White House Chief of Staff calls Israel's existence 'occupation'
On Monday, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, who was representing his boss, told the J Street convention that Israel must end 'more than 50 years of occupation (Hat Tip: Eliyahu P).'
McDonough then described the alternate to a two-state agreement: a
one-state solution based on unilateral annexation and abandonment of
democratic rights for Palestinians that, he warned, “would only
contribute to Israel’s further isolation.” In other words, he said, more
divestment, boycotts and efforts to delegitimize Israel in the
international community.
“An occupation that has lasted more than
50 years must end,” McDonough said, one of several times he brought the
crowd to its feet.
While I have occasionally heard American officials refer to an Israeli 'occupation,' this is the first time I have ever heard an American official refer to an 'occupation' starting before 1967 (2015 - 50 = 1965).
Is the Obama administration now asserting - as Fatah and Hamas do - that Israel's very creation constitutes an 'occupation' of Arab land?
If yes, that's not likely to bring about a whole lot of trust for the Obama administration. And that's the least of the problems.
As to 'pro-Israel' J Street, no one should be surprised to see them applauding that assertion.
"The situation is out of control, and it is not reversible," said
Soeren Kern, an analyst at the Gatestone Institute and author of annual
reports on the "Islamization of France."
"Islam is a permanent
part of France now. It is not going away," Mr. Kern said. "I think the
future looks very bleak. The problem is a lot of these
younger-generation Muslims are not integrating into French society.
Although they are French citizens, they don't really have a future in
French society. They feel very alienated from France. This is why
radical Islam is so attractive because it gives them a sense of meaning
in their life."
While not a complete safe-haven for al Qaeda-type
operatives, Paris and other French cities have become more fertile
places for Muslim extremists in the past decade. City leaders have
allowed virtual Islamic mini-states to thrive as Muslims gain power to
govern in their own way.
"There are no-go areas not just in Paris,
but all over France, where they are effectively in control," said
Robert Spencer, who directs JihadWatch.org, a nonprofit that monitors
Muslim extremists.
"They're operating with impunity, apparently
secure in the knowledge that authorities cannot or will not act
decisively to stop them," he said. "And with the universal denial and
obfuscation of the clear motive for the Charlie Hebdo attack, they have
good reason to think that."
The attackers who killed 12 people at
the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo claimed to be members
of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. Witnesses said they spoke
perfect French, a strong indication that they are homegrown terrorists
who received help from AQAP or another group.
And it's not just France. It's all over Europe.
Said Mr. Kern, "Europe is very committed to multiculturalism. So any
speech critical of Islam is immediately branded as being Islamophobic or
racist or something like that. There's not really an honest debate
about what's going on in Europe because the European elite have so much
invested in this multicultural society that they're trying to build."
For those of you sitting in the US who think this doesn't affect you... French citizens don't need a visa to travel to the United States. Neither do most European citizens. Maybe once Obama is gone, that can be reconsidered.
For that matter, French and other European citizens don't need a visa to travel to Israel either, although we've been known to deny entry to people who come here to make trouble, and the French government knows it.in
But as long as the attitude toward Islamic terrorism in France and in other countries in Europe remains like the flashing light above, the West is going to have a problem and will some day - God Forbid - be defeated.
Unfortunately, stones are thrown at cars every day in and around Jerusalem. And it's considered 'non-violent.' Just ask the United Nations, the European Union or the Obama administration. Doesn't look non-violent to me.
If you're an Orthodox Jew like I am, you may have missed President Hussein Obama's speech to the United Nations on Wednesday, the eve of Rosh HaShanna. Here's a recap.
Obama in his remarks offered praise to controversial cleric Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah
and referred to him as a moderate Muslim leader who can help combat the
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s (ISIL or ISIS) radical ideology.
However, Bin Bayyah himself has long been engulfed in controversy for many of his views, including the reported backing of a 2004 fatwa that advocated violent resistance against Americans fighting in Iraq.
...
“The ideology of ISIL or al Qaeda or Boko Haram will wilt and die if
it is consistently exposed, confronted, and refuted in the light of
day,” Obama said before the U.N., according to a White House transcript
of his remarks.
