Clinton emails show visceral hatred for Michael Oren
I've been
arguing on
social media for the last few days that we ought to be focusing on the contents of both Hillary Clinton's and the Democratic National Committee's emails, and not on how they came to light. At the end of the day, what's in the emails is far more important than Donald Trump trolling the Russians to release them (and he may well be correct that the Russians already have them).
In that light, I'd like to discuss some of what's come to light about Hillary Clinton's relationship with Israel as Secretary of State, and particularly about her relationship with Michael Oren, who was the Israeli ambassador to the United States during her tenure at the State Department.
In his book, Ally, Oren writes that during his first six months in Washington, he could not get a meeting with Clinton. It's perhaps indicative of that relationship that when I tried Googling "Clinton Oren" and "Hillary Clinton Michael Oren" in Google Images, the picture above was the only one I found that had the two of them in it together. There were several pictures of Oren with Barack Obama and of Prime Minister Netanyahu with Clinton, but only one of Oren and Clinton together.
This was
not Oren's imagination, as Haaretz reported about a year ago from an earlier release of Clinton emails:
On December 10, 2009, about six months after Oren took up his position in Washington, Brian Greenspun sent an email to the private account of then- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking her to check why her staff was not allowing the Israeli ambassador to meet her. It’s isn’t clear whether Oren was the one who asked Greenspun to intervene.
Greenspun is publisher of the Las Vegas Sun and was Bill Clinton’s old college roommate. He even raised money for him in Nevada when Clinton was president. According to various reports, in January 2001, a few weeks before the end of the president’s term, Greenspun also asked Clinton to grant a pardon to the founder of Israel Aerospace Industries, Al Schwimmer, for his role in smuggling U.S. planes to Israel in 1950.
“Hi Hillary,” writes Greenspun in the short message, parts of which were redacted before it was released for publication. Greenspun writes that rumor has it that the Israeli ambassador was unsuccessfully trying to arrange a meeting with the secretary of state.
He says he can’t imagine why her staff would keep Oren away from her and offered his help if there was any problem.
Why did Hillary keep Oren away? Rabbi Shmuely Boteach connects it to
Oren's refusal to speak at the first J Street conference in 2009.
Furthermore, a flurry of email communications from July 2012 surrounded
Hannah Rosenthal, who served from 2009 to 2012 as special envoy to
monitor and combat anti-Semitism for the Obama administration. After
three years in this position, news broke that Rosenthal had accepted a
position as president of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation. However, she
faced harsh criticism from sectors of the Jewish community for her past
views toward Israel. The exchange in these released emails from Hilary’s
server showed that the administration was very concerned about this
opposition and planned on how best to counteract it, with long-time aide
Huma Abedin keeping Clinton apprised.
Rosenthal had previously
served on the board of directors of the anti-Israel J Street. She was
also on the board of directors of Americans for Peace Now – an
organization that advocates for a total BDS-style boycott of Judea and
Samaria and its settlements. Yes, this was the person hand-picked by the
White House with Clinton’s blessing to fight anti-Semitism.
The
protests of Rosenthal’s appointment to the Milwaukee Jewish Federation
post stemmed in part from her associations with these anti-Israel
groups.
We know that Rosenthal has been a major supporter of
Hillary Clinton for the past 20 years and was appointed and served under
the Bill Clinton administration in a top-level position in the
Department of Health and Human Services.
In a speech of July 13,
2010, Hillary Clinton praised Rosenthal’s appointment to combat
anti-Semitism, saying, “I have known Hannah for more than 20 years and
we have worked over those 20 years on issues that are near and dear to
both of us.” She went on to say, “We know we have a big challenge ahead
of us, but I was thrilled when Hannah agreed to take this position...”
Yet
just a few months earlier, Rosenthal’s first denunciation in her new
role was not against anti-Semitism but shockingly against ambassador
Michael Oren.
Oren had recently turned down the offer to be the
keynote speaker at J Street’s inaugural conference in December 2009,
saying that the policies and approaches of J Street toward Israel were
“fooling around with the lives of 7 million people.”
Rosenthal,
no doubt offended at the refusal, broke protocol in an uncharacteristic
attack on Oren, condemning his comments, and calling his approach to J
Street “most unfortunate,” saying that he “would have learned a lot” if
he had attended the conference.
Supporting J Street, boycotting Judea and Samaria, and condemning
Michael Oren. Was this the basis of Hillary’s support for Rosenthal?
Rosenthal faced criticism from a number of Jewish groups for her words.
Alan Solow, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American
Jewish Organizations, summed up the unusual and inappropriate nature of
Rosenthal’s comments. “As an official of the United States government,
it is inappropriate for the anti-Semitism envoy to be expressing her
personal views on the positions ambassador Oren has taken, as well as on
the subject of who needs to be heard from in the Jewish community.”
The Israeli government released a statement that said in part, “We received Ms. Rosenthal’s statements as reported in Haaretz with astonishment and surprise.”
The Obama administration tried to reassure Israel that these comments did not represent State Department policy.
Unfortunately,
the truth is that based on everything we have seen in these email
dumps, this is precisely what the State Department’s policy was.
Drawing on Clinton's emails, Boteach describes some of the paranoia in the State Department's treatment of Oren.
In one email, [Sidney] Blumenthal sent an article from the notoriously
anti-Israel website Mondoweiss, which has long trolled me on the
Internet, and which duplicitously implied with empty insinuations that
Oren had planted a false story about a joint US-Israel Iran strike in a
plot to manipulate US policy.
On another occasion, Blumenthal sent two articles written by his
anti-Semitic son, the notorious Israel-hater Max Blumenthal, which
implied Oren was conspiring with Benjamin Netanyahu to derail the peace
process.
Sidney Blumenthal derisively emailed Hillary about
Oren’s untrustworthiness writing, “[T]he New Republic is a preferred
outlet for the highest level Likud/neocon propaganda. Michael Oren, a
channel for Israeli intel, was a frequent contributor in the past.”
He
also sent an email describing rumors from his journalist son Paul, who
claimed to have heard that “Oren raced around the West Wing searching
for Barack [Obama], opening doors and looking in rooms.
[Then-US national security adviser Thomas] Donilon heard about
Oren’s frantic snooping and raced after him, catching him, and escorted
him out. Apocryphal? True?” Hillary responds to the email, “Doubt that
it happened, but, these days, who knows???”
In another article several months ago,
Boteach went further.
In the entire forced dump of her emails, you will be hard-pressed to
find a single note that is sympathetic toward the Jewish state from any
of the people she trusted. The negative, poisonous approach Ms. Clinton
established demonstrates that a huge segment of her close advisers and
confidants were attacking Israel, condemning Prime Minister Netanyahu,
and strategizing how to force Israel to withdraw from Judea and Samaria
at all costs.
This was occurring in the backdrop of Israel’s recent Gaza
withdrawal, which led to the takeover of the Strip by Hamas. There is
almost zero mention of the huge risks to Israel’s security in
withdrawing, as Ms. Clinton and the Obama Administration did everything
they could to pressure Israel to capitulate to their demands.
Read some of the emails cited by Boteach in that article. Appalling.
One doesn't need much imagination to conclude that a Clinton administration's relationship with Israel would be no better than the Obama administration's relationship with Israel over the last eight years, especially so long as Binyamin Netanyahu is Prime Minister.
That's one lesson we should all be learning from the Clinton emails.
Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, Hillary Clinton, Max Blumenthal, Michael Oren, Rabbi Shmuely Boteach, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Sid Blumenthal, US presidential campaign 2016, Wikileaks
Jewish woman forced to hide from anti-Israel 'activists' at UC Irvine
You all remember the University of California at Irvine, the place where then-Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren was
heckled and forced to stop speaking? Well, it happened again. Last week, a Jewish woman was forced to hide from anti-Israel 'activists' at Irvine outside a meeting at which a movie about the IDF was being screened.
Let's go to the videotape.
Here's how the woman, Sophomore Eliana Kopley, was
trapped outside.
Sophomore Eliana Kopley had just left a Holocaust-related event when
she was walking toward the facility featuring a screening of “Beneath
the Helmet,” a documentary about the Israel Defense Forces. As she
arrived at the event hosted by Students Supporting Israel, Ms. Kopley
was met by an angry crowd pounding on the doors and windows—engaged in
violent chants targeting the Jewish state.
“I was terrified. There is no other word to describe how I felt,” Ms. Kopley told the Haym Salomon Center.
As the mob tried to gain entrance to the event, one protestor shouted, “If we’re not allowed in, you’re not allowed in!”
With the crowd physically forbidding Ms. Kopley from attending the
event and chants inciting violence against Jews and Israel such as
“Intifada, Intifada—Long live the Intifada!” and “F**k Israel!” Ms.
Kopley walked away from the scene.
But she was not alone. A group of female students followed her as she escaped to safety in the room nearby.
“When I turned back, at that moment, I looked at one of the girls and wanted to hide and cry,” Ms. Kopley said.
Throughout this entire time, Ms. Kopley never hung up the phone with
her mother, who was anxiously fearful on the other end of the line.
“My mom keeps asking what’s going on. But I couldn’t even say
complete sentences. All I managed to say was ‘protesters’ and she
started yelling at me to call the cops,” Ms. Kopley said.
So she did. As the chanting heightened, Ms. Kopley remained on the
line with 9-1-1 until an officer found her shortly after. Two officers,
who decided it would be best to put on black rubber gloves to protect
them from sharp objects, escorted her through the crowd of protesters to
the nearby film screening safely.
There's more.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: anti-Semitism, BDS, Michael Oren, pro-Israel students, Students for Justice in Palestine, University of California at Irvine
They don't speak in my name
Uber-Leftist MSNBC cites 'Jewish organizations' as reacting to
Mike Huckabee's comment that President Hussein Obama's Iran deal is
leading Israelis to the doors of the ovens (Hat Tip:
Memeorandum).
The National Jewish Democratic Council immediately called on members of the Republican Party to denounce Huckabee’s comments, saying it is “not
only disgustingly offensive to the President and the White House, but
shows utter, callous disregard for the millions of lives lost in the
Shoah and to the pain still felt by their descendants today.”
“It may be the most inexcusable we’ve encountered in recent memory,” the organization added in a statement.
The Anti-Defamation League, a group that fights antisemitism,
said that while they are wary of the deal, Huckabee’s comments are “completely out of line and unacceptable.”
“To hear Mr. Huckabee invoke the Holocaust when
America is Israel’s greatest ally and when Israel is a strong nation
capable of defending itself is disheartening,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, in a statement.
The NJDC is an organization of the Democratic party that has come out in favor of the Iranian nuclear sellout. It exists to promote the Democratic party (and Jewish donations to it) and is definitely not Jewish. The ADL is a group of paranoid liberals that is too busy finding anti-Semitism on every street corner to think about what it means to be Jewish. In fact, I am surprised that they did not accuse Huckabee of being an anti-Semite.
I have never heard of any of the other organizations cited, although I do 'know' one of the people cited from his online persona.
And in true Leftist fashion not a single comment supporting Huckabee has been cited.
Israeli ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer
didn't like Huckabee's comments either.
"Look, we have a very serious disagreement with the administration on
a very serious issue," Ambassador Ron Dermer told Capital Download.
"But what I don't doubt is the sincerity of the president or his team
when they say they believe this deal not only makes America safe but
makes Israel safe. Where we disagree is the judgment of actually what
this deal is going to do."
On Huckabee's comments, he said: "These are not words that I would use or that I think are appropriate."
But what did you expect him to say
while he's the Ambassador? That Obama is at best indifferent and at worst hostile to Israel's existence as a state? Consider
what Dermer's predecessor wrote once he was out of office (from a review by John Podhoretz):
It’s not that there’s lots of breaking news in “Ally” that will
startle people. Rather, it makes news on almost every page with its
incredibly detailed account of the root hostility of the Obama
administration toward the Jewish state.
What makes the details especially credible is that Oren is no
flame-breathing Israeli right-winger but very much (and at times
distressingly) an Establishment creature and one, moreover, who makes it
clear he drank the Obama hope-and-change Kool-Aid in 2008. (Indeed, he
now serves in Israel’s Knesset not as a member of Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud
but of the new centrist Kulanu party.)
On major matters, the administration seemed to hold Israel accountable for problems it had nothing to do with.
Example: The Palestinian Authority made moves toward seeking a
declaration of statehood at the United Nations in 2011, which would’ve
triggered a law shutting down their US mission and suspending all aid to
the PA and to UN agencies that recognized Palestine.
In response, Deputy Secretary of State Tom Nides called Oren into his
fancy Foggy Bottom office and screamed at him: “You don’t want the
f - - - ing UN to collapse because of your f - - - - ing conflict with
the Palestinians, and you don’t want the f - - - king Palestinian
Authority to fall apart either.”
To which Oren replied that Israel didn’t want the United Nations to
collapse “but there are plenty of Tea Party types who would, and no
shortage of Congress members who are wondering why they have to keep
paying Palestinians who spit in the president’s eye.” He reports that
Nides “slumped into his Louis XVth chair.”
Oren also writes about bizarrely petty offenses. In 2010, Obama left
Israel off a list of countries he mentioned as having helped in the wake
of the Haiti earthquake when it was the first nation in the world to
dispatch relief teams and get them to the disaster sites — because the
president was angry about something having to do with the peace process.
Even when the administration is acting friendly, Oren senses it is
doing so not out of genuine fellow feeling but to keep Israel close —
hugging it to prevent it from acting, especially when it came to Iran’s
nuclear program.
Dermer is (a) still in office and (b) a '
flame-breathing Israeli right winger.' He is also a
Republican at heart and therefore cannot agree with Huckabee and still keep his position in Washington. Obama is already
obsessed with removing Dermer.
I'd bet that Dermer is a lot closer to Huckabee and Oren on this than he is to the ADL or the NJDC - he just can't say so.
My own view is that while I'm averse to Holocaust analogies (they make me cringe because I think they're overused), there is something to the notion that 'ovens' reflects Obama's deepest wishes for the people of Israel, if not for (non-liberal) Jews generally. And it certainly reflects what Iran wants to do with its nuclear program.
Labels: ADL, Barack Hussein Obama, Holocaust, Iranian nuclear threat, liberal media bias, Michael Oren, MSNBC, National Jewish Democratic Council, Ron Dermer
The bizarre rules of the Temple Mount
Miriam Elman has a detailed summary of the
bizarre rules that govern Jewish visits to the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism. I strongly urge you to read the whole thing, especially if you're not familiar with the situation. But I found especially intriguing Miriam's summary of an essay by
Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik.
In an important essay for the online journal Mosaic
this past November, Meir Soloveichik, the Director of the Straus Center
for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University in N.Y., writes
that Israel’s 1967 “status quo” arrangement is one of the “most
misguided in Israel’s history”.
