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December 2016

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Trump Could Be Even More Wrong on Israel Rejecting a two-state solution would be worse than Obama’s U.N. abstention. By William A. Galston see note please

By on December 28th, 2016

But Mr. Galston was also outraged when Netanayhu addressed the U. S. Congress in 2015…
Netanyahu’s Capitol Hill Debacle The Israeli leader and House speaker are risking a rupture in U.S.-Israel relations.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/william-a-galston-netanyahus-capitol-hill-debacle-1424218804
Netanyahu’s Forceful but Misguided Address His logic should lead him to urge an Iranian regime change, but he knows that won’t sell in the U.S.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/william-a-galston-netanyahus-forceful-but-misguided-address-1425427204

As children we are taught that two wrongs don’t make a right. And when we grow up, we learn that this maxim harbors a deep, sad truth—nowhere more so than in the Middle East.

The Obama administration’s decision to abstain on U.N. Security Council resolution 2334, which condemns Israel for its settlements on the West Bank and east Jerusalem, was a mistake. Understandable, perhaps, but still a mistake. It has given false hope to Israel’s adversaries while uniting Israelis across the political spectrum against an institution they see as one-sided and hypocritical.

The resolution makes no discernible contribution to the cause of peace in the Middle East. Most Israelis regard it as the final act of an expiring administration, not a long-term change in U.S. policy.

The recent resolution is most accurately understood as a continuation of past Security Council and U.S. policy in the region. As my Brookings colleague Natan Sachs points out, by abstaining in 1987, the Reagan administration allowed the passage of the Security Council’s Resolution 605, which included “Jerusalem” in the “Palestinian and Arab Territories, occupied by Israel since 1967.”

When it comes to the Middle East, it is Donald Trump who represents a breach with the past, not Barack Obama. blah,blah, blah….

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Climateers Can’t Handle the Truth Lee Raymond’s 1997 climate speech in China is looking better than ever. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

By on December 28th, 2016

Congrats are due for the term “climate denialist,” which in 2016 migrated from Paul Krugman’s column to the news pages of the New York Times.

On Dec. 7, the term ascended to a place of ultimate honor when it figured in the headline, “Trump Picks Scott Pruitt, Climate Change Denialist, to Lead E.P.A.”

Unfortunately, never to be explained is precisely which climate propositions one must deny in order to qualify as a denialist. In zinging Mr. Pruitt, currently Oklahoma’s attorney general, the Times rests its unspoken case on a quote from an article this year in National Review, in which he and a coauthor wrote: “Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”

But this statement is plainly true. No climate scientist would dispute it. Through all five “assessment reports” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—sharer of Al Gore’s Nobel prize—the central puzzle has been “climate sensitivity,” aka the “degree and extent” of human impact on climate.

Greenpeace adopts the same National Review article to attack Mr. Pruitt, lying that he and a coauthor “claimed the science of climate change is ‘far from settled.’”

The science is not settled (science never is), but this is not what Mr. Pruitt was referring to. His plain, unmistakable words refer to a “major policy debate” that is “far from settled”—a statement that indisputably applies even among ardent believers in climate doom. Witness the battle between wings of the environmental movement over the role of nuclear power. Witness veteran campaigner James Hansen’s dismissal of the Paris agreement, which other climate campaigners celebrate, as “worthless words.”

These lies about what Mr. Pruitt wrote in a widely available article aren’t the lies of authors carried away by enthusiasm for their cause. They are the lies of people who know their employers and audiences are beyond caring.

Which brings us a two-part article in the New York Review of Books by representatives of the Rockefeller family charity, desperately trying to make the world care about their fantasy that Exxon is somehow a decisive player in the policy debate—Exxon, not voters who oppose higher energy taxes; Exxon, not the governments that control 80% of the world’s fossil fuel reserves and show no tendency to forgo the money available from them.

The Rockefeller family’s charitable attachment to the climate cause is understandable, though. Their money might instead be used to bring clean water to poor villages, immunize kids against disease, or improve education. But such programs can be evaluated and found wanting due to fraud or incompetence, whereas climate change is a cause to which money can safely be devoted to no effect whatsoever without fear of criticism. CONTINUE AT SITE

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The EU vs. the Nation State? by George Igler

By on December 28th, 2016

The question remains, however, why any nation would want to throw out its sovereignty to institutions that are fundamentally unaccountable, that provide no mechanism for reversing direction, and whose only “solution” to problems involves arrogating to itself ever more authoritarian, rather than democratically legitimate, power.