“Look at the new Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies—Sheikh
bin Bayyah described its purpose: ‘We must declare war on war, so the
outcome will be peace upon peace,’” Obama said, quoting the
controversial cleric.
Concern over the administration’s relationship with Bin Bayyah started as early as 2013, when outrage ensued after he was reported to have met with Obama’s National Security Council staff at the White House.
While Bin Bayyah has condemned the actions of groups such as Boko
Haram and ISIL, he also has taken controversial positions against
Israel.
He issued in 2009 a fatwa “barring ‘all forms of normalization’ with
Israel,” according to a Fox report on the White House meeting.
Additionally, the notorious 2004 fatwa permitting armed resistance
against U.S. military personnel in Iraq reportedly stated that
“resisting occupation troops” is a “duty” for all Muslims, according to reports about the edict.
And then Obama dropped the other shoe. After spending fifteen minutes
blabbering about the glories and wonders of Islam, even as he decried
extremism and sectarianism, Obama proceeded to blame Israel for conflict
in the Middle East:
Leadership
will also be necessary to address the conflict between Palestinians and
Israelis. As bleak as the landscape appears, America will never give up
the pursuit of peace. The situation in Iraq, Syria and Libya should cure
anyone of the illusion that this conflict is the main source of
problems in the region; for far too long, it has been used in part as a
way to distract people from problems at home. And the violence engulfing
the region today has made too many Israelis ready to abandon the hard
work of peace. But let’s be clear: the status quo in the West Bank and
Gaza is not sustainable. We cannot afford to turn away from this effort –
not when rockets are fired at innocent Israelis, or the lives of so
many Palestinian children are taken from us in Gaza. So long as I am
President, we will stand up for the principle that Israelis,
Palestinians, the region, and the world will be more just with two
states living side by side, in peace and security.
The Israelis may not be the “main source of problems in the region,”
but by pressuring Israel before the entire world just weeks after Hamas
continuously fired rockets into Israel and shielded its own rockets with
children, Obama demonstrates his distaste for the Jewish State, and his
desire to cast them as a bleeding abscess leading to more violence. The
moral equivalence here was stunning, unjustifiable, and purely
disgusting.
Over the weekend, my children asked how much longer would be in power. One of the older ones helpfully figured out that the next election is in 2016. I told them that may not help. Hillary Clinton is as bad as Obama, and Elizabeth Warren could be worse.
Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Sunday, March 18.
1) The Washington Post holds the Obama administration accountable
On March 2, the Washington Post ran an editorial, Egypt's Small Concession, about the release of the American NGO workers from Egypt. The editorial concluded:
The generals may suppose that freeing the Americans will be enough to preserve their aid money. It must not be. The Obama administration appears to recognize this: On Thursday, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the administration remained concerned about “the ultimate outcome of the legal process” and wanted to see the NGOs registered. Importantly, officials say that no decision will be made on continuing aid until April and that it will be based on a broad assessment of whether Egypt is moving toward democracy, as required by Congress. The Obama administration has demonstrated that aid to the Egyptian military is not inviolate; it can and should be used as leverage to achieve a transition to democracy. Now the administration must see that transition through.
The Obama administration plans to resume military aid to Egypt, American officials said on Thursday, signaling its willingness to remain deeply engaged with the generals now running the country despite concerns over abuses and a still-uncertain transition to democracy. To restart the aid, which has been a cornerstone of American relations with Egypt for more than three decades, the administration plans on sidestepping a new Congressional requirement that for the first time directly links military assistance to the protection of basic freedoms. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to waive the requirement on national security grounds as soon as early next week, according to administration and Congressional officials. That would allow some, but not yet all of $1.3 billion in military aid this year to move forward, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so that they could discuss internal deliberations.
In other words the editorial's expressed confidence in the administration was misplaced.
After a year of turmoil, U.S. relations with Egypt’s political actors — from the military to the secular elite to the ascendant Islamist political parties — are shaky. A waiver would send the wrong message to all of them. It would confirm the widespread suspicion in Cairo that Washington cared only about its own citizens, not the underlying democratic principles in the NGO case. It would tell the military that, provided Americans are not harmed, it is free to persecute peaceful citizen activists and subvert the democratic transition. It would cruelly break faith with those Egyptians who went to work in U.S.-funded democracy and human rights programs and now will face an unjust trial alone.
