On the face of it, Russia’s active, aggressive and some say malevolent Middle East intervention bodes ill for the Jewish state.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s last-minute brokering of a compromise deal over the Assad regime’s chemical weapons stockpile and his prevention of an American military strike on Syria solved immediate domestic challenges for US President Barack Obama; uncertain congressional approval and American popular opposition to a US military strike posed obstacles to US enforcement of its declared red lines on the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons.
However, Obama’s last-minute acceptance of Russia’s intervention sent shock waves through Arab capitals and may have triggered more ominous dangers to western influence and power in the Middle East. The price of Russian ascendency and apparent American passivity may also drag Israel into the middle of the Middle East fray that it has been trying to avoid.
A senior member of the PLO’s Fatah party told me recently that the Arab world’s anti-Obama, pro-Putin crusade is in full swing, especially in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Who, he asked rhetorically, will protect Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states from the Iranian regime and its terrorists? Obama’s statement in his September 10th speech on Syria that “the United States is not the world’s policeman” has fed Arab concerns. My Arab colleague noted that “Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are going to switch sides soon, leave the American orbit and take cover under the Russian protective umbrella.”
“But how can you trust Russia?” I queried, “they have been financing and supporting the avowed enemies of the Sunni Arab world, selling sophisticated weapons systems to the Assad regime and helping build the Iranian nuclear program.”
He retorted that from an Arab point of view, Putin stood by his allies and showed resolve and strength, while the US abandoned former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, supported the Muslim Brotherhood, neglected the Syrian opposition and killed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi even after Gaddafi acceded to US demands to give up his nuclear and non-conventional weapons program.
In another conversation, a Syrian friend assessed this week that in a Middle East where perceptions of power shape realities and command local loyalties even more than real muscle does, Russia’s perceived takeover from the US as the superpower cop in charge of deconstructing Syria’s chemical weapons program, and Putin’s quick pivot toward the Iranian regime for a similar grand bargain on Tehran’s nuclear program, seemed to remap the superpower politics of the Middle East.
Putin’s ongoing insistence that it was the Syrian opposition – and not the regime – that gassed more than 1,000 Syrian civilians despite intelligence from Israel, France, the UK and the US, makes trusting Russia as interlocutor a major issue.
When asked if the Kremlin could be relied upon, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said this week on Washington’s Face the Nation program that “Russia could be trusted to pursue its own national interests.”
Putin’s national interest is to maintain Russia’s naval base at Syria’s Tartus port, keep the Assad regime in power, even upgrade its international legitimacy, which his nominal compromise deal may have helped accomplish. Perhaps most importantly, in ensuring the Assad’s regime survival against the local and imported Sunni rebels, Putin seeks to protect Russia from what he called possible terrorist blowback from Syria into Russia, which is home to tens of millions of Sunni Muslims.
Historically, Putin has also waited for decades for the opportunity to sideline the US in the Middle East. The US-backed Israeli routing of the former Soviet Union’s Egyptian client in the 1973, the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, fuel Russian motivation. Russia’s increasingly aggressive reentry into the Middle East over the past 20 years, leading with advanced weapons sales to Syria and Iran, as well as the provision of equipment and training to the PLO, capped by the Kremlin’s recent “Syrian” victory provide context to Putin’s recent soviet-styled anti-US political warfare offensive, launched on the opinion pages of The New York Times.
His quick pivot toward Tehran to push for a grand bargain on its nuclear program and his statement to Reuters that “Syria’s chemical weapons program is a response to Israel’s nuclear program” illustrate the complexities of provocative Russian outreach to Iran and the Arab street. Putin’s comments were well timed, coming on the heels of last week’s Arab-led attempt at the annual conference of the UN’s nuclear agency to censure Israel’s refusal to acknowledge having nuclear arms and put it under international oversight.
Russia’s re-emergence as Syria’s foreign policy subcontractor has made a prospective attack against Syria and possibly Iran far more difficult for the US-led Western alliance. The prospect of passing any self-enforcing Chapter 7 resolution at the UN Security Council calling for the use of force against Syria if the current Russian-brokered deal falls apart becomes highly unlikely. Russia’s more central role in promoting its interests in advancing the Iranian nuclear project will also make prospective Israeli preemptive actions more complicated. At the same time, it seems clearer that the US independently may be seeking a direct path to a grand bargain with a lunch meeting scheduled at the UN between President Obama and the Iranian regime’s new president, Hassan Rouhani. What this all means for Israel is unclear.
