Deja vu all over again: Obama not the first President to attempt to hurt Israel in his final days
Barack Hussein Obama is not the first US President to try to use the United Nations to hurt Israel in his final days in office. That 'honor' goes to Obama's ideological mate, Jimmy Carter. In this Washington Post editorial from December 21, 1980 (Hat Tip: Mark Dubowitz) (would they publish it today?), if you replace Carter with Obama, the result is uncanny.
THE AMERICAN vote against Israel in the Security Council Friday was,
in a sense, the essential Carter. There was no good reason of state for
the United States to reverse its previous refusal (twice to condemn
Israel for expelling two West Bank mayors -- not least because a change
would mark its previous votes as politically motivated. Moreover, the
issue of the mayors, who are indeed their people's authentic
representatives but are also spokesmen for violence, is more complicated
than any U.N. majority -- and certainly Secretary General Kurt
Waldheim, who immediately offered the mayors the comforts of the house
for a hunger strike -- could be expected to grasp. Yet the
administration condemned Israel. It evidently did so out of a familiar
impulse to be at one with the virtuous souls of the Third World,
notwithstanding the complexities of the larger issue at hand.
That
issue is whether friends should be treated differently from
enemies.It's a tough one. That is, it's a tough one for the United
States and especially for the Carter administration. No other country --
no other president -- has so indulged the luxury of deciding whether to
support friends on all occasions regardless of their failings or
whether to apply ostensibly universal values and condemn them in
particular cases when they are deemed to fall short. It would be truly
regrettable if the United States followed the pack and decided every
case on political grounds alone. At the same time, it cannot be denied
that there is a pack and that it hounds Israel shamelessly and that this
makes it very serious when the United States joins it. Jimmy Carter has
regularly anguished on this score. This time, in perhaps his last U.N.
act of consequence, there was a suggestion in the air that he was
finally doing what in his heart he has always wanted to do: vote for
what he regarded as virtue.
To whatever effect, Ronald Reagan will do it differently.
May God obliterate both Carter's and Obama's names and memories. ימח שמם וזכרם of these evil people. And may Obama's efforts have even less effect than Carter's had.
Jimmy Carter saved by jointly developed US-Israel cancer drug
Hamas-loving former US President Jimmy Carter is now cancer free thanks to a cancer drug developed by a joint US-Israeli team. This is from the first link.
Carter announced in August that he had been diagnosed with melanoma
that had spread to his brain and laid out a treatment plan, including a
round of targeted radiation at the brain tumors and doses of an
immune-boosting drug every three weeks. Keytruda, the drug, was approved
not long before Carter's announcement and helps his body seek out and
destroy cancer cells.
Carter's spokeswoman Deanna Congileo said in an email
that Carter received doses of the drug from August through February.
She said his doctors will continue to perform scans to ensure cancer
cells have not returned, and Carter will "resume treatment if
necessary."
A spokesman for Emory University's Winship Cancer
Institute, where Carter has been treated, declined to comment on Sunday,
citing patient privacy.
Medical experts have called Keytruda and similar
immune therapy drugs "game-changing" for patients with melanoma. But the
drugs are relatively new, and doctors are still learning about how they
should be used, said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer
for the American Cancer Society. He is not involved in Carter's
treatment.
"Some people believe they should be continued as long
as a patient is doing well, some feel the drugs should continue for a
period of time and then be stopped," Lichtenfeld said. "This is clearly a
(decision) based on individual evidence specific to the president and
made with his doctors."
Carter will continue to receive doses of the drug every three weeks. Here's a story from 2014 on the development team.
"This medicine is a
miracle cure - it's a real breakthrough," says Prof. Jacob Schachter,
head of research and treatment of melanoma and skin cancer at Sheba
Medical Center, who is part of the international research team for the
medicine.
The new treatment comes
from the field of immunotherapy, which helps the immune system fight
cancer, unlike chemotherapy, which attacks the tumor itself. There are
various types of cancerous tumors, such as melanoma, that use a "shield"
to protect themselves from being identified by the immune system. The
new medicine paralyzes this type of screening mechanism, so the immune
system can recognize the cancer and attack it.
The results of the
international research suggest that using the medicine Pembrolizumab,
also known as MK-3475, yields impressive survival rates in patients with
advanced cancer, with 69 percent surviving one year and 63 percent
surviving 18 months.