The Washington Post has been pretty consistent in its criticisms of President Obama's foreign policy.
In one of its more blatant attempts to rewrite history, on a recent television program, the Palestinian Authority claimed that "If I forget thee, Jerusalem ..." is from the Crusaders, not a part of the Bible. (It is from Psalms, chapter 137.) Palestinian Media Watch reports:
The purpose of the current PA TV song may be to generate Palestinian feelings for "ancient Palestinian roots" in Jerusalem while denying Jewish history there. PMW reported on a PA TV broadcast of an interview with a Palestinian historian who told the audience that the term "If I forget thee, oh Jerusalem" was not from the Bible, but was a crusader term misappropriated by modern Zionism to falsify a Jewish connection to Jerusalem.
“Jerusalem” is mentioned 669 times in the Jewish Bible (Tanach). It does not appear at all in the Koran or in Islamic prayers. Islam’s founder and prophet Mohammad never visited Jerusalem, and no mosque was built there until 682 CE, when the Umayyad Caliph Suleiman Abd al-Malik built the mosque on the Temple Mount to create from scratch an alternative holy site after Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr rebelled against the Islamic rulers in Damascus, conquered Mecca and prevented pilgrims from reaching Mecca for the hajj. And even then, Jerusalem never served as the seat of any Islamic political entity. In fact, after the Arab/Islamic conquest of the region, the aforementioned Umayyad Caliph subsequently built the city of Ramla in 705 CE and his appointees ruled the region from there, not Jerusalem. While the Caliph called the mosque “al-Aqsa”, claiming after the fact that this was the “al-Aqsa mosque referred to in the Koran, as “the further mosque” where Mohammad prayed, this was merely a political contrivance due to the rebellion of al-Zubayr who then controlled Mecca. As Dr. Mordechai Kedar noted in a 2008 article in Yediot Ahronot, Islamic tradition in fact tells us that the aforementioned “al-Aqsa mosque” referred to in the Koran is actually near Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula. “Islamic tradition tells us that al-Aqsa mosque is near Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula. This was unequivocally stated in “Kitab al-Maghazi,” a book by the Muslim historian and geographer al-Waqidi,” Dr. Kedar writes. “According to al-Waqidi, there were two “masjeds” (places of prayer) in al-Gi’irranah, a village between Mecca and Ta’if – one was “the closer mosque” (al-masjid al-adna) and the other was “the further mosque” (al-masjid al-aqsa,) and Muhammad would pray there when he went out of town."
Over the past few years there has been a Palestinian campaign which focuses on the so-called "Judaization" of Jerusalem. A number of related topics have been raised recently in what appears to be an orchestrated campaign initiated by leading figures in the PA, Hamas, and Muslim Brotherhood. On February 24, 2012, Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh delivered a sermon in Cairo at the prominent Al-Azhar Mosque, in which he reportedly stated: "We paid a lot in blood in order to keep Jerusalem an Arabic and Islamic city. The Arab Spring brought the Islamic nation to the threshold of the city of Jerusalem."3 On the same weekend, a large conference on the defense of Jerusalem was held in Qatar under the patronage of the Arab League,4 featuring what has been called "an unprecedented coalition against Israel."5 This is the second Arab League conference on the topic; the first took place in Sirte, Libya, in March 2010, hosted by the country's late president Gaddafi.6 The current conference reportedly7 featured the Qatari emir, politicians, and diplomats from other Middle East countries, secretaries-general of both the Arab League and Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), Sheikh Qaradawi and various other figures from the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood,8 Arab-Israeli MKs, senior Fatah and PA figures including President Abbas, and several rabbis from the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta group. In addition, eight UN officials from various departments attended, as well as Western politicians and academics, representatives of far-left political groups, and at least one Western individual, Prof. Hans Köchler, president of the Vienna-based International Progress Organization (IPO), tied to both the European far-right and far-left.9
Those who wish to minimize the importance of Jerusalem to Jews (and inflate it for Muslims) have an agenda in mind. The point is not greater harmony between Israel and its neighbors.