Instead of setting aside a designated section on the Temple Mount for
Jewish prayer—one that wouldn’t have interfered with Muslim worship and
would’ve also been appropriate according to halakhah (Jewish
religious law), which forbids Jews from visiting certain portions of the
Har HaBayit—the government’s decision “set in place a policy that
resulted in the worst of all possible worlds”:
First, many Jews who continued to visit the Mount did so
without any rabbinic guidance, entering areas where according to
halakhah they should not have set foot. Second, Israel’s self-imposed
ban on Jewish prayer persuaded both the Waqf and the Palestinians and
Arab world in general that Israel’s leaders lacked any attachment to or
reverence for the site”.
According to Soloveichik the indifference has merely reinforced the
“foul false narrative” that the Jews never worshipped God on the Mount,
that the Temples never existed, and that the Jewish nation has no
historical legitimacy.
It’s a sentiment echoed recently by the indefatigable Vic Rosenthal. Writing in Abu Yehuda, a “blog about the struggle to keep the Jewish state”, Rosenthal claims that Israel now either has to “exercise sovereignty” on the Temple Mount “or lose it”:
When Israel conquered the Old City in 1967, the Arabs
expected that they would be kicked out. After all, that is what they did
to the Jews in eastern Jerusalem in 1948. That is what a victorious
people in a national conflict over possession of land have always done,
if they didn’t kill or enslave the population. But that is not what
Israel did. When Israeli law was extended to eastern Jerusalem in 1967,
Arab residents were offered Israeli citizenship. Most refused and became
permanent residents, with the right to vote in municipal elections,
health and social security benefits, etc…When the IDF took control of
the Temple Mount, IDF Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren wanted to build a
synagogue there…But Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had other ideas: he
prohibited Jews from praying on the Mount, and placed its administration
in the hands of the Jordanian waqf…Thus were the seeds planted
for the current situation, which includes absurdities like Israeli
police officers arresting Jews who are seen to move their lips when
visiting the Mount, and shrieking Arab women confronting Jews who want
to just stand there”.
We have only ourselves to blame. But then, it's not surprising. Anyone who has read Michael Oren's account of the Six Day War is aware that the government did not want to liberate Jerusalem and the Temple Mount - only the late Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren was interested in doing so. Unfortunately, the government of Israel has never reconciled itself to being in control of the Mount.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Michael Oren, Old City of Jerusalem, Palestinian riots, prayers, Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik, Temple Mount
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.
Maybe that's why Oren made aliya.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: anti-Semitism, Barack Hussein Obama, Iranian nuclear threat, Jimmy Carter, liberal academia, Michael Oren, Orthodox Jews, Republicans, Ronald Reagan, self-hating Jews
Barack Obama must be wondering what hit him
President Hussein Obama must be wondering what hit him. Former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren continues to hammer away at the President, publishing two more op-ed pieces in the US media on Friday, one of which
really gets into Obama's kishkes.
In Foreign Policy, Oren took Obama to task for not joining the
solidarity march in France after the attack on Charlie Hebdo or the
kosher supermarket earlier this year, nor for sending two senior
officials who were in Paris at the time to the march. He also took the
president to task for not admitting that the attack on the kosher
market was directed a Jews, but rather an act perpetrated by “vicious
zealots who... randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli.”
“Obama’s
boycotting of the memorial in Paris, like his refusal to acknowledge
the identity of the perpetrators, the victims, or even the location of
the market massacre, provides a broad window into his thinking on Islam
and the Middle East. Simply put: The president could not participate
in a protest against Muslim radicals whose motivations he sees as a
distortion, rather than a radical interpretation, of Islam,” he wrote.
“And if there are no terrorists spurred by Islam, there can be no
purposely selected Jewish shop or intended Jewish victims, only a deli
and randomly present folks."
During his first year in office,
Obama, Oren argued, offered in essence “a new deal in which the United
States would respect popularly chosen Muslim leaders who were
authentically rooted in their traditions and willing to engage with the
West.”
...
Oren
attributed this orientation to the intellectual milieu in which Obama
grew up, as well as his personal history. “I could imagine how a child
raised by a Christian mother might see himself as a natural bridge
between her two Muslim husbands. I could also speculate how that
child’s abandonment by those men could lead him, many years later, to
seek acceptance by their co-religionists.”
The tragedy, he said, was that Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world was rejected.
“Historians
will likely look back at Obama’s policy toward Islam with a
combination of curiosity and incredulousness,” he wrote. “While some
may credit the president for his good intentions, others might fault him
for being naïve and detached from a complex and increasingly lethal
reality.”
In the LA Times piece, headlined “Why Obama is
wrong about Iran being 'rational' on nukes,” Oren quoted Obama’s
comment in a recent interview that being anti-Semitic, or racist,
doesn't preclude one from from being interested in survival, and that
just because Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei is anti-Semitic
“doesn't mean that this overrides all of his other considerations.”
Oren
wrote that the dispute whether Iran was a rational or irrational actor
was “ever-present” in the discussions between the US and Israel when
he was ambassador. While the American view the Iranians as logical
actors, Israel could not rule out the idea that “the Iranians would be
willing to sacrifice half of their people as martyrs in a war intended
to ‘wipe Israel off the map.’”
“Obama would never say that
anti-black racists are rational,” Oren argued. “And he would certainly
not trust them with the means – however monitored – to reach their
racist goals. That was the message Israeli officials and I conveyed in
our discreet talks with the administration. The response was not, to
our mind, reasonable."
Oren, while he served in Washington, was
considered very cautious and diplomatic, and rarely caught flack for
comments deemed “undiplomatic.”
Oren has been blasted by opposition MK's Tzipi Livni (goes without saying), Avigdor Liberman and Yair Lapid (the latter also goes without saying). But
Lee Smith wrote some similar things in Tablet Magazine last week, but from a slightly different angle.
Whether Obama is an honorary Jew or not, the evidence suggests that
he keenly understands certain peculiarities of the Jewish communal
psyche—survival strategies that distinguish the Jews from other American
minority groups. The president’s use of Jewish aides and organizations
to advance his policies with the Jewish community shows that Obama is
correct in believing that Jewish politics are often motivated by fear,
which can range from the existential fear of mass extermination to the
more prosaic fear of looking shabby in front of the goyim. And Obama
isn’t using his energy and inspiring leadership skills to help these
people rise above their fear; he is instead capitalizing on
it—masterfully, ruthlessly—by manipulating American Jews in ways that
other minority groups would find unbelievably insulting.
Consider recent statements from Jewish aides to the president.
Netanyahu is the kind of politician, said David Axelrod, “who run[s] for
public office because they want to be somebody.” Israel doesn’t know
what’s best for it, Obama’s former envoy to the Palestinian-Israeli
peace process Martin Indyk told Israeli media last week. “You are an
emotional nation, not a rational nation,” he sniffed. “You work from
your gut and not your mind.”
It’s very hard to imagine Catholic policymakers helping a U.S.
president undermine and insult the Vatican and then defending the
president when he says that he understands what the church stands for
better than the pope does. During the darkest moments of the AIDS
crisis, there were no gay organizations that encouraged U.S.
policymakers to cut funding for a cure. There are no transgender
activists who argue that the real threat to the community comes not from
people who fear and hate transgendered people, but from within the
transgender community itself. Eric Holder doesn’t scold people of color
that they’re an emotional, not a rational, people, or imply that black
officeholders get into politics because they “want to be somebody.”
The issue in America today is clearly not that pro-Obama people or
organizations are leading the American Jewish community to destruction.