Previous worries over unemployment and the economy have been side-lined: the issues now vexing European voters the most, according to the EU’s own figures, are mass immigration (45%) and terrorism (32%).

The Netherlands’ Partij Voor de Vrijheid, France’s Front National and Germany’s Alternativ für Deutschland are each pushing for a referendum on EU membership in their respective nations.

Given that the EU’s institutions have been so instrumental as a causal factor in the mass migration and terrorism that are now dominating the minds of national electorates, some might argue that the sooner Europeans get rid of the EU, which is now doing more harm than good, the better.

Attention is beginning to focus on elections due to take place in three separate European countries in 2017. The outcomes in the Netherlands, France and Germany will determine the likely future of the European Union (EU).

In the Netherlands, on March 15, all 150 members of the country’s House of Representatives will face the ballot box. The nation is currently led by Prime Minister Mark Rutte, whose VVD party holds 40 seats in the legislative chamber, ruling in a coalition with the Dutch Labour party, which holds 35 seats.

In contrast, the Party for Freedom – Partij Voor de Vrijheid (PVV) – led by Geert Wilders, currently holds 12 seats.

According to an opinion poll, issued on December 21, Wilders’s party has leapt to 24% in the polls, while Rutte’s party has slid to 15%. Were an election to happen now, this would translate to 23 MPs for Rutte’s VVD, and 36 MPs for Wilders’s PVV.

Given the strict formula of proportional representation in the Netherlands, however, coalition governments are the norm. Should Wilders’s PVV come first in March, he will likely need to negotiate with one of his staunchest critics to form a government.

In France, two rounds of voting in the presidential elections are set to take place on April 23 and May 7 – with the two leading candidates from the first round facing each other in a runoff in the second round.

The most likely candidates to make it through to the second round, François Fillon, of the centre-right Les Républicains, and Marine Le Pen, of the populist Front National, remain tied in first-round polling.

A survey, published on December 7, gave each candidate 24%. Le Pen’s party, however, has previously fallen afoul of France’s dual-round voting system, in which voters for other parties have used the second round to swing behind the more moderate candidate.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Berlin Truck Massacre Shows the Soundness of Trump’s Views on Illegal-Alien Criminals Pro-sanctuary mayors and the New York Times are appalled by the suggestion there’s any connection between immigration and terror. By Heather Mac Donald

By on December 27th, 2016

Donald Trump was asked on Wednesday if the Christmas-market truck massacre in Berlin had caused him to reevaluate his various proposals regarding immigration from terror-spawning regions. His answer sent the liberal media into another nervous breakdown: “I’ve been proven to be right,” Trump responded. “One hundred percent correct.”

And so he has. To the New York Times, however, Trump’s words were front-page news. “Trump Suggests Berlin Attack Affirms His Plan to Bar Muslims,” read the headline (even though Trump had not specifically addressed the temporary ban in his response to the reporter’s question). The Times assumes that its readers will be shocked by any suggested connection between Islamic terror attacks and immigration policy. The Times, for its part, treats the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” like the Ebola virus, inoculating itself from any misperception that it would independently pen such scandalous words by the liberal use of scare quotes. “One area where Mr. Trump and his advisers have been unswerving is their repeated denunciation of ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’” writes the Times incredulously.

Despite the Times’ protestation, the problem of Islamic terrorism in the West is, among other things, an immigration issue, whether an attack has been committed by first-generation immigrants or second. But the Berlin massacre does more than vindicate Trump’s planned reassessment of entry protocols. It also vindicates his intention to eliminate local sanctuary policies. The suspected Berlin attacker was, like many previous Islamic terrorists, a thug first, a terrorist second. Anis Amri had been arrested several times in his home country of Tunisia for various street crimes, including petty theft; he was sentenced in absentia to five years in prison for stealing a car. He committed arson in Italy. He assaulted fellow prisoners while jailed in Italy. He sold drugs in a Berlin park.

