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2016

Good Riddance to Obama After His Betrayal of Israel Frank Gaffney and Fred Fleitz

President Obama chose the Friday afternoon of Christmas weekend, less than a month before he leaves office, to try to do lasting damage to the State of Israel. He refused to veto a UN Security Council resolution that will serve to intensify Israel’s conflict with Palestinian jihadists.

In other words, as with so much of the Obama foreign policy legacy, we are left reaping the whirlwind sown by a President whose odious doctrine has been characterized by nine words: Undermine our allies. Embolden our enemies. Diminish our country.

The fact that Mr. Obama took this step over the express objections not only of our Israeli allies, but also of his successor, ensures that this action will be repudiated as soon as President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in. It should also decimate U.S. funding for the United Nations.

Good riddance, Barack Obama.

ROTTEN CHRISTMAS PUDDING: NIDRA POLLER

UNSC Resolution 2334 stinks to high heaven but don’t count on me to belabor the obvious: the stab-in-the- back American abstention is confirmation of Obama’s real intentions, and the dastardly resolution won’t help the peace process. Pouah! Old news worn to the bone. 2334 is tailored more like an international suicide belt than a whip to beat the Jews.

Let’s look at how the UNSC vote was reported on France’s all-news channel BFM TV. A typical newscast begins with replays of the smashed Berlin Christmas market alternating with scenes in the backward Tunisian town of Oueslatia from which the truck jihadi Anis Amri set out to conquer Europe. Then comes a festive sequence featuring luscious Christmas delicacies displayed in our French markets and footage of shoppers rushing to grab up the last gifts…followed by frightening/reassuring shots of hefty policemen and soldiers guarding our churches. Our churches are targeted, frère, not our synagogues. The newscast closes with the evacuation of miserable refugees and rebels from the snowswept ruins of Aleppo. Underneath all this pertinent news, the scroll mentions in passing a UNSC Resolution “calling on Israel to halt its colonization.”

Stunning juxtaposition: Jihad truck attack, jittery Christmas markets, security details on the threshold of midnight mass, the festering boil of Syria…and the UN sets its sights on…Israel! In the good old days a slap in the face from international opinion would have stimulated an endless stream of insults and accusations against Israel. The Palestinian plight has lost its drawing power: from 23 December to Christmas Day, the perfidious resolution never made it from the scroll to the screen. The Berlin massacre remained front and center.

Apparently it took German police 24 hours to find Amri’s ID stashed in the mastodon killer vehicle. Naïve commentators wondered why these absent-minded guys-e.g. the Kouachi brothers that gunned down the Charlie Hebdo staff two years ago-leave their ID at the scene of the crime. They are still too far from understanding the allahu akhbar resonance of these prideful signatures. Meanwhile Amri was chilling out in Berlin’s “Daesh” mosque across the street from a police station. In the same meanwhile, New Zealand was chumming up with Malaysia, Venezuela, and Senegal, to stick the finger to the whole wide western world in a thinly disguised resolution that delivers you up, chumps, to all the Amris stalking your streets and public squares. You’re in the firing line, boys, and you don’t know what to do about it.

François Hollande’s UN diplomat was supporting the rotten Christmas pudding resolution when the aforementioned Amri slipped out of Germany-so riddled with shoah guilt they couldn’t even close their borders after the Berlin attack-and into France. He passed through Lyon and Chamberry on his way to Torino, Milano, and wherever his heart desired if it hadn’t been for two alert caribinieri who aimed straight from the heart of our endangered liberty.

Where are the smarties that mocked Nicolas Sarkozy for “rubber stamping” George W. Bush, and snapped at the heels of “Bush’s poodle” Tony Blair? They’re ok with pudgy François Hollande yessirring BHO, the same BHO that chickened out on him when Syria’s Assad stepped across the disappearing red line. If you asked the phenomenally unpopular Hollande why France voted for UNSC 2334, he’d probably tell you it’s in the interest of peace. Hmph! Here at home our towns and regions are under constant threat of “two-state” solutions and Paris is in greater danger of division than Jerusalem. France is too busy whoring around at the UN to see the irony. Whatever you say, boys, we won’t make waves. Just put peace in the pudding and we’ll swallow it.

It took Tunisian authorities precious months to admit Anis Amri was a citizen, and accept his deportation. Too late. He had already killed and maimed victims that are hardly mentioned in the media, as if their concrete existence would upstage the mass of refugees whose needs must not be ignored. The outgoing French president never found a way to use existing legislation to deport thousands of dual-citizen jihadis that do not deserve our hospitality. Tunisians don’t want us to send back their rejects. Ordinary citizens are in the streets clamoring “No Jihadis Here.”