At a joint news conference on Saturday with Chilean President Sebastian Pinera in Ramallah, 'moderate' 'Palestinian' President Mahmoud AbbasAbu Mazen demanded that his imaginary reichlet of 'Palestine' be allowed to join the United Nations, with borders being the same as the area occupied by Jordan between 1949-67.
“This is one of the September goals and we call on all parties, specifically the Quartet in its next meeting, to do what is necessary to force Israel to stop its aggression and end its occupation of our land,” Abbas said, speaking at a press conference with visiting Chilean President Sebastian Pinera in Ramallah.
The Palestinian Authority president added that peace negotiations have "reached a serious deadlock because of Israel’s land expropriation policy and systematic settlement of Palestinian land in general and Jerusalem in particular in spite of the international consensus that settlements are illegal and that they should not make a de facto situation on the ground.”
Abbas stated that "in spite of all the obstacles," the Palestinian people would continue to support efforts for peace.
Abbas thanked Pinera for recognizing an independent Palestinian state and upgrading the status of the PA's delegation in Santiago.
Pinera responded, stating that "Chile has defended and truly believed in the justice of the Palestinian cause. The Palestinian people should have their viable state and be independent with the right to move freely. They should be able to live in peace with all their neighbors.”
The Chilean president added that he will also discuss the peace process with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who he was scheduled to meet on Sunday.
Chile has the largest community of expatriate 'Palestinians' outside the Arab world.
Of course, there is no 'international consensus' that 'settlements' are 'illegal,' and even if there were one it could not be justifiably implemented ex post facto. Moreover, there were no '1967 borders' - just an armistice line from where the War of Independence ended in 1949. And the 'Palestinian people' are free to leave anytime they can find someone to take them in. But hey - let's not let facts get in the way of Abu Bluff's dreams.
Abu Bluff also rejected Phase II of the 2003 road map on Saturday - saying that he would not agree to a state in 'temporary borders.'
So thanks to the Obama administration's insistence on an Israeli 'settlement freeze' the 'Palestinians' are now on a full blown drive for a 'state' without any negotiations. They have rejected Phase I (dismantling the terror organizations), Phase II (a state in 'temporary borders') and now seek international approval to reject Phase III (a negotiated final settlement) of the 'road map' that was agreed upon in 2003.
US fears Iran will use new technology to speed nuke program
London's Financial Times reports that the United States fears that Iran will shorten the time it needs to obtain nuclear weapons over the coming months by using new technology.
Washington is particularly concerned that Tehran might deploy a new generation of centrifuges to enrich uranium, a process that can yield nuclear fuel and weapons-grade material.
Since such devices are three times faster than the centrifuges Iran relies on now, officials say they would reduce the “dash time” needed to develop a nuclear weapon.
“If they were to deploy large numbers of these second-generation machines then it could dramatically reduce dash time,” said an administration official.
The US would look at the next quarterly report of the UN nuclear watchdog to see if Iran was making progress with the new centrifuges, he said.
The previous such report, in November, indicated Iran planned to deploy several hundred new centrifuges for “research and development” at its once-secret nuclear site near Qom.
David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security (Isis) in Washington said: “The next crisis will probably be over the question of deployment of these advanced centrifuges.”
Iran has been working for years to build a new generation of centrifuges. But they have yet to be deployed in significant numbers in spite of announcements by Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the president, that the effort had succeeded.
The Obama administration says it would take Iran one to two years between reaching a decision to make a bomb and producing enough highly enriched uranium for one weapon. That would leave plenty of time for detection by UN inspectors – unless the centrifuges are at a secret site.
Some outside commentators say far less time would be needed – about six months, according to Isis. Iran says its nuclear programme is purely peaceful.
Commentators agree the calculations would change greatly if Iran deployed more efficient centrifuges.
Hmmm. Is there another Stuxnet worm in the making to cope with this?
The Obama administration has expressed disappointment that a stream of envoys to Prime Minister Netanyahu has not pried out of him his vision of final borders with the 'Palestinians.'
One Israeli official said that while Netanyahu is not opposed to discussing borders, he is unwilling to do so in a vacuum “without first having a clear understanding of security issues, and the character of a future Palestinian state.”
Before discussing a map of a future state of Palestine, the official said, Netanyahu wants to “first discuss the security map.”
Netanyahu has said that in any future agreement Israel would have to retain a security presence on the Jordan River, and – according to a recent Newsweek story – has told the Palestinians he also wants Israeli troops stationed along territory on the Palestinian side of the security barrier to protect the country’s “narrow waistline.”
The official said it is impossible to discuss the contours of a border without first knowing whether a future Palestinian state “will be demilitarized, and how that will be achieved.”
It is also necessary first to see whether this state will recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state and whether it will consider that an agreement with Israel will put an end to the conflict, “with no more demands,” the official said.
The prime minister’s position is that borders cannot be discussed isolated from other issues.
Do they really think he's dumb enough to start giving out Israel's final red line positions without knowing the other side's positions? With whom do they think they are dealing? Ehud Olmert?
As Barak’s rise to power in 1999 makes clear, the media’s bid to demonize the Right and undermine Israel’s alliance with the US in the hopes of restoring the Left to power is nothing new. But this week, a leading media siren was kind enough to expose the media’s entire strategy for disenfranchising the public.
Haaretz’s veteran columnist Akiva Eldar performed this service in a pair of articles published on Tuesday in the Guardian and Haaretz.
Eldar co-authored his Guardian article with his comrade Carlo Strenger. It was their response to Erekat’s declaration of eternal war. Eldar’s main message to Erekat was that he should keep his plans to himself. Certainly he shouldn’t be blabbing about them in a place the Israeli public was liable to see them. It could wreck the media’s entire plan to discredit the government.
Eldar and Strenger scolded, “Erekat’s article is disappointing.
He is not just a private citizen, but the Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator, and he knows Israel and its internal dynamics very well. He knows that raising the right of return at this moment plays into the hands of Israel’s right wing: they will be able to say: ‘We always told you so: the two-state solution is just a Palestinian plot to incorporate the Jewish state into the Greater State of Palestine.’” But then again, as Eldar showed in his article in Haaretz, Erekat doesn’t really have anything to worry about. Eldar and his comrades will keep the Israeli public in the dark about Erekat’s determination to destroy Israel.
Ignoring completely what Erekat wrote, Eldar’s column in Haaretz started where Friedman’s ended. He placed all the blame for the absence of a peace process on Netanyahu’s shoulders. He accused Netanyahu of destroying Israel’s alliance with the US by not embracing Obama’s latest request to abrogate Jewish property rights in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. He then claimed that due to Netanyahu’s behavior, the Obama administration has decided to follow in the Clinton administration’s footsteps and overthrow his government.
As Eldar put it, “When Clinton recently invited Kadima leader Tzipi Livni to a private meeting, this signified an unofficial announcement that Netanyahu’s account in Washington has been closed.”
He continued, “Twelve years ago, when Hillary Clinton’s husband realized that... [Netanyahu] had no intention of honoring his signature (on the Wye River Accord with Yasser Arafat), that was Netanyahu’s last stop before being sent back to his villa in Caesarea.”
So this is the game. The media and the US administration are again colluding with the Israeli Left’s political leadership to overthrow the Netanyahu government. They are willfully ignoring both the will of Israel’s voters and the declared commitment of their favorite “moderate” Palestinians to fight Israel until it is destroyed in order to blame the absence of peace on Netanyahu.
THIS GAME can stop. But two things must happen first.
The Obama administration and the US foreign policy establishment that supports it must pay a price for seeking to undermine the elected government of the US’s most important strategic ally in the region. And Israeli voters – who gave Kadima more mandates in the Knesset than any other party in the last elections – must abandon Livni and her Astroturf party.
Until these things begin to happen we can expect our media to continue to collude with its American partners, and with Livni and Barak, to undermine the will of the public.
Read the whole thing. It would be much easier to defend Netanyahu if he didn't insist on trying to please Obama.