On the face of it, Russia’s active, aggressive and some say malevolent Middle East intervention bodes ill for the Jewish state.
Israeli leaders have repeated endlessly, especially recently, Israel’s commitment to “defend itself by itself” against all threats. Putin’s recent public demand that Israel declare and destroy its alleged nuclear program makes him a foreign policy advocate of the Iranian regime, while he continues to aid Iran’s nuclearizing regional ambitions.
Clearly, Israel and Russia may tangle on the Iranian and Palestinian issues. Netanyahu failed to convince Putin in their May 2013 Moscow summit to stop transfer of advanced weapons systems to Iran-backed Syria, particularly the balance-breaking S-300 missile system which Netanyahu told Putin would be destroyed by Israel. Putin has warned Israel against attacking the Syrian regime.
However, the Russian-Israeli relationship also shows signs of warmth. As former Israeli ambassador to Washington Zalman Shoval pointed out, there are more than a few declared and secret agreements between the sides. There also appears to be a positive emotional component to the Russia-Israel relationship.
At the end of Putin’s 2012 visit to Israel for a dedication in Netanya of a major Red Army memorial he expressed his “deep respect for the Jewish people.”
During a trip to Moscow last year, a very close Jewish associate of Putin’s told me that Putin’s animus was directed at the US, not Israel. Its abiding respect for Israel’s battle against radical Islamic terror and Putin’s warm sentiments for the more than one million Russians living in Israel would help ensure that the two countries’ relationship would overcome obstacles, as Putin indicated in the presence of President Shimon Peres at the Netanya Red Army memorial dedication. Israel, however, remains one of the closest allies of the US. Therefore, Jerusalem will need to negotiate a delicate path between the two superpowers to defend its firmly delineated “red lines” on the Palestinian issue, the Syrian and Iranian threats, and protect its other vital interests.
The author is a foreign policy fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He served as secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress from 2011 to 2013.
@ ArnoldHarris:
Amen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
dove Said:
Esta celoso?????????
Vinnie Said:
” He laughs at wounds, who never felt a blow”,it esasy to get advice from the safety of Ohio.
ArnoldHarris Said:
You are correct,I wish Obama was more like Putin [putting American interest forward] and less like a social worker to the world, especially the Muslim Brotherhood.
ArnoldHarris Said:
OK, Dove, I’m right there next to you, now.
@ Shy Guy:
Time will tell….better not be in my bad books. Your lucky your a fellow Jew, I will give you a second chance.
Goodnite George
@ yamit82:
ah yes Yamit who thinks he is a connoisseur of women.
One correction to the above: Never mind the bit about Obama allegedly proclaiming November to be “Muslim Appreciation Month”. I had originally gotten that from another pro-Israel activist in the Pacific Northwest, but then I checked it out on Snopes…turned out to be a hoax. My bad…
@ ArnoldHarris:
I don’t understand why you all but wax poetic over Stalin…and make no mention of Churchill. Whatever his faults were, he had been a strong proponent of the establishment of modern Israel. And, he stood up to the Nazis to the fullest extent he could, though he obviously lacked the resources of the USSR to do so. By the standards of his day, he was practically philo-Semitic…and had nothing but contempt for modern Israel’s immediate Arab/Moslem enemies. It speaks volumes that the most anti-Israel president in U.S. history – i.e., the current occupant of the WH – promptly removed the bust of Churchill from the same just after taking office.
There is nothing wrong with democracy…as long as it is maintained in a reasonably healthy condition. I would liken democracy to a fine, powerful automobile that delivers superior performance, as long as it is properly maintained.
What is wrong with our democracy – or what is left of it – is that one of the most important components, if not THE most important component, has been completely corrupted. That is the MEDIA. You say you have had it with “democracy”…well, at the level of presidential elections, as of ’12, we don’t have it anymore, anyway.
