http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2557 The attacks against United States embassies and consulates in the Islamic world this week were to be anticipated. Though the ostensible spark for the violence that left U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and other Americans dead or wounded was a trailer of an amateur film called “Innocence of Muslims,” the real impetus was […]
http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/6798
Up until September 11th, 2012, the Obama campaign truly believed that their candidate had the upper hand on the issue of foreign policy. In fact, during Mr. Obama’s nomination acceptance speech just last week, he portrayed Mr. Romney as “new to foreign policy.” But while it is true that Mr. Obama has the luxury of having three and one-half years under his belt as President of the United States, it is also true that he has spent most of time focused on domestic issues of an ideological nature. It is true, too, that his foreign policy is based on the United States taking its “proper place” in the world as an “equal.” Further, it is also true, as is evidenced by the violence currently be perpetrated against US embassies across the Middle East – violence that has claimed the lives of four US emissaries, including a State Department ambassador – that Mr. Obama’s foreign policy is not only a complete and utter failure, it has left our nation less safe and the target of those who oppose liberty and freedom around the world.
http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/
Yasser Arafat and Yitzchak Rabin were reportedly overheard having the following spirited conversation in the afterlife recently – frankly reflecting on the mistakes they both had made in trying to reach the “Peace of the Brave” for which they and last surviving member of the trio – Shimon Peres – had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.
Yitzchak: I always thought that the way to peace between the Jews and the Arabs involved re-subdividing Palestine into two States with Jewish Israel sovereign in about 20% of Palestine and Arab Jordan sovereign in about 80% of Palestine.
Shimon persuaded me to pursue a different path by accepting Oslo.
In hindsight this was a terrible error of judgement by me and cost me my life, the lives of thousands of Jews and Arabs and the maiming, wounding and emotional scarring of our respective populations.
Yasser: Look Yitzchak, I know you weren’t happy with Oslo. I felt it in that famous handshake at the White House. I was aware of your comment in The Australian newspaper on May 27, 1985:
“One tiny State between Israel and Jordan will solve nothing. It will be a time bomb.”
Oslo would have created just such a State.
Yitzchak: I think my then prediction is more relevant today than ever – considering the collapse of Oslo, 9/11, your 2001 refusal of Barak’s offer, the second Intifada, the failed Roadmap, the 2006 Lebanon War, the 2008 Abbas rejection of Olmert’s offer, the 10000 rockets fired into civilian population centres in Israel from Gaza since 2007, Operation Cast Lead in 2008, what’s happening now in Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, the West Bank and Iran’s nuclear threat to wipe out Israel.
The Quartet members are making a big mistake pursuing the two-state solution.
They supposedly respect my memory but not my opinions. They know I also said when making my prediction:
“the Palestinians should have a sovereign State which includes most of the Palestinians. It should be Jordan with a considerable part of the West Bank and Gaza. East of the Jordan River there is enough room to settle the Palestinian refugees.”
Yasser: On June 25, 1987 I myself told the New York Review of Books that before the Second World War:
“Jordan was an emirate, completely part of Palestine.”
I know my history as well as you, my dear partner in peace. We both agreed that Jordan was part of Palestine – part of the problem and part of the solution..…
Yitzchak: We really should have built on this common agreement when we finally decided to talk about peace.
Yasser: … I also told Der Spiegel in 1986:
“Jordanians and Palestinians are indeed one people. No one can divide us. We have the same fate.”
Yitzchak: Even Jordan recognised the historic and demographic reality of what you were saying. As early as Spring 1982 Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan was quoted in the Foreign Affairs Review as endorsing the words of a leading Jordanian social scientist:
“the Jordanians and Palestinians are now one people, and no political loyalty, however strong, will separate them permanently.”
Yasser: Farouk Kadoumi, the Head of the Political Department of the PLO, told Newsweek on 14 March 1977:
“Jordanians and Palestinians are considered by the PLO as one people.”
Farouk stood by my wife Suha during my dying days in hospital in France. Now there is more concern about whether I was poisoned than there is about the failed peace process.
www.navon.com
This year, I happened to be in lower Manhattan during the 9/11 commemorations. Eleven years have passed since that terrible morning, and America has thankfully killed Ben-Laden. From a historical perspective, however, Ben-Laden did achieve one of his objectives: to replace US-backed Arab regimes with Islamic ones.
