no one in Washington to ride herd and set limits on the nerve of these radical actors. The world has no sheriff. Which unfortunately, is exactly the way Obama likes it.

David M. Weinberg

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7543

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The Shelved Iran Report and Diplomacy

by Jonathan S. Tobin


With the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference starting this weekend in Washington, the debate about the Iranian nuclear threat is back in the headlines. But, as the AIPAC activists know all too well, in their efforts to mobilize Congress to support increased sanctions on Iran the administration has effectively checkmated them on the issue by claiming the measure would derail diplomacy. Opponents of sanctions have falsely sought to frame the issue as being a choice between war and diplomacy even though the new sanctions, which would not go into effect until after the current negotiations with Iran are seen to have failed, would clearly strengthen the administration’s hand in the talks. But the problem with treating the diplomatic process as sacrosanct is that in doing so, the truth about the nature of the threat may be sacrificed without the West getting any closer to its goal of thwarting Iran’s nuclear program.

That dilemma was illustrated this week when it was revealed that the International Atomic Energy Agency had shelved a new report about Iran’s nuclear project because it was felt its publication would harm the diplomatic process. Sources told Reuters that the report would have been a wider review of the Iranian program including crucial analysis of Tehran’s military research. But the IAEA, whose reports over the last few years have raised awareness of the nuclear threat, ultimately decided that putting out more information about the topic now would, like the sanctions being debated in Washington, harm diplomacy.

After the Reuters report was published, Israel called on the IAEA to release the report. In response, the agency claimed today that it doesn’t exist. But all that tells us is that the decision to spike the report took place before it was formally prepared. The bottom line remains the same. Whatever new information the IAEA has obtained about military dimensions of Iran’s program is not going to be published because the more the Western public knows about the subject the less likely they are to give diplomats the leeway they need to craft a nuclear deal that will fall short of their stated goal of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.



We don’t know what a new IAEA report on Iran would have said. Given that the interim nuclear deal signed by the U.S. in November did not provide for inspections of Iranian facilities where military research is being conducted, it may be that the agency has not learned of any breakthroughs or further evidence of Iran’s clear intent to build a bomb. But past IAEA reports have served an important purpose in clarifying the danger involved in letting Tehran continue to use diplomacy to run out the clock until they reach their nuclear goal. But whether the IAEA acted on its own or if it succumbed to pressure, the effect is the same. The Obama administration and its P5+1 partners understand that the more information is released about the ongoing Iranian efforts to circumvent the diplomatic process, the harder it is to silence criticism of their tactics or to prevent Congress from seeking to put more sanctions in place.

There is no disagreement between the administration and its critics about whether a diplomatic solution is the best way to resolve this issue. No one wants the U.S. to be forced into a position where its only choice really is between the use of force and accepting a situation in which Iran becomes a nuclear power. But the suppression of the free flow of information about the nature of that threat raises suspicions that what is going on now is more about preserving diplomacy for its own sake than anything else.

By agreeing to negotiations that tacitly recognized Iran’s “right” to enrich uranium and loosened existing sanctions, the administration has allowed Tehran to believe that it will never have to dismantle its nuclear infrastructure. Having triumphed in the interim talks, it is little surprise that Iran’s leaders believe they will achieve their nuclear goal either through diplomacy or by stalling the process until the point where their bomb is a fait accompli. It is to be hoped that the administration means what it says about preventing an Iranian bomb. But the more President Obama seeks to suppress the truth about the Iranian threat and to silence debate about sanctions, the harder it is to believe that he will keep his promises. The goal must be to make it impossible for the Islamist regime to build a bomb, not detente. A diplomatic process that aims for anything less than that is not worth the effort or the sacrifices of the truth required for keeping it alive.


Jonathan S. Tobin

Source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/02/28/the-shelved-iran-report-and-diplomacy-iaea-nuclear-sanctions-aipac/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Norwegian YMCA Embraces Boycott Israel Policy

by JTA

With 30,000 members in over 500 different chapters, the Norwegian YMCA-YWCA is among the country’s largest and oldest youth groups.

           

Norwegian YMCA Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Norway’s Young Men and Women’s Christian Association aligned itself with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, or BDS.

The Norwegian YMCA-YWCA “encourages broad economic boycott of goods and services from Israel and Israeli settlements to pressure the Israeli government to follow up on UN resolutions and end the illegal occupation of Palestine,” the organization wrote in a statement published on its Norwegian-language website last week.

With 30,000 members in over 500 different chapters and affiliated Scouts groups, the Norwegian YMCA-YWCA — or KFUK-KFUM in its Norwegian acronym — is among the country’s largest and oldest youth groups.

Conrad Myrland, director of Norway’s With Israel for Peace group, or MIFF, told the Vart Land daily that he considers the youth organization’s move “too weak to be considered tragic. Boycott of Israel is stupid and immoral independently of the support it has from YMCA-YWCA,” he said.

“The only result is that YMCA-YWCA now supports boycotting the only democracy in the Middle East,” Myrland said. “I encourage all individuals and churches to withdraw their support of YMCA-YWCA until the immoral boycott action is abandoned.”

On its website, Norway’s YMCA-YWCA wrote that the organization decided to embrace BDS “because a long series of UN resolutions and negotiations for decades have not yielded results. We believe it is now appropriate to initiate an economic boycott of Israel to put increased pressure on the Israeli authorities.”

JTA

Source: http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Norwegian-YMCA-embraces-boycott-Israel-policy-343995

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.