To me, that is the most powerful argument to be made for Israel “switching sides”, as you suggest. One can say, like Laura, that Israel must remain united with a fellow democracy in the form of the U.S., but IS the U.S. a “fellow democracy”?? What do we stand for, as represented by our current unLeader, when we support the likes of the Moslem Brotherhood? What level does that place us on? Under Obama, are we really so much better – if at all – than Putin’s Russia?
Israel is at a crossroads, but so are we here in the U.S. I honestly don’t know if we can make a comeback at this point. I think it is possible – not probable, only possible – that there will be a popular reaction against Obama and what he represents, that might lead to us returning to our former state of relative power and greatness, worthy of respect once again. We still have great potential, and Russia is not such a great prospect in terms of their long-term potential. Their economy still is much smaller than ours, and is weakening. Even their military – aside from nuke forces – is hardly what it once was in terms of relative power to the U.S. What has transpired in recent years is a great object lesson in the difference a national leader or lack of the same can make: Putin has played a mediocre hand for all it is worth; Obama has, perhaps intentionally, thrown away our cards.
I would submit to you that the needle Israel must try to thread is one which differentiates between Obama on the one hand, and America on the other.
Operationally, to me that would mean hitting Iran’s nuke weapons program as soon as, and as hard as, Israel can, assuming that Israel still has the caapability to set them back at least five years. If this means using WMDs, so be it. If the world cries foul – and of course they will – then Israel replies that Obama left Israel with no choice. And if Obama then proceeds to try to punish Israel for her “defiance” – and he will – then Israel recalls her ambassador from the U.S., and claims that Israel had no choice but to act as she did due to the fact of Obama selling out Israel for the sake of appeasing Islamist interests, and that furthermore, so long as Obama is president, Israel cannot consider the U.S. as a genuine ally. Israeli leaders would thank the American people for their past support, and leave open the door for future congenial relations, but say that they’ve been forced to conclude that Obama can no longer be dealt with.
If the Palestinians then launch Intifada Three – and they probably would – then crush the bastards, even if this means getting expelled from the UN, knowing that the PA would probably be given Israel’s seat…but making damn sure that the PA would represent nothing in J&S besides rubble and corpses. If Hezbollah also lets fly, then hit them with WMDs as well to promptly silence them…and again, claim that the lack of Obama’s support left Israel with no other choice but to use her most powerful weapons. All the time, make it explicitly about “Obama”, as opposed to “America”.
Then, let the chips fall where they may…
It is a helluva risk I describe above, but what is the greater risk? Playing along with an ally that is “led” by nothing but a lying betrayer, in the form of Obama? Given his recent UN speech, how much is left to lose? How much is left to lose from a U.S. president who, on the heels of the outrageous spectacle of the Kenyan mall massacre, announces that November will be “Muslim Appreciation Month”, and that he will work with Congress to make it easier for Muslims to immigrate here??!!
But again, as many bridges might take heavy hits in all of what I suggest above…I would try to avoid burning all of them. I stress again, the key is to make all of this about Obama personally. For other reasons, he may be going down hard in the end here anyway..and then the U.S. might, just might, look a lot more attractive than the likes of Russia or China. While all of this is transpiring, I’d try to avoid doing anything that would represent irrevocably throwing in Israel’s lot with either Russia or China (though if I had to favor one over the other, I’d take China over Russia; beyond the Middle East, China is a far more important player on the global stage, and best of all, they have no history of anti-Semitism whatever).
In reference to the current and future vital needs of the Jewish state and the Jewish nation, it doesn’t matter what Russians think of Jews, or whether Russian women are sexier than any others, or whether Josef Stalin was a sly, ruthless dictator and, when he thought conditions called for it, an arranger of mass murder. Nor does it matter that the Soviet government from September 1939 until the midnight before June 22, 1941, aided and abetted Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
What does matter is Jewish understanding that successful Russian rulers always have been characterized as serving exclusively the interests of the Russian state and the Russian nation. So instead of dreaming up arguments of why Jews in general and Israel in particular should hold everything Russian in distrust, focus more usefully in the service of the Jewish future on aspects in which the interests of Russia and Israel can truthfully be considered mutual by both parties.
