The Clinton Tapes: 'We should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win'
From an Israeli perspective, what is perhaps the most interesting leak comes not from Wikileaks, but rather from the release of an old-fashioned audio cassette with a 2006 interview with Hillary Clinton.
The tape is 45 minutes and contains much that is no longer relevant,
such as analysis of the re-election battle that Sen. Joe Lieberman was
then facing in Connecticut. But a seemingly throwaway remark about
elections in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority has taken on
new relevance amid persistent accusations in the presidential campaign
by Clinton’s Republican opponent Donald Trump that the current election is “rigged.”
Speaking to the Jewish Press about the January 25, 2006, election for
the second Palestinian Legislative Council (the legislature of
the Palestinian National Authority), Clinton weighed in about the
result, which was a resounding victory for Hamas (74 seats) over the
U.S.-preferred Fatah (45 seats).
“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the
Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen.
Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should
have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”
The sentiment is not surprising. In 2011, former Bush National Security aide Elliott Abrams told the Jerusalem Post that the 'Palestinian Authority' sought to call off the 2006 'Palestinian' elections, and the reason it didn't happen was that they insisted on blaming Israel.
According to Abrams, the Palestinians seized on the voting in Jerusalem
as a possible pretext to cancel the elections, since this issue has been
debated amid questions of how and where Palestinians would vote.
“The
Palestinians said to Sharon, ‘Why don’t you say no voting in Jerusalem.
Zero. Not in the post offices [where voting was allowed in 1995]. Zero.
And this will be a reason to call off the election.’”
Sharon,
according to Abrams, “said he was not going to take the blame for this.
He said, ‘If you want to call off the elections, call off the election, I
don’t care. If you want to have an election, great; if you want to call
off the election, great. But you do it – I’m not taking the blame for
it.’” The Palestinians, Abrams said, then came to the Americans with a
request that they call off the elections.
The American reaction
was that the US doesn’t call off elections just a few days before they
are scheduled, “because it looks like you’re not going to win anymore.
That’s ridiculous.
Your job is to win the election, go out and
work, and get your people to the polls and win the damn election. So the
election was held, and Hamas won.”
Of course, it was 'moderate' 'Palestinian' President Mahmoud AbbasAbu Mazen who insisted that Hamas participate in that election in the first place.... And by the way, after the election, there were discussions over the possibility of Hamas being expelled from the 'Palestinian Authority.' So Hillary's statement about making sure that Fatah won the election was practically mainstream thought back then.
But there's something else on that audio tape that's even more significant.
Regarding capturing combatants in war—the June capture of IDF soldier
Gilad Shalit by Hamas militants who came across the Gaza border via an
underground tunnel was very much front of mind—Clinton can be heard on
the tape saying, “And then, when, you know, Hamas, you know, sent the
terrorists, you know, through the tunnel into Israel that killed and
captured, you know, kidnapped the young Israeli soldier, you know,
there’s a sense of like, one-upsmanship, and in these cultures of, you
know, well, if they captured a soldier, we’ve got to capture a soldier.”
Equating Hamas, which to this day remains on the State Department’s official list
of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, with the armed forces of a close
American ally was not what many expected to hear in the Jewish Press
editorial offices, which were then at Third Avenue and Third Street in
Brooklyn. (The paper’s office has since moved to the Boro Park section
of Brooklyn.) The use of the phrase “these cultures” is also a bit of a
head-scratcher.
In other words, Hillary equates Israel with Hamas. That ought to bother you all a lot more than whether she thought the 'Palestinian election' should be rigged.
Why AIPAC's Israel monopoly deserves to come to an end
Bruce Abramson is a politically conservative former lawyer colleague of mine. Jeff Ballabon is currently best-known as the man behind the Iron Dome Alliance, which is seeking to undo AIPAC's 'accomplishment' in making sure that the 2012 Republican platform was no more pro-Israel than the same year's Democratic platform. Jeff is a long-time pro-Israel activist with whom I am occasionally in touch (and who follows me on Twitter).
Bruce and Jeff have written a lengthy piece in which they demonstrate that AIPAC, the big 'pro-Israel' lobby, has lost its monopoly on pro-Israel lobbying. In the course of their article, you will understand why that's probably the best thing that has happened to US-Israel relations in a long time.
By eschewing policy innovation while occupying the entire field,
AIPAC has imposed upon pro-Israel activism the same sclerosis that
monopolists commonly impose upon the markets they dominate. In Israel’s
case, that sclerosis is both misplaced and dangerous. Israel is a small
state surrounded by enemies seeking her destruction and the genocide of
her citizens. As a foreign government dependent on the United States,
Israeli diplomacy compels conciliatory statements about American policy
and leadership. American activists are under no compulsion to believe
such statements. To the contrary, American supporters add maximum value
when championing the tough truths that diplomacy puts beyond Israel’s
reach.
Yet rather than pushing to expand Israel’s political playing field,
AIPAC has instead filtered Israel’s necessary diplomatic risk-aversion
through the partisan and policy preferences of its own membership. To
pick but one example, numerous American Jewish leaders, including
prominent members of the Conference of Presidents, have recognized that
American energy independence would weaken OPEC’s hold over American
policy and thus serve Israel’s interests. Rather than taking a
leadership role on the issue, however, AIPAC demurred, explaining: “We
knew as American Jews we couldn’t touch environmental issues and have
any credibility with our community. American Jews don’t want to destroy
Alaska to import a few barrels less from Angola.”
A political monopolist
who avoids alliances for reasons unrelated to its mission necessarily
weakens that mission—in AIPAC’s case, lobbying in Israel’s best
interests.
In classic monopolist form, AIPAC protects its market by playing to
avoid losing rather than to win. A pro-Israel lobby that played to win
would articulate basic, immutable principles for which it would
fight—and it would count among its “friends” only those elected
officials who supported these positions even when politically
inconvenient. Such a lobby would pressure Israel’s neighbors to work
with Israel while removing pressure on Israel to take risks that
compromise its security, and it would stop pushing to reward Arab
incitement and terror with a PLO-led state. Above all, a pro-Israel
lobby playing to win would innovate on policy, promoting truths and
ideas that run counter to conventional wisdom—even if such innovations
remain minority positions for the years that lobbyists often need to
assemble winning coalitions.