Such crimes, if committed by an illegal alien in San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, or the 300 other sanctuary jurisdictions in the U.S., would induce local jail authorities and police chiefs to hold that alien in order to protect him against any federal effort to deport him. Politicians in sanctuary cities work feverishly to bury this core fact: The sanctuary policies they have rushed to defend in the wake of Trump’s election are designed to shield street criminals and thugs from deportation. Such policies forbid jail authorities from honoring a federal request to hold an illegal-alien criminal beyond his release date so that federal agents can start removal proceedings against him.

On Friday, BBC Radio interviewed Seattle mayor Ed Murray about his city’s recently reaffirmed sanctuary policy. Murray ducked any question that would have clarified the fact that it was criminal law-breakers Seattle was shielding. Instead, Murray waxed self-righteous about his “moral obligation” to defeat immigration enforcement, with not a peep of acknowledgment that Seattle’s defiance of federal authority meant that law-abiding Seattle residents would be forced to pay the costs of illegal-alien crime.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

THE ANCIENT FOREIGN POLICY: VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

By on December 27th, 2016

Nations are collections of human beings, and human nature has not changed, despite Obama’s pleadings. For the last eight years, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Susan Rice have sought to rewrite the traditional approach to foreign policy. In various ways, they have warned us about the dangers that a reactionary Trump presidency would pose, on the assumption that their new world order now operates more along the lines of an Ivy League conference than according to the machinations and self-interests of the dog-eat-dog Manhattan real-estate cosmos.

It would be nice if the international order had safe spaces, prohibitions against micro-aggressions, and trigger warnings that warn of hurtful speech, but is the world really one big Harvard or Stanford that runs on loud assertions of sensitivity, guilt, apologies, or even the cynical progressive pieties found in WikiLeaks?

The tempo abroad in the last eight years would suggest that the answer is no: half a million dead in Syria, over a million young Muslim men flooding into Europe, an Iraq in ruins (though Biden once bragged it would be the Obama administration’s “greatest achievement”), the Benghazi catastrophe, North Africa a wasteland and terrorist incubator, Israel and the Gulf states estranged from America, Iran empowered and soon to be nuclear, Russia hell-bent on humiliating the U.S., China quietly forming its own updated Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, an impoverished Cuba and much of Latin America gnawing the limp wrist of U.S. outreach, and the European Union gradually imploding.

Obama’s lead-from-behind foreign policy has becoming something like the seduction of an old house. Its wiring, plumbing, and foundation are shot, but the majestic structure, when given a thin coat of new paint by the seller, proudly goes on the market as “restored” — at least until the new buyer discovers that the Potemkin façade is about to collapse from lax maintenance and deliberate indifference. In other words, Obama’s periodic declamations, Nobel Prize, and adulation from a toady press are all veneers of shiny paint; the Middle East, Russia, China, Iran, and ISIS terrorism are the insidious frayed wiring, corroded pipes, and termites that are about to take down the entire structure from the inside out. Note that the unrepentant seller is always loudly petulant that the new owner, as he makes endless vital repairs, did not appreciate the paint job he inherited.

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EDUCATION, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

A New Documentary Shows the Extent and Nature of Anti-Zionist ‘Hate Spaces’ on Campus by Jeffrey Barken

By on December 27th, 2016

Americans for Peace and Tolerance’s (APT) new documentary, Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus, explores the roots of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement waged against Israel, and reveals the mob mentality that characterizes antisemitic student groups on college campuses across the US.https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/12/26/a-new-documentary-shows-the-extent-and-nature-of-anti-zionist-hate-spaces-on-campus/

The 70-minute film strikes a nerve, and an emotional punch.

Authenticated cell-phone videos and recorded interviews transport viewers to hate-crime scenes where Jewish students are subjected to verbal and physical abuse, and are intimidated even by college professors and administrators.

British singer George Michael, who became one of the pop idols of the 1980s with Wham! and then forged a…

This is not a propaganda film about the Middle East conflict, Avi Goldwasser, the documentary’s executive producer, tells JNS.org. It is strictly “a film about what’s happening on campus,” he says.

Indeed, recent events at schools like Northeastern University in Boston deserve scrutiny. On that campus, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) protesters have chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, the state of Israel has got to go!” Statues of Jewish donors have been vandalized, while cruel sticker campaigns and “apartheid walls” are used to single out and shame individual Jewish students regardless of their opinions about Israel.

