Here's a summary of this 132-page book, which I guarantee you will read in one sitting:
This book is the fruit of many years of research, during which thousands
of sources have been meticulously reviewed in libraries and archives
worldwide. It is no doubt the most comprehensive and extensive review of
some 3,000 years of Palestinian history, with emphasis on the
Palestinian people’s unique contribution to the world and to humanity.
So what's so special about this book? JPost's Joy Bernard explains:
The catch? This lauded historical account that is also available in
Arabic and in Hebrew and was penned by the Israeli writer offers no real
insight, let alone content. Yes, that's right- "History of the
Palestinian People" is a book whose every single page (and there are 120
of them) is a blank.
Unfortunately, if you go to Amazon today and search "History of the Palestinian People + Voll" or "History of the Palestinian People + Assaf Voll" you find something different (and if you search "History of the Palestinian People + Assaf," you find nothing). But at least it's (seemingly) on the right side. This is from the author's summary.
The secret is that there will never be peace between the Palestinians
and the State of Israel because the Palestinians were formed for a very
specific purpose which is to lead to the destruction of the State of
Israel. This is their sole objective…..at least that of the leaders.
Let's hope Amazon doesn't discover this one.
By the way, if you click on the link in my original post, you get a message from Amazon that they 'can't find that page.' A likely story.....
Amazon's new best seller: "A History of the Palestinian People from Ancient Times to the Modern Era"
It's only been out ten days, but this book has become the number 1 best seller on Amazon in its Israel and Palestine History category. Its price has dropped to $6.21 from $7.79 yesterday when I first saw it. It's already garnered 245 reviews. Here's a summary of this 132-page book, which I guarantee you will read in one sitting:
This book is the fruit of many years of research, during which thousands of sources have been meticulously reviewed in libraries and archives worldwide. It is no doubt the most comprehensive and extensive review of some 3,000 years of Palestinian history, with emphasis on the Palestinian people’s unique contribution to the world and to humanity.
So what's so special about this book? JPost's Joy Bernard explains:
The catch? This lauded historical account that is also available in Arabic and in Hebrew and was penned by the Israeli writer offers no real insight, let alone content. Yes, that's right- "History of the Palestinian People" is a book whose every single page (and there are 120 of them) is a blank.
In other words, we finally have a book that tells the truth about the 'history' of the 'Palestinian people.' It's about time.
Anyone who recognizes this picture and can identify the person in it before they read this post deserves a prize.
This post is slightly off topic, as in it doesn't directly deal with Israel. Rabbi Steven Pruzansky is one of my college classmates (for the record, another is David M. ("Dave") Friedman, the 'Israel adviser' to Donald Trump). Rabbi Pruzansky is the rabbi of a shul in Teaneck, New Jersey where many of my friends consider him to be a 'controversial' figure.
About a week ago, I told someone somewhere in social media that this election in the US reminds me of the 1972 Nixon-McGovern election. I was a little too young to vote, but I can recall arguing with my parents that they should vote for Nixon because 'he may be a crook, but at least he's our crook.' Nixon was gone two years later, but I certainly have no regrets for having supported him.
Rabbi Pruzansky is a historian and compares this election to a much older one of which I was not aware. He compares it to the election of 1856. The picture at the top is the guy who lost that election.
Imagine for a moment a US presidential election between two
candidates, neither of whom is particularly beloved to the populace. One
candidate is an undistinguished former Senator and lackluster Secretary
of State who had few if any accomplishments in office but is breaking a
social barrier by running for the presidency, and the other is a
wealthy businessman with dictatorial tendencies and a populist streak
and inspires devotion in his followers and fear and loathing in his
adversaries. Even members of his own extended family support his
opponent. Imagine also that exactly four years after one of these
individuals is elected – after four years in office of abject failure,
with simmering problems and no solutions – that utter catastrophe
befalls the nation.
We need not let our imagination run that wild because such was the
fateful election of 1856 that pitted James Buchanan against John C.