Iran has played a major role, and continues to play a major role, in the Islamic takeover of the Middle-East and of North Africa. It also pursues nuclear weapons with the declared aim of wiping Israel off the map.
History has taught us that when Jew-haters threaten to kill Jews, they should be taken seriously. But History has also taught us that no country has ever abandoned its nuclear ambitions as a result of economic sanctions.
The Reagan administration didn’t want Pakistan to go nuclear, and the Bush junior Administration didn’t want North Korea to get the bomb either. Yet in spite of pressures and sanctions, both countries went ahead.
Iraq and Libya, on the other hand, did forego their nuclear programs only because they either suffered or feared a military strike. Saddam Hussein abandoned his nuclear ambitions after his French-built nuclear reactor was bombed by Israel in 1981. Muammar Gaddafi stopped his nuclear program right after the US and British invasion of Iraq in 2003, because he feared that he would be next in line. Even Iran temporarily suspended its nuclear program after the invasion of Iraq for fear of a US strike. As soon as it became clear that the Bush Administration had abandoned the idea of destroying Iran’s nuclear plants, Iran renewed its nuclear program.
Not surprisingly, economic sanctions are not convincing Iran to stop its nuclear program. For a start, these sanctions are a sham because they are not enforced by China (which needs Iran’s oil) and by Russia (which sees in Iran the last rampart against US hegemony in the Middle East). In addition, Iran and Egypt are now negotiating an oil deal to make up for Iran’s lost sales to the European Union. Iran supported the 2011 uprising that brought Muhammad Morsi to power. Now it is ripping the economic benefits of having a new Islamic ally.
But even if sanctions were actually enforced against Iran, they would be powerless: a leadership that has declared its readiness to sacrifice millions of its own citizens for the sake of destroying Israel surely has no qualms about temporarily lowering the living standards of its future victims.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/un-human-rights-council-promotes-violence-against-u-s/
http://www.eyeontheun.org/
While the calamitous consequences of President Obama’s foreign policy are being played out on the Arab street, the Obama-backed UN Human Rights Council is fueling the hatred behind such violence. Today in Geneva during its current session, the council advertised and facilitated a “parallel” event designed to condemn American troops for human rights atrocities.
Legitimization of the Human Rights Council has been a cornerstone of the president’s so-called engagement policy, and his administration is currently seeking a second term as a council member, with elections scheduled for November 12, 2012. And yet in the council’s bulletin of parallel meetings today was an event organized by two UN-accredited non-governmental organizations, one of which had close ties to the regime of Mouammar Kadhafi. The other is a devotee of Saddam Hussein.
The title of the session was “Roundtable on Human Rights Issues that Require the Council’s Attention: Iraq.” Here’s a sample of what organizers meant by “human rights.” Daniela Valencia: “U.S. troops are perpetrators of rape, torture and abuse.” Karen Parker: “The U.S. engaged in terrorism. … It terrorized the civilian population.” The third speaker, Christopher Busby, said his research suggested the U.S. dropped “bombs made of uranium in Fallujah,” and finished with “thank goodness the Koran has such enormous power.”
The UN-accredited organizations behind the event included the International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (EAFORD) and the Union of Arab Jurists. EAFORD, established thirty years ago in Libya, has told UN audiences in the past that “the anthrax letters … were mailed in the United States by a well-known American Zionist.” Speeches at the Human Rights Council from the Union of Arab Jurists include rants about Saddam Hussein as “the legitimate president of Iraq.”
The UN attempts to give itself deniability when it comes to anti-Western and anti-Israeli side-events by claiming in its bulletin that the advertised events do “not imply any opinion or endorsement by the [UN] Secretariat.” The claim is bogus.
http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4476 Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama are men trapped in pickles. As the prime minister, Bibi’s first duty is to assure the survival of Israel. Against the prospect of another Holocaust, nothing else matters. “Diplomacy is nice, and keeps the wet, the wilted and the wimpy of Foggy Bottom off the street. Sometimes diplomacy works, […]
http://www.jinsa.org/fellowship-program/jinsa-fellows/egypt-governable The Obama administration is baffled by the Egyptian government’s response to the Sept. 11 attack on the American embassy in Cairo. It took President Mohamed Morsi two days to denounce the assault on the embassy, and even then he placed the blame on a hitherto unnoticed clip posted on YouTube rather than on the […]
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LI14Ak01.html Asymmetrical warfare was supposed to benefit the insurgents. For the price of a few flying lessons a gang of jihadis brought down the World Trade Center, a terrorist with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and powdered Tang can blow up an airplane, and a few pounds of plutonium can cripple a major city. Meet […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/editorial-obamas-foreign-policy-is-a-national-disaster/
President Barack Obama was elected largely on the assumption that he could – and would — make the world “like” us again. The disturbing and disgraceful events that we are witnessing in the Middle East over the last few days have revealed just what an unmitigated disaster this President’s foreign policy has been.