So should we be concerned about Wikileaks? If it's a one-time event, it means that the US will have to rebuild the trust of other countries, some of whom - mostly in the Arab world - have got to be embarrassed about what came out in their names. That will be no small task but it should be a possible task. For other countries - like Israel - it should be possible to brush off this episode.
However, if this becomes a regular occurrence, it would seriously impact the United States' ability to conduct foreign policy.
Michelle Malkin is upset by the fact that the United States was specifically targeted (there's little doubt about that).
For those of you catching up after the holidays, Allahpundit at Hot Air has the most thorough coverage and analysis of the developing story here. Key passage on the anti-American agenda driving the leaks, the transnationalist left’s use of the “hypocrisy” card, and the cowardly, selective publication of our diplomatic communications versus other nations:
The aim, transparently, is to embarrass the target, but since that’s too petty a reason to justify so vicious a tactic, the exposure is unfailingly dressed up as some sort of high-minded attempt to make the target “live by his principles.” If you take this argument seriously, any confidential communication between government officials should be fair game for leaking so long as it somehow contradicts or questions, however glancingly, state policy. (Hypocrisy!) But of course, they’re not limiting publication to only those documents that undermine official State Department positions; as noted above in the context of Turkey’s foreign minister, a lot of this stuff will simply be bits of intelligence about various international actors and speculation about their motives. Nothing “hypocritical” about it — but mighty embarrassing. In fact, there’s nothing “hypocritical” about arguably the biggest revelation thus far, the report of North Korea shipping missiles to Iran. That sort of cooperation goes straight back to Bush’s “axis of evil” speech; theories about collaboration between the two are a staple of proliferation analyses. There’s no U.S. government “lie” that needs to be exposed there, in other words. It’s simply a case of Wikileaks trying to weaken America’s hand by revealing some of the cards that it’s holding. (emphasis added)
Two other points. One: Note that they don’t say they wouldn’t have published the documents if the crucial hypocrisy component was missing. On the contrary, in their sonorous meditation about George Washington, [the Guardian editors] suggest that they would have done so anyway even though the damage to U.S. interests would have been greatly diminished. That’s further evidence that it’s confidentiality itself that they object to, not hypocrisy, and it follows Simon Jenkins’s lead in ignoring the usual balancing act when weighing the merits of a leak between the sensitivity of the information and the public’s interest in knowing about it. Wikileaks would have you believe that confidential government communications are so inherently anti-democratic that exposing them is virtually always in the public interest, no matter what collateral damage might result. No country in the world has ever followed that standard and no country ever will. (emphasis added) Two: To the extent that they do take the hypocrisy standard seriously, does that mean that less democratic nations aren’t fair game for leaks because, hey, at least they’re living by their principles? Wikileaks’s lack of interest to date in revealing state secrets of, say, China is mighty conspicuous given that cracking Beijing’s culture of secrecy would be a far greater intel coup than publishing U.S. diplomatic cables and might even have major political repercussions for the Chinese regime. But then, China isn’t “hypocritical,” you see. And of course China also isn’t likely to tolerate damaging leaks like this the way liberal western nations are…
Many Foggy Bottom officials have proven feckless under both GOP and Democrat administrations. Hillary Clinton’s “smart power” deserved mockery, for sure. But whatever microscopic kernel of constructive criticism may have motivated the Wikileakers and their abettors is galactically outweighed by the destructive sabotage of secure diplomatic communications.
I don't know whom the leakers thought they were helping, but I live in one of the very few countries that might actually have gained from the massive document release. And that benefit is short-term.
The Obama administration abandons Lebanon to the wolves
I'm sure none of you is deluded. But just in case any of you thought that the United States would lift a finger to assist Lebanon if violence spontaneously breaks out with Hezbullah, the transcript of Secretary of State Clinton's interview with Hisham Melhem of the Lebanese newspaper an-Nahar should disabuse you of that notion.
QUESTION: What can the U.S. do in practical terms to help the Lebanese government fend off the campaign waged by Hezbollah and Syria to undermine and discredit the STL as an Israeli-American plot, now that Hezbollah is using "the multitudes" against the STL's investigators as we have seen recently.