Without this treatment, patients with metastatic melanoma die from
the disease within 4-5 months, after reaching stage four cancer. The
research tested 41,818 patients, 1,800 of them in Israel. The research
took place over a decade, while the clinical stage took four years.
The new medicine, which belongs to a new generation of biological
drugs, yielded extraordinary results to the point that the FDA approved
it for "compassionate use" (the use of an investigational drug outside a
clinical trial by patients with life-threatening conditions) and it
will be given for free to terminally ill patients. It is also be fast
tracked for approval, which is expected by October.
"One of my patients
who suffered metastatic melanoma in very critical condition entered the
trial, and within six weeks his body was completely clean of cancer,"
said Schachter. He stressed that because of the biological nature of the
drug; its side effects are minimal and allows patients optimal quality
of life.
Merck, the American company that developed the drug, has a department
in Israel called MSD, which operates a research division working in
tandem with medical centers in Israel.
"We are on our way to turn melanoma a treatable chronic disease,"
said Schachter. "We are also seeing positive results in other types of
cancer such as the urinary bladder, head neck and lungs". Prof. Alise
Reicin, who heads the American team that developed the drug, termed it
"definitely a breakthrough in the war against cancer".
Meanwhile, Carter's friends at Hamas are still working on a drug to create suicide bombers....
Deja vu all over again: Iran takes 10 US sailors hostage
It's 1979-80 all over again. Iran has seized two US Naval boats and has taken the 10 sailors on board hostage. But it's worse than 1979-80 - the Obama administration is already blaming the sailors.
Iran detained two small Navy craft
and was holding 10 American crew members Tuesday in the Persian Gulf, U.S.
officials said, an incident that seized the attention of Congress just hours
before President Barack Obama planned to deliver his final State of the Union
address.
Defense officials scrambled to determine what
happened, saying they were looking into whether a mechanical issue caused the
incident. Officials also said one or both of the small boats may have veered
into Iranian territorial waters near Iran’s Farsi Island. The U.S. Navy had lost
contact with the two boats, U.S. officials said.
A senior administration official said the U.S.
has received assurances that the two small boats and their crew were to be
released “promptly.” The Iranians held 10 U.S. sailors, who were on board the
two craft on a trip to Bahrain from Kuwait, officials said.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called his
Iranian counterpart, Javad Zarif, on Tuesday to try and arrange the release of
two U.S. boats, according to a second senior administration official. The second
official said the U.S. expected the American personnel to be released
soon.
How many of you are old enough to remember this video?
Jonathan Tobin describes the decrepit foreign policy legacy that Barack Hussein Obama is bequeathing to the United States:
The conceit of American foreign policy for the last seven years has
been the notion that Obama’s faith in outreach to Islamists, his
dedication to multilateral diplomacy, and his aversion to conflict would
transform America’s image in the world and leave it a better place. But
that has turned out to be only partially true. Obama may claim that
Iran or Russia are acting out of weakness, and that ISIS is merely the
JV of terrorism, but the rest of the world knows better. Though George
W. Bush made some big mistakes (though he kept America safe in the years
after 9/11) and was reviled in some quarters, his America was not
thought of as weak. Unfortunately, the catastrophe in Syria and Iraq is
just the first indication of what happens when America is not only
perceived as a paper tiger but actually acts out of weakness. We can
only guess at what new horrors will arise as that situation unravels but
the rise of a newly strengthened post-nuclear deal Iran will only
worsen the situation for American allies in the coming years.
Nor can we leave the Israel-Palestinian conflict out of the
discussion of his legacy. The president was sure that the resolution of
that century-old war could only be achieved by creating more daylight
between the United States and Israel and he was unceasing in his efforts
to create more of it. But far from encouraging the Palestinians to
negotiate a two-state solution or pushing the Israelis to take new risks
for peace, all he accomplished there was to encourage the Palestinian
leadership to be even more resolute in their refusal to make peace since
they believed America no longer had the back of the Jewish state.
Indeed, in just the last week, the administration’s reflexive
even-handed approach has caused it to equate the fate of Israeli victims
of terror with that of slain terrorists. Can it be any surprise that
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has become the leading
inciter of terror while enjoying the enthusiastic support from Obama as a
champion of peace. The president inherited a stalemated peace process.
But on his watch, he did what many thought was impossible in 2008 since
the conflict has actually worsened and peace is even more unlikely that
it was then.