In April 2013, Northeastern University SJP activists stormed into a classroom and interrupted a Holocaust memorial service. “The lessons of the Holocaust were not learned, you are child murderers,” SJP members are caught shouting on camera. Going beyond Northeastern, Hate Spaces tours the country, revealing a long list of hotspots where the BDS movement is spiraling out of control.

The rigid ideology of BDS

A quote from George Packer’s 2011 New Yorker article, “Deepest Cuts,” gets to the core of what is wrong with BDS: “Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked.” The scenes depicted in the documentary clearly demonstrate that a rigid ideology has taken hold of BDS supporters on college campuses. Groups like SJP use megaphones to shout their rallying slogans, but adherents are fundamentally uninterested in engaging in a serious, civil debate with anyone who questions their self-proclaimed righteous position.

APT is a Boston-based non-profit whose stated mission is to advocate for “peaceful coexistence and tolerance in an ethnically diverse America.” According to Goldwasser, Hate Spaces is geared at engaging “decent people in America who would look at an indecent situation … and understand the obvious unfairness.”

“No other minority group would stand for such treatment on campus,” Goldwasser says of Jewish students’ plight.

Hate Spaces meticulously charts the flow of money from dictators in Muslim countries to American universities, suggesting that this transfer of capital buttresses support for Islamic causes among academics. Devoid of intellectual integrity, professors choose a path of least resistance when discussing Israel and the Palestinian territories, and are unfairly sympathetic to the BDS agenda. The result is a classroom where one side of the debate is permitted to demonize the other, and pro-Israel students are systematically denied a voice.

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EDUCATION, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus A new film exposes academic Jew-Hatred . Andrew Harrod

By on December 27th, 2016

“Today on American college campuses, there is only one group of students that you are allowed to attack and you can attack at will, and those are Jews,” states the narrator in the new film Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus. This latest production from Americans for Peace & Tolerance, the makers of the J Street Challenge, engagingly examines how demonization of Israel’s Jewish state is reviving anti-Semitism in American academia.

Hate Spaces extensively documents what has become a nationwide campus “hostile environment” for Jews, according to Susan Tuchman from the Zionist Organization of America. Student signs at colleges like Columbia University appear in the film with statements such as “Israel is a swollen parasite…the Jews: Too fat…Too greedy…Too powerful…Fight the Jewish mafia.”

Quoted in Hate Spaces, University of California (UC)-Los Angeles Hillel President Natalie Charney notes an “anti-Israel culture” in which “singling out the only Jewish state creates an environment where it’s ok to single out Jewish students.” The film focuses on one of Israel’s main campus adversaries, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a leading supporter of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel with deep links to the Muslim Brotherhood. The film notes SJP members chanting “Allahu Akbar” to celebrate the nonbinding 2013 UC-San Diego student council decision for BDS and a SJP chapter president’s 2010 assault upon a Jewish UC-Berkeley student.

Former SJP member and current “pro-Israeli Muslim” Rezwan Ovo Haq notes that “SJP largely masquerades behind the human rights issue” of support Palestinians as part of a broader human rights agenda. Yet in SJP he was “slandering Israel and I had deep-seated hatred for Israel.” Corresponding to this ugly reality, a University of Tennessee SJP member once tweeted: “What is the difference between a Jew and a pizza? The pizza leaves the oven.”

Eminent law professor Alan Dershowitz notes in a film interview that “antisemitism used to come mostly from the right, now it’s coming mostly from the hard left.” Hereby “one of the strangest alliances on university campuses today is between the hard left” of minorities like blacks and Islamist groups like SJP. Accordingly, San Diego State University student journalist Anthony Berteaux discusses once identifying with SJP as a gay, Asian man.

Wall Street Journal editor Bret Stephens wonders at such leftwing “useful idiots of the twenty-first century.” “Why is it that the liberals and progressives who espouse a certain set of values are so intent on demonizing and de-legitimatizing the one country that shares their values” in the Middle East, he asks. By contrast, past African-American civil rights leaders such as W.E.B Dubois, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Bayard Rustin “have been Zionists, from socialists to liberals to conservatives,” notes African-American Zionist Chloe Valdary.