Fremont. Buchanan, a Democrat, had served without distinction in the
House and Senate, and as Secretary of State under President Polk. His
sole qualification for the presidency, aside from the boxes checked off
on his resume, was that immediately before the election season he was
serving as American ambassador in Great Britain and so was removed from
the disputes then raging over slavery. He remains the only lifelong
bachelor ever to serve as president, shattering once and for all that
important impediment to high office.
His opponent was the colorful Republican John C. Fremont, whose long
locks flowed over his ears and whose beard gave him a dashing
appearance. Fremont was a wealthy businessman who gained his fortune in
an unorthodox way. He was by profession an explorer, one of many
Americans to go west in the 1840’s blazing new trails and expanding
America’s horizons. He ventured as far as California, and when the
Mexican-American War erupted in 1846, Fremont was awarded a commission
as a Lt.-Colonel, won several battles in California (including in the
area of Santa Barbara) and almost immediately declared himself the
military governor of California.
That did not sit well with his superiors. Fremont was eventually
court-martialed and convicted but had his sentence commuted by President
Polk. Back in California, Fremont found his fortune when his Mexican
workers discovered enormous quantities of gold on land Fremont claimed
as his own. He parlayed that gold into the purchase and development of
extensive real estate holdings, especially around San Francisco, and
into a career in politics, briefly as Senator from California and then
the run for President as the first candidate ever of the newly-minted
Republican Party.
There was a third-party candidate as well in this election. Former
president Millard Fillmore ran on the ticket of the self-proclaimed
“American Party,” nicknamed the “Know-Nothings.” They were a party with a
single cause – opposition to immigration; at that time, the disfavored
immigrants were Catholics from Europe. There is no truth to the rumor
that Fillmore promised to build a wall along the Eastern seaboard to
prevent Catholic immigration and have the Vatican pay for it. In any
event, American society today is much more efficient, so Fillmore’s
party has been subsumed by one of our two parties.
All things considered, Fremont was the superior candidate and despite
his intriguing resume would have made a better president, but who
knows? Buchanan the Democrat was pro-slavery in an understated way, and
as a northerner (the only president ever to be born in Pennsylvania), it
was assumed he would attract some Northern votes along with those of
the Southern pro-slavery crowd. Fremont the Republican was anti-slavery,
as were most Republicans of that era, and that moral stance forced his
own father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, to oppose
Fremont and support Buchanan.
Democrats accused Fremont of being unfit for the presidency and
claimed that he would surely provoke a civil war. In the end , of
course, it was Buchanan who won and whose failures as president made the
Civil War, the bloodiest in American history, inevitable.
The election
was closer than it seemed. Buchanan won 45% of the vote to Fremont’s
33%, but the anti-immigrant Fillmore earned a startling 22% of the vote
as the third-party candidate. Absent Fillmore’s involvement and
siphoning of votes from the other two candidates, Fremont might have won
and American history might not have taken the dark turn it did. Fremont
carried most of the north, but even lost his own state of California;
Buchanan swept the slave south and his home state of Pennsylvania (then,
the second largest state after New York). Fillmore won Maryland and
that’s all, and soon faded into obscurity.
Buchanan as President, despite his gaudy resume, allowed the fight
over slavery to escalate. He supported the Dred Scott decision wherein
the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had no authority to prohibit
slavery in the territories and basically allowed this moral and civil
problem to fester. It festered into the outbreak of the Civil War a
month after Buchanan left office and Abraham Lincoln was sworn in. Such
is the price for failed leadership in a time of crisis and for stale
ideas when new thinking is required.
Fremont fought in the Civil War for the Union, later moved to New
York, died in 1890, and is buried in Sparkill, New York in Rockland
County, just a few miles south of the Tappan Zee Bridge.
Is past prologue?
Continue reading here. By the way, there is a city along the California coast not far from San Francisco named Fremont, California. Yes, named after the same John C. Fremont (although you have to go his Wikipedia page to confirm that).