SECRETARY CLINTON: The recent assault on Tribunal investigators, which you alluded to, should be of grave concern to all Lebanon’s friends and supporters. Strong statements were made at the UN and elsewhere condemning any actions that attempt to frustrate or undermine the Tribunal and its work. Intimidation and interference should not be tolerated.
The problem in Lebanon is not the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. The problem is that some are threatening violence in order to try to stop justice. The Special Tribunal is an independent judicial entity, established in response to a terrible time in Lebanon’s history by an agreement between the Lebanese government and the United Nations, and brought into force by a UN Security Council Resolution with wide international support. Its work is legitimate and necessary.
We should not lose sight of the fact that the Tribunal symbolizes something larger than the investigation into the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. It represents a chance for Lebanon to begin moving beyond its long history of political violence. Tragically, Lebanese of all communities and confessions have been plagued for years by violence and threats. And yet very few have ever been held accountable for their crimes. This history is a major source of instability and the tension that people in Lebanon feel today. They deserve a return to the rule of law and justice for all – these are crucial building blocks for stability and peace in Lebanon.
QUESTION: There is concern in Lebanon and the region, that if the STL issued indictments against some Hezbollah operatives or leaders, that Hezbollah would resort to force as it did in 2008 to create new facts on the ground. What would the US do in this case?
SECRETARY CLINTON: First, it bears repeating that no one knows what the Special Tribunal is going to do, who it might indict, or when it might choose to move forward. This is an independent process. Hezbollah should know that resorting once again to violence in Lebanon runs completely counter to the interests of the Lebanese people, the interests of the region, and of the United States. They should also know that if the goal of violence is to stop the tribunal, it won’t work. And more importantly, there is simply no justification or excuse for more political violence. That is the position of the United States and it will not change.
QUESTION: There is concern in Lebanon that the country could pay a steep price if it became an arena for renewed regional and international conflicts, and that the U.S. may not appreciate fully the inherent danger in such a situation.
SECRETARY CLINTON: We know this is not the first time Lebanon has faced real challenges and rising tensions. The Lebanese people have shed too many tears and buried too many loved ones. They deserve lasting peace and an end to political violence once and for all. The United States is committed to that goal, and we will continue supporting the Lebanese Armed Forces [which have more loyalty to Hezbullah than to the government of Lebanon. CiJ] to ensure they have the capacity to protect Lebanon’s security from threats both internal and external. We also work hard to avoid actions or statements that would raise temperatures higher or inflame tensions further.
Lebanon has many friends, in addition to the United States, who are strong supporters of its sovereignty and security. We are in frequent contact with our friends and allies about how we can work together to support the Lebanese people and their elected government.
President Suleiman, of course, came to power after the Doha Agreement of 2008, and as his election showed, he has widespread support in Lebanon. He is in a position to help unify Lebanon and maintain the country’s peace and stability.
...
QUESTION: What can you tell us about persistent media reports regarding continued Syrian provisions of missiles, including scuds to Hezbollah, and joint training on these missiles in Syria?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Reports of the transfer of increasingly sophisticated weapons from Syria to Hezbollah is of serious concern to the United States and to the international community. It threatens regional security. It threatens Lebanon’s security. It destabilizes the region in a way that serves no one’s interests. Let’s not forget that Hezbollah, in 2008, did just what it swore it would never do: turn its weapons against the Lebanese people—the very people it swore to defend—and that’s something that should never be encouraged, enabled, or repeated.
We have been warning everyone, including Syria, about the dangers of miscalculation and the dangers associated with the transfer of sophisticated technologies and weaponry.
Notice how she avoids answering the first three questions and just acknowledges the problem in the fourth one. It should be clear from reading this interview that the Obama administration will not lift a finger if Hezbullah carries out a coup. Nor will it do anything about Syria 'protecting its interests' in Lebanon.
Good bye Lebanon. It's been....
By the way, on Friday, Representatives Howard Berman (D-Cal) and Nita Lowey (D-NY) lifted their holds on aid to the Lebanese Armed Forces, and the US transferred that aid on Friday afternoon. I'll talk about that in a separate post, but it doesn't change my assessment of the interview above. Lebanon has been abandoned.
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