Anti-Israel forces understand the strategic imperative of policy
innovation, and they are rarely bashful about pushing ideas whose
absurdity is apparent to all people of good faith. Yasser Arafat first
fabricated Temple Denial from whole cloth in 2000, but within the past
year the New York Times has detailed the “controversy”
surrounding Jewish “claims” to the Temple Mount, and UNESCO has declared
the Kotel a Muslim holy site. BDS, which grew out of the United
Nations’ rabidly anti-Semitic Durbin Conference in 2001, began in
earnest with a coalition of radical fringe NGOs in 2005. By 2015,
allegations of Israeli apartheid and genocide had come to dominate
discourse among American academics and European parliamentarians.
Or consider the course of the so-called “Two-State Solution,” once a
policy innovation of the far left but now conventional wisdom. In 1980,
Jimmy Carter—hardly an Israel advocate—opposed as destabilizing the
emergence of an Arab state wedged into disputed territories that Israel
had liberated in 1967. Yitzchak Rabin, martyred in 1995 for his dovish
politics, never wavered from his opposition to a Palestinian state. In
1998, five years into the Oslo process, Hillary Clinton publicly implied
support for an independent Palestine; her husband’s White House issued
an official repudiation. Yet AIPAC now doggedly promotes “a negotiated
two-state solution—a Jewish state of Israel living alongside a
demilitarized Palestinian state.”
The erosion of Israel’s reputation and diplomatic standing among
Western governments—and in particular, among Western parties to the left
of center—should provide fertile ground for policy innovation. Who
objects to the canard that Israel is an occupier? Who lobbies the White
House to recognize an undivided Jerusalem—within its full current
municipal boundaries—as Israel’s capital? Who takes to task every
politician who differentiates the anti-Israel terror of Hamas, Fatah,
and Hezbollah from the world’s other instances of Islamist terror? Who
challenges the calls for “balance” in confronting the terrorist
mini-state of Gaza that are oddly absent from any discussion of other
terrorist safe havens? Who emphasizes the connection between
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism? Who pushes American politicians to
revisit the Oslo agreement—particularly following Mahmoud Abbas’s
unilateral withdrawal from its terms during his 2015 speech to the U.N.
General Assembly?
To each of these questions, the answer is “not AIPAC.” In typical
monopolist fashion, AIPAC does more than underinvest in policy
innovation: It objects to policy innovations that might imperil its
monopoly. That objection traps pro-Israel activism behind a
lowest-common-denominator bipartisan strategy in an increasingly
partisan world.
...
Unsurprisingly, those taking these divergent worldviews also see
Israel very differently. To a progressive, even one with no inherent
animus toward Jews, Israel mirrors the worst of America—an oppressor
state occupying the territory of an indigenous people, practicing
apartheid policies, demonstrating contempt for the international
community, and seeking to play by a unique set of rules. To a
conservative, the situation is just as clear. Israel possesses all of
the right cultural norms and values, stands allied against America’s
enemies, and places itself on the front lines of a civilizational
battle. Israel holds itself to exceptional standards of humanity and
decency despite the constant threats to its existence and widespread
opprobrium. Support for Israel is thus a logical and consistent part of
the conservative worldview, while an outlier among progressives.
The elections of 2006 through 2010 solidified the resorting of the
parties by worldview, and furthered their divergent views of Israel.
Hillary Clinton’s hawkish Senate record cost her the 2008 Democratic
nomination. Foreign-policy realists boasting impeccable Republican
pedigrees—from James Baker and Brent Scowcroft to Colin Powell and Chuck
Hagel—suddenly found warmer receptions on the left than on the right.
Tony Blair, leader of the maturing European left in the 1990s,
discovered that Republicans were his most receptive American audience.
In 2016, Sen. Bernie Sanders galvanized young Democrats behind positions
overtly hostile to Israel. Sanders was also the only presidential
candidate who skipped AIPAC’s 2016 Policy Conference; his submitted
comments parroted much of the standard progressive anti-Israel
rhetoric—and earned widespread praise from the left, including J Street.
AIPAC’s strategic bipartisanship inevitably dismays both those who
view Israel through the progressive lens and those who view it through
the conservative lens. In the face of the post-9/11 transformation of
the American foreign policy debate, AIPAC remains rigidly dedicated to
blind bipartisanship, doing little to educate or inform its members that
most of them are trapped in an increasingly progressive Democratic
Party boasting an increasingly powerful anti-Israel caucus. Polls show a
partisan split on the issue of Israel v. Palestinians of 83R-48D, with
pro-Israel Democrats now representing a minority of their party. That 35
percent gap makes Israel one of the most extreme partisan issues in the
current political climate, not remotely a matter of bipartisan
consensus.
***
J Street studied its market well before launching. Its founders
understood that AIPAC could not help but alienate the large numbers of
Jewish Americans who consider themselves Progressives but harbor some
affinity for Israel. The rival organization built upon AIPAC’s
unyielding dogma that there is no difference between the parties to
insist that the anti-Israel policies gaining salience among Democrats
represent the true pro-Israel positions. By redefining Zionism as
something close to its opposite, J Street gives American Jews a license
to remain proudly progressive and frees Democrats to be increasingly
adverse while still maintaining they are pro-Israel. To J Street’s
supporters, Israel’s true interests at any given point in time are
precisely those that the left says they are—thereby eliminating any
potential dilemmas arising from a divergence of Israel’s interests from
those of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. Furthermore, by
providing consistent visible Jewish support for President Obama’s
foreign-policy agenda, J Street has already conferred value upon both
its members and the Democratic politicians who need their support.
The Obama policy agenda that enabled J Street’s rise caught AIPAC
sleeping. For the first six-plus Obama years, nearly every policy or
pronouncement touching upon Israel produced a predictable sequence: J
Street emerged as an early, enthusiastic supporter, lauding the
president’s boldness and urging him to move in an even more progressive
direction. AIPAC noted both positives and negatives in the president’s
moves, studied their implications from all angles, and eventually
announced cautious, grudging support. As late as December 2013, amid
widespread alarm triggered at the Obama Administration’s dealings with
Iran, AIPAC called a special meeting of the Conference of Presidents to
demand that Jewish groups stop criticizing the president. AIPAC
Executive Director Howard Kohr declared at that meeting that AIPAC and
Obama share the “same goals” and have only “a difference of strategy”—an
assertion that AIPAC ought now regret.
