RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/get-over-it-it-is-not-and-has-never-been-a-special-relationship-ruth-king.html

Partisans of Israel from left and right keep evoking the so called America/Israel special relationship. The left worries that a muscular Israeli response to a mortal threat will threaten the relationship, and the right frets that it has seriously frayed under the Obama administration.

They are both wrong. The so called special relationship is a chimera.

Let’s revisit some history.

In closing critical international shipping lanes, the nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser in July, 1956, was a serious provocation to Great Britain, France and Israel. Furthermore after continual terrorism and threats Israel had credible intelligence that the Arabs were preparing for war. On Oct. 29, 1956, Israeli forces, directed by Moshe Dayan, launched a combined air and ground assault into Egypt’s Sinai peninsula. Early Israeli successes were reinforced by an Anglo-French invasion along the canal. The November 6 cease fire, demanded by the United Nations and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles led to a total withdrawal by Israel, England and France in exchange for reassurances that the U.N. would monitor the Sinai and keep open the Straits of Tiran crucial for Israel’s shipping. That was special only in the thinly disguised animosity of John Foster Dulles.

Border incidents and terrorism continued against Israel for the next decade. Egypt’s President Nasser escalated his blood curdling threats to destroy Israel and in 1967 he requested the withdrawal of United Nations forces from the Sinai and closed the Gulf of Aqaba and Straits of Tiran.

When Israel complained of these flagrant violations of the 1956 agreement, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and President Lyndon Johnson declared that they could not find the agreement and therefore could not issue any warning to Egypt. Israel launched a pre-emptive lightning strike which crippled the forces of Syria, Egypt and Jordan arrayed against it. By the time Israel heard Dean Rusk’s demands for a cease fire it was all over, and the era of so called “occupation,” which has been flogged by every successive administration, began.

In October of 1973 it was clear to Israel and confirmed by international intelligence that Arab States were preparing a major strike on Israel. President Nixon, already beset by escalating scandal permitted his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to pressure Israel to avoid a preemptive strike. Israel bowed to the hard fisted demands and on Yom Kippur, the combined forces of Egypt and Syria with logistical support from all the Arab states attacked. Israel’s desperate pleas for re-supply of dwindling ordnance were ignored by the State and Defense Departments. Finally, Nixon ordered an immediate air-lift. While dispute continues as to whether it was Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger or Kissinger who held up the resupply, what is clear is that when Israel regrouped and began a counteroffensive, Kissinger demanded an immediate cease fire. Negotiations over Israel’s retreat from the Sinai continued into the administration of Gerald Ford in which Kissinger remained as Secretary of State. Largely as a result of Kissinger’s crude threats of a “reassessment of America’s relations with Israel” Israel withdrew back across the Suez Canal and several miles inland from the east bank. All territorial gains in Syria made during the war were given up.

MIDEAST OUTPOST OCTOBER 2012

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/

Coming Apart: William Mehlman

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/coming-apart-william-mehlman.html

The Iranian nuclear impasse is beginning to tell on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s nerves.

From the Editor: Rael Jean Isaac

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/from-the-editor-rael-jean-isaac-21.html

To the Shores of Tripoli :Sarah Honig

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/to-the-shores-of-tripoli-sarah-honig.html

It is written in the Koran that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet are sinners, whom it is the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every Muslim who is slain in this warfare is sure to go to Paradise

–Tripoli’s envoy, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja

Reflections of a Diaspora Jew: David Horowitz

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/reflections-of-a-diaspora-jew-david-horowitz.html

Editors’ note: Horowitz gave this speech (slightly abbreviated here) at a ZOA dinner on Sept. 6, 2012.

Living Without Solutions in Samaria Spengler

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/living-without-solutions-in-samaria-spengler.html

Get Over It! It is Not and Has Never Been a Special Relationship Ruth King

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/get-over-it-it-is-not-and-has-never-been-a-special-relationship-ruth-king.html

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/49889

Bitterly angry enemies of the Jews come not from a place of pride but of prejudice

In the 1940s, when the Jews in America woke up to the unspeakable horror that their very own relatives or fellow-Jews in Germany, Poland, Vichy France and all over Europe were being savagely, grotesquely, sadistically murdered by Hitler, aided and gleefully abetted by the Muslim Brotherhood…sound familiar?, and that—worse to them—their hero FDR knew about Hitler’s slaughtering rampage but failed to take a moment from puffing tobacco through his pretentious cigarette holder to save them, they went into a period of sustained mourning.