For those who don't recognize the picture, it's Iranian Neda Agha Soltan shortly after being shot by Iranian thugs in the streets of Tehran in June 2009. The suppression of the Iranian revolution in 2009 (the two opposition candidates remain under house arrest six years later) is one reason why Leon Wieseltier is critical of President Hussein Obama's insistence on forgetting history (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
This is nothing other than the mentality of disruption applied to
foreign policy. In the realm of technology, innovation justifies itself;
but in the realm of diplomacy and security, innovation must be
justified, and it cannot be justified merely by an appetite for change.
Tedium does not count against a principled alliance or a grand strategy.
Indeed, a continuity of policy may in some cases—the Korean peninsula,
for example: a rut if ever there was one—represent a significant
achievement. But for the president, it appears, the tradition of all the
dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
Certainly it did in the case of Cuba, where the feeling that it was time
to move on (that great euphemism for American impatience and
inconstancy) eclipsed any scruple about political liberty as a condition
for movement; and it did with Iran, where, as Rhodes admits, the
president was tired of things staying the same, and was enduring history
as a rut. And in the 21st century, when all human affairs are to begin
again!
Obama’s restlessness about American policy toward Iran was apparent
long before the question of Iran’s nuclear capability focused the mind
of the world. In his first inaugural address,
he famously offered an extended hand in exchange for an unclenched
fist. Obama seems to believe that the United States owes Iran some sort
of expiation. As he explained
to Thomas Friedman the day after the nuclear agreement was reached, “we
had some involvement with overthrowing a democratically elected regime
in Iran” in 1953. Six years ago, when the streets of Iran exploded in a
democratic rebellion and the White House stood by as it was put down by
the government with savage force against ordinary citizens, memories of
Mohammad Mosaddegh were in the air around the administration, as if to
explain that the United States was morally disqualified by a prior sin
of intervention from intervening in any way in support of the
dissidents. The guilt of 1953 trumped the duty of 2009. The Iranian
fist, in the event, stayed clenched. Or to put it in Rhodes-spin, our
Iran policy remained in a rut.
But it is important to recognize that
the rut—or the persistence of the adversarial relationship between Iran
and the United States—was not a blind fate, or an accident of
historical inertia, or a failure of diplomatic imagination. It was a
choice. On the Iranian side, the choice was based upon a worldview that
was founded in large measure on a fiery, theological anti-Americanism,
an officially sanctioned and officially disseminated view of Americanism
as satanism. On the American side, the choice was based upon an
opposition to the tyranny and the terror that the Islamic Republic
represented and proliferated. It is true that in the years prior to the
Khomeini revolution the United States tolerated vicious abuses of human
rights in Iran; but then our enmity toward the ayatollahs’ autocracy may
be regarded as a moral correction. (A correction is an admirable kind
of hypocrisy.) The adversarial relationship between America and the
regime in Tehran has been based on the fact that we are proper
adversaries. We should be adversaries. What democrat, what pluralist, what liberal, what conservative, what believer, what non-believer, would want this Iran for a friend?
When one speaks about an unfree country, one may refer either to its
people or to its regime. One cannot refer at once to both, because they
are not on the same side. Obama likes to think, when he speaks of Iran,
that he speaks of its people, but in practice he has extended his hand
to its regime. With his talk about reintegrating Iran into the
international community, about the Islamic Republic becoming
“a very successful regional power” and so on, he has legitimated a
regime that was more and more lacking in legitimacy. (There was
something grotesque about the chumminess, the jolly camaraderie, of the
American negotiators and the Iranian negotiators. Why is Mohammad Javad
Zarif laughing?) The text of the agreement states
that the signatories will submit a resolution to the UN Security
Council “expressing its desire to build a new relationship with Iran.”