Finally, in year seven, Israel’s government took an unprecedented
step to preempt AIPAC. In 2014, AIPAC had been willing to support the
president’s call to end sanctions on Iran as a step toward easing
negotiations. When it came to assessing the package that the Obama team
negotiated in 2015, however, Israel’s prime minister delivered a bold
and controversial speech to Congress that forced AIPAC’s hand. AIPAC had
little choice but to agree publicly with the Israeli consensus that the
deal represented an existential threat. For the first time in many
years, AIPAC appeared to launch a full-throated campaign to defeat a
Democratic administration priority—though it simultaneously offered
counter-productive (if not overtly cynical) reassurances that it would
exact no price from “friends” who supported the deal.
In 2016, AIPAC continues to monopolize the field of activists eager
to provide policy support for Israel, while J Street provides a useful
outlet for those unwilling to abandon progressive policy priorities
while maintaining or manipulating a pro-Israel self-image. Another
clearly visible market niche, however, remains unfilled: activists
adopting the conservative worldview unsatisfied with the compromises
inherent in bipartisan policy formulations.
The arrival of a partisan pro-Israel group to AIPAC’s right will
dethrone the Israel monopolist but not destroy it. AIPAC has invested
decades in developing a powerful brand, exceptional connections, a
demonstrated ability to work across the aisle, and unrivaled lists of
donors and grassroots supporters. Furthermore, AIPAC’s flagship
product—the foreign aid bill—is likely to become increasingly important
as fallout from the Iran deal triggers a regional arms race. Whether
broadly appropriate or not, to the degree that AIPAC can retain its
bipartisan relationships, it can help ensure continued military aid to
Israel regardless of the configuration of power in Washington.
In addition, though few cast it in such terms, AIPAC plays two other
critical roles: It serves as a Jewish pride organization and as a safe
space for Truman Democrats. Its annual Policy Conference provides Jewish
pro-Israel activists with a brief respite from pervasive anti-Semitism
and anti-Zionism. And AIPAC’s membership may represent the largest
remaining group of hawkish Democrats—voters who reject progressive
foreign policy even as they support other parts of the progressive
agenda. By providing a forum for such voters, AIPAC fills a niche
critical to American national security—as well as to the State of
Israel. Voters who place primacy on the ascendance of progressive
cultural mores and/or economic distribution, while still favoring a
strong national defense, deserve a forum in which they can speak
comfortably. AIPAC appears to be the only prominent organization filling
that need. Without such a forum, Democratic approaches to this
traditionally bipartisan belief will range from cavalier to
disdainful—much to the detriment of national security.
The pro-Israel community should push AIPAC to reposition itself with a
clear eye on contemporary reality. AIPAC can best serve the pro-Israel
cause by redeploying its formidable assets to help pro-Israel,
national-security-conscious Democrats defeat the anti-Israel
progressives ascendant in their party—certainly the most effective way
to ensure continued bipartisan support for Israel. New organizations
promoting policy innovation and adaptive political strategies must also
enter the pro-Israel market, however, to address challenges, push
policies, and forge alliances on behalf of Israel that run counter to
AIPAC’s strategic approach and the preferences of its members. AIPAC’s
directors and customers—i.e., the Jewish community’s leading
philanthropists and the grassroots activists who genuinely want to
protect Israel and the U.S.-Israel relationship—should accept nothing
less.
New PAC ad destroys Obama-Clinton 'Leading from Behind' foreign policy
If you want to know how to attack Hillary Clinton and blame her for the Obama administration's decrepit foreign policy (blame that is well-deserved), look no further than this video from the America Rising PAC.
9/11/2015: Americans don't get it any more than in 2002
This post is timed for the exact moment of 9/11 - 8:46 am US Eastern time.
I'd like to rerun a slightly revised version of a post I did three years ago (it has a new postscript). The original is here.
I started looking for a column by Deborah Sontag in the New York Times
in the aftermath of September 11. Sontag had just returned from a stint
as the Times' bureau chief in Jerusalem during the intifadeh, during
which she was less than understanding of Israeli actions. I discovered
that I excerpted the article in last year's post on 9/11. And so, I
decided to run it again:
One of the immediate reactions to 9/11 here in Israel - crass though it
might have been - was "now the Americans will finally understand what
we've been going through." In the year leading up to 9/11, Israel had
suffered dozens of terror attacks. Parents looked to avoid putting their
children on public buses (in fact, we have raised a generation where
many of the kids no longer know how to use the buses before they are in
high school). And yet, we were pushed by Clinton and by Tenet and even
by Bush for the first few months, to make more concessions to the
'Palestinians' every time they murdered a few Jews.
For me, one of the most memorable pieces to come out of 9/11 was this one
by Deborah Sontag. Sontag was the New York Times' bureau chief here
from 1998-2001, and was a constant nemesis. She returned to New York
shortly before 9/11. Here's some of what she wrote in the Sunday Times
Magazine ten days after the attack.
That terrible Tuesday
was the first day of American school for Emma, who was entering third
grade, and Adam, who was starting kindergarten. It was a glorious
morning as they skipped through downtown Brooklyn. They wore new
sneakers (Stride Rite won out) and backpacks that were essentially empty
but nonetheless an essential part of the American school uniform. I
left Emma designing a name tag to hang above her cubby. In Adam's class,
where he was seated at a table designated ''Femur'' in anticipation of a
unit on the human body, I patted his blond head and inadvertently said
aloud what I was thinking, ''You'll be safe here.''
Then a parent
barged into the room and told a few of us that a plane had crashed into
the World Trade Center. We walked, because there really was no other
choice, straight to the Brooklyn promenade on the East River overlooking
Lower Manhattan. The second airplane had just crashed into the twin
towers, and flames were devouring the tops of the buildings. It was a
perfect view of the horror, and there was nothing we could do but stare.
This
was terrorism of a different magnitude. In Israel, such attacks were
chillingly intimate. Within hours, everyone in the country knew who had
been killed and knew someone connected to the victims. Bombings were
also anticipated and routine. With grim efficiency, daily life was
restored to the bombed area. But this was so vast that it could not be
personalized or swept up. We were struck by the fact that no victims
were named on the news that first day. We were breathing the acrid,
dusty air that wafted across the river. The attack was palpable. Yet, it
was beyond our grasp.