Yet at the same time, it is also clear that two millennia of diasporic
dependence and insecurity have left a deep and probably permanent
imprint on the Jewish communal psyche. Even in America, a free country
in which Jews have never been subject to European-style mass oppression
or persecutions, the role performed by “court Jews’ still makes
structural and emotional sense to people who like to think of themselves
as independent thinkers. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain why
Obama still has the support of the majority of the Jewish community for
policies that from any rational perspective—the perspective of any other
minority group—cannot be seen as anything other than detrimental to the
Jewish state.
In other words, Oren is right about Obama's bad treatment of Jews as compared with any other ethnic group. Obama isn't playing any other ethnic group - only Jews. And according to Smith, Obama is playing the Jews like a master.
But what about the Jews who speak for the administration? None of
several former high-ranking Jewish officials was willing to speak on the
record on this subject, but every single one of them agreed that this
moment was an extraordinary one. “No administration will always do what
the Jewish community wants or what Jews think best for Israel, just as
none will ever always do what Catholics want or Greek Americans or
farmers,” said a former Jewish American policymaker who served in
high-level positions in several administrations. “When you are in an
administration you know this is coming. If the variance is in the
particular area you cover, it can be painful. If it gets repeated, you
need to change jobs or leave the government. That’s normal.”
But: “The Obama situation is not normal,” he continued, “due to the
length and depth of the confrontation with Israel and the harm that’s
being done. It should give rise to soul searching by Jewish appointees.
In my view they’ve become enablers, in the worst sense of that word.
That not one single Jew has left in protest is remarkable considering
that relations have not been worse in a long, long time.”
By not resigning in protest, Obama’s Jewish aides have arguably not
only harmed their community; they weakened their own position—which was,
in a sense, ultimately far more detrimental. In a town where the
appearance of power is power, Obama’s Jewish defenders had no idea which
way the president was actually going. They got played, and now everyone
knows it. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew wasn’t in the room when Obama was
making Iran policy with Ben Rhodes and Valerie Jarrett. Martin Indyk
didn’t know that a central part of Obama’s Middle East policy—without
which the Iran deal would be impossible—was to weaken AIPAC,
the cornerstone of the pro-Israel community. AIPAC, in turn, didn’t see
itself as a target of the Obama Administration. Instead, it kept
telling itself that bipartisan support for Israel was the very premise
of its power. Had these actors actually participated in helping the
president pull a fast one on the Jewish community, at least they’d have
showed they had connections to power. The biggest problem with the Jews
around Obama is not that they spoke up on behalf of policies that may
very well turn out to be harmful to the Jewish state; it’s that they
were so clearly out of the loop—a status quo they will now bequeath to
future administrations.
In this regard, even AIPAC’s ostensible rival J Street got played. As
one senior official in the pro-Israel community told me, he believes
that “their standing has diminished a lot. The administration used J
Street and included them, and went to their conferences, because they
believed they would be a useful tool.” But J Street is weakened not, as
the pro-Israel official believes, because it plowed its own field
recklessly. If you describe yourself as a pro-Israel organization then
your power is directly proportional to how important a role Israel plays
in American foreign policy. If your actions, like J Street’s,
contribute to making Israel about as important to American foreign
policy as Malaysia is, then you aren’t very important either.
Read the whole thing.
What Smith is describing is what I have called the
Poritz Syndrome.
Oren is an historian and he has an historian's perspective. I'm sure he sees everything that Smith sees and has many more facts and data points to prove what Smith is saying. Unfortunately, Oren is getting no support here in Israel, other than Netanyahu's refusal to disown him.... Yet Oren disowned Netanyahu by running for the Knesset with Kahlon's party. Perhaps there's a lesson there for the historian too.
In the meantime, my copy of Oren's book is on order. Can't wait to read this one.
Labels: Avigdor Lieberman, Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, court Jew, Jack Lew, Martin Indyk, Michael Oren, Moshe Kahlon, poritz syndrome, Tzipi Livni, Yair Lapid
Netanyahu: The hell I'll do Obama's dirty work for him
Haaretz reports that Prime Minister Netanyahu has
refused to disavow former Ambassador Michael Oren's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, nor Oren's book which will be published on Tuesday (and will be an instant best-seller at this rate - mine has been ordered). The
Times of Israel summarizes what's happened.
The op-ed has drawn unhappy reactions from the
US, including an angry phone call from US Ambassador to Israel Dan
Shapiro to Netanyahu, asking the prime minister to renounce Oren’s ideas
in a public statement, according to a report in Haaretz Thursday.
Netanyahu refused Shapiro’s request and said
he had no intention of publicly addressing the piece, an anonymous
source told the newspaper.
The prime minister said Oren was no longer a
public official but a politician belonging to another party and
therefore he saw no reason he should intervene, Israel’s Army Radio
reported, citing a statement from Netanyahu’s office.
The Prime Minister’s Office refused to share Netanyahu’s views on the issue.
Shapiro’s office also refused to comment on the content of his call with Netanyahu.
...
Shapiro also reached out to Kulanu leader
Moshe Kahlon Wednesday to address the claims made in the opinion piece
and in a book Oren has written about his time as ambassador to the US.
Kahlon, in response, sent a letter to Shapiro
emphasizing that they were Oren’s personal views and did not reflect the
party line of Kulanu.
Oren, according to Kahlon’s letter, wrote his
book before he joined the party. Kahlon, who serves an finance minister,
said he had summoned Oren and made clear his appreciation for the US’s
commitment to Israel.
Speaking to Army Radio Wednesday morning,
Shapiro called Oren’s claims “imaginary” and accused him of creating
drama to sell books.
The sentiment was later echoed by a US State
Department spokesperson, who said Oren’s claims were not accurate and
did not reflect the reality of US-Israeli ties when Oren was a diplomat.
US Secretary of State John Kerry also denied Oren’s statements, saying they were made in order to sell his book.
Can't wait to read the book....
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Dan Shapiro, Gilad Erdan, John Kerry, Michael Oren, Moshe Kahlon
Hillary Clinton's staffers listened and cheered while one of her deputies chewed out Ambassador Oren
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State in what claims to be the 'most pro-Israel administration evah'
allowed her staffers to listen in from another room when her deputy, Jim Steinberg, 'privately' scolded Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren over the announcement of construction in
Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish neighborhood of more than 20,000 souls, while Joe Biden was in Israel in 2010. This is from the first link.
By the way, some of those apartments finally got their final approval to be built
last month. Aren't you glad the 'Palestinians' decided to follow the Obama-Clinton-Biden lead and stay away from the 'peace talks'?
Oren recounted that when he landed back in Washington, D.C.,
following the trip, he landed “to learn that [then] Secretary of State
Clinton has excoriated Netanyahu for 45 minutes over the phone, rebuking
him for humiliating the president and undermining America’s ability to
deal with pressing Middle East issues.”
Soon after that, Oren found out that he had been “summoned” to the
State Department for an “immediate meeting,” according to the book.
Before attending the meeting, Oren huddled with his senior advisers
and informed them, “while I would continue to adhere publicly to the
‘all’s well’ [between the United States and Israel] pose, behind the
scenes I would forcibly resist this attempt to fabricate a crisis.”
Oren then traveled to the State Department for a tense meeting with
then-Deputy Secretary Jim Steinberg. Oren later found out the meeting
was being listened to by State Department staffers, who “cheered” as
Steinberg upbraided Oren.
“There, waiting in his not-nice American mode, was Deputy Secretary
Jim Steinberg, who proceeded to read me the text of Hillary’s
conversation with Netanyahu,” Oren writes. “This contained a list of
demands, including a total building freeze in East Jerusalem as well as
the West Bank, most of which would be unacceptable to any Israeli prime
minister, much less a [right-leaning] Likudnik.”
Steinberg went on to lecture Oren in a “furious” manner.
