IBD Editorial
Mideast: Barack Obama has gone out of his way to undercut a key ally, Israel, while going to bat for those keen to destroy it. This is an agenda that traces all the way back to Chicago.
For the first time, a sitting president has called on Israel to give up its defensive buffer zone secured in the Arab war to destroy the Jewish state. He is adopting Hamas’ position demanding Israel pull out of the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
In an earlier affront, Obama didn’t buy Israel’s story over the Gaza flotilla flap, even though it’s now confirmed that Hamas was trying to smuggle weapons into the area under a false humanitarian flag.
Why is he so quick to distrust Israel, while so eager to appease Palestinians?
One of his best friends in Chicago was Rashid Khalidi, former PLO spokesman under Arafat who supported terrorist strikes on Israeli government targets. At a 2003 pro-Palestinian banquet, during which speakers expressed anger at Israel and U.S. foreign policy, then-Illinois state Sen. Obama sang Khalidi’s praises.
What he said exactly is still secret — suppressed by the media. The Los Angeles Times has a video of the dinner but won’t make it public, honoring a deal with a source.
Obama’s Chicago mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, called for a boycott of Israel for its “apartheid” against Palestinians while Obama sat in his pews. Echoing his sermons, his star acolyte now says Palestinians are “suffering the humiliation of occupation.”
“Israeli settlement activity continues,” Obama said in his one-sided speech, forcing Palestinians to walk away from peace talks. Does that justify their terror activity? Obama’s pastor thinks so.
Wright even reprinted Hamas’ terror manifesto against Israel in his church bulletin — when Obama was attending services. Written by Hamas deputy chief Mousa Abu Marzook, a fugitive terrorist wanted by the U.S., the letter was featured on Wright’s “Pastors Page” under “A Fresh View of the Palestinian Struggle.”
Wright, a one-time member of the Nation of Islam, gave dozens of Jew-bashing sermons while mentoring Obama. His partner in Chicago is the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, with whom Obama marched on Washington in 1995. In 2008, Wright honored Farrakhan as a hero on the cover of his church magazine.
Both Islamism and the radical “Black Liberation Theology” Wright preached rejecting the Jews as God’s chosen people. Obama’s church also preached that North Africa is the promised land, and that Moses and Jesus were Africans.
This is where Obama’s suicidal demands on Israel are coming from, no matter how he tries to soothe the Jewish lobby now.
What about the satellite intel provided by the US to Israel? I imagine that must’ve helped in planning the crossing of the Suez?
Um, the only reason the advances were stopped on Damascus and Cairo in ’73’ — at least according to Chaim Herzog, were that the Soviets were loading up their massive military air transports w/troops and equipment to directly intervene on behalf of their Islamofascist allies, at which point Nixon went to DEFCON 4 and mobilized US forces to their highest readiness since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Yet in almost the same breath, Yamit acknowledges that
In fact, Truman wrote on his calendar for March 19, 1948: “The State Dept. pulled the rug from under me today…. The first I know about it is what I see in the papers! Isn’t that hell? I am now in the position of a liar & a double-crosser. I’ve never felt so low in my life. There are people on the third and fourth level of the State Dept who have always wanted to cut my throat. They’ve succeeded in doing it.”
As Presidents go, HST was anything BUT ‘weak’ — but until a president comes along who is prepared to go the distance to clean out the Augean Stables at the State Dept, Foggy Bottom will always be a problem.
At the risk of being tiresome, I repeat what I noted in my earlier [May 26, 12:03 pm] post (and many, many other times as well):
“[A] US Chief-of State isn’t all there is to the Executive Branch, and the State Dept bureaucracy remains in place long after a given administration is gone; it tends to have its own, abiding agenda, and little countries don’t rank high on its list of valued interests.”
This is the primary reason why we can never, EVER, rely on the Presidency, even with a genuinely sympathetic President in the Oval Office. There’s simply too much else going on in the Executive Branch. It’s just that clear.
But if you want a real taste of Truman’s experience with the State Dept in his decision to recognize the Jewish state, you may want to read this interview with Clark Clifford (recently reprinted also by JCPA). It’s a helluva read:
http://rslissak.com/content/president-trumans-decision-recognize-israel-clark-clifford-richard-holbrooke
Maybe not more to do w/opposing the Soviet Union but certainly at least as much.
Then too, though, it seems that Nixon was MORE eager to be prompt & timely with the resupply than Kissinger, who — given his Machiavellian inclinations — thought the postwar negotiations would go better if America were to “let the Israelis bleed a little first.”
Make of that what you will.