Adam was clueless when we picked him up at
the kindergarten annex. In the school's main high-rise building, Emma's
class waited in the overheated basement where the elementary students
had been herded to stop them from watching the whole thing from their
classroom windows. We pushed through the thronged halls to get outside.
Passersby were wearing paper masks. ''Aliens!'' Adam said. A woman
snapped at us, ''Cover your children's mouths!'' Emma burst into tears.
''My first day of school wasn't fun at all,'' she said. ''You promised.
You promised it would be better here.''
In Israel, we could keep
our children, who were foreigners, in a relatively secure cocoon,
although that meant greatly limiting their universe. We could even
isolate them from much of the news. But here, waiting for our apartment
to be ready, we were staying in a hotel that was designated an emergency
relief center. People were streaming over the Brooklyn Bridge covered
in ash and seeking first aid in the Brooklyn Marriott. Security was
tight. School for the next day was canceled. A father of one of Emma's
classmates was missing. We had to start explaining. At first, I used a
silly, gingerly phrase, telling Adam that a plane had ''bumped into''
the twin towers. ''By accident?'' he asked. There was no avoiding the
ugly truth.
We turned on the television news. ''It looks like
Israel,'' Adam said. He asked if we were going to start seeing soldiers
in Brooklyn. I told him no, but then we descended to the lobby and
happened on several National Guardsmen in their camouflage uniforms and
army boots. We stepped outside. Sirens wailed. We were home?
Although ordinary Americans began to appreciate our plight on 9/11,
except for the period between June 2002 (when Bush called for a new
'Palestinian' leadership) and Arafat's death just after the 2004
election, American leadership has largely not recognized that we and you
are fighting the same battle. The first indications that would be the
case came within a few days of 9/11, and the point was driven home
strongly by President Bush's reaction to then-Prime Minister Sharon's Czechoslovakia speech on October 4, 2001.
The
discovery of the Karine A weapons ship in January 2002 started to turn
the tide with Bush in our favor, and we enjoyed two brief romances with
him that have colored perceptions of his Presidency here: From June 2002
until November 2004 and during the final months of his term. Between
late 2004 and early 2008, the people who pushed Bush to be more
pro-Israel (the neo-cons - Rumsfeld, Cheney, Feith et al) had left the
White House and those who came in their place (people like Robert Gates
and Condoleeza Rice) were far less favorable to Israel.
Ten years
ago today, it looked like the American leadership would understand why
you cannot make peace with terrorism. Unfortunately, they no longer do.
And the fact that America elected Obama three years ago has to make you
wonder how many of the American people get it now either.
Postscript:
The last three paragraphs of this postscript are what I wrote in 2012. Perhaps, I should have changed 'terrorism' to 'Islamic terrorism' even then, but given what is going on in the Middle East, it would certainly be appropriate to do so today.
It is perhaps fitting that the sellout to a nuclear-armed Iran by a partisan cloture vote in the Senate was completed on September 10. For several years after 9/11, 'September 10' was code for the naive way of thinking about Islamic terrorism before 9/11. The fact that a lame duck President was able to hold party loyalty enough to force that vote through the Senate shows how partisan the United States has become. It's hard to say that the Americans are even more clueless now about Islam and terrorism than they were 14 years ago, but I believe that's definitely true. Mark Steyn got it right on Hugh Hewitt's Thursday show.
I think the problem is that we defined what we were
up against in the fall of 2001, 2002 too narrowly - and I think you can
see that actually at the time of the first anniversary in 2002. We are
in an ideological struggle... And we've seen that that ideology is very
seductive to people who hold the passports of Western nations. We are a
hole, we are a vacuum - and something fills the vacuum, which is what we
see in Europe and to a lesser extent over here. And you can't fight
this war even with the most brilliant military in the world because it's
as I said inAmerica Alone
all those years ago - it's not my line, it's from Basil Liddell Hart,
the great military strategist – it's not about blowing up their tanks
and it's not about shooting their planes out of the sky – and nobody can
beat Western militaries for doing that - but if you don't understand
that you're up against this ideology and you don't target that ideology,
then you can never win. And that's why I find this anniversary about as
dispiriting as any of the fourteen since that Tuesday morning all those
years ago.
I don't know why I said that this ideological faintheartedness was
evident even at the time of the first anniversary in 2002. So, after
the show, I turned toThe Face of the Tiger,
my account of the first year of the new war. Back then 9/11 was "the
day everything changed". With hindsight, very little changed, with the
exception of Muslim immigration, which accelerated. So, as I said to
Hugh, I find these anniversaries more dispiriting with each passing
year. Here's what I had to say on September 11th 2002, all of which
applies to 2015, only more so:
WE ARE BACK to September 10th 2001, at least if the National
Education Association is anything to go by. Their attractive series of
classroom lessons and projects for September 11th, sponsored by Johnson
& Johnson, begins with a little light non-judgmentalism: the NEA
advises teachers not to "suggest any group is responsible" for the, ah,
"tragic events". Just because Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'eda boasted they
did it is no reason to jump to conclusions:
Blaming is especially difficult in terrorist
situations because someone is at fault. In this country, we still
believe that all people are innocent until solid, reliable evidence from
our legal authorities proves otherwise.
So instead the NEA thinks children should:
Explore the problems inherent in assigning blame to
populations or nations of people by looking at contemporary examples of
ethnic conflict, discrimination, and stereotyping at home and abroad."
And by that you mean...?
Internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor
and the backlash against Arab Americans during the Gulf War are obvious
examples.
Not that obvious: for one thing, the "backlash against Arab
Americans during the Gulf War" is entirely mythical. But you get the
gist. Don't blame anyone. But, if you have to, blame America...
The fact that the United States went on to elect and re-elect a President whose answer to everything was to blame America, abandon its allies and give comfort to its enemies speaks volumes about how much Americans don't get it. No, they still don't get it. They don't understand that left to its own devices, Islam will come after them. It's not just Israel that Iran wishes to destroy with its nuclear weapons - we're just the warm-up act, the appetizer. It's the United States they're really after.
While I think you should read the whole thing, this paragraph is particularly ominous, albeit not yet for the United States.
I believe western culture – rule of law, universal suffrage, etc – is
preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in
Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I
support immigration, but with assimilation. Without it, like a Hindu
widow, the west is slowly climbing on the funeral pyre of its lost
empires. You see it in European foreign policy already: they're scared
of their mysterious, swelling, unstoppable Muslim populations... The
Islamists are militarily weak but ideologically secure. A year on, the
west is just the opposite. There's more than one way to lose a war.