Maybe you find these these trends distasteful. But one thing you can say about working with the Russians. They typically are more straightforward than Americans of the official class, and they are less likely to sell you out as has happened so frequently over the past 65 years in the way Washington has treated Jerusalem. Excuse me. Make that Tel Aviv. Most of the non-Jewish world does not even recognize Jewish rights to its own historic capital city.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
yamit82 Said:
If you arn’t carefull,one day you will take round!!!!!!Sugar http://youtu.be/Kc4cBiSXoCs
Shy Guy Said:
Are you implying Gracie Allen is a dumb blond? http://youtu.be/DjwtEwoZw7E
dove Said:
By all means! So… are you a Pol Pot aficionado?
Say goodnight, Gracie.
.@ ppksky:
One more for you
dove Said:
Brains beauty and feminine wiles are not mutually exclusive.
Russian women have fire not found in other ethnicity’s and I know from experience. I have a friend Irma who fended off a rapist by knifing him to death and then let her father take the blame and go to prison for a few years. She was also a concert pianist later a piano teacher sought after. I once was proposed to by a Russian women on our first meeting. Blind date, invited her for a weekend. She brought her violin (Taught at the Beer Sheba conservatory) and a chess board as she was # 2 on our woman’s national team, ( she beat me in 6 moves) she also brought her mother on our second date, to meet her future husband, (long story).
ppksky Said:
Antisemitism is irrational so forget even the thought of it being erased. The only explanations that make any sense are theological. If you do not accept the theological explanation and arguments you will always apply incorrect solutions and false hopes to something completely not within your control or powers of rational understanding. Antisemitism is neither rational or logical.
“Israel’s degradation is the desecration of the Name of the L-rd.” (The Biblical commentator Rashi, Ezekiel 39:7)
“The Exile is the personification of Jewish weakness, defeat, flight, persecution, torture, humiliation, genocide, holocaust, degradation. And because of this, it must – in the eyes of the gentiles – personify the weakness, so to speak, of the G-d of the Jews. To the enemy of the Jew, Jewish defeat is proof of the inability of the G-d of Israel to give His people strength and triumph and glory. Such a G-d is either impotent or non-existent…”
“Not for our sake, not for our sake but unto Thy Name give glory… Why shall the nations say: ‘Where is G-d?’” (Psalms 115)
“Oh L-rd, what shall I say, after Israel hath turned their backs before their enemies… and what wilt Thou do for Thy great Name?” (Joshua 7)
yamit82 Said:
AS an American Jew and a Texan I resemble that!!!!!!!!!!!!!Vodka Pie
@ Shy Guy:
@ dove:
Shy Guy Said:
@ Shy Guy:
Why not? What’s wrong with me reminding you of OTHER holocausts. Sorry to disappoint you Shy Guy but I do not engage in ‘too much bubbly’. Unless you consider 1 glass of wine at the end of Yom Kippur and 1 glass of wine on Shabbat as too much. Sometimes you don’t understand when I joke around. ‘Too much bubbly’ can get you into trouble.
@ dove:
Why are you telling me this? Too much bubbly?
@ yamit82:
and furthermore Shy Guy I know MANY Ukrainians. For some of them the torch has been passed. You can SEE the Ukrainian holocaust in their eyes just like you can SEE the Jewish holocaust in the eyes of many Jews.
yamit82 Said:
Thanks yamit82 to for those excellent videos.
It is one thing to be indifferent about people and another to single them out for aggression. For example, we know we will have solved the problem of antisemitism not when everyone loves the Jews, but when finally, nobody cares about the Jews. The challenge is transforming fear and hatred into understanding and indifference. What is there to like about the Russians? Maybe nothing, but is there anything to hate?
dove Said:
No. I am simply unaware of your previous debates on this subject. You made a claim on comments here and I simply asked you what part of Arnold’s comment you were referring to. The only thing I think Stalin was good for was that he was the enemy of my enemy. Other than that, he was one of the great butchers of history and helped sow the political and economic seeds for the USSR’s eventual collapse.
@ Shy Guy:
WoW! Are you in denial too Shy Guy? I have had this debate with Arnold before. He has repeatedly stated that of ALL the leaders there have been Stalin is the one he admires the most. When I asked him why can’t you learn from one of ours? Like King David or Moses? He stated that we don’t have a King David or Moses to lead the Jewish people. What a poor excuse. Stalin is dead too. We are to LEARN from history and as a Jew the people we should admire for their accomplishments would not include mass killers, torturers, rapists who are opposed to the Jewish people.