Not a relationship with a new Iran, but a new relationship with this
Iran, as it is presently—that is to say, theocratically, oppressively,
xenophobically, aggressively, anti-Semitically, misogynistically,
homophobically—constituted. When the president speaks about the people
of Iran, he reveals a bizarre refusal to recognize the character of life
in a dictatorship. In his recent Nowruz message,
for example, he exhorted the “people of Iran … to speak up for the
future [they] seek.” To speak up! Does he think Iran is Iowa? The last
time the people of Iran spoke up to their government, they left their
blood on the streets. “Whether the Iranian people have sufficient
influence to shift how their leaders think about these issues,” Obama
told Friedman, “time will tell.” There he is again, the most powerful
man in the world, backing off and bearing witness.
If
I could believe that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action marked the
end of Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon—that it is, in the president’s
unambiguous declaration, “the most definitive path by which Iran will
not get a nuclear weapon” because “every pathway to a nuclear weapon is
cut off”—I would support it. I do not support it because it is none of
those things. It is only a deferral and a delay. Every pathway is not
cut off, not at all. The accord provides for a respite of 15 years, but
15 years is just a young person’s idea of a long time. Time, to borrow
the president’s words, will tell. Even though the text of the agreement
twice states that “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran
ever seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons,” there is no
evidence that the Iranian regime has made a strategic decision to turn
away from the possibility of the militarization of nuclear power. Its
strategic objective has been, rather, to escape the sanctions and their
economic and social severities. In this, it has succeeded. If even a
fraction of the returned revenues are allocated to Iran’s vile
adventures beyond its borders, the United States will have subsidized an
expansion of its own nightmares.
I don't believe that Obama is so stupid as to decide to ignore history entirely. I think he wanted change - a different policy - that aligned the United States with rogue regimes like Iran and Cuba. Those are the people with whom he feels most comfortable. Another reminder.
Victor Davis Hanson: The IDF is the modern-day William Tecumseh Sherman
Victor Davis Hanson is not content with chocking up the world's hatred of Israel to anti-Semitism. He has a different explanation. Hanson argues that the IDF is a modern-day William Tecumseh Sherman.
The Israeli army was eerily Shermanesque when it went into Gaza. The
IDF targeted the homes of the wealthy Hamas elite, the private
sanctuaries of the tunnels, and the rocketry and other infrastructure of
the Hamas terrorist state. The homes of civilians who did not have
rockets in the backyard or tunnels in the basement were usually not hit,
and that sent a telling Shermanesque lesson. Long after the
international media’s cameras have left, Gazans will argue over why one
man’s house was leveled and another’s was not, leading to the conclusion
more often than not that one was being used by Hamas, either with or
without its owner’s consent, while the other was not. But all Gazans
suffered amid the selective targeting — as did all Georgians and
Carolinians for their allegiance to a plantationist class whose own
interests were not always the same as those of the non-slave-owning
white poor. Fairly or not, the IDF was reminding the people of Gaza that
while it tried to focus exclusively on Hamas, such selectivity was
often impossible when Gazans followed such reckless leaders who
deliberately shielded themselves among civilians.
The IDF taught the supposedly fearsome Islamic warriors of Hamas, who
adopted the loud bells and whistles of primordial killers and who
supposedly love death more than life, that nondescript Israeli
conscripts, through hard training and with the help of sophisticated
technology, were in fact far deadlier than a man in a suicide vest or an
RPG-wielding masked bandit. The IDF, then, like Sherman, sought to
dispel the romantic notion that a uniformed conscript army cannot fight a
warrior culture, or that it becomes so baffled by insurgencies and
asymmetrical warfare as to be rendered helpless. The IDF went into the
heart of Gaza City and came out largely intact after defeating all those
it encountered.
Sherman was obsessed with separating bellicose enemy rhetoric from
facts on the ground. He believed that unless humiliation was a part of
defeat, a tribal society of ranked hierarchies would always concoct
myths to explain away failure. southern newspapers boasted that Sherman
was a Napoleon trapped deep in a Russia-like Georgia and about to be cut
apart by Confederate Cossacks. Yet when his Army of the West sliced
through the center of the state, Sherman smiled that some southerners
had suggested that he go instead over to South Carolina and attack those
who “started” the war.