And now for my 2012 postscript: If Obama is reelected in November - and the fact that it is possible
that he will be - it will show that Americans really have forgotten 9/11
(the next post will show just how much the meaning of 9/11 has faded).
Unfortunately, the next 9/11-like event in the US could be worse. A lot
worse.
Every time I travel to the US, I shudder at the lack of
security in malls, theaters, ballparks etc. Yes, you have to go through
'security' at Fenway Park (I was there two weeks ago), but they seem
much more concerned with bottles and cans than with guns and plastic
explosives. You can walk into and out of the most crowded shopping malls
without anyone seeing you or checking your bags. Even airport security
is a joke, with the backscatter machine taking the place of human
intelligence. The big news on that front is that if you're over 75-years
old, you no longer have to take your shoes off!
We're in a war against terrorism. And the saddest thing is that most of the West doesn't even realize it.
Back to today - I feel no more secure in the United States than I did three years ago. Nothing has happened there on the security front. Nothing at all.
Ultimately,
in my view, whether one supports or opposes the resolution of
disapproval depends on how one thinks Iran will behave under this
agreement.
If one thinks
Iran will moderate, that contact with the West and a decrease in
economic and political isolation will soften Iran’s hardline positions,
one should approve the agreement. After all, a moderate Iran is less
likely to exploit holes in the inspection and sanctions regime, is less
likely to seek to become a threshold nuclear power after ten years, and
is more likely to use its newfound resources for domestic growth, not
international adventurism.
But
if one feels that Iranian leaders will not moderate and their unstated
but very real goal is to get relief from the onerous sanctions, while
still retaining their nuclear ambitions and their ability to increase
belligerent activities in the Middle East and elsewhere, then one should
conclude that it would be better not to approve this agreement.
Admittedly,
no one can tell with certainty which way Iran will go. It is true that
Iran has a large number of people who want their government to decrease
its isolation from the world and focus on economic advancement at home.
But it is also true that this desire has been evident in Iran for
thirty-five years, yet the Iranian leaders have held a tight and
undiminished grip on Iran, successfully maintaining their brutal,
theocratic dictatorship with little threat. Who’s to say this
dictatorship will not prevail for another ten, twenty, or thirty years?
To
me, the very real risk that Iran will not moderate and will, instead,
use the agreement to pursue its nefarious goals is too great.
Therefore,
I will vote to disapprove the agreement, not because I believe war is a
viable or desirable option, nor to challenge the path of diplomacy. It
is because I believe Iran will not change, and under this agreement it
will be able to achieve its dual goals of eliminating sanctions while
ultimately retaining its nuclear and non-nuclear power. Better to keep
U.S. sanctions in place, strengthen them, enforce secondary sanctions on
other nations, and pursue the hard-trodden path of diplomacy once more,
difficult as it may be.
For all of these reasons, I believe the vote to disapprove is the right one.
Schumer came out against the deal, but the only way he could have made it less noticeable and less effective was to wait until mid-September to do so. I guess he wilted under the pressure to take a position.
The real question now is whether he will be active in trying to persuade others to vote against the deal. It doesn't sound like it.
While we have come to different conclusions, I give tremendous credit to
President Obama for his work on this issue. The President, Secretary
Kerry and their team have spent painstaking months and years pushing
Iran to come to an agreement. Iran would not have come to the table
without the President’s persistent efforts to convince the Europeans,
the Russians, and the Chinese to join in the sanctions. In addition, it
was the President’s far-sighted focus that led our nation to accelerate
development of the Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP), the best military
deterrent and antidote to a nuclear Iran. So
whichever side one comes down on in this agreement, all fair-minded
Americans should acknowledge the President’s strong achievements in
combatting and containing Iran.
Obama opposed the sanctions every step of the way. And as to the MOP's, they were developed under Bush and not under Obama, although they were finally delivered to Israel under Obama. But hey - why let facts get in the way of throwing a little support to an embattled President from one's own party?
Yes, Schumer will vote against the deal to preserve his Senate seat, but I doubt he will lead the opposition to the bill. I also have to wonder whether he acted in concert with New York's junior Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, or whether he double crossed her by leaving her as the one to face the wrath of New York's heavily pro-Israel voters.
I am generally critical of Obama administration efforts to blame George Bush for everything that happens in and with the United States. But I've been thinking that Bush is partly to blame for the Iran nuclear agreement and he will be partly to blame when (and if, but more likely when) Iran gets nuclear weapons. No, Bush is not to blame as much as Obama, but he shares in the blame for this one.
Bush is to blame because he should have had the junk to destroy Iran's nuclear capability while he was still in office and before Obama came to power. Instead, he cowered in front of a ridiculous National Intelligence Estimate that claimed that Iran was no longer pursuing nuclear weapons, and that Bush himself knew to be false.
Bush did not have the junk to buck this anonymous 'estimate' and for that he will eternally share the blame for a nuclear Iran.
I've been waiting for this for a long time, and I'm sure many of you have as well: Former President George W. Bush - the man who is blamed for everything seven years after he left office - finally let loose on Barack Hussein Obama (Hat Tip: Zvi S).
One attendee at the Republican Jewish Coalition session, held at the
Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas with owner Sheldon Adelson in attendance,
transcribed large portions of Bush’s remarks. The former president, who
rarely ever criticizes Obama in public, at first remarked that the idea
of re-entering the political arena was something he didn’t want to do.
He then proceeded to explain why Obama, in his view, was placing the
U.S. in "retreat" around the world. He also said Obama was misreading
Iran’s intentions while relaxing sanctions on Tehran too easily.
According to the attendee's transcription, Bush noted that Iran has a
new president, Hassan Rouhani. “He's smooth," Bush said. "And you’ve
got to ask yourself, is there a new policy or did they just change the
spokesman?”
Bush said that Obama’s plan to lift sanctions on Iran with a promise
that they could snap back in place at any time was not plausible. He
also said the deal would be bad for American national security in the
long term: “You think the Middle East is chaotic now? Imagine what it
looks like for our grandchildren. That’s how Americans should view the
deal.”
...