Eva/Hava,
Please contact me directly at my email address, arnoldharris@tds.net
I too have major family connections to Jugoslavija through my wife Stefi (Stefanija Prasnjak Harris). I tried twice describing this to you in response comments, but Ted thought they were too long and unrelated to the topic at hand.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Anti-Semites and Jewish Zionists have long held similar aims. That is, removing the Jews in various countries to Palestine. Aims are the same but they have different motivations. I suspect HST conformed to this profile. While he initially supported partition his Amb later tried to nullify the UN resolution 181 and make The Jewish Yishuv a protectorate of the UN. It failed to sway the UN mainly because of our once in a lifetime support from Russia (Stalin saw this as a way to get rid of Russian Jews who he later planned to liquidate). To say as dweller tries to project that HST was too weak to buck the entrenched state dept. fly’s in the face of how he forced the original UN partition vote against Marshal and co., ( that he had already done so) Yes he recognized Israel 11 min. after we declared statehood but he also ensured (what he believed) that we would lose and be overrun by the Arabs. As an anti-Semite I think he had no problem with that scenario. He had covered his ass politically and HST was an experienced political animal. America through out the three years of our Independence war America stayed politically neutral until we started to win, then they intervened to halt our advances and gains and arranged an armistice, essentially halting the war with Israel advancing on all fronts increasing our territory beyond the partition plan.
This was the first of American perfidious interventions against Israeli military gains. America never recognized our military gains until after the war of 67. Then the 67 lines became the lines of demarcation politically for America. Jerusalem was never recognized by America as Israels Cap.
Nixon for cold war considerations(mostly) decided to resupply Israel two and a half weeks after the war began. By the time the first resupply planes landed at Lod, Israel was across the canal heading for Cairo and the Egyptian third Army surrounded and cut off. We had to feed and supply them with water. by this time the war was over. We captured enough military weaponry to make up much if not all of our losses except for aircraft. Remember in those days we made our own fighters called the Kafir. (Copy of the French Mirage).
to sum up the aid cam to late to effect the outcome of the war as we had already won it by the time the first American resupply airlift arrived.
How do I know besides reading histories? I was on the other side of the Canal when the first resupply arrived.
Kissinger then intervened to stop us from taking Cairo and liquidating the whole Egyptian military structure. So much for our friends in America.
In the first days of the 73 war when it looked like we would be overrun by Syria and Egypt America sat on her hands. America will do the same today under similar or even more dire circumstances, of that I’m sure.
An Urban Myth grew out of that resupply and Israel went along with it.
Arnold, I felt your comment and one other you wrote were both far too long and too irrelevant.
Ted, I just carefully wrote and posted a nice reply to Eva/Hava, who comes from the same country as my wife Stefi. Kindly retrieve from your bin and post it here.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I just wanted to thank Dweller and Yamit for their interesting comments on Truman vis-a-vis Israel. It seems to me Truman comes out better than Yamit painted him though.
On another note, I’ve read that Nixon was an antisemite, yet he initiated the 2nd largest military airlift in US history to Israel
in ’73’ (in addition to providing satellite intel at some point in the game). Maybe his motivations had less to do w/Israel and more to do w/opposing the Soviet Union?
The ugly, yet unacknowledged and unfortunate truth, for the last 60+ years.
How loyal have the Muslims been to Israel? Are they at best fence sitters ?I’ve read that the Mt. Carmel fires are strongly thought to have been arson on the part of the Islamic 5th column in Israel but have never read or heard about the results of an investigation into this.
Dear Arnold Harris.
How I agree with you I love every word you wrote. My beloved father’s name was also Arnold, he was murdered in Treblinka gass chamber
because he was a Jew. What a brilliant mind, dear Arnold I applaud you. I was a resistance soldier in my native Jugoslavija at age 19 and learned
one thing, you must defeat your enemy, period. If we were so silly and believed in all the “Peace Talks” we would never defeated the brutal monsters, the Nazis.
What troubles me most that very few people know history and make the same mistakes. Don’t they worry about their children and grand children.?
Arnold, I will read everything you write
Shalom and study history.
Hava Dishon, holocaust survivor, author and artist
You are correct, Dawg. He was the world’s first Chief-of-State to extend de facto recognition to the Provisional Government of the new state (having waited all of eleven minutes after Israel’s Declaration to announce U.S. recognition) -— and this in the face of bitter & vociferous opposition from the man whom Truman himself regarded as “the greatest living American”: General of the Army, George C. Marshall, his OWN Secretary of State, who even threatened privately to vote against him in the forthcoming election.
The President had a long, substantive & unambiguous record of support for the Jewish restoration, and is -— perhaps not inappropriately -— viewed as the “midwife” to the birthing of the Jewish state. David Ben-Gurion called him our “Cyrus,” a declaration that was seen to bring tears to Truman’s eyes.