Obama began his tenure in office by traveling around Europe apologizing for America’s supposed international arrogance, which earned him only contempt, not goodwill. He went on to begin alienating our longstanding, closest allies. It began with small but offensive gestures like returning Churchill’s bust to England and openly snubbing Israel’s Netanyahu. Speaking of Israel, Obama has proven himself to be “the anti-Israel President.”
But it wasn’t enough that Obama pushed away our allies – he has also emboldened and empowered our enemies. He stood by and did nothing as the Iranian regime crushed the people’s Green Revolution which, with our support, could have removed Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollahs from power. One can only imagine how that would have changed the balance of power in the Middle East. Obama could have taken credit for taking down the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism; instead, he gave them space to continue their pursuit of nuclear weapons and dumped the problem of a nuclear Iran in Israel’s lap.
After the Green Revolution fizzled out there came the supposedly democratic uprisings across the Middle East called the “Arab Spring” – the inspiration for which some attribute to Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech. They degenerated quickly into an Islamist Winter, with Muslim fundamentalists (including al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood) seizing power, threatening war with our ally Israel, and now attacking our embassies and murdering Americans. Obama helped pave the foundation for this nightmare by helping to oust our former ally Mubarak in Egypt; now the largest country in the Middle East is in the grip of the Muslim Brotherhood and the black flag of jihad has been raised over our own embassy.
And so here we are. It is interesting to note that, up until now, no one defined the Obama Doctrine. Americans had a general idea what the Bush Doctrine was; we obviously understood the Reagan Doctrine. But the Obama Doctrine has puzzled commentators for years — is it appeasement? Is it anti-colonialism? Is it multilateral internationalism?
Well, as we witness the catastrophe unfolding right before our eyes in the Middle East, with our enemies unleashing hate and violence against America and with our President beating his breast in response with contrition and mumbling mea culpa, we now know what the Obama Doctrine is: it’s a vacuum.
President Obama is a foreign policy failure who has placed America in the worst global position she has been in since the end of the Cold War. Nations that were once our allies — though Obama says the term “ally” is a “term of art” — are now our enemies (Egypt, Tunisia). Nations that were quiet are now loud (Libya). Nations that were headed in the right direction have been turned over to Islamists (Iraq, Afghanistan). Meanwhile, we have sold our debt to China, giving them outsized influence over our foreign policy; we have allowed Russia to broaden its sphere of influence in the Middle East, as well as Central and Eastern Europe; we have ceded ground to the Hugo Chavez acolytes in South America. It is difficult to name a single spot anywhere on earth that is more pro-America thanks to President Obama.
Obama’s foreign policy: a national disaster.
http://news.yahoo.com/secretary-clinton-delivers-powerful-religion-speech-middle-east-034054319–abc-news-politics.html
This blather from a woman who has ignored the persecution of women and honor killings, the persecution of Christians in the entire Muslim world, and murders and terrorism against “infidels” in every corner of the world….
Secretary Clinton delivered a powerful and personal speech about religion at an Eid ul-Fitr reception, marking the end of the Muslim holiday of Ramadan. The speech, at times, was a direct response to the attacks on U.S. diplomatic missions in the Middle East, and the deaths of four diplomats at the hands of militants in Libya.
In her remarks, Clinton repeated much of what she’s said in the last two days. Namely that the Benghazi attack was carried out by a “small and savage group,” and that the United States completely rejects what she called the “inflammable and despicable” anti-Muslim film circulating the Internet. However, Clinton pointed out all religions have faced insults and denigration, but that’s no justification for violence. The response to such insults is what separates people of true faith from those who would use religion as an excuse to commit violent acts, she said.
“When Christians are subject to insults to their faith, and that certainly happens, we expect them not to resort to violence. When Hindus or Buddhists are subjected to insults to their faiths, and that also certainly happens, we expect them not to resort to violence,” said Clinton. “The same goes for all faiths, including Islam.”