Again, once the IDF is out of Gaza, civilians will ask their leaders
what the tunnels and rockets, the child tunnel-diggers, the use of human
shields, and all the braggadocio were supposed to achieve. What will
Hamas tell its donors, when it requests money for more cement and rebar?
That it wishes to build schools and hotels and not more instruments of
collective suicide?
Sherman welcomed the hatred he earned from the South. He understood
well the dictum of Machiavelli that men hate far more those who destroy
their patrimonies than those who kill their fathers. He accepted that
humiliating the South was a far graver sin than destroying its manhood,
as Grant had done from May to September 1864 in northern Virginia. Lee
at least could say that brave southerners had killed thousands of
Grant’s troops in defense of their homeland; Sherman’s opponents, like
Generals Hardee, Hood, and Johnson, could not brag that very few
northerners died marching through Georgia or the Carolinas.
Sherman’s rhetoric was bellicose, indeed uncouth — even as he avoided
killing as many southerners as he could. He left civilians as mad at
their own leaders as at him. For all that and more, he remains a
“terrorist,” while the bloodbaths at Cold Harbor and the Crater are not
considered barbaric — and just as the world hates what the IDF did in
Gaza far more than the abject butchery of the Islamic State, which at
the same time was spreading savagery throughout Syria and Iraq, or than
the Russians’ indiscriminate killing in Ukraine, or than what passes for
an average day in the Congo.
Sherman got under our skin, and so does the IDF. Today we call not
losing very many soldiers “disproportionate” warfare, and leaving an
enemy’s territory a mess and yet without thousands of casualties
“terrorism.” The lectures from the IDF about the cynical culpability of
Hamas make the world as livid as did Sherman’s sermonizing about the
cowardly pretensions of the plantationist class.
We tend to hate most deeply in war those who despoil us of our
romance, especially when they humiliate rather than kill us — and teach
us the lesson that the louder and more bellicose often prove the more
craven and weak.
Sean Hannity also interviewed former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold on Wednesday night. Gold gave him a history of Jerusalem.
Let's go to the videotape.
Last night, I posted a video which, like this one, was embedded from Fox News' web site. A couple of people (one in the comments and one on Twitter) complained they couldn't see the video. It turned out that one of them wasn't trying to watch the video but rather to get to the embed code. I don't know how to do that other than getting to Fox's web site. For anyone else who has problems, I would suggest that if you're using NoScript or something similar, you must free up any components that are required to view the video.
By the way, I think this video is Part 1 of 2. I will try to post Part 2 later.
The Sykes–Picot Agreement, officially known as the Asia Minor Agreement, was a secret agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and France,[1] with the assent of Russia, defining their proposed spheres of influence and control in the Middle East should the Triple Entente succeed in defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The negotiation of the treaty occurred between November 1915 and March 1916.[2] The agreement was concluded on 16 May 1916.[3]
The agreement effectively divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman
Empire outside the Arabian peninsula into areas of future British and
French control or influence.[4] The terms were negotiated by the French diplomat François Georges-Picot and British Sir Mark Sykes. The Russian Tsarist government was a minor party to the Sykes–Picot agreement, and when, following the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the Bolsheviks exposed the agreement, 'the British were embarrassed, the Arabs dismayed and the Turks delighted.'[5]
ISIS, the al-Qaeda spin-off that has effectively destroyed Iraq in the last few months, aims to dismantle the Sykes-Picot agreement altogether. That's likely to lead to massive bloodshed in the Middle East, where the only true loyalty is - not even to Islam - tribal.
Here is an English language video from ISIS explaining their goal. Because YouTube has removed ISIS videos before, I downloaded this one.
Let's go to the videotape.
Thanks to US President Hussein Obama, there really isn't anyone to stop them. At least until they meet Israel.
On this day in 1970, Elvis Presley met Pres. Nixon in the White House and offered his help in the war on drugs. pic.twitter.com/1NpTtkuUwS
— World History 101 (@WorldHistory101) December 21, 2013
Nixon would never have been caught with his feet on the White House desk....