Obama promised to degrade and destroy Islamic State's forces but then
didn’t develop a strategy to complete the mission, Bush said. He said
that if you have a military goal and you mean it, “you call in your
military and say ‘What’s your plan?’ ” He indirectly touted his own
decision to surge troops to Iraq in 2007, by saying, “When the plan
wasn’t working in Iraq, we changed.”
“In order to be an effective president ... when you say something you have to mean it,” he said. “You gotta kill em.”
...
Regarding Hillary Clinton, Bush said it will be crucial how she plays
her relationship with the president. She will eventually have to choose
between running on the Obama administration’s policies or running
against them. If she defends them, she's admitting failure, he said, but
if she doesn't she's blaming the president.
For George W. Bush, the remarks in Vegas showed he has little respect
for how the current president is running the world. He also revealed
that he takes little responsibility for the policies that he put in
place that contributed to the current state of affairs.
I disagree with the last sentence. It isn't that Bush takes little responsibility for the policies he put in place, but rather that he takes no responsibility for the way Obama has implemented them. Americans aren't using to hearing that since 2009.
I may be able to cross Jeb Bush off the list of potential candidates for whom I would vote. The Wall Street Journal reports that Bush's foreign policy is more likely to be like his father's than his brother's. George W. Bush may not have been perfect (although between 2002-05 he was awfully close to it), but he was far better than his father, George H.W. Bush, whose hostility to Israel has only been exceeded by Barack Hussein Obama and Jimmy Carter since Israel gained its independence in 1948 (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
One early indication suggests he is leaning toward his
father’s more pragmatic and restrained philosophy. The former Florida
governor is considering naming Meghan O’Sullivan as his top
foreign-policy aide; several people familiar with the deliberations
describe her as the front-runner for the post.
In many ways, the 45-year-old Ms. O’Sullivan, who now teaches at Harvard, bridges the two Bush worlds. She
served as deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan for
much of George W. Bush ’s second term and was heavily involved in
carrying out his Iraq policies. But she wasn’t among the neoconservative
advisers who drove the initial decision to invade Iraq, and she is more
closely aligned with—and is being promoted by—the kind of pragmatists
who dominated George H.W. Bush ’s presidency.
If that is supposed to be a sign that Bush’s foreign policy won’t
be like his brother’s, what would be evidence that it will? Choosing
someone “heavily involved” in carrying out George W. Bush’s policy in
Iraq to be a “top foreign policy aide” is practically an endorsement of
that policy. It certainly doesn’t suggest that Bush thinks there was
very much wrong with how his brother’s administration handled things.
O’Sullivan served as an assistant to the staggeringly incompetent Paul Bremer at the CPA in the early days of the occupation. She was an early advocate
of the “surge,” which should make it clear that she isn’t as much of a
“pragmatist” as this article would lead us to believe. Short of choosing
a leading Iraq war booster, Bush could hardly be making his agreement
with his brother’s policies more obvious.
No one should be fooled when someone claims that Jeb Bush is
following in his father’s footsteps on foreign policy. George W. Bush
indulged in some rhetoric about “humility” and realism as a candidate,
too, and he relied on his father’s reputation on foreign policy to make
up for the fact that he knew nothing about it. It turned out that there
was no substance to Bush’s rhetoric, and the country endured the effects
of one of the most incompetent administrations on foreign policy in our
modern history. We have the benefit of that experience, so there is no
excuse for falling for the same con twice.
So Larison is arguing that Jeb Bush is 'as incompetent' on foreign policy as his brother? What could go wrong?
The United States helped build
the bomb, the former official said, and tested it repeatedly at a CIA
facility in North Carolina to ensure the potential blast area was
contained and would not result in collateral damage.
“We probably blew up 25 bombs to make sure we got it right,” the former official said.
The
extraordinarily close cooperation between the U.S. and Israeli
intelligence services suggested the importance of the target — a man who
over the years had been implicated in some of Hezbollah’s most
spectacular terrorist attacks, including those against the U.S. Embassy
in Beirut and the Israeli Embassy in Argentina.
The United States
has never acknowledged participation in the killing of Mughniyah, which
Hezbollah blamed on Israel. Until now, there has been little detail
about the joint operation by the CIA and Mossad to kill him, how the car
bombing was planned or the exact U.S. role. With the exception of the
2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, the mission marked one of the most
high-risk covert actions by the United States in recent years.
Israel, of course, has said 'no comment.' So has the CIA. But over the past week we've been warned repeatedly about how Prime Minister Netanyahu would be 'jeopardizing' cooperation with the United States if he comes to Washington to speak to Congress in March. Cooperation like this? Well, maybe.
Really? This comes out right now? The “new” book by Robert B. Baer cited in the article was actually published in October — and it doesn’t say there was collaboration. Baer and unnamed others have been gotten to confirm it, apparently. But the timing is distinctly odd, given the recent dust-ups between Hezbollah and the IDF.
You might almost think someone was trying to add fuel to the fire.
Notice how the finger points at an event in the Bush years, and not at
cooperation since Obama took office, although there undoubtedly has been
such cooperation.
So Obama is burning the bridges between the US and Israel because he's ticked off that Netanyahu is coming to the US to tell Congress that Israel is opposed to Obama's weak policies on Iran. How short sighted!
Krauthammer: 'Obama has less personal sympathy for Israel than any other President'
A reminder that I am in Boston where the Sabbath has not started yet.
Over the past week, I've heard a lot of talk comparing President Obama's relations with Israel with those of American Presidents who seemed more friendly, but with whom we also had disagreements: Reagan, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and so on.
But with Obama... it's different. Here's Charles Krauthammer. Let's go to the videotape.
Yes, Obama's different. Even George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter had less antipathy toward Israel than he does.
New term enters our lexicon: 'Post-Congressional foreign policy'
A new term has entered our lexicon: The 'post-Congressional foreign policy.' It refers to Czar Barack's circumvention of Congressional approval of his termination of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran by calling it a suspension. And he's betting that Congress cannot or will not do anything about it (Hat Tip: Memeorandum). Or about several other breaches of Congressional oversight authority.
Only Congress can permanently lift the sanctions--which it’s unlikely
to do even if Democrats hold on to the Senate—but the deal could be
structured in such a way that this wouldn’t happen until Iran meets
certain internationally verified benchmarks. In other words, it could be
years.
It’s not unusual for presidents to look abroad in search of monsters
to destroy late in their terms, as they have more authority to conduct
foreign as opposed to domestic policy independently of Congress. But
even by historical standards, the Obama administration seems to be
particularly interested in freezing Congress out.