A FINAL INSULT TO ISRAEL: FRED FLEITZ

Many Americans and Israelis are outraged at President Obama for betraying the state of Israel yesterday by refusing to veto a Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank and calling Israel’s settlements and continuing construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem a “flagrant violation of international law.”

By allowing this resolution to pass, Obama broke with a long tradition of the United States standing with Israel on council resolutions concerning the Israel–Palestinian conflict and ignored a plea by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to veto the resolution.

What is the significance of this resolution for Middle East security and U.S.–Israel relations? Absolutely nothing. The world knows this resolution was approved because a U.S. president with just a few weeks left in office chose to abandon Israel. They know this president’s positions — especially his hostility to Israel — are not shared by a majority of Americans and will be quickly reversed by President Trump.

Israelis and the American people know what a cowardly act this Security Council vote was by President Obama since it was deliberately delayed until after the presidential election to ensure Hillary Clinton and congressional Democrats would not pay a political price. The vote also took place on Friday afternoon two days before Christmas to limit negative press coverage.

President-elect Trump called on the Obama administration to veto the resolution and indicated he will ignore it when he tweeted: “Things Will Be Different After Jan. 20.” Democratic and Republican congressmen are already siding with Trump on the vote. In an unprecedented statement, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office directly condemned the Obama administration in response to the passage of the anti-Israel resolution and expressed its eagerness to work with President Trump: The Obama administration not only failed to protect Israel against this gang-up at the UN, it colluded with it behind the scenes. Israel looks forward to working with President-elect Trump and with all our friends in Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, to negate the harmful effects of this absurd resolution.

How the Obama Administration Facilitated Palestinian Violence Israelis needed our help more than ever last week. Yet for the first time in decades, they couldn’t rely on it. By David French

Last week the Obama administration defied both history and international law to grant Palestinian terrorists a grand victory. At a stroke, the administration purported to declare any Israeli claim to any portion of the West Bank — including the Western Wall — illegitimate, and empowered Palestinian terrorists to press for their next round of concessions. It’s a betrayal that will echo far beyond any arms deals with Israel and could conceivably endanger the Jewish state’s very existence.

To put this staggering betrayal into context, one has to understand the long, bloody history of Arab efforts to destroy Israel, efforts that have been aided at every turn by the eternal anti-Semitism of huge swaths of our much-vaunted “international community.”

For the first 25 years of its existence, Israel endured multiple brute-force attempts at its destruction, as Arab powers mobilized large land armies for direct invasions of Israeli territory. That effort failed on a grand scale: Against all odds, Israeli forces prevailed time and again, leaving Israel in control of far more land than it initially possessed on its birth as a state. Undeterred by its conventional military losses, the Arab world turned to different methods, using a combination of lawfare and terrorism to slowly erode Israel’s ability to sustain its nation and culture. It is through the former tactic — the abuse of international law toward ends not achievable on the battlefield — that the international community seeks to deligitimize Israel’s territory and demography.

In other words, anti-Semites define “true” Israel (the only one they’ll recognize) as a much smaller nation that is swollen with literally millions of Palestinian “refugees” who pose an existential threat to the world’s only Jewish state. An Israel jammed into indefensible borders with a majority-Arab population wouldn’t be Israel at all. It would be Palestine, and its Jewish residents would be entirely dependent on the good graces of their enemies to live peacefully in their own ancestral homeland.

No rational nation would agree to its own extinction, though, so a hammer is necessary — one strong enough to drive a nation to make compromises it would never otherwise make. That hammer is terrorism. Whether it’s rockets from Gaza, incursions from Lebanon, or crazed knife attacks in Jerusalem, terrorism is the force that’s supposed to make Israelis ultimately beg for mercy. Of course it’s all “condemned” by the international community. They tut-tut when Jewish children die, but all that violence has to be “understood.” Oppressed people lash out against their oppressors, you see.

One can’t understand the international community’s anti-Semitism without understanding the three great double standards that together gin up fake outrage against Israel and dupe the gullible into believing the Big Lie that Israel is the oppressor and Palestinians its chief victims.