Faux progressive condemnation of Israel, Dershowitz notes, arises largely because “there is no subject today in the world which has more distortion, more lies, more dissembling, than discussion about Israel.” Hate Spaces shows women from Israel’s Arab minority joining Israel’s parliament and winning the Miss Israel beauty contest, belying a sign in the film condemning Israel as the “Fourth Reich. During speaking engagements, Dershowitz challenges listeners “to name a single country in the history of the world faced with threats comparable to those threats faced by Israel both internal and external that have had a better record of human rights.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

10 Ways Donald Trump Can Cut Waste – Our Advice From OpenTheBooks.com by Adam Andrzejewski ,

By on December 27th, 2016

Donald J. Trump won the presidency by giving real hope to millions of voters that their situation could improve. Now he and Congress have a chance to take action and deliver real results. One way to encourage economic growth is to stop wasting taxpayer dollars on activities that do nothing to create wealth.

At OpenTheBooks.com we believe that in order to make America great again we need to hold government accountable again. Here are ten steps the president elect can take to eliminate wasteful spending and rein in an out-of-control federal government:

1. Disarm federal regulatory agencies

During an eight-year period, 53 non-military, non-law enforcement agencies spent $335 million on guns, ammunition and military-style equipment. Agencies like Environmental Protection Agency, Health and Human Services, Internal Revenue Service, Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, Food and Drug Administration, Smithsonian Institution, etc. sharply increased procurement of weaponry.

The scope of federal power is growing. Today, there are 200,000 federal officers with arrest and firearm authority across 67 federal agencies vs. only 182,000 U.S. Marines. These 67 federal agencies spent a total of $1.48 billion on guns, ammunition and military-style equipment (FY2006-FY2014).

2. Fire EPA lawyers

If the EPA were a private sector law firm, it would rank as the 11th largest. The EPA loves lawyers and employs more lawyers than scientists.
Since 2008, the EPA spent $1.2 billion in salary for over 1,000 lawyers. More money was spent on “General Attorneys” than on chemists, general health scientists, ecologists, chemists, microbiologists, geologists, hydrologists, toxicologists, biologists, physical scientists, and health physicists combined.

When the EPA is sued, the Department of Justice defends the EPA in court. The EPA doesn’t need 1,020 lawyers to harass the private sector.

3. Blockade federal funds for sanctuary cities

Want to clean up sanctuary cities? Issue an executive order telling all federal contractors they have three years to move operations from any city that won’t follow federal law, or lose their contract. Watch how fast the sanctuary cities decide to follow federal statutes.

For example, in Austin, TX, the amount of federal contracting was $900 million. In Chicago, total federal contracting amounted to $2.47 billion (FY2016). In San Francisco, the top twenty federal contractors were paid$18.6 billion last year.

Federal funding is Trump’s biggest stick. He should use it within his constitutional powers.

4. Cut funding for agency self-promotion

One bi-partisan no-brainer would be to severely scale back the $1.5 billion per year spent on PR campaigns designed to convince taxpayers to spend even more taxpayer money on bigger budgets for federal agencies and regulatory schemes.

There’s no public purpose for a phalanx of 5,000 federal public relations officers costing $500 million per year. And it’s an abject waste of resources to spend over $1 billion annually with outside PR firms. We identified these firms charging the agencies up to $88 per hour for their interns, billing $275/hour for graphic designers and $525/hour for their own executives.

Congress should tell the administration how agencies are doing through rigorous oversight. Funding self-promotional agency PR campaigns is absurd.

5. Direct small business funds … to small business

Here’s a novel idea: Lending by the U.S. Small Business Administration should go to small businesses! We’ve identified $14 billion in SBA financial transactions flowing to anything but small business including some of the most successful Wall Street bankers and boutique investment firms; $200 million in lending to private country clubs, golf clubs, beach clubs and tennis clubs; $142 million into ZIP code 90210 (Beverly Hills, CA); and over a quarter billion to subdivisions of the Fortune 100.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

3 Lessons on the 25th Anniversary of the Soviet Union’s Fall The winning strategy President Trump must apply toward Islamic Supremacism. Jamie Glazov

By on December 27th, 2016

Reprinted from Breitbart.com.

December 25 marked the 25thanniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. On this occasion, it is urgent for us to reflect on 3 key lessons that the fall of the Evil Empire provided. They are lessons that the new incoming Trump administration must put into action immediately vis-à-vis our enemy in the terror war.