“Steinberg added his own furious comment—department staffers, I later
heard, listened in on our conversation and cheered—about Israel’s
insult to the president and the pride of the United States.”
Oren said he did not hold back in his response.
“Let me get this straight,” Oren recalls saying. “We inadvertently
slight the vice president and apologize, and I become the first foreign
ambassador summoned by this administration to the State Department.”
The Israeli people, Oren said, “will see this as nothing but a pretext to arm-twist us and beat up on us.”
A State Department official declined to comment on the issue.
That last line is an admission that the story is true. Don't misconceive that one. There's more.
One former high-ranking White House official said the Obama administration’s treatment of Oren is unusual.
“In eight years at State and eight at the [White House National
Security Council], I never participated in a meeting with the secretary
or deputy secretary of state that was piped elsewhere in the building
through hidden microphones,” Elliott Abrams, a former deputy assistant
to the president and deputy national security adviser in the George W.
Bush administration.
“There were always note takers present and everyone understood that
each side could distribute its own notes, but foreign diplomats could
rely on the U.S. not to tape the meeting or broadcast it to others
outside the meeting room where it took place,” Abrams said. “If this
really happened as Oren says, one has to ask whether this was a
punishment devised especially for Israel, or whether there were hidden
microphones recording lots of other Steinberg and Clinton meetings.”
And they talk about Richard Nixon.... Oh... wait... Hillary Clinton was kicked off the Watergate investigation committee staff back in the '70's for
lying, unethical behavior, wasn't she? She knows all about hidden microphones and extra email accounts....
One senior official with a D.C.-based Jewish organization was not
surprised to learn that State Department staffers were pleased when Oren
was upbraided.
“The president stacked the State Department with opponents of Israel,
then let them indulge themselves by picking new fights with Israel
every few months,” the source said. “Of course they enjoyed it. This is
who they are. This is what they do.”
Most pro-Israel administration evah? Until Hillary Clinton takes charge....
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Michael Oren, Ramat Shlomo, US presidential campaign 2016
Michael Oren: How Obama abandoned Israel
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States and current MK Michael Oren (Kulanu) criticizes Prime Minister Netanyahu's handling of his relationship with President Hussein Obama, and then
rips Obama for abandoning Israel. More after the lengthy excerpt (someone was kind enough to send me the full article by email).
[M]any of Israel’s bungles were not committed
by Mr. Netanyahu personally. In both episodes with Mr. Biden, for example, the
announcements were issued by midlevel officials who also caught the prime
minister off-guard. Nevertheless, he personally apologized to the vice
president.
Mr. Netanyahu’s only premeditated misstep was
his speech to Congress, which I recommended against. Even that decision, though,
came in reaction to a calculated mistake by President Obama. From the moment he
entered office, Mr. Obama promoted an agenda of championing the Palestinian
cause and achieving a nuclear accord with Iran. Such policies would have put him
at odds with any Israeli leader. But Mr. Obama posed an even more fundamental
challenge by abandoning the two core principles of Israel’s alliance with
America.
The first principle was “no daylight.” The U.S.
and Israel always could disagree but never openly. Doing so would encourage
common enemies and render Israel vulnerable. Contrary to many of his detractors,
Mr. Obama was never anti-Israel and, to his credit, he significantly
strengthened security cooperation with the Jewish state. He rushed to help
Israel in 2011 when the Carmel forest was devastated by fire. And yet,
immediately after his first inauguration, Mr. Obama put daylight between Israel
and America.
“When there is no daylight,” the president told
American Jewish leaders in 2009, “Israel just sits on the sidelines and that
erodes our credibility with the Arabs.” The explanation ignored Israel’s 2005
withdrawal from Gaza and its two previous offers of Palestinian statehood in
Gaza, almost the entire West Bank and half of Jerusalem—both offers rejected by
the Palestinians.
Mr. Obama also voided President George W. Bush’s
commitment to include the major settlement blocs and Jewish Jerusalem within
Israel’s borders in any peace agreement. Instead, he insisted on a total freeze
of Israeli construction in those areas—“not a single brick,” I later heard he
ordered Mr. Netanyahu—while making no substantive demands of the
Palestinians.
Consequently, Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas boycotted negotiations, reconciled with Hamas and sought statehood in the
U.N.—all in violation of his commitments to the U.S.—but he never paid
a price. By contrast, the White House routinely condemned Mr. Netanyahu for
building in areas that even Palestinian negotiators had agreed would remain part
of Israel.
The other core principle was “no surprises.”
President Obama discarded it in his first meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, in May
2009, by abruptly demanding a settlement freeze and Israeli acceptance of the
two-state solution. The following month the president traveled to the Middle
East, pointedly skipping Israel and addressing the Muslim world from Cairo.
Israeli leaders typically received advance
copies of major American policy statements on the Middle East and could submit
their comments. But Mr. Obama delivered his Cairo speech, with its unprecedented
support for the Palestinians and its recognition of Iran’s right to nuclear
power, without consulting Israel.
Similarly, in May 2011, the president altered 40
years of U.S. policy by endorsing the 1967 lines with land swaps—formerly the
Palestinian position—as the basis for peace-making. If Mr. Netanyahu appeared to
lecture the president the following day, it was because he had been assured by
the White House, through me, that no such change would happen.
Israel was also stunned to learn that Mr. Obama
offered to sponsor a U.N. Security Council investigation of the settlements and
to back Egyptian and Turkish efforts to force Israel to reveal its alleged
nuclear capabilities. Mr. Netanyahu eventually agreed to a 10-month moratorium
on settlement construction—the first such moratorium since 1967—and backed the
creation of a Palestinian state. He was taken aback, however, when he received
little credit for these concessions from Mr. Obama, who more than once publicly
snubbed him.
The abandonment of the “no daylight” and “no
surprises” principles climaxed over the Iranian nuclear program. Throughout my
years in Washington, I participated in intimate and frank discussions with U.S.
officials on the Iranian program. But parallel to the talks came administration
statements and leaks—for example, each time Israeli warplanes reportedly struck
Hezbollah-bound arms convoys in Syria—intended to deter Israel from striking
Iran pre-emptively.
Finally, in 2014, Israel discovered that its
primary ally had for months been secretly negotiating with its deadliest enemy.
The talks resulted in an interim agreement that the great majority of Israelis
considered a “bad deal” with an irrational, genocidal regime. Mr. Obama, though,
insisted that Iran was a rational and potentially “very successful regional
power.”
The daylight between Israel and the U.S. could
not have been more blinding. And for Israelis who repeatedly heard the president
pledge that he “had their backs” and “was not bluffing” about the military
option, only to watch him tell an Israeli interviewer that “a military solution
cannot fix” the Iranian nuclear threat, the astonishment could not have been
greater.
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.
Oren seems to be placing the burden of restoring the US-Israel relationship to what it was on both the US and Israel. But clearly, one party here (the US in the person of the Obama administration) initiated the hostilities. The actions that Obama took immediately on taking office - the introduction of '
daylight' between the US and Israel, the
Cairo speech, the
Buchenwald visit in which he adopted the 'Palestinian' narrative of Israel's sole right to our land being based on the Holocaust, and the
disavowal of the Bush letter - set the tone for the relationship, and it's up to Obama - more likely to his successor - to reset that tone.
Yesterday, I met with the Washington correspondent of a US-based newspaper. She asked me how Israelis feel about the United States. I told her 'Israelis love the United States and the American people. Israelis hate Obama. For good reason.'