Sarah Honig gives some historical context for President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry's mendacious treatment of Israel.
*Even the definitive end of “the Czechoslovakian problem,” didn’t end
Hitler’s provocations – as the appeasers had trusted it would. Hitler
robbed Europeans of “a nice quiet sleep” with yet new demands. These
involved the Free City of Danzig, a semi-autonomous entity created in
1920 as part of the Treaty of Versailles and placed under League of
Nations protection.
Hot on the heels of the Munich Conference, Hitler began agitating for
Danzig’s incorporation into the Third Reich. In April 1939 Poland
warned that it would defy any German incursion. That presumably would
subsequently oblige Warsaw’s allies to come to its aid.
And to forestall this, Déat wrote his commentary with the stirring
headline that tauntingly asked Frenchmen whether they should really want
to put their lives on the line for Danzig. Not only did Déat think that
they shouldn’t, but he further portrayed the Poles as intransigent
firebrands, whose irresponsible politicking was the source of all their
tribulations. They bring calamity on themselves by opposing Germany’s
territorial demands, he asserted.
This should sound ominously familiar to us Israelis all these decades
after Déat’s powerful pro-appeasement piece. We have been told that we
would bring calamity on ourselves if we continue to oppose Ramallah’s
territorial demands. This reprimand was delivered by none other than
America’s top diplomat – precisely when he and his boss also bent over
backwards to appease the tyrants from Tehran.
Anyone who gets in the way of appeasers is sure to be castigated by
them. In his address to the British people on September 27, 1938, a
couple of fateful days before the signing of the Munich Agreement,
Chamberlain made it seem that Czechoslovakia is the troublemaker, that
it harasses Europe’s fellow-democracies with impertinent expectations:
“We cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole
British Empire in war simply on her [Czechoslovakia’s] account. If we
have to fight it must be on larger issues than that.”
And after putting Czechoslovakia in its place, as a diminutive
no-account bother, Chamberlain proceeded to defend his duplicity as
morality incarnate: “Since I first went to Berchtesgaden, more than
20,000 letters and telegrams have come to No.10, Downing Street. Of
course, I have been able to look at a tiny fraction of them, but I have
seen enough to know that the people who wrote did not feel that they had
such a cause for which to fight, if they were asked to go to war in
order that the Sudeten Germans might not join the Reich.”
This is exactly what Déat did to the Poles six month later – depict
their ostensible obstructionism and obduracy as the only obstacles to
world peace. This is what Kerry does to us Israelis when he warns that
if the so-called peace talks fail, it will be our fault and we will reap
the whirlwind. We will only have ourselves to blame for the misfortunes
we bring on ourselves.
Tuesday is the 150th anniversary of President Lincoln's Gettysburg address. President Hussein Obama won't be there. Bret Stephens speculates as to why (Hat Tip: Ricky G).
Abraham Lincoln spoke greatly because he
read wisely and thought deeply. He turned to
Shakespeare,
he once said, "perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional
reader." "It matters not to me whether Shakespeare be well or ill
acted," he added. "With him the thought suffices."
Maybe Mr. Obama has similar literary tastes. It doesn't show. "An economy built to last,"
the refrain from his 2012 State of the Union, borrows from an ad slogan
once used to sell the Ford Edsel. "Nation-building at home," another
favorite presidential trope, was born in a
Tom Friedman
column. "We are the ones we have been waiting for" is the title
of a volume of essays by
Alice Walker.
"The audacity of hope" is adapted from a
Jeremiah Wright
sermon. "Yes We Can!" is the anthem from "Bob the Builder," a TV
cartoon aimed at 3-year-olds.
There is a
common view that good policy and good rhetoric have little intrinsic
connection. Not so. President Obama's stupendously shallow rhetoric
betrays a remarkably superficial mind. Superficial minds designed
ObamaCare. Superficial minds are now astounded by its elementary
failures, and will continue to be astounded by the failures to come.