Like many Americans, both private and prominent, Truman had (years earlier, as a senator) joined the pro-Zionist, American Christian Palestine Committee. [Remember, in those days, the only people identifying themselves as “Palestinians” were the Jews.]
Then-Senator Truman was rip-roaring mad when the UK govt of Neville Chamberlain, issued the infamous White Paper of 1939, barring Jewish immigration to Palestine (in hopes of appeasing the Arabs, and effectively signing the death warrant of European Jewry). Truman snapped from across the Pond that the Brits had contemptuously “made a scrap of paper out of Balfour’s promise, and added another to the long list of surrenders to the Axis powers.”
Later, as President, HST vigorously supported the Partition-Independence Resolution, and had exerted judicious diplomatic pressure to secure passage.
Mostly correct, Yamit.
Actually the embargo came months before recognition — in fact a week after the Partition Resolution, 5 Dec 1947. In the name of “preventing bloodshed,” Truman had credulously yielded to lobbying from his own, virulently pro-Arab and anti-Zionist, foreign policy bureaucracy -— his much-vaunted “Wise Men”: Dean Acheson, Robert Lovett, Chip Bohlen, George F. Kennan, Loy Henderson, Director of UN Affairs Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal (and of course the Sec.State himself, Marshall) -— to impose, shortly after Resolution 181 was approved, an arms embargo on “the region.”
The Wise Men -— who would shape the foreign policy of the US for the next 40 years -— were much committed to the numbers game, they wanted the vast petroleum reserves of the Mideast for the US and they were determined that America be on what they fully expected to be the winning side in the Arab-Zionist struggle.
The greatest, most overriding concern of Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett -— as the diplomatic temperature rose, and the projected, 29 November 1947, voting date for the Resolution approached -— seems to have been that, since it was beyond question that one side or the other was certain to be dissatisfied by the outcome of that Resolution, “the Arabs might use arms of US origin against Jews, or Jews might use them against Arabs.”
Of course, the Arab states (as the Wise Men & the pinstripes at Foggy Bottom knew perfectly well) would, regardless of the circumstances, never lack for weaponry: which they received in massive quantities from HMG -— who never made, or even intended to make, so much as a pretense of honoring the embargo. (And what was “Give-‘em-Hell Harry” going to do about that -— attack British shipping as an enforcement measure?)
Yes.
No.
However, a US Chief-of State isn’t all there is to the Executive Branch, and, as I’ve pointed out, Yamit, time & again, the State Department bureaucracy remains in place long after a given administration is gone; it tends to have its own, abiding agenda, and little countries don’t rank high on its list of valued interests. That’s why the Legislative Branch — Congress — tends to be, for us, a more reliable barometer of the popular will.
Once again, partly correct.
While most of the Jewish armament came thru the Czechs (the Skoda Arms Works) — at first, dismantled fighter planes, spare parts & ammo, etc; later (during the first truce), armored vehicles & field pieces — a lot of it was smuggled in by the French, who also provided airfields: in Corsica, for planes refueling enroute to Israel -— and proceeded, as well, to sell large quantities of weapons to the Jews (albeit more quietly, in view of the embargo), while providing training, storage & assemblage facilities for armament that had been dismantled and shipped as “textile machinery.”
No card.
He had some of the common, heretofore unexamined, prejudices about Jews, often osmotically absorbed, as it were, from childhood; and — finding himself embarrassed to discover them in himself — fought them throughout all of his life.
His wife Bess’s family was notoriously racist, and keeping their influence out of his political and personal considerations was a handful of headaches from the word Go. Remember too, that his home state of Missouri was a border state in the Civil War. Border states were often the locus of the bitterest struggles attendant to that great national & cultural upheaval, often the point where the two POV’s interfaced — and the residues of that clash have been slow to fade.
To the notion that it’s possible for Jewish numbers to increase rapidly — keyn yehi ratzohn!
However, with all due respect, may I suggest that the fact that Israel’s Jewish populace has multiplied in six decades is as much or more a factor of aliyah as (or than) it is one of natural growth. The world’s present Jewish (or Jewish-identified) population is somewhere just over 13 million. Your projected figure of “25 Million” — to be domiciled in Israel alone — is nearly twice that.
Then too, there’s no denying that predicting future population trends can be harder that forecasting tomorrow’s weather. Too many variables, many of them far too subtle to identify up front.
Still, while I don’t presume to know what He’s got up his sleeve, I happy to see that you’re thinking outside the box. Carry on.