The true Obama legacy abroad has nothing to do with the peace that he
craved to make between Israelis and Palestinians or in the wars that he
believed himself to be ending. The aftermath of his presidency will be
one in which American power and prestige fall to its lowest point since
Jimmy Carter. U.S. allies are isolated and weakened while its foes such
as Iran and Russia are embarked on the sort of adventurism not seen
since the 1970s. But the president is right about one thing. He has
changed the world. Just not in the way he or his adoring fans ever
dreamed it would happen.
The Obama-Kerry State Department comes out in favor of BDS
Read the statement in the tweet below, and it becomes quite clear that the Obama administration has come out in favor of boycotting, divesting from and sanctioning Israel.
No, this administration is different than previous administrations. Previous administrations (with the exception of Carter) may have referred to Jewish settlement of Judea and Samaria as 'unwise' and may have called it 'illegitimate.' But only the Obama and Carter administrations have called it 'illegal.' (Which it's not). And the Bush administration did support some Israeli 'settlement' and did issue a letter saying that it expected that some of those 'settlements' would be made apart of Israel as part of a final agreement with the 'Palestinians.' But then came the Obama administration and disavowed the letter.
More importantly, every administration until the Obama administration has said that peace between Israel and the 'Palestinians' must come about as a result of a negotiated solution. Only the Obama administration - in a mad rush for a 'Palestinian state' that would immediately be consumed by terrorists - has attempted to impose a solution on Israel. Only the Obama administration has forced Israel to release terrorist murderers from its jail. And only the Obama administration has forced a 'settlement freeze' on Israel.
No, this is not the same as every other US administration.
The U.S. State Department on Tuesday punched a big hole in Israel-led
efforts to induce the Obama administration to regard boycotts of
settlements as identical to boycott
of Israel proper. In doing so, it provided the Israeli government and
the pro-Israel lobby with yet another painful lesson in the pitfalls of
being too clever by half and biting off more than one should chew.
A special statement issued by the State Department
Press Office on Tuesday afternoon made clear that while the
administration “strongly opposes” any boycott, divestment or sanctions
against the State of Israel, it does not extend the same protection to
“Israel-controlled territories.” Rather than weakening efforts to
boycott Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, as Israel
supporters had planned, the State Department was actually granting them
unprecedented legitimacy.
The statement came in the wake of President Obama’s
signing of the Trade Promotion Authority bill, which grants him the
authority he had sought to conclude the Trans-Pacific Partnership
accord. But as the bill deals with free trade agreements in general, a
clause was inserted in the Senate by Democratic Senator Ben Cardin and
Republican Senator Rob Portman and by Representative Peter Roskam in the
House of Representative that instructs American diplomats to include
opposition to any boycott of Israel - or of persons from “territories
controlled by Israel” - in their free trade negotiations with the
European Union.
The State Department statement, however, makes clear
that the bill will not change U.S. policy towards the settlements. “The
U.S. government has never defended or supported Israeli settlements or
activity associated with them, and, by extension, does not pursue
policies or activities that would legitimize them,” it said. It went on
to note: “Administrations of both parties have long recognized that
settlement activity and efforts to change facts on the ground undermine
the goal of a two-state solution.”
This anti-Israel administration cannot end soon enough. 'Most pro-Israel administration evah' my tuches.
Michael Oren: 'Non-Orthodox' intermarried Jews in Obama administration don't understand Israeli character
Michael Oren continues to pound away at Barack Obama and his administration.
In an appearance at New York City's uber-Leftist 92nd Street Y on Sunday, Oren explained that his book was directed at American Jews (and here I thought it was directed at Israelis who still don't get that Obama is not our friend) and that he pushed to have it published now because of the critical juncture of the Iran negotiations.
Former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren
says he pressured Random House to publish his controversial new book
“Ally” now, rather than during book season in September or October,
because “Israel is at a fateful juncture” before the deadline of the
Iran talks and the vote on the French initiative on Palestine in the
Security Council. He said that one of his main objectives was to
“motivate, animate and inspire my readers” in advance of these
challenges “to do more than just stand there”.
“It’s about saying no” to an Iran deal that
“everybody in the Knesset agrees is emphatically bad,” Oren said. He
compared “this critical moment” to the Holocaust era, when American Jews
had an opportunity to “intercede and perhaps save millions of Jews”.
Oren received a surprisingly warm reception from the 92nd Street Y, where he made remarks that might be read by some as an indictment of American Jewry.
Oren discussed what he described as the unprecedented predominance of
American Jews in the Obama administration – “there were discussions in
the White House in which there were six Jews – 3 Americans and 3
Israelis, discussing a Palestinian state - and the only non-Jewish
person in the room was the President or the Vice President.” He said
that the non-Orthodox and the intermarried American Jews in the
administration – “have a hard time understanding the Israeli character.”
Well, yes, but that's not just the administration. That's true of American Jews in general. For years now, there's been a split between American Jewry and Israeli Jewry, but that split has been virtually non-existent among Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Jews also consistently vote Republican (or have since Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980), and the more Orthodox, the more consistent they are about that. And Orthodox Jews and most Israelis would disagree with Oren's statement that Obama is not anti-Israel. He most definitely is anti-Israel. As I said once before:
Oren doesn't go far enough. His claim that Obama was 'never anti-Israel' doesn't square with the facts that we knew long before Obama was elected President.
The fact that the one example Oren gives of 'significantly strengthened
security cooperation' under Obama relates to a natural disaster and not
to a military action is telling.
And Oren ties the Obama White House in with the anti-Israel bent of American academia.
Recounting his academic experience in America, Oren said that “1968
revolutionaries” had taken over the Middle East and international
relations departments of American universities and that unless one
published their “neo-Marxist ideas”, one would not get tenured or
published. When he came to Washington in 2009, he encountered the same
ideas in his talks with Obama administration officials in the White
House and the State Department: “I could tell what professors they had.”
Oren went on to claim that the term “Israel Lobby”,
which was condemned when it was used by Professor Stephen Walt and John
Mearsheimer, is now an accepted term in Washington discourse.
The [former] president, who has been visiting Israel
and the West Bank, met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas Saturday but didn’t meet with Netanyahu or President Reuven
Rivlin.
He told reporters that he didn’t ask to meet
with Netanyahu or his government, and never has, because it would be a
“waste of time.” He told Channel 2 in an interview broadcast Saturday
that he requested to meet Rivlin, but the president’s office declined.
Israel officials said last week that Netanyahu
and Rivlin had refused invitations to meet with Carter, who was
described by an Israeli diplomatic source as “a disaster for Israel,”
who holds “anti-Israel positions.”
...
“I don’t believe that he’s a terrorist. He’s
strongly in favor of the peace process,” Carter said of Hamas politburo
chief Khaled Mashaal. He said Mashaal expressed interest in the Saudis
hosting a “peace meeting” and that the Doha-based Hamas leader would
recognize Israel’s right to exist based on the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.
Netanyahu, on the other hand, wasn’t “in favor
of a two-state solution,” said the former president, who orchestrated
the peace accords between Israel and Egypt in 1979.
“I don’t see that deep commitment on the part
of Netanyahu to make concessions which [former prime minister] Menachem
Begin did to find peace with his potential enemies,” Carter told Channel
2.
Anyone want to take bets on how long it will take for Barack Hussein Obama to make similar statements soon after January 20, 2017? #AskHillary!
Israel finds its spinal cord: President Rivlin refuses to meet with Jimmy Carter
What's most amazing about this story is not so much that President Reuven Rivlin - a man of integrity - refused to meet with Jimmy Carter during the latter's upcoming trip to Israel. What's amazing is that Rivlin did so at the behest of Israel's mostly Leftist foreign ministry (Hat Tip: Gershon D).
President Reuven Rivlin has refused to meet with former US president
Jimmy Carter during his upcoming visit to the region, due to his stances
over recent years seen as "anti-Israel."
In recent years, Carter
has become one of the most prominent critics of Israel, notably when
during last summer's war with Hamas he denounced the IDF's Operation
Protective Edge in Gaza as illegitimate.
An Israeli diplomatic official told The Jerusalem Post's Hebrew sister publication Ma'ariv
that the Foreign Ministry recommended Rivlin not meet with Carter, in
order to transmit the message that those who harm Israel will not meet
with the president.
Carter is reported expected to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories in the coming weeks.
What I don't get is why we're letting the creep into the country at all. I don't see any difference between Carter and the many ISM 'activists' we have barred over the years. Maybe Carter has to arrive on a Gaza flotilla for people to get this man's deep hatred for Israel.
Jews have fled Paris en massage due to growing anti-Semitism and the
recent the massacre of Jews in a kosher food store by Islamic
extremists. The editor of Britain’s Jewish Chroniclesaid that the problem is so bad that “every single French Jew I know has either left or is actively working out how to leave.”
...
Carter also said that the recent attacks in Paris should provide an
opportunity for the West to discover what makes Islam “great.”
“I think this is going to give a lot of people incentive to look into
Islamicism, what is it about this religion that makes it great, that
makes it appeal to really billions of people and to understand that
Islamic leaders condemn this kind of terrorism just like the rest of the
world,” he said.
It's not just French Muslims who say that last week's terror attacks were the Jews' fault. So does Jimmy Carter. That's what he told the Daily Show's Jon Stewart. Watch this one starting from 2:15.
A US court ruling that has been kept under wraps for more than a year,
but which was just released to the public, shows that three
organizations who were named as unindicted co-conspirators in the CAIR
trial have more than enough evidence against them to leak them to al-Qaeda.
A
federal judge's long-secret ruling that federal prosecutors violated
the rights of three major American Islamic organizations and others
named as unindicted co-conspirators in a Texas terrorism support case
finally became public on Friday.
However, publication of the
ruling is a mixed blessing for the groups: the Council on
American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America and the
North American Islamic Trust. That's because U.S. District Court Judge
Jorge Solis found that the government presented "ample evidence to
establish the association" of the three organizations with Hamas, a
Palestinian group that the U.S. has labeled as a terrorist organization
and with a defunct charity convicted in the terrorism support case, the
Holy Land Foundation.
Rudy Giuliani slams Carter's call to recognize Hamas
Here's a Fox News interview with former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani in which he discusses Jimmy Carter's and Mary Robinson's call for the West to recognize Hamas.
In the book of Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State, and President Hussein Obama's adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Israel and only Israel is at fault for the current goings on in Gaza.
How did the Obama administration lose Iraq? The same way it lost every other country in the Middle East - inflexibility followed by indecisiveness. Eli Lake explains:
On November 1, 2013, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki visited the
White House, and made a rather stunning request. Maliki, who celebrated
when the last U.S. troops left his country in 2011, asked Obama to
quietly send the military back into Iraq and help his beleagured Air
Force develop targets for air strikes; that’s how serious the threat
from Sunni insurgents led by the extremist group ISIS had become.
Twelve days later, Brett McGurk, a deputy assistant secretary of
state and the Obama administration’s senior U.S. official in Baghdad
since the crisis began last month, presented to Congress a similarly dark warning.
ISIS was launching upwards of 40 suicide bombers a month, he said,
encouraged in part by the weakness of Maliki’s military and the
aggressively anti-Sunni policies of the Shi’ite prime minister. It was
the kind of ominous report that American intelligence agencies had been
delivering privately for months. McGurk added that ISIS had “benefited
from a permissive operating environment due to inherent weaknesses of
Iraqi security forces, poor operational tactics, and popular grievances,
which remain unaddressed, among the population in Anbar and Nineweh
provinces.”
Maliki's requests were rebuffed; McGurk’s warnings
went largely unheeded. The problem for Obama was that he had no good
policy option in Iraq. On the one hand, if Obama had authorized the air
strikes Maliki began requesting in January, he would strengthen the hand
of an Iraqi prime minister who increasingly resembled the brutal
autocrat U.S. troops helped unseat in 2003. Maliki’s heavy handed policies—such
as authorizing counter-terrorism raids against Sunni political leaders
with no real links to terrorism—sowed the seeds of the current
insurrection in Iraq.
But while Obama committed to sell Maliki’s military nearly $11
billion worth of advanced U.S. weaponry, he was unwilling to use that
leverage in a meaningful way to get him to reverse his earlier reforms
where he purged some of his military’s most capable leaders and replaced
them with yes men. As a result of this paradox, the Iraq policy process
ground to a halt at the very moment that ISIS was on the rise.
Two months later, ISIS captured the strategically important city of
Fallujah in Anbar province.
Five month after that, Iraq’s second-largest
city—Mosul, in Nineweh province—fell to ISIS and an army of Sunni
insurgents. At the time, senior Obama administration officials went out
of their way to proclaim just how impossible-to-predict the collapse of
Mosul was. But interviews with a dozen U.S. and Iraqi intelligence
officials, diplomats, and policy makers reveal a very different story. A
catastrophe like the fall of Mosul wasn’t just predictable, these
officials say. They repeatedly warned the Obama administration that
something like this was going to happen. With seemingly no good choices
to make in Iraq, the White House wasn’t able to listen.
“It’s simply not true that nobody saw a disaster like the fall of
Mosul coming,” Ali Khedery, who served as a senior adviser at the U.S.
embassy in Baghdad, told The Daily Beast. “I can’t speak for anyone
else, but I literally predicted this in verbal warnings and in writing
in 2010 that Iraq would fall apart.”
“I and a zillion other people said in 2014 that we needed to do more
than the very slow and inadequate reaction,” added James Jeffrey, a
former U.S. ambassador to Iraq. “If [ISIS] could move in and seize
Fallujah and they were on the offensive, and they were active in Mosul
and Nineweh [province] too, the army was lethargic and not doing very
well, at that point there was a possibility for us to provide air
strikes and advisers.”
Instead, the Obama policy meandered through a series of half-measures. As the Wall Street Journal reported last month, unmanned surveillance flights over Iraq that would provide crucial overhead intelligence on areas where ISIS operated were limited to about one mission per month until about mid-June.
He's Carter reincarnate. He doesn't get that sometimes when you're a superpower, you have and must pursue shared interests with dictators. Oh wait.... Obama has fixed it so the US isn't a superpower anymore.
“He’s done the best he could under the circumstances,” Carter said of
Obama in an interviewed published on Thursday. “His major
accomplishment was Obamacare, and the implementation of it now is
questionable at best.” (RELATED: Jimmy Carter: America no longer has a functioning democracy)
Yes, but at least Americans 34 years ago weren't stupid enough to reelect Carter.
Eighth years ago, former President Jimmy Carter cozied up to Hamas and urged that the world give the terror organization a 'chance' to show it wanted peace. But Carter was an ex-President and the terror organization was a terror organization and not a government back then. Now, Barack Hussein Obama, the worst President ever (stealing the title from Carter) is urging giving a 'chance' to a much larger, more powerful enemy: Iran. Yes, he's worse than Jimmah....
If you want to find a group of Americans who really know Iran, the embassy employees who were held hostage for 444 days in 1979-81 would not be a bad place to start. They are mostly unenthusiastic about President Hussein Obama's new agreement with the Mullahcracy.
"It's kind of like Jimmy
Carter all over again," said Clair Cortland Barnes, now retired after a
career at the CIA and elsewhere. He sees the negotiations now as no
more effective than they were in 1979 and 1980, when he and others
languished, facing mock executions and other torments. The hostage
crisis began in November of 1979 when militants stormed the United
States Embassy in Tehran and seized its occupants.
Retired Air Force Colonel Thomas E. Schaefer, 83, called the deal "foolishness."
"My personal view is, I never found an Iranian leader I can trust,"
he said. "I don't think today it's any different from when I was there.
None of them, I think, can be trusted. Why make an agreement with people
you can't trust?"
Schaefer was a military attaché in Iran who was among those held
hostage. His wife of more than 60 years, Anita, also takes a dim view of
the agreement: "We are probably not very Christian-like when it comes
to all this," she said.
...
To be sure, the former
hostages have varying views. Victor Tomseth, 72, a retired diplomat,
sees the pact as a positive first step.
...
Tomseth, who was a
political counselor at the embassy in Tehran in 1979, had written a
diplomatic cable months before the hostage crisis warning about the
difficulties of negotiation with the Iranians.
Still, he said in a phone interview Monday that it is possible to cut a mutually beneficial deal with them.
"The challenge is Iranian society and politics is so fragmented that
it's difficult to reach a consensus," he said – a problem that is also
present in the US. He said he considers the deal "in a category of an
initial confidence measure."
...
For other hostages,
though, their experience has led them to the conclusion that attempting
to negotiate and expecting Iran to live up to its end of the bargain is a
losing proposition. Sergeant Rodney "Rocky" Sickmann, 56, then a Marine
sergeant, remembers clearly being told by his captors that their goal
was to use the hostages to humiliate the American government, and he
suspects this interim deal is in that vein.
"It just hurts. We negotiated for 444 days and not one time did they
agree to anything ... and here they beg for us to negotiate and we do,"
he said. "It's hard to swallow. We negotiate with our enemies and stab
our allies in the back. That doesn't seem good."
The
deal may also have a direct effect on some of the hostages who have
long fought to sue the Iranian government for damages. The new agreement
calls for $4.2 billion in frozen Iranian assets to be released, which
could make it more difficult to collect a judgment on any successful
suit.
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