Given that it’s virtually impossible to get any multilateral treaty ratified by the Senate—some
obscure fishing regulations are the exception that proves the rule—the
administration’s plan for a long-awaited climate change deal will
involve “politically binding” commitments rather than legally binding
ones, which Congress would have to approve.
In the case of what’s been dubbed “Operation Inherent Resolve,” the
campaign of airstrikes to counter ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the
administration never sought congressional approval.
The 60-day deadline, after which Congress must authorize military
action under the War Powers Resolution, has long passed. (Obama did
issue a letter to Congress in September informing them of the operation
and noting, somewhat vaguely, “I appreciate the support of the Congress
in this action.”)
Yale Law professor and constitutional scholar Bruce Ackerman has described
the operation against ISIS as “a decisive break in the American
constitutional tradition” that outdoes anything attempted by the Bush
administration. But interestingly, congressional Republicans who
normally jump on any chance to accuse the administration of imperial
overreach, have been fairly blasé about these strikes. House Speaker John Boehner says
that Congress should debate the use of military force against ISIS but
only after the newly elected legislative body convenes in January—a
lifetime in terms of a fast-moving military operation like this one.
Read the whole thing. As Israelis say, maybe there are things that Obama (who was opposed to unilateral Presidential actions in the foreign policy field under Bush) didn't see from there that he sees from here. On the other hand, I am very opposed to any weakening of the Iran sanctions regime....
Finally, I'd like to re-post something I wrote three years ago.
One of the immediate reactions to 9/11 here in Israel - crass though it
might have been - was "now the Americans will finally understand what
we've been going through." In the year leading up to 9/11, Israel had
suffered dozens of terror attacks. Parents looked to avoid putting their
children on public buses (in fact, we have raised a generation where
many of the kids no longer know how to use the buses before they are in
high school). And yet, we were pushed by Clinton and by Tenet and even
by Bush for the first few months, to make more concessions to the
'Palestinians' every time they murdered a few Jews.
For me, one of the most memorable pieces to come out of 9/11 was this one
by Deborah Sontag. Sontag was the New York Times' bureau chief here
from 1998-2001, and was a constant nemesis. She returned to New York
shortly before 9/11. Here's some of what she wrote in the Sunday Times
Magazine ten days after the attack.
That terrible Tuesday
was the first day of American school for Emma, who was entering third
grade, and Adam, who was starting kindergarten. It was a glorious
morning as they skipped through downtown Brooklyn. They wore new
sneakers (Stride Rite won out) and backpacks that were essentially empty
but nonetheless an essential part of the American school uniform. I
left Emma designing a name tag to hang above her cubby. In Adam's class,
where he was seated at a table designated ''Femur'' in anticipation of a
unit on the human body, I patted his blond head and inadvertently said
aloud what I was thinking, ''You'll be safe here.''
Then a parent
barged into the room and told a few of us that a plane had crashed into
the World Trade Center. We walked, because there really was no other
choice, straight to the Brooklyn promenade on the East River overlooking
Lower Manhattan. The second airplane had just crashed into the twin
towers, and flames were devouring the tops of the buildings. It was a
perfect view of the horror, and there was nothing we could do but stare.
This
was terrorism of a different magnitude. In Israel, such attacks were
chillingly intimate. Within hours, everyone in the country knew who had
been killed and knew someone connected to the victims. Bombings were
also anticipated and routine. With grim efficiency, daily life was
restored to the bombed area. But this was so vast that it could not be
personalized or swept up. We were struck by the fact that no victims
were named on the news that first day. We were breathing the acrid,
dusty air that wafted across the river. The attack was palpable. Yet, it
was beyond our grasp.
Adam was clueless when we picked him up at
the kindergarten annex. In the school's main high-rise building, Emma's
class waited in the overheated basement where the elementary students
had been herded to stop them from watching the whole thing from their
classroom windows. We pushed through the thronged halls to get outside.
Passersby were wearing paper masks. ''Aliens!'' Adam said. A woman
snapped at us, ''Cover your children's mouths!'' Emma burst into tears.
''My first day of school wasn't fun at all,'' she said. ''You promised.
You promised it would be better here.''
In Israel, we could keep
our children, who were foreigners, in a relatively secure cocoon,
although that meant greatly limiting their universe. We could even
isolate them from much of the news. But here, waiting for our apartment
to be ready, we were staying in a hotel that was designated an emergency
relief center. People were streaming over the Brooklyn Bridge covered
in ash and seeking first aid in the Brooklyn Marriott. Security was
tight. School for the next day was canceled. A father of one of Emma's
classmates was missing. We had to start explaining. At first, I used a
silly, gingerly phrase, telling Adam that a plane had ''bumped into''
the twin towers. ''By accident?'' he asked. There was no avoiding the
ugly truth.
We turned on the television news. ''It looks like
Israel,'' Adam said. He asked if we were going to start seeing soldiers
in Brooklyn. I told him no, but then we descended to the lobby and
happened on several National Guardsmen in their camouflage uniforms and
army boots. We stepped outside. Sirens wailed. We were home?
Although ordinary Americans began to appreciate our plight on 9/11,
except for the period between June 2002 (when Bush called for a new
'Palestinian' leadership) and Arafat's death just after the 2004
election, American leadership has largely not recognized that we and you
are fighting the same battle. The first indications that would be the
case came within a few days of 9/11, and the point was driven home
strongly by President Bush's reaction to then-Prime Minister Sharon's Czechoslovakia speech on October 4, 2001.
The
discovery of the Karine A weapons ship in January 2002 started to turn
the tide with Bush in our favor, and we enjoyed two brief romances with
him that have colored perceptions of his Presidency here: From June 2002
until November 2004 and during the final months of his term. Between
late 2004 and early 2008, the people who pushed Bush to be more
pro-Israel (the neo-cons - Rumsfeld, Cheney, Feith et al) had left the
White House and those who came in their place (people like Robert Gates
and Condoleeza Rice) were far less favorable to Israel.
Ten years
ago today, it looked like the American leadership would understand why
you cannot make peace with terrorism. Unfortunately, they no longer do.
And the fact that America elected Obama three years ago has to make you
wonder how many of the American people get it now either.
What I wrote three years ago about American leadership not getting it is even more true today. But the American people seem to be starting to get it. The American people overwhelmingly want their government to fight ISIS by bombing Syria and Iraq. Will that desire carry over into an election in which the current Islamist-loving American administration is replaced with one with clearer vision? We can only hope and pray.
The time on this post is 13 years to the minute from the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The resistance put up by the passengers of that plane likely prevented it from crashing into the US Capitol or the White House. In the meantime, I'd like to remind you all of what was going on in 'Palestine' exactly 13 years ago, just a few minutes from now.
Let's go to the videotape.
That video has only 200,000 views. The one in the previous post has more than 3 million. It's time for Americans to awaken to the reality of who the 'Palestinians' are and how they really feel about the United States. It isn't going to change even if they get their 'state.'
Change! Editor in Chief of Egypt's Al-Ahram: 'We don't have an alliance with the US'
Yet another example of how President Hussein Obama has 'fixed' the United States' relations with the Arab world. In an interview on Russia Today, the editor in chief of al-Ahram, Egypt's largest newspaper (which I believe is government-owned) says that Egypt does not have an alliance with the United States.
Let's go to the videotape.
Obama has sure fixed the United States' relations with the Arab world, hasn't he? Blame it on Bush!
OMG: Obama tries to blame Bush for withdrawal from Iraq
Barack Hussein Obama spent the entire 2012 election campaign bragging about how he 'ended' the war in Iraq. But now that the end of the war is blowing up in his face, Obama is singing a different tune (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
On the South Lawn of the White House today, after Obama explained why
he had ordered the U.S. military to renew airstrikes in Iraq, a
reporter asked Obama about his decision to remove all U.S. troops from
Iraq.
“Mr. President, do you have any second thoughts about pulling all
ground troops out of Iraq?” the reporter asked. “And does it give you
pause as the U.S.--is it doing the same thing in Afghanistan?”
“What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps
on coming up, as if this was my decision,” Obama said, indicating he
does not believe it was his decision as commander in chief of U.S.
troops in a congressionally authorized action in Iraq to decide whether
the troops should stay or leave.
“Under the previous administration, we had turned over the country to
a sovereign, democratically elected Iraqi government,” Obama said. “In
order for us to maintain troops in Iraq, we needed the invitation of the
Iraqi government and we needed assurances that our personnel would be
immune from prosecution if, for example, they were protecting themselves
and ended up getting in a firefight with Iraqis, that they wouldn’t be
hauled before an Iraqi judicial system.
“And the Iraqi government, based on its political considerations, in
part because Iraqis were tired of a U.S. occupation, declined to provide
us those assurances,” Obama said. “And on that basis, we left. We had
offered to leave additional troops. So when you hear people say, do you
regret, Mr. President, not leaving more troops, that presupposes that I
would have overridden this sovereign government that we had turned the
keys back over to and said, you know what, you’re democratic, you’re
sovereign, except if I decide that it’s good for you to keep 10,000 or
15,000 or 25,000 Marines in your country, you don’t have a choice, which
would have kind of run contrary to the entire argument we were making
about turning over the country back to Iraqis, an argument not just made
by me, but made by the previous administration.
“So let’s just be clear: The reason that we did not have a follow-on
force in Iraq was because the Iraqis were--a majority of Iraqis did not
want U.S. troops there, and politically they could not pass the kind of
laws that would be required to protect our troops in Iraq,” said Obama.
Two comments: As bad as President Obama has been for the United States (and in my humble opinion he has been a horrible President in just about every respect), the place that has been most hurt by his incompetence, bullheadedness, arrogance... no time to write the whole list... at least outside of the United States is the Middle East. And it will be much harder for the Middle East to recover from the Obama administration than it will be for the United States. The damage here is far more permanent.
Second, aside from his lousy policies, the thing I find most irritating about his personality is that the man is incapable of owning a mistake. He cannot say he was wrong. He cannot admit that he blew something.And that's a lousy trait with which to go through life.
Ah golf, that sport that seems as exciting as watching grass grow,
but seems to have an obsessive grip on powerful men. Golfing is a
notoriously problematic pursuit for U.S. leaders – the amount of grief
that former President Bush got for his hitting the links at key
junctures was so substantial that Bush confessed he decided to give up
the game during his Iraq-plagued second term because "it's just not
worth it anymore" and "I don't want some mom whose son may have recently
died to see the commander in chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the
families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think
playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."
You’d
think Obama would be smart enough to learn from Bush’s mistakes, and
not risk having split screen images of him having fun on the golf course
paired with images of Islamic State tanks rolling across Iraq, stranded
Yazidi children dying of thirst on a mountaintop, and U.S. planes
dropping bombs below.
But no. Five and a half years after taking office, Obama is still determined to be the anti-Bush more than anything else. It's a matter of tastelessness.
This is Islam: ISIS systematically beheading Christian children in Iraq
This is what Islam is really all about. ISIS, the Islamic group that has taken over Iraq (thank you President Hussein Obama) is systematically beheading Christian children. By the way, the nearest part of Iraq is about 300 miles from Israel.
A quick scan of Youtube shows the truth of what Arabo is saying -
there are gruesome videos of heads on spikes, and many of live
beheadings (one poor Christian is forced to say the Shahada 'there is no
God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet' and then beheaded anyway.)
Warning: don't google these things unless you have a strong stomach.
"They are absolutely killing every Christian they see," Arabo said of
ISIS. "This is absolutely a genocide in every sense of the word. They
want everyone to convert, and they want sharia law to be the law of the
land."
When George Bush left office, United States armed forces were protecting Iraq. At the rate this is going, Barack Hussein Obama is becoming the enemy of all humanity.
Al-Qaeda announces plan to eliminate America, US unaware
In the largest gathering in years of the allegedly 'defeated' terror organization, al-Qaeda has announced a new plan to eliminate America. According to CNN, the United States was unaware of the meeting.
Some of you might recall that President Obama gloated after the Bin Laden assassination that he had eliminated al-Qaeda. Isn't it funny how no one calls that out like they do Bush's premature declaration of victory in Iraq.
Flashback: Remember when the President's first pitch reached home plate
Too good not to post.
Here's President George W. Bush throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium a month and a half after 9/11. A secret service agent was dressed as an umpire to provide extra protection. And unlike the current occupant of the White House, Bush reached home plate (threw a strike in fact).
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