After voting in favor of partition the USA tried hard to convince the UN to recant and reverse the vote.
After recognition America Embargoed all weapons to Israel while the Arabs had no problems of supply from England France and Russia. Russia actually saved our asses by giving us some old almost useless weapons through the Czechs. Truman fully expected Israel to be overrun by the Arabs and did his part to ensure that conclusion. His vote of recognition was internal politics. Last year his diary was made public and we find he was a card carrying Jew hater/ Isn’t revisionist history fun? Myths linger long after the truth is known. This is a case in point.
Um, I believe Truman was one POTUS who went to bat for Israel.
michael wiener says:
May 25, 2011 at 8:59 pm
Laura: America has been pressuring Israel since Pres.
Eisenhower.
Truman#1,3,18
I agree.
Arnold is suggesting that Israel act like any other militarily powerful nation and deal with it’s enemies in a draconian and intractable manner. There is only some 3000+ years of history to validate that such an approach is the only way to conclusively deal with an enemy. Any other mechanism Israel employs in dealing with her enemies is doomed to failure.
It is no surprise that Khalidi is his friend after all his middle name Hussein says it all
Dweller,
You may snort about the idea of 25 million Jews resident in a greater Israel one day. But Israel’s Jewish population has been doubling at the rate of 35-40 years for quite some time now. Remember that in only 63 years, it has grown almost ten-fold from less than 600 thousand to approaching 6 million. Moreover, as religious Jewish families grow as a percentage of the overall population, Jewish birthrates have been increasing. Therefore, in the 89 years left until the end of this century, there is easily enough time for the Jewish population to quadruple.
Will the Israel of the future be able to sustain such a population? Actually, the relatively vast growth of the economy, including the “brinpower” industries of computerization and science-based industrialization, to the extent it can be sustained in the future, is precisely what Israel needs to become an economic giant. Water can be desalinated, and through that, deserts can be irrigated and cultivated. The sun’s rays can be converted into energy. Ha-Aretz will get there in time. And I’m not referring to the leftist rag published in Tel Aviv.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
See youtube of Obama’s history with rashid khalidi way back with obama’s connection to supporting arabs against Israel the sore that infects American foreign policy in 2003.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC35JMkd0ZI
Come on, Dude, don’t sugar coat it.
Tell us what you really feel.
Nah, no fair. That one’s been used already. Stick with original (at least original-sounding) concepts.
Where would you get those kindsa numbers to NEED that kinda lebensraum? — put ground-up fertility pills in the kharoset on the Seder plate?
Maybe the creator is sort of saying to Israel: ok, this is a test that will show me how much faith you have in me. If you panic, and create dramatic scenarios, then those will materialize. Think of identifying with the creator and seeking his guidance and illumination. Once a new attitude of calm and reason prevails then new scenarios will seem probable that we didn’t know existed before. We were caught in that one single scenario where we could predict the outcome and made sense to us on a rational level. Yet we never left the material conception of things and so we didn’t receive revelation from above but from something lower. We need to reach the higher and then the material realm will seem rearranged and operating smoothly–the mistakes in the chaos were in us, not in the creator. But only Kabbalists can correctly guide one on connecting to the spiritual world, and then once that connection is established then all problems will seem to have the solution to themselves imbedded in them. Like day and night to how it was before where we were left to imagine anything, and we were happy with that material solution which seemed totally logical but we had no clue as to whether it was holy or not or pleasing to the creator or pleasing to our ego.
Personally, I feel better about reading “arrogant, bitter, and distasteful” stuff regarding Jewish attitudes, than the normal Kumbayah stuff we’re so good at uttering.
Yes – the “world” wants to see us that way because then it can have reason for bringing us down. But when we REALLY are like that, they may change their tune.
Over time I’ve come to the conclusion that much of the world despises Jews because they tended never to fight back. When you fight back ruthlessly, the fear you instill turns to respect, and this respect may actually develop into friendship.
Ask Ted by private email. My comment/reply to you that used his real name was just blocked by the bot
Google Israpundit and H peskin
Yamit, who is Hymie?
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
DF,
I don’t recall ever have written that I support US foreign aid for anybody, now that World War II has been over for 66 years. As a matter of fact, I’m one of no small number of Americans who wants the United States to drop its membership in the UNO, which, in any case, is little more now than an international conspiracy against the Jewish nation.
As for most of the US armed forces, I want enough of them planted along our Mexican border to stop, shoot and kill anybody attempting sneak into this country without authorization of a duly appointed United States consul stationed in the foreign city closest to their place of residence.
And when I say “stop, shoot and kill”, I’m not just talking about drug dealers.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Ted please release my comment.