Lesson #1: Go on the Offense Against Islamic Supremacism

While we know that the Soviet Union collapsed, on many realms, from within, the record is clear that President Reagan also fueled the collapse. By moving against détente and beyond containment, Reagan’s aggressive anti-communism saw the U.S. take on a strategic offensive against the Soviet Union which led to victory. As Paul Kengor has documented in his book, The Crusader, Reagan fought not to just contain, but to win. His administration’s massive defense build-up, support of anti-communist rebels around the world, support of dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain, promotion of SDI, and many other aggressive policies put a heavy pressure on the Soviet Union that ultimately broke its already fragile legs.

Thus, we see how in our present-day conflict with Islamic Supremacism, we need to go on the offensive. In order to do that, we must first take two crucial steps. The first step is to name the enemy; the second is to formulate an actual doctrine against him. As Sebastian Gorka urges in Defeating Jihad, the U.S. government needs to lay down a vision, an actual “threat doctrine analysis” in a thorough document, just like George Kennan’s Long Telegram and NSC-68 did in laying out the strategic foundation to fighting communism in the Cold War. The new incoming Trump administration, therefore, must articulate a threat doctrine analysis and then shape it into a Reagan-like doctrine of offense.

Lesson #2: Deceive the Totalitarian Enemy into Being Pluralistic

In Reagan’s War, Peter Schweizer revealed how the Reagan administration cleverly promoted the process of change within the Soviet Union towards a more pluralistic political and economic system. This was a brilliant approach, seeing that Gorbachev’s policies of Glasnost and Perestroika clearly triggered communism’s collapse.

Henry Kissinger has shrewdly delineated how Gorbachev’s effort to reform, as well as to salvage, Soviet communism was the very ingredient that fueled its disintegration. Indeed, once Moscow ended its total and intrusive control of its satellites, and once it allowed free discussion, it signed its own death warrant. Gorbachev wanted to de-Stalinize, yet he could not do so without destroying the regime itself. Kissinger writes:

Gorbachev’s gamble on liberalization was bound to fail. To the degree that the Communist Party had lost its monolithic character, it became demoralized. Liberalization proved incompatible with communist rule — the communists could not turn themselves into democrats without ceasing to be communists, an equation Gorbachev never understood.

To be sure, the whole idea of de-Stalinization was based on the assumption that the Soviet regime could survive without its despotic component; that it could endure a reconciliation with its past. But a legitimate examination of the causes of Stalinism could not occur without an uncensored evaluation of Leninism, which the Soviet system could not allow without risking the de-legitimization of its entire foundation.

This is a crucial lesson for our leadership in the terror war. But first, let us be clear: we must not buy into Natan Sharansky’s naive assumption that all people want freedom. They do not, especially Sharia-believers. The dark consequences of the so-called “Arab Spring” taught us this painful lesson well, as we witnessed the process of “democratization” in the Middle East lead to a totalitarian Islamist Winter.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Obama’s Barbaric UN Resolution Report: he’s cooking up another one. P. David Hornik

By on December 27th, 2016

UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which was passed on Friday and focuses on Israeli settlement activity, is even worse than its critics—who include Democratic lawmakers and the staunchly left-wing Central Conference of American (Reform) Rabbis (here and here)—have made it out to be.

The resolution—whose passage was made possible by the U.S. abstention ordered by President Obama from Hawaii—is not just shameful, unfair, unbalanced, or destructive. It’s barbaric.

Only in one clause—which is in the preamble, which has less force than the body of the text—does the resolution explicitly call on Palestinians to do anything. The preamble calls on “the Palestinian Authority Security Forces to maintain effective operations aimed at confronting all those engaged in terror and dismantling terrorist capabilities.”

In contrast, five full clauses in the body of the text portray Israel as a rogue state engaged in endemic criminality.

These clauses call “the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem…a flagrant violation under international law” and demand “that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.”

But if even “East Jerusalem” is off limits to Israeli Jews, then—as pointed out by Alan Dershowitz, who was for years a center-left supporter of Obama:

Under this resolution, the access roads that opened up Hebrew University to Jewish and Arab students and the Hadassah Hospital to Jewish and Arab patients are illegal, as are all the rebuilt synagogues—destroyed by Jordan—in the ancient Jewish Quarter of the Old City.

And even as the diplomatic Chanukah greetings keep rolling in, “illegal,” too, are the Chanukah candle-lighting ceremonies at the Western Wall—another “East Jerusalem” site that Israel has extensively refurbished.

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