Is
there a remedy? Probably not. Then again, the president's no-show at
Gettysburg suggests he might be trying to follow Old Abe's counsel in a
fruitful way: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool," the Great
Emancipator is reported to have said, "than to speak and to remove all
doubt."
The Umbrella Men: Neville Chamberlain and Barack Obama
Bill Whittle talks about some of the similarities between Neville Chamberlain and Barack Hussein Obama.
Can personal charm stop a dictator? That's what Neville Chamberlain thought he was going to do, when he implemented Plan Z. Of course it didn't work, and World War II happened in spite of Chamberlain's charisma and personal likability. It was Winston Churchill, the pompous and grumpy stalwart, who actually fought the war.
In this Afterburner, Bill Whittle uses this lesson from history as an allegory to discuss how President Obama assumes he can handle foreign relations.
Let's go to the videotape (Hat Tip: Shy Guy).
In case you're wondering, I took some of the kids up north today.
“Don’t know much about history . . . Don’t know much about geography.”
Victor Davis Hanson laments the President of the United States' boorishness when it comes to history and geography. Of course, that boorishness helps him to follow his instincts and to be anti-Israel.
In
the case of geography, Harvard Law School graduate Barack Obama
recently lectured, “If we don’t deepen our ports all along the Gulf —
places like Charleston, South Carolina; or Savannah, Georgia; or
Jacksonville, Florida . . . ” The problem is that all the examples he
cited are cities on the East Coast, not the Gulf of Mexico. If Obama
does not know where these ports are, how can he deepen them?
Obama’s
geographical confusion has become habitual. He once claimed that he had
been to all “57 states.” He also assumed that Kentucky was closer to
Arkansas than it was to his adjacent home state of Illinois.
In
reference to the Falkland Islands, President Obama called them the
Maldives — islands southwest of India — apparently in a botched effort
to use the Argentine-preferred “Malvinas.” The two island groups may
sound somewhat alike, but they are continents apart. Again, without
basic geographical knowledge, the president’s commentary on the
Falklands is rendered superficial.
When
in the state of Hawaii, Obama announced that he was in “Asia.” He
lamented that the U.S. Army’s Arabic-language translators assigned to
Iraq could better be used in Afghanistan, failing to recognize that
Arabic isn’t the language of Afghanistan. And he also apparently thought
Austrians speak a language other than German.
The
president’s geographical illiteracy is a symptom of the nation’s
growing ignorance of once-essential subjects such as geography and
history. The former is not taught any more as a required subject in many
of our schools and colleges. The latter has often been redefined as
race, class, and gender oppression so as to score melodramatic points in
the present rather than to learn from the tragedy of the past.
The
president in his 2009 Cairo speech credited the European Renaissance
and Enlightenment to Islam’s “light of learning” — an exaggeration if
not an outright untruth on both counts.
Closer to home, the president claimed in 2011 that Texas had
historically been Republican — while in reality it was a mostly Jim Crow
Democratic state for over a century. Republicans started consistently
carrying Texas only after 1980.
Recently, Obama claimed that 20th-century Communist strongman Ho Chi
Minh “was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and
Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson.” That pop assertion is
improbable, given that Ho systematically liquidated his opponents,
slaughtered thousands in land-redistribution schemes, and brooked no
dissent.
Those who ignore the past are destined to repeat it. And those who cannot find a place on a map cannot appreciate its challenges. Obama is a disaster.
The truth is that there has never been a nation or state of Palestine in human history (nor did outnumbered and poorly-armed
Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees from Arab countries "expel" the
Arabs within Israel's borders after being attacked by them and 5 Arab
states in 1947-48).
Israel was carved out of a corner of the
400 year old Turkish Ottoman Empire by a **unanimous** vote of the
League of Nations in 1922 -- exactly like Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and
Iraq were.
But only tiny, democratic Israel's existence --
which is justified by deeper historical ties than any -- is questioned.
None of the 22, incomparably larger Arab dictatorships and colonies
surrounding it ever are. That discrimination alone is proof that
anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
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