ArnoldHarris Said:
Russians supported Nazi Germany until the very day it launched its offensive against the Soviet Union; Germany thrived on Russian iron, grain, and many other products.
Churchill and FDR were perfectly content to let the Russians bleed the Germans for as long and as many they were able. Hitler never trusted Stalin so he invaded against all his military advisers. Stalin not only purged his best military generals but divided Poland with Germany thereby eliminating the buffer state that might have saved the Red Army from being decimated by the initial German Invasion.
Both dictators were paranoid and both lousy strategic thinkers.
jlevyellow Said:
If we abandon Israel and she is destroyed, in all likelihood, Americans will have nothing to worry about. After Israel launches the Samson Option to include France and Russia, the French and Russian nukes will fall on us and end our civilization.
ppksky Said:
Russian women are hot but really what’s to like with regards to Russians?
1/3 1/3 1/3 One third will assimilate, one third will immigrate and one third will be exterminated: the Russian version of the final solution.
Trotsky made revolutions and the Jews paid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp7yu4J_y2Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=250szpbM32Y
dove Said:
Can you quote where Arnold proclaims this?
Laura Said:
Translate that into actionable deeds in terms of policy by American governments past and present that is favorable to Israel.
Arnold, are you on crack? Your falling prey to just want they want. To twist your mind to admiring dictators. No wonder some people are afraid the Jews will ‘get even’ by doing to them what was done to the Jews. I wouldn’t want someone like you to ever be a spokesperson for the Jewish people.
I do not believe that it is overstating the issue when I say that the fate of America hinges upon its support for Israel and its continued existence. Certainly, no one knows which way America will swing in a crisis given the psychopathy of Obama. However, the support for Israel in the mind of the American public, which ranges from mild interest to over-the-top support, will cause Americans to modify their view of their own governing hierarchies should they abandon Israel. The smart politicians have always supported Israel in any conflict for their own good, but politicians live in their own exceedingly strange bubble and may swing at a moment’s notice toward utter and complete relativism, allowing them to ignore Israel and its supporters. That will end their rule, whoever is in office, when push comes to shove. Few Americans, even rabid anti-Semites, can easily live with that sort of dissonance. Some Americans might cheer at the troubles of the Jews, but abandonment of the Jews and Israel will give them pause with regard to what to expect for themselves from their leaders. And this is what we should tell politicians and anyone else who asks.
@ Laura:
Laura Said:
Do you really believe the “American people” run this country. You really know better than that. The American people may love Israel but love will not help Israel win wars.
@ Laura:
I think Ron Paul was also in the military but he is clearly anti-American.
ArnoldHarris Said:
If it had not been for the antisemitism of Stalin, it is possible that the military progress of the Third Reich could never have been realized and the alliance between the Soviet Union and the US and Britain would have been entirely unnecessary. It was the antisemitism of Stalin that softened him towards Hitler. It is difficult to really appreciate the damage that Stalin did to the Jewish contribution towards the Communist Party in the US especially. You could leave the Communist Party in the US, like you couldn’t do in the USSR. Many fled the Communist Party when Stalin made the pact with Hitler and they weren’t all Jewish.
Meanwhile, the military contributions of Stalin’s USSR were wasteful and poorly managed. The good generals who warned Stalin about the foolishness of negotiating with Hitler had been purged. The Russians fought the Nazis with the Communist Party at their backs, shooting the “slackers”.
And meanwhile we see that much of what motivated hostility from political leaders in the West had less to do with communism than it did with the Russian people. We see people here in comments at this website say that communism was really just a cover for Russian imperialism, despite the suffering of the Russian Orthodox church and the extinction of the Russian monarchy. Some people just hate Russians, geopolitics be damned.
Laura Said:
Sometimes the Almighty uses the devil to his own purpose!!
@ oldjerry:
It offers the support of the American people, which no other country on Earth can offer Israel.
@ oldjerry:
You are obviously just as blind and clueless as Arnold when it comes to Russia. You obviously didn’t bother to read the article either. Russia is the one arming assad and indirectly hamas and hezbollah through its support of the Syrian regime. Russia is also helping Iran get nuclear weapons and providing Iran’s defense against a potential Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities. If this is your idea of an ally, I would hate to see how Russia would behave as an enemy
And if the rest of you on Israpundit agree with Arnold about Russia, then you have all lost your marbles.