While Jews of every political persuasion found it impossible to wrap their minds around the consciousness-anesthetizing number of six-million men, women, children, toddlers, babies and infants—half of the miniscule Jewish population of the entire world—being wrenched out of their homes in the middle of the night, brutally hurtled into suffocating cattle cars, and transported to camps where they were systematically starved, beaten, and worked to near-death, and then sent to “showers” of Xyklon-B gas that choked the lives out of them, the few Jews who remained knew something that the rest of the anti-Semitic world seemed not to have absorbed:

That throughout their lengthy but besieged history Jews had been through this kind of maniacally obsessed Jew-hatred before, a history that Professor of Linguistics George Jochnowitz painstakingly elaborates upon in The Universality Of Anti-Semitism—Normalizing Hate.
That their enemies, including vast realms like the Roman, Babylonian, Persian and Ottoman Empires, among many others, always perished while the Jews always survived.
That the remaining Jews in any conflict, no matter how small their numbers, would prevail.

As Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu “said the other day at New York City’s very own cesspool, the United Nations: “Throughout our history, the Jewish people have overcome all the tyrants who have sought our destruction. It’s their ideologies that have been discarded by history. The people of Israel live on.”

http://www.mittromney.com/blogs/mitts-view/2012/09/party-and-vision-lincoln A society has an obligation to care for those in need. How we help the most vulnerable members in our midst is not simply a private matter, though it is surely that. It’s also a public concern. Securing justice for the poor and upholding the cause of the needy comes in many different forms, […]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/overcoming-obamaddiction_653239.html?nopager=1

“It is important and urgent, Karpel writes, that those in the grip of Obamaddiction move past denial and stop blaming others, accept responsibility, and embrace alternatives. One suspects that he isn’t holding his breath. And, of course, the AA modeling is just the scaffolding. The book isn’t written so much to change behavior or minds—like the debates upon which the Romney campaign has now pinned its hopes. What Karpel has done—delightfully, given the gravity of the exercise—is explain how we arrived at a point where “we became hooked on a political cult that, blurring the distinction between government and religion, presented a politician as a messianic figure.”One Karpel has now memorably and conclusively made laughable.”

Five weeks to go until Election Day, and the Romney campaign says it is counting on the debates to change things. Leading one to wonder .  .  . what’s to debate? Mitt Romney is the challenger against an incumbent whose record of failure is long and nearly unblemished.
Barack Obama promised that if his stimulus plan were adopted, unemployment would be held at under 8 percent. The plan was adopted, and unemployment has been over 8 percent ever since. He promised to cut the deficit in half. The deficit rose and now comes in routinely at over a trillion dollars a year. He promised a new and sunnier day in relations between the United States and the Muslim world. Our ambassador to one Muslim nation was murdered by terrorists, and an official of another Muslim nation has put a bounty on the head of an American resident for producing a video that offends Islam. The renewable energy projects that we were told would provide “green jobs” have gone bankrupt, costing billions, while the price of gasoline has doubled. And on and on.

Meanwhile the president is holding his own in the polls while Romney struggles. One suspects that this isn’t a question of voters not understanding the candidates’ positions on the issues, and that a couple of debates are unlikely to clear up the confusion. This looks more like a refusal by a big part of the electorate to recognize reality. The question is .  .  . why?

The answer, according to Craig Karpel, is the same one that accounts for a lot of our contemporary miseries: namely, addiction.

“My name is Craig K., and I’m an Obamaholic,” he writes to open The 12-Step Guide for the Recovering Obama Voter. “Welcome to what Alcoholics Anonymous would call a ‘meeting in print.’ We’re here to admit to each other and to ourselves that the Obama presidency isn’t Obama’s fault—it’s ours. We should be impeached for having elected him.”
Karpel is, of course, having fun here. He has the kind of satirical gifts that legions who blog on these matters earnestly try to attain but which remain, forever, beyond their reach. Here, for instance, is Karpel on Al Gore:

.  .  . ever wandering from one five-star hotel to another, his humble mantle—mantle collection, actually—stitched together on self-effacing Savile Row, subsisting somehow on speaking fees of $175,000 per jeremiad, the extent of his renunciation of the pleasures of the flesh ascertainable from his continually expanding girth, warning evildoers (that would be you and me) that this earthly realm will soon be engulfed by “the-fire-next-time,” updated to “global warming,” re-updated to “climate change,” formerly known as “weather.”