For those who can,
read the whole thing.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Bush letter, Cairo, Holocaust, Joe Biden, Michael Oren, Palestinian state RIGHT NOW syndrome, settlement freeze, settlements, US-Israel relationship
Report: Israel helped Obama avoid action in Syria
Stories from
Michael Oren's new book continue to leak to the media. In yet another report based on the book, Eli Lake reports that
Israel helped President Hussein Obama avoid action on his 'red line' on Syrian use of chemical weapons.
Oren's book, "Ally," discloses for the first time that in late August
and early September 2013, Israel's then-intelligence minister, Yuval
Steinitz, floated a plan for Syria to relinquish its chemical weapons to
the Russian government and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
received Obama's blessing to move forward with the proposal.
To be sure, Oren also writes in his memoir that Israel did not oppose
U.S. airstrikes in late August 2013, saying the Jewish state saw no
downside with Obama enforcing his red line and hopefully deterring
Syria's ally, Iran. But at the same time, he credits Steinitz and
Netanyahu with helping prepare the diplomacy that allowed Obama to climb
down from the air strikes that Oren himself believed at the time were
all but a certainty.
It was in this period that America came closest to directly entering
the Syrian civil war. In August 2013, U.N. inspectors confirmed that
Bashar al-Assad's regime attacked a rebel position in Ghouta outside of
Damascus. Obama reluctantly acknowledged that the Syrian dictator had
crossed the administration's red line and used chemical weapons. But
after Syria and Russia agreed to a plan in which Assad would acknowledge
and dispose of his chemical weapons, the threat of American airstrikes
as punishment for the attack in Ghouta subsided.
At the time, the disarmament plan appeared to come about by accident. On Sept. 9 that year, Secretary of State John Kerry floated the idea
that Assad could avert a U.S. attack on his territory if he gave up his
chemical weapons. State Department officials soon after said the
remarks were more a rhetorical flourish than a sincere proposal. But
Kerry's Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, quickly seized on the
remarks and presented a proposal to Syria's foreign ministry. Within the
space of a news cycle, a U.N. plan was being negotiated and America was
backing away from airstrikes.
It turns out that Netanyahu was helping to bring about the deal
behind the scenes, according to Oren. "In the course of this frenzy,
though, I heard of a proposal to peacefully remove Syria’s chemical
arsenal," Oren writes. "The idea originated with an Israeli minister,
Yuval Steinitz, who first pitched it to the Russians, who were eager to
avoid an American intercession that they could not stop. Netanyahu next
brought it to Obama and received a green light."
And it goes without saying that Arrogant Obama showed no appreciation for Israel's role in saving him from his red line.
Oren also notes that Obama never publicly credited Israel with help on
the plan. "In subsequent interviews, Obama rarely missed the chance to
cite the neutralization of Syria’s chemical capabilities as an historic
diplomatic achievement. Russian president Vladimir Putin also took
credit for the initiative and praised this 'vivid example of how the
international community can solve the most complex disarmament and non-
proliferation task.' Israel’s role remained unmentioned, but its
citizens were relieved not to have to sign up for more gas masks," he
writes.
Given what's happened in Syria since 2013, perhaps we're better off with Obama's lack of gratitude.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, chemical weapons, Michael Oren, Syria, Syrian uprising, Vladimir Putin
Michael Oren's 'Ally' rips the cover off Obama administration's 'pro-Israel' pretensions
Adam Kredo is reading (or has read) Michael Oren's new book,
Ally - My Journey Across the Israeli-American Divide, which will be officially released on Monday, and which I discussed
here.
Here are some tidbits that Adam has tweeted from the book.
Anyone still want to argue that this is really the 'most pro-Israel administration evah,' or that Hillary Clinton is pro-Israel?
Where is Debbie Wasserman Schultz when we need her?
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Hillary Clinton, Iranian nuclear threat, J Street, Michael Oren
'For ideological reasons, Obama doesn’t like the Israel that exists. Period.'
John Podhoretz reviews a new book by Michael Oren - release date June 23 - in which Oren recounts his
four years as Israeli ambassador to Washington. What's unique about this book is that except for Oren, all the players are still in place. Podhoretz reports that reading the book will convince you that Obama's hostility isn't just to Netanyahu - it's a
visceral hostility to the very existence of the State of Israel (Hat Tip:
Jonathan Schanzer).
It’s not that there’s lots of breaking news in “Ally” that will
startle people. Rather, it makes news on almost every page with its
incredibly detailed account of the root hostility of the Obama
administration toward the Jewish state.
What makes the details especially credible is that Oren is no
flame-breathing Israeli right-winger but very much (and at times
distressingly) an Establishment creature and one, moreover, who makes it
clear he drank the Obama hope-and-change Kool-Aid in 2008. (Indeed, he
now serves in Israel’s Knesset not as a member of Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud
but of the new centrist Kulanu party.)
On major matters, the administration seemed to hold Israel accountable for problems it had nothing to do with.
Example: The Palestinian Authority made moves toward seeking a
declaration of statehood at the United Nations in 2011, which would’ve
triggered a law shutting down their US mission and suspending all aid to
the PA and to UN agencies that recognized Palestine.
In response, Deputy Secretary of State Tom Nides called Oren into his
fancy Foggy Bottom office and screamed at him: “You don’t want the
f - - - ing UN to collapse because of your f - - - - ing conflict with
the Palestinians, and you don’t want the f - - - king Palestinian
Authority to fall apart either.”
To which Oren replied that Israel didn’t want the United Nations to
collapse “but there are plenty of Tea Party types who would, and no
shortage of Congress members who are wondering why they have to keep
paying Palestinians who spit in the president’s eye.” He reports that
Nides “slumped into his Louis XVth chair.”
Oren also writes about bizarrely petty offenses. In 2010, Obama left
Israel off a list of countries he mentioned as having helped in the wake
of the Haiti earthquake when it was the first nation in the world to
dispatch relief teams and get them to the disaster sites — because the
president was angry about something having to do with the peace process.
Even when the administration is acting friendly, Oren senses it is
doing so not out of genuine fellow feeling but to keep Israel close —
hugging it to prevent it from acting, especially when it came to Iran’s
nuclear program.
Would love to read this.... Most pro-Israel administration evah? Keep fooling yourselves American Jews.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Michael Oren, Obama's obsession with Israel, Palestinian state RIGHT NOW syndrome
'Most pro-Israel administration ever' blocks missile shipment to Israel
In yet another sign of the cool relations between the Obama administration and the State of Israel, the Obama administration has blocked a shipment of hellfire missiles to the Jewish state and has ordered that
future requests be approved by the administration and not just by the military.
White House and State Department officials who were leading U.S. efforts to rein in Israel's military campaign in the Gaza Strip were caught off guard last month when they learned that the Israeli military had been quietly securing supplies of ammunition from the Pentagon without their approval.
Since then the Obama administration has tightened its control on arms transfers to Israel. But Israeli and U.S. officials say that the adroit bureaucratic maneuvering made it plain how little influence the White House and State Department have with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu —and that both sides know it.
The munitions surprise and previously unreported U.S. response added to a string of slights and arguments that have bubbled behind the scenes during the Gaza conflict, according to events related by senior American, Palestinian and Israeli officials involved.
In addition, current and former American officials say, U.S.-Israel ties have been hurt by leaks that they believe were meant to undercut the administration's standing by mischaracterizing its position and delay a cease-fire. The battles have driven U.S.-Israeli relations to the lowest point since President Barack Obama took office.
Now, as Egyptian officials shuttle between representatives of Israel and Hamas seeking a long-term deal to end the fighting, U.S. officials are bystanders instead of in their historic role as mediators. The White House finds itself largely on the outside looking in.
U.S. officials said Mr. Obama had a particularly combative phone call on Wednesday with Mr. Netanyahu, who they say has pushed the administration aside but wants it to provide Israel with security assurances in exchange for signing onto a long-term deal.
As a 72-hour pause in the fighting expired at midnight Wednesday, a senior Hamas official said negotiators agreed to another cease-fire, this one of five days. There was no immediate confirmation from Israel or Egypt.
Well, there was another five-day cease fire, but
Hamas has already breached it.
Hamas already breached
the last 72-hour ceasefire three hours ahead of its conclusion
Wednesday at midnight; on Thursday morning it proved that it does not
intend to honor the newly achieved five-day ceasefire either.
Rocket warning sirens were sounded around 10 a.m. on Thursday in the Eshkol Regional Council and Hof Ashkelon region.
Shortly afterwards reports came in that a rocket fell in open ground
in the Hof Ashkelon region, apparently causing no injuries or damage.
The attack comes after Hamas fired at least one rocket at the Hof Ashkelon region on Wednesday night around 9 p.m., where it hit open ground.
The terrorist organization then continued firing into the night even after the ceasefire extension was announced, with the Iron
Dome anti-missile system intercepting one rocket over the city of
Netivot. Two other rockets exploded in the Sdot Negev region.
Is anyone really surprised that Israel doesn't trust Obama? This is from the first link again.
Today, many administration officials say the Gaza conflict—the third between Israel and Hamas in under six years—has persuaded them that Mr. Netanyahu and his national security team are both reckless and untrustworthy.
Israeli officials, in turn, describe the Obama administration as weak and naive, and are doing as much as they can to bypass the White House in favor of allies in Congress and elsewhere in the administration.
While Israeli officials have privately told their U.S. counterparts the poor state of relations isn't in Israel's interest long term, they also said they believed Mr. Netanyahu wasn't too worried about the tensions. The reason is that he can rely on the firmness of Israeli support in Congress, even if he doesn't have the White House's full approval for his policies. The prime minister thinks he can simply wait out the current administration, they say.
Yeah, 'attacking' Hamas after thousands of rockets is 'reckless and untrustworthy.' I would say that the one who is 'reckless and untrustworthy' is Obama. Is he behaving like an ally?
Of course, the official Israeli response (as opposed to the 'privately' one) is a lot tamer.
"The allegations are unfounded," said Israel's ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer. "Israel deeply appreciates the support we have received during the recent conflict in Gaza from both the Obama administration and the Congress for Israel's right to defend itself and for increased funding of Iron Dome."
Blah, blah, blah. Obama is clearly ticked off. It's hard to run a war from a golf course.
A senior Obama administration official said the White House didn't intend to get into a "tit for tat" with the Israelis when the war broke out in Gaza. "We have many, many friends around the world. The United States is their strongest friend," the official said. "The notion that they are playing the United States, or that they're manipulating us publicly, completely miscalculates their place in the world."
American officials say they believe they have been able to exert at least some influence over Mr. Netanyahu during the Gaza conflict. But they admit their influence has been weakened as he has used his sway in Washington, from the Pentagon and Congress to lobby groups, to defuse U.S. diplomatic pressure on his government over the past month.
And for the record, Israel did nothing wrong! It's Obama who's changing the rules in the middle of the game.
On July 20, Israel's defense ministry asked the U.S. military for a range of munitions, including 120-mm mortar shells and 40-mm illuminating rounds, which were already kept stored at a pre-positioned weapons stockpile in Israel.
The request was approved through military channels three days later but not made public. Under the terms of the deal, the Israelis used U.S. financing to pay for $3 million in tank rounds. No presidential approval or signoff by the secretary of state was required or sought, according to officials.
...
A U.S. defense official said the standard review process was properly followed.
"There was no intent to blindside anyone. The process for this transfer was followed precisely along the lines that it should have," another U.S. defense official said.
Then the officials learned that, in addition to asking for tank shells and other munitions, Israel had submitted a request through military-to-military channels for a large number of Hellfire missiles, according to Israeli and American officials.
The Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency, or DSCA, was about to release an initial batch of the Hellfires, according to Israeli and congressional officials. It was immediately put on hold by the Pentagon, and top officials at the White House instructed the DSCA, the U.S. military's European Command and other agencies to consult with policy makers at the White House and the State Department before approving any additional requests.
A senior Obama administration official said the weapons transfers shouldn't have been a routine "check-the-box approval" process, given the context. The official said the decision to scrutinize future transfers at the highest levels amounted to "the United States saying 'The buck stops here. Wait a second… It's not OK anymore.' "
White House and State Department officials were worried about public reaction.
The Palestinians, in particular, were angry, according to U.S. diplomats.
"The U.S. is a partner in this crime," Jibril Rajoub, a leader in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Western-backed Fatah party, said of the decision to provide arms to Israel during the conflict.
Even as tensions with the White House and the State Department were spilling over, Israeli officials worked to expedite the Iron Dome money on Capitol Hill.
Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona said Israeli officials told lawmakers the money was urgently needed because they were running out of interceptors and couldn't hold out for a month or more.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said Congress's goal in approving the money quickly on Aug. 1 was to send a message to the administration to stop calling Israel out about civilian casualties.
A senior Republican congressional aide said Israeli officials told senators they wanted the money sooner rather than later. He said Israel's main purpose in accelerating the vote in Congress to before legislators' August recess was to provide an overwhelming "show of support" for the military operation.
The last straw for many U.S. diplomats came on Aug. 2 when they say Israeli officials leaked to the media that Mr. Netanyahu had told the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, that the Obama administration was "not to ever second-guess me again" about how to deal with Hamas.
The White House and State Department have sought to regain greater control over U.S.-Israeli policy. They decided to require White House and State Department approval for even routine munitions requests by Israel, officials say.
Instead of being handled as a military-to-military matter, each case is now subject to review—slowing the approval process and signaling to Israel that military assistance once taken for granted is now under closer scrutiny.
A senior U.S. official said the U.S. and Israel clashed mainly because the U.S. wanted a cease-fire before Mr. Netanyahu was ready to accept one. "Now we both want one," one of the officials said.
A top Israeli official said the rift runs deeper than that. "We've been there before with a lot of tension with us and Washington. What we have now, on top of that, is mistrust and a collision of different perspectives on the Middle East," the official said. "It's become very personal."
We have to become more reliant on our defense and weapons capabilities and less on the United States, at least so long as this administration is in power. 'Most pro-Israel administration evah'? You got to be kidding.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Dan Shapiro, Egypt, Gaza, Hamas, Hellfire missiles, John Kerry, Michael Oren, Operation Protective Edge, Qatar, Ron Dermer, Turkey, weapons acquisition
Michael Oren on Hamas' media strategy
Michael Oren explains how
causing civilian casualties gains media attention and international sympathy for Hamas.
And the reason is simple:
More than a military strategy, Hamas has a media strategy.
Calculatingly, Hamas employs primitive military tactics to mount a
sophisticated media campaign that can threaten Israel's basic security.
And in conducting that offensive, Hamas can count on one of the world's
most powerful weapons: the international media.
Hamas fires hundreds of
rockets at Israeli cities and towns and tries to attack Israeli farms
via the sea and through tunnels. Thanks to Israeli technology and
vigilance, few of these actions have inflicted extensive damage. Still,
they disrupt Israeli life, impair the economy, and leave cumulative
psychological scars.
As a sovereign nation,
Israel must respond robustly to such attacks. And as a state committed
to Jewish and democratic values, Israel provides water, humanitarian
aid, and electricity to the residents of Gaza even as their government
murders Israelis.
Throughout, Israel
strives tirelessly to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties. Yet in
spite of the hundreds of thousands of leaflets Israel dropped, the
countless text messages and personal phone calls it made warning
Palestinian civilians to leave targeted areas, tragedies still occur.
Israel deeply regrets these losses and continuously hones its operations
to make them more surgical still.
In a war with Hamas,
though, Israel's strength and morality can become vulnerability and
guilt. By investing nothing in air raid sirens and bomb shelters, by
hiding deep beneath neighborhoods and shooting near hospitals and
mosques, Hamas ensures that Israel will invariably wound and kill
civilians.
Hamas gunmen carry out
attacks disguised as women and old men, fight from UN and Red Cross
vehicles, store rockets in schools, and physically prevent Palestinian
civilians from fleeing combat zones. This context, though, is rarely
mentioned by the media when covering the civilian cost of the fighting.
...
Unwittingly or not, the international media is complicit in Hamas's
plan. While some may think they help the Palestinians by highlighting
their plight, in reality, the journalists only worsen it. They
effectively absolve Hamas of culpability for using Gaza's population as a
human shield, of stealing its aid money to buy munitions and dig
fortified tunnels with the sole purpose of killing Israelis, and of
contributing nothing to Gaza's welfare.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: anti-Israel media bias, civilian casualties, Gaza, Hamas, human shields, Michael Oren, Operation Protective Edge
Cease fire talks going on, Kerry not invited
There are cease fire talks going in to try to bring the war between Israel and Hamas to an end, but US Secretary of State John FN Kerry - who is on his way - is not even invited. Former Israeli ambassador to the United States says that's because of the
United States' tense relations with both Egypt (where the Obama administration backed the Muslim Brotherhood) and Israel.
In comments to Channel 2 on Monday afternoon,
Oren cited the Obama administration’s strained relations with Egypt, and
the “tension” in ties between the US and Israel. To Israel’s chagrin,
he said, America has consequently not been able to play a more
constructive role in this crisis, whereas previous administrations had
been able to do so in past crises. He commented on the way the
Administration handled the Arab spring, the blame it placed on Israel
for the failure of the peace process, and the US’s strained ties with
Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.
Oren said Kerry and the Obama administration
have close ties with Qatar and Turkey, “who are not on the best terms
with Egypt right now.”
Oren emphasized that Kerry, who made things
worse with a live-microphone slip Sunday criticizing the scope of
Israel’s operation, was coming to the region even though that hot-mic
incident showed he had “not been invited.”
“It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation, it’s a
hell of a pinpoint operation,” Kerry told an aide over the phone on
Sunday, seemingly criticizing the Israeli government’s pledge to limit
the scope of its ground invasion,
Politico reported.
Kerry used the same word, “pinpoint,” that was employed by Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a Sunday interview with CNN.
It was plain from those remarks that Kerry
decided on his own to come to the region, Oren said, rather than being
invited to do so.
Oren’s comments followed remarks Sunday by
Channel 2′s veteran Arab affairs analyst Ehud Ya’ari, who said that as
far as Israel is concerned, the secretary of state’s ceasefire trip was
premature “and bad for Israel,” and that he should have left it to the
Egyptians to lead the ceasefire effort. Ya’ari said many people,
“including senior American officials,” tried to convey this to Kerry.
This marks the continuing trend of the Obama
administration “to give credit” to the Muslim Brotherhood, in this case
Hamas, Ya’ari said, except that now it’s graver, because “we’re in a
war.”
I guess the Obama administration has done one hell of a job of repairing the United States' relations with the Middle Eastern countries that George W. Bush had screwed up, haven't they?
The silver lining in the cloud as that at least the insufferable Martin Indyk has gone back to his think tank, and presumably won't be along on this trip.
What could go wrong?
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, cease fire, Egypt, Gaza, Hamas, John Kerry, Michael Oren, Muslim Brotherhood, Operation Protective Edge, Qatar, Turkey
An exchange of emails well worth reading
Michael Oren and David Rothkopf were college roommates at Columbia around the time that I was there. Although both went into international politics, their lives took very different directions. Oren has just finished a term as Israel's ambassador to the United States. Rothkopf is editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine.
Although he considers himself a Zionist, Rothkopf only visited Israel for the first time in late 2013. This exchange of emails resulted from Oren asking Rothkopf what he thought about his visit. You should definitely
read the whole thing. It's way too long to start excerpting. Oren tells Rothkopf to get rid of his idealized conception and to start looking at Israel as a real country with real people. When I did that 35 years ago, I decided to make aliya.
Labels: Michael Oren, personal stuff, US-Israel relationship
Stone throwing is not a 'hobby'
How bad was that
puff piece Jodi Rudoren wrote about 'Palestinian' stone throwers? Here's Israel's
Ambassador to the US responding in a letter to the editor. I am guessing that he really want to respond via an op-ed and the Times wouldn't publish it.
While Palestinian protagonists are described in detail, their Israeli
victims are largely dehumanized “settlers” — no name, age or gender. And
for the record, all Israelis, irrespective of residence and ethnicity,
Jews and Arabs, drive with yellow plates.
The article could have added another chart: the names of Israelis who
have been killed or permanently maimed by rock throwers and the time
they have spent hospitalized. One of the names would be Adele Biton, a
2-year-old seriously wounded by a stone in March.
The article notes that Palestinian youths attack Israelis “because their
brothers and fathers did.” By breaking that pattern, Palestinian
leaders can prepare their people for peace.
You really think Jodi didn't try to slant that article? Come on...
Labels: anti-Israel media bias, Jodi Rudoren, Michael Oren, New York Times
'If you abandon the Middle East, the Middle East will come running after you'
Haaretz's weekend edition has a lengthy interview with soon-to-be-leaving ambassador to the United States Michael Oren.
There's a lot in here with which I disagree. For instance, I believe that trading US action on Iran for 'Palestine' is a bad idea. I believe that things are and were nowhere near as rosy as Oren claims that they are and were between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Obama. I don't believe that President Obama is such a great friend of Israel's. And I don't believe that the Women of the Wall fiasco is anywhere near as important as Oren (and his ideological buddies at Haaretz) make it out to be.
But on
this point, he is dead on, and all Americans should take it to heart.
“And besides that, there is a great weariness now in America that is
leading to a kind of neo-isolationism. In the past decade, this great
nation has been through two difficult wars and a traumatic economic
shakeup. So you have this exhaustion and cutbacks in the defense budget
and a shrinking of the military and an aversion to any more overseas
intervention. Lawmakers are asking why send money to Egypt or the
Palestinians rather than invest that money in a new bridge. Americans
are tired of the Middle East. They don’t want to hear about it, and they
don’t want to know what is happening in Egypt and Syria and Iran. And
what I am compelled to repeat here over and over is that when the
helicopters took off from the Saigon embassy in 1975, the Vietcong did
not chase the Americans all the way to Fifth Avenue. But it won’t be the
same with the Middle East. You can’t run away from the Middle East,
because if you run away from the Middle East, the Middle East will come
running after you. I think President Obama understands this. Secretary
of State [John] Kerry certainly understands this. But a mood of
weariness and isolationism is making it difficult for them. America in
2013 is an America that is tired of the Middle East.”
I'm not suggesting that the US intervene on the side of the rebels in Syria - it's far too late for that. But you can't run away. And ultimately, I believe that the only way that Iran can be completely stopped is military action under the lead of the United States. But for that to happen, Americans first have to understand that they have a stake in what goes on in this region, and it's not just because of your friendship with Israel.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Egyptian Revolution, Iranian nuclear threat, Michael Oren, Syrian uprising