@ ArnoldHarris:
If you defend Russia and putin, then you are not being loyal to America. I stand by my comment. The fact that you served in the military decades ago doesn’t absolve you. Lot’s of people who are anti-American or make anti-American statements hide behind their former military service in order to shield themselves from criticism. John Kerry served in the military, yet he is a traitor. That’s just one example.
@ ArnoldHarris:
True
@ ArnoldHarris:
Well said Arnold. The problem all of us and mostly politicians have is that of facing and dealing with reality. Just as England’s sun has set over its’empire so is America’s dominance fading in the Mid East. Accept the reality that Russia, not America is the big power in that area and will do whatever in pursuit of its own interests. It has become folly for Israel to look for support from America. America has nothing to offer Israel in support and seldom has. For Israel to cling to this country because they both share the same democratic and liberal values is stupid.Israel and Russia share sufficient matters of mutual self interest to make for a good partnership to replace Israel’s partnership with the USA.
Eric and Laura, the issue here is not Josef Stalin or how many Ukrainians he starved in 1933 in order to collectivize agriculture all across the Soviet Union, or how many Russians were executed in his show trials or were worked to death in the Gulag. Stalin’s Red Army was the one that did the bulk of the tough job of destroying Hitler’s Nazi armies, without which Roosevelt, Churchill never could have mounted Eisenhower’s Allied invasion of Western Europe in June 1944. But even that has not been a main issue since the end of World War 2.
The issue here in fact is the meltdown of American influence in the Middle East in particular and in all the rest of Asia in general. That vacuum is now in he process of being filled by Russia, China and India. And all of you damned well had better get used to the new order of things, lest the Jewish nation gets plowed under in the midst of this truly seismic shift. The Jewish nation and the Jewish state need a new set of allies among the world powers; and quickly, before all these changes are hardened.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
I do not agree with your acessment of Stalin,but I agree with when it come the action the American got during WWII, Today is the aniversery of Poland’s surrender to Nazi Germany.
@ ArnoldHarris:
You had me agreeing with you until you started praising Stalin. That monster murdered more than 30 million between the purges, the Gulag and the extermination of the Kulaks (and that does not count the millions of Russians who died in WW2 because he was too stupid to believe that Hitler wanted to invade Russia.)
And you know damn well that had he not suffered a stroke in 1953, he would have exterminated the Jews of the USSR – Kruschev admits as much. That’s what the infamous Doctor’s plot trial was all about. To set up an excuse for deporting the Jews to Siberia and then starving them to death.
As for Jewish generals fighting for him – well, he was preferable to Hitler, but then again, a meteor smashing into the earth and creating an extinction level event was preferable to Hitler if you were Jewish.
You don’t believe in Western style democracy? Fine. Even I’m getting disillusioned with it as I see how the leftist media/education/entertainment complex has brainwashed people (voters), and made them ignorant, stupid and blind to reality.
But really, now – you can do better than endorsing a genocidal monster like Stalin.
@ Laura:
Call me a fool as you wish, Laura. As for my being anti-American and anti-Israel: I was born and raised in America, and I served this country in its armed forced in time of war, all three years until I completed the commitment I had made. Whose armed forces have you ever served in, Laura? As for terming me anti-Israel, my wife and I devoted some 18 months of our lives to undertake graduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And when war came on October 6, 1973 with the usual massed Arab attack from Syria and Egypt, neither of us grabbed our passports and ran to Lod Airport. Instead we stayed and performed emergency services around Jerusalem. Moreover, I know myself to be a Jewish nationalist who studied both with Dr Israel Eldad of the old-time Lehi freedom fighters and the blessed Rav Meir Kahane through the Kach movement.
The America I served was a land in which a man such as Barack Hussein Obama could never have been elected President of the United States; a land in which official recognition of homosexual marriages would have heen considered little more than obeisance to the queer whims of a pack of sexual perverts; a land whose government used its tariff policies to make certain that no American jobs would be lost to cheap foreign competition; a country whose governments at all levels spent only what could be collected through reasonable taxes. That America has been bankrupted and cleaned out by crooked politicians looking for popular votes. I seriously question whether this country can avoid smashing itself into separate and mutually alienated multi-state segments, as if Abraham Lincoln had lived and been martyred for nothing. But the America of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan is now as dead as Babylon. And I neither worship nor serve the dead.