I’m really tired of this business about “aid” to Israel. Israelis are not shnorrers. I’ve made this point numerous times and it always falls on deaf ears with the anti-Israel crowd. So once again I will set the record straight. The US government PROVIDES LOANS TO ISRAEL ON THE CONDITION THAT ISRAEL USES THE MONEY TO PURCHASE AMERICAN MILITARY EQUIPMENT. So the money actually gets filtered back into the American economy. The three billion bucks are not an outright handout. And the same crowd incidentally never has anything to say about American money to Egypt and Pakistan.
Yamit,
I think I understand your point of view by now, and that you must understand mine. Although they are relatively close, there are major differences.
I don’t care about hanging Abbas from a flagpole in Ramallah, or about removing their two mosques from atop the temple mount in Jerusalem, or executing Arabs for this and that act of terrorism, or even expelling all of them from Aretz-Yisrael.
What I want, in plain language, is to expand Israel from a tiny commonwealth of 10,000 square miles (everything west of the Jordan River) with about 6 million Jews, to a large, strong, wealthy and militarily assertive state of 100,000 square miles ranging from the Gulf of Suez and the Mediterranean Sea on the west to the Euphrates River and Syrian Desert on the east, and from the Litani River gorge on the north to tip of the Sinai peninsula on the south, holding a still-growing population of some 25 million Jews; and all this strong enough to massively destroy any target some 2000-2500 miles in any direction.
So I hope Israel’s enemies stay at war with the Jewish state, because I want to see Israel and the Jewish nation to be compelled to grow in strength in order to fight them, and, acting in cold blood and precision, take their lands away from them, one slice or even one chunk at a time. For the same reason that Moshe ought not to have wanted Ramses II to cave in to his demands to let the Hebrew people leave Egypt 3400 years ago, I want our enemies to stay stubborn with our people so that we can despoil them and not feel diffident about it.
In short, I want the Jewish nation, just for once, to become the pitiless, ruthless and implacable aggressors that all the world has become conditioned to think we are.
In fact, that to me is the only vision worthy of the great Jewish nation.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
There is no independence in Israel. We are still at war with the Arabs. We need to recognize this and take the following steps:
Elect Torah leaders who will throw the Arabs out. This is the Halachah.
A moral government will make it a priority to wipe out all terrorists groups and execute anyone who has even the slightest drop of Jewish blood on his hands. Abbas will hang from a flagpole in Ramallah.
Remove the two abominations that sit atop the Temple Mount. Unearth the grotesque husks of dead Arabs that litter the mount, and send them to the local landfill. Use the gravestones to build latrines.
If Obama is undercutting Israel in regard to Israel’s borders — and certainly in regard to the rights of the Jewish nation to all the land set aside for the Jewish nation in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, he gets away with it because the Israeli electorate keeps electing one Judenrat after another that never gives more than minor lip service to those national Jewish rights, and always includes this or that minister who is empowered to slow down or even stop Jewish settlement in all the lands that fell under Israel’s military control in June 1967.
In other words, and as bluntly as I can spell it out for you, your problem with almost every recent American president is one that Israel’s elected representatives always cause, because they never insist on using the powers of the government of the Jewish state to enhance and enforce the rights of the Jewish nation.
I for one am not interested in peace. For you or anybody else. If peace is what you want, as a substitute for your national rights, then relocate back to the USA, Canada, Europe or wherever it was that you or your forefathers came from. Because you will never have peace in a place surrounded with always hostile and frequently boiling mad Arabs and other Moslems. But as some of you admit, no Jew ever has true acceptance in the fullest sense in any non-Jewish society, and sometimes such places have turned into death-traps for their Jewish inhabitants.
But if you want peace, and you want it as residents of Israel, then you have no option but to shove most or all those hostile Arabs back into or beyond the nearby deserts that surround your country. That means you must engage in outright conquest. Because nobody ever has created a country without conquering the land on which that country would be established, and driving out the prior inhabitants. And if you can’t stomach that notion, then neither the government of the USA, nor the UNO, nor even ha-Shem can or will grant you the peace you hunger for.
Most of the comments I make on Israpundit these days sound arrogant and bitter and distasteful. But I always try to analyze issues exactly on all the facts available to me, and I tend to skip all the bullshit and get right to the heart of any issue.
If you want to live a normal life in Israel, harden your hearts to your enemies. Annex the lands available to you even if the whole world shouts or even screams at you. Arm your country with the most horrendous and dreadful weapons your scientists can devise, and be prepared to use them. Build, build, build. Settle, settle, settle. Then each time the Arabs go to war with you, take some more of the land, expel them further back into their deserts. and repeat the above steps.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI