#FeelTheBern Sanders appoints 3 anti-Israel 'activists' to write Democratic party platform, Wasserman-Schultz appoints another one as chair, and Clinton appoints... Wendy Sherman
The Democratic party has revamped the way it appoints members of its platform committee, apportioning representation based on votes in the primary. As a result, Hillary Clinton has appointed six members of the platform committee, Bernie Sanders has appointed five, and party Chaircritter Debbie Wasserman Schultz ('I wear my support for Israel to work on my sleeve every morning') has appointed four.
One of Sanders' appointees is longtime anti-Israel activist James Zogby.
Sanders’s choices include James Zogby, a pro-Palestinian activist who
is president of the Arab-American Institute in Washington and a
frequent commentator on Arab-Israeli issues.
On Saturday Zogby
noted recent government shifts under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
that consolidated his right-wing power base.
“His behavior has
been shameful, but so too is the extent to which Israelis, Americans and
others continue to enable his malevolent rule,” Zogby wrote.
The Obama administration has “repeatedly expressed displeasure over
Netanyahu’s settlement policies and his blatant interference in US
internal politics. Nevertheless the administration is now debating
whether to reward his government with a 10 year aid package valued at
$35 billion—while Netanyahu, supported by allies in Congress, is
brazenly holding out for $45 to $50 billion,” he wrote. “And so,
operating with virtually no restraints, Netanyahu continues to maneuver
and to aggressively advance his hard-line agenda. He maintains his grip
on power. Israeli society continues to become more extreme and
intolerant. Palestinians are more despairing and desperate. And peace
more remote.”
Other Sanders appointees include two other anti-Israel 'activists' - Cornel West and America's first Muslim Congresscritter, Keith Ellison.
One of Clinton's appointees is Wendy Sherman, the social worker turned nuclear negotiator, who brought us the disastrous nuclear agreements with Iran and North Korea.
And Wasserman Schutlz appointed as Chairman of the Platform Committee Representative Elijah Cummings, another member of the Hamas 54 (along with Ellison) who called for lifting the Gaza 'blockade' and letting Hamas continue to lob rockets at Israel.
He couldn't get this published in a US mainstream media?
I'm posting this article to show you the kind of blatant lies that pass in the Arab world - even in the English language.
It's an article by James Zogby, the founder of the (supposedly 'moderate') Arab American Institute. Presumably, even the New York Times would not touch this, because it stands in such diametric opposition to the facts.... Let's just use one of Zogby's claims to illustrate. Okay - two. It's hard to unravel one lie from another.
I was reminded of just how annoying it could be to hear this "little fib" earlier this week when I read an interview which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave to The Jerusalem Post. At one point in the exchange, the interviewer pressed Netanyahu on whether or not he would consider agreeing to a new "settlement freeze" in order help restart peace negotiations with the Palestinians. Netanyahu's response was a short, but telling: "I think we already gave at the office".
...
I can almost imagine his mental processes at work: "No one stops me, Benjamin Netanyahu. In the 1990's, I was elected prime minister on a platform that promised to end the Oslo peace process, and I did it. I was forced by president Clinton to go to talks at the Wye River Plantation and forced to sign an agreement with the Palestinians. But I beat them all, because I refused to implement what I signed. I was told by Clinton not to destroy Jabal Abul Ghanaim, the last green hill between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. And now on that hill stands Har Homa, a city of 18,000 settlers, with more due to come. All those settlements the US once called "illegitimate" and the EU called "illegal" are now called "accepted realities" by them."
"Then came my second term as Prime Minister and a new US president who told me to freeze settlements. After dithering a bit, I pretended to agree (even while I continued to build). And I got away with it. "
Zogby is claiming that Netanyahu had agreed to destroy Jabal Abul Ghanaim - now known as Har Homa - as part of the Wye River Memorandum. That's impossible. Construction on Har Homa began in March 1997. The Wye River Memorandum was signed on October 23, 1998 and approved by the Knesset on November 15, 1998. Netanyahu never agreed to stop building Har Homa or to flatten the last hill between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. And by the way, the land on which Har Homa sits was purchased by Jews in the 1940's and confiscated and occupied by Jordan from 1948-67. Plans for Har Homa were originally approved in 1991.
Another lie in those few paragraphs above is the claim that Netanyahu continued to build in the 'settlements' during the 'settlement freeze' he implemented from November 2009 to September 2010. He did not. This is a September 1, 2010 JPost article by Tova Lazaroff.
For the second quarter in a row, there were almost no new housing starts in the West Bank settlements, according to numbers released Tuesday by the Central Bureau of Statistics.
The report of what is an historic absence of housing starts in Judea and Samaria comes on the eve of the start of direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. It is the first such meeting since talks broke down in December 2008. Halting settlement construction has been one of the key demands Palestinians have made of Israel.
Initially, when the CBS reported its first quarter statistics at the end of May, its data showed no housing starts for the first quarter of this year. Since then the CBS has adjusted the numbers slightly, as it often does. Based on the new data there were only two new housing starts from January to March of this year. From April to June, the CBS reported only three new housing starts.
Overall, according to the CBS, there were a total of five new housing starts in the first two quarters of 2010, during which time the 10-month moratorium on such activity was in place.
The number marks a sharp contrast from the 673 new starts that occurred in that same period last year when there was no moratorium.
The dramatic drop to almost zero housing starts runs counter to the trend in the rest of the country, which saw a 17 percent increase in housing starts during that time.
Separately, there was also a drop of 12 percent in the number of new apartments which were completed in West Bank settlements in the first two quarters of 2010, even though there was only a two percent decrease country wide during that same time.
So Mr. Zogby is a liar. The Gulf Daily News doesn't fact check. And even the New York Times finds some news unfit to print.
The age of Obama: US less popular than evah in Arab countries
How's that bowing to the Arab world going Mr. President? It sure doesn't look like it's helped their perception of Israel or the US, has it?
Attitudes towards the US president and the United States as a whole have been growing increasingly negative over the past ten years due to the invasion of Iraq, outrage over Guantanamo Bay, and continued frustration over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, which has been tracking attitudes for a decade.
But the current poll is striking in that is illustrates how far Obama’s favorability has fallen in the region, after an initial optimistic spike when he took office.
“It’s because expectations were created that were not met,” Zogby said.
In 2008, the final year of the Bush administration, only 9 percent of Egyptians had a favorable attitude towards the United States. A year later, after Obama took office, that number jumped to 30 percent. But now it has plummeted to just 5 percent of Egyptians who view the United States favorably.
Similar figures in Morocco, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates show that the United States is viewed less favorably now than the final year of the Bush administration.
In a worrisome sign for US policymakers who would like to enlist the region’s support in isolating the Iranian regime, the poll shows that the policies of Iran are viewed more favorably than the policies of the United States.
James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, warns that Arab-American voters may also be turned off by Obama's stance on the Middle East peace process:
Now, with the growing awareness and organization of Arab Americans and American Muslims, there are other consequences to this behavior. Backing away from a smart and tough approach to Israeli-Palestinian peace may make a few hard-line supporters of Israel happy, but it can alienate Arab and Muslim voters in some key swing states.
The bottom line: the calculus involved in the search for Middle East peace needs to be matched by a more complicated set of political considerations closer to home.
The bottom line is that he's not making anyone happy. Heh.
How did the American Jewish community lose the battle for college campuses?
This article gives a little too much 'credit' to one person, but to me the important point here is that we need to look into how the American college campus was lost so that we can go about trying to regain it.
How did the Jewish community, known for its rhetorical genius, lose a critically important political battle on American campuses? Here is a thumbnail sketch:
In 1990, James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, explained on Jordanian TV how the Arab Lobby can and will match Jewish political and organizational success in America. Zogby and his allies recognized that the campus and the media, unlike Capitol Hill, are two battle grounds that Arabists could win by allying themselves with the American left. In both venues they already had beachheads and feet on the ground. The campus was in transition politically, influenced by ’60s tenured radicals who had adopted the dogma of post-colonialism, and its Palestinian version, Professor Edward Said’s “Orientalism.”
Moreover, America was experiencing a significant increase in foreign born Muslim students as well as increased Muslim immigration (many from countries with a culture of vicious anti-Semitism). Zogby focused on forming alliances with Marxist professors, die-hard socialist activists, African- American student groups, gay-lesbian groups and, most importantly, Jewish progressives. He also realized that an emerging anti-Israel Left/Muslim axis on campus could be better organized and benefit from an inflow of Arab petro dollars into prestigious American universities. All this was happening while many Jewish leaders, intoxicated by the Oslo agreement, were abandoning Israel programming.
Today, we can see the brilliance of Zogby’s strategy: Anti-Israel sentiment suffuses the campus atmosphere. In the classroom, radical professors express the the dominant narrative that the Palestinians are right and the Israelis are in the wrong. In its mild form, the Palestinians suffer needlessly at the hands of Israeli occupiers; in its more vicious version, Israel is a racist, genocidal apartheid nation. Outside the classroom, anti-Israel groups hold conferences, screen films and conduct theatrical demonstrations that portray Israel in the harshest of terms. Israel’s advocates are rudely interrupted, prevented from speaking; pro-Israel events are disrupted; Jewish students are intimidated verbally or even physically, and are excluded from pro-Palestinian events. Pathetic attempts by Jewish groups to initiate dialogue with Palestinian students are rejected. Any acknowledgement of Israelis’ humanity is seen as a validation of Palestinian oppression. Our epoch’s secular religion – political correctness and multiculturalism – judges people by who they are, not what they do. Israelis are by definition always guilty, while darker skinned, impoverished, indigenous Palestinians are eternally innocent.
There's another point that needs to be made here. For whatever reason, the vast majority of the American Jewish community is unfortunately incapable of voting Republican. As a result, the community either votes Democratic or stays home, and since most Jews don't stay home on Election Day, the result is that the Democrat gets the Jewish vote regardless of their position on the issues. That leaves the Democrats free to do anything they want to court the Left - including abandon Israel.
The picture below thus reflects reality in today's American Jewish community. And until that changes - until non-Orthodox Jews feel that they can vote Republican and not be deemed sinners for having done so - the Jewish community is likely to continue to be a partner in a radical Leftist agenda that includes supporting the 'Palestinians.'
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