As for Israel, I count myself as a Jewish nationalist, as I was taught by my mentors. None of that has or ever will have anything to do with democracy, which is a principle that I plainly despise.
Do I trust Russia and the Russians? Ask the same question of the scores of millions of Americans who have been telling public polls in recent weeks that Vladimir Putin serves his Russia ably and honestly, while his American counterpart, Barack Hussein Obama, does little more than act out the part of a feckless, ill-prepared scoundrel finding himself managing situations demanding more competence than he was born to handle.
I never was and never would have been a communist. But I thought Stalin, who was served by more than a hundred Russian Jewish generals in the Great Patriotic War, was far less an anti-Semite than the typical functionaries in the US government who have conspired to enslave the Jewish state and the Jewish nation, offering nothing but vague promises that are never borne out by accomplishment.
I want a fully-independent Jewish Israel, and I want a Jewish nation that not only will abandon western liberal democracy but will re-establish the rule of Tora over the Jewish nation and the Jewish land, and will retake by conquest the lands that historically belong to the Jewish nation but also any additional lands needed to enable the Jewish nation to live permanently in its homeland, guarded by its own armed strength. For that, I could not care less what any majority may want that contradicts the national rights of the Jewish nation.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
A totally blind and bias fool like Arnold Harris continues to defend the Russian regime even as it provides protection for Iran to develop nuclear weapons. If you support Russia and Putin you are anti-American and anti-Israel.
While its understandable that our allies mistrust of Obama would cause them to break ranks with America, on the other hand Russia is the one helping Iran get the nuclear weapons that these Arab states want protection from. Russia’s behavior is kind of like the mafia protection racket.
Yes they were and are. Your bias unables you to see that reality. I have never trusted the Russians.
The USA under elected leaderships such as that of Obama, and of equally feckless foreign affairs appointees such as Clinton’s wife and Kerry, is a rapidly-shrinking former imperium whose voters and taxpayers will no longer sustain foreign military adventures for purposes as dubious as attempting to subvert authentic militant Islam with sham democracy.
Therefore, all the traditional US client states in the Middle East, including Egypt and the petrochemical monarchies, will rapidly seek closer relationships with Putin’s re-emerging Russian empire. The one remaining traditional US client state in the Middle East whose government somehow has ignored all this is Israel.
I never have seen Russia — Stalin’s or Putin’s — necessarily as an enemy of the Jewish state. The Russian national leaderships other than those managed by idiots such as Khrushchev, weaklings such as Gorbachev and drunken buffoons such as Yeltsin, were first and foremost Russian nationalists.
When Israel in 1948 had broken free of the already shrinking British Empire, Stalin had hopes that the Jews of Israel would join the Soviet orbit. For that purpose, Stalin saw too it that Israel would receive armaments with which to stand off the combined Arab armies. Those armaments included Czech copies of the famed World War 2 German Luftwaffe Messerschmidt 109 fighter aircraft; whereas their American counterparts sent the Jews nothing and strenuously enforced an international arms embargo that seriously threatened Israel’s existence. But the Jews in control of the new State of Israel — fools in the same mold as today’s Netanyahu — valued democracy and practiced it much more diligently than they practiced Judaism. So when Stalin saw this, he turned against the Jews because it was in Russia’s interests to do just that.
Once again, the Jewish nation is at a great crossroad. You all have your choices to make here, If democracy is more important to you than Jewish nationalism, then that is the false god which you shall follow, and be punished for it accordingly, exactly as you deserve.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Putin would love nothing more than a major strike on Iran, because it would drive oil to $200/barrel, and Iran is one of only three other nations to have gas reserves rivaling Russia’s (and one of the others – Turkmenistan – is a former Soviet “republic” that will not upset Putin).
Taking Iran out of the oil and gas action, even for a fairly shor time, would not only strengthen Putin’s domination of the world’s natural gas supply and thus Russia’s power in the world, it would bring in hundreds of billions of dollars.