The first double standard deals with the status of land acquired as a result of waging defensive warfare. Traditionally, when aggressors launch losing wars, they are not permitted to reclaim all the territory they lost without cost or consequence. This truth is uncontroversial and apparent from the distant and recent past. Germany does not control the same land that it did in August 1939, nor does Japan. Yet time and again, the “international community” has taken the view that nations such as Egypt and Syria could and should claim the lands they lost in their own aggressive wars with Israel, including the very lands used as launching pads for those wars. The international community maintains that view in spite of the fact that applying the same reasoning worldwide would cause instability and chaos. Israel, alone among all countries, is thus bound to bear the burden of unwinding its past wars.

Obama’s 7 Deadliest Lame-Duck Sins Deborah Heine 1-6

Costly Midnight Regulations:

The Obama administration has put forth 25 so-called “midnight” regulations, which will cost the economy $44.1 billion, according to a report from the American Action Forum.

Midnight regulations are rules that are published after Election Day and before the next president is inaugurated in January 2017. Earlier this year, the administration estimated that there would be $5.2 billion in regulatory costs incurred during that time.

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The $44.1 billion in regulatory costs have overshot that estimate by more than eight times.

Obama’s job-crushing regulations have stifled economic growth, making him the only president in modern history whose time in office didn’t include at least one year of economic growth at the 3% historical average.

Economy-Crippling Executive Actions:

With less than a month left in his presidency, Obama has launched an initiative to wipe out coal mining and handicap offshore drilling for oil and natural gas.First, he ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to proceed with its controversial Stream Protection Rule. By one estimate, that would make mining so difficult it would make 85 percent of the nation’s coal reserves unrecoverable.

Then, on Tuesday, the president designated most government-owned areas in the Arctic Ocean and a large swath off the Atlantic Coast closed to drilling. That would prevent production of huge reserves of oil and gas.

For the past eight years, the Obama administration has abused the power of the executive branch by issuing unconstitutional, unilateral executive actions to push his agenda. Article I of the Constitution, which grants enumerated legislative powers to Congress — not the president, became a quaint, but outdated artifact from the past under Obama. Hopefully Donald Trump will return the country to constitutional governance.

Record Wave of Pardons and Communtations:

President Obama on Monday pardoned 78 people and granted another 153 commutations, amounting to the most acts of clemency granted by a U.S. president ever in a single day.

White House Counsel Neil Eggleston announced the decisions in an official blog post. He described all the individuals being pardoned or seeing their sentences shortened as “deserving.”

“The 231 individuals granted clemency today have all demonstrated that they are ready to make use – or have already made use – of a second chance,” he wrote.

He also previewed additional clemency decisions in the weeks ahead, saying: “I expect that the President will issue more grants of both commutations and pardons before he leaves office.”

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The White House boasts that Obama has commuted the sentences of more prisoners than all of the last six presidents combined. Most of them were drug offenders, who have a high recidivism rate. As 50 percent of drug traffickers were rearrested shortly after they were released, about half of the Obama release pool are likely return to the streets.

Don’t be surprised if Hillary Clinton, Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, and Anthony Weiner are among those pardoned in the next wave.

From Obama’s perspective, the decision to grant or withhold a pardon is a political and a personal one. Legal considerations do not directly arise.

Like all presidents at the end of their terms, he is concerned about the legacy he leaves for history. Does he want his legacy to include a pardon of the secretary of State who served under him during the entirety of his first term in office?

Because acceptance of a pardon amounts to a confession of guilt, the acceptance by Clinton would, to a degree, besmirch both Clinton and also Obama. After all, Clinton was Obama’s secretary of State. If she was committing illegal acts as secretary, it happened literally on his watch.

On the other hand, if the new administration were to prosecute and convict Clinton of crimes committed while she was secretary, that might be an even greater embarrassment for Obama post-presidency.

Obama’s 7 Deadliest Lame-Duck Sins By Debra Heine number 7

Obama Administration’s Betrayal of Israel:

Adding a final shameful chapter to a foreign-policy record that already runneth over with them, Barack Obama on Friday abandoned America’s commitment to Israel’s security, and to the vindication of democracy over sharia-supremacist aggression. In an act of cowardly venom, the president had the United States abstain from — and thereby effectively enact — a United Nations Security Council resolution that condemns Israeli settlement activity. At least, that’s what the resolution ostensibly does. The reality is much more than that. The resolution undertakes to render our ally indefensible. It was a black day in modern American diplomatic history, a flurry of sinister wheeling and dealing while the nation — exhausted by the election, anticipating a weekend of Christmas and Hanukkah celebration — was looking the other way.

Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz calls it “Obama’s ill-advised, lame duck, and undemocratic effort to tie his successor’s hands.”

This is what President Obama has wrought in his ill-advised refusal to do what American presidents have done for decades: exercise their veto in preventing biased, destructive, and one-sided resolutions from being enacted against Israel by the automatic anti-Israel majority that exists in every institution of the UN.

The bad news is that no future president, including President-elect Trump, can undo this pernicious agreement, since a veto not cast can never be retroactively cast. And a resolution once enacted cannot be rescinded unless there is a majority vote against it, with no veto by any of its permanent members, which include Russia and China, who would be sure to veto any attempt to undo this resolution. Obama’s failure to veto this resolution was thus a deliberate ploy to tie the hands of his successors, the consequence of which will be to make it far more difficult for his successors to encourage the Palestinians to accept Israel’s offer to negotiate with no preconditions.

There are a few things President Trump can do to ameliorate the effects of this “bigoted resolution,” Dershowitz says, including “officially recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving its embassy there,” but the damage Obama has done is grievous and will be hard to undo.

There are 22 days left in Obama’s second term. Let’s cross our fingers that there will be no more nasty surprises.

Obama discards his court Jews: Richard Baehr

When U.S. President Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president in 2007, he was just two years removed from having served as an undistinguished backbencher in the Illinois State Senate. Some people committed to the U.S.-Israel relationship took the time to explore Obama’s background in Illinois, and found a significant number of troubling things. One of the explorers was Ed Lasky in the American Thinker. Lasky’s article on Obama and Israel was widely (though quietly) circulated by the Hillary Clinton campaign in her ultimately unsuccessful effort against Obama to win the Democratic nomination in 2008. Clinton believed that policy toward Israel was a major differentiating factor between herself and Obama, and in the primaries, Clinton won more votes than Obama among Jewish Democrats.

Another writer who came to explore Obama’s history on Israel and the Palestinians was Stanley Kurtz, who arguedtwo years into Obama’s first term that Obama was indeed a man of the hard Left, particularly when it came to the Middle East struggle. It did not take a lot of digging to discover that Obama’s mentors on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict included the likes of Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said, radical activist Bill Ayers, his minister Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Electronic Intifada founder Ali Abunimah. In perhaps the most meaningful article on the subject, and one that was almost entirely ignored by the national media, Abunimah argued in “How Barack Obama Learned to Love Israel” that the once Palestinian-friendly Obama had tacked toward Israel so as to look like more of a mainstream candidate and help get himself elected as senator and then president (and to collect lots of campaign cash from pro-Israel liberal Jews for his election contests). To get some idea of how radical Obama’s long-time friend Abunimah is on the subject of Israel, he opposed the U.N. Security Council resolution passed on Friday for not being harsh enough in targeting Israel (no sanctions) and for condemning violence committed by those who are only exercising resistance against occupation.

In both of his races for president in 2008 and 2012, Obama won a large majority of the Jewish vote according to exit polls, though some Jewish voters seemed to have wised up, noticing during Obama’s first term that the president was a lot less than advertised in terms of support for the Jewish state. Among Jews, the gap between support for Obama and for his Republican opponent dropped from 56 to 39 percentage points.

On Friday, while vacationing in Hawaii, Obama observed his normal pattern of not being around to face the music when something controversial occurs, ordering his U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power to abstain on U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, which targeted all Israeli activity, settlements and otherwise, beyond the 1949 armistice line, as a violation of international law. The measure also called for the nations of the world to take account of the dividing line, meaning of course that boycotts of Israeli products produced on the wrong side of the line, or by companies that produced products on both sides, were in order. Jews now living in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, where they have lived nearly continuously for the last 3,000 years, are apparently illegal settlers in the eyes of the United Nations and Barack Obama.

Peter Smith: Good Riddance…*****

“A first thing to note is that the idea of a two-state solution is fanciful. The Palestinians hate and are taught to hate Israelis from an early age. Nothing short of Israel’s demise will ever satisfy them. Any leader offering less, without being tongue in cheek (i.e. practicing taqiyya), is likely to be assassinated. In case there is any doubt, Israel is not bordered by Belgians or by the Swiss. Second, the 1967, pre Six-Day War, borders are indefensible. Israel will never withdraw to them and if it ever did it would be no more than a first course for the Palestinians and their Arab allies, as Israelis know. Third retreating to 1967 borders would mean giving up historical Jewish sites, including the Western Wall in East Jerusalem. That is unthinkable for Israel. Now look at the resolution (particularly clause 1) which the United States was deeply complicit in passing. It effectively calls for the dismemberment and eventual destruction of Israel. Words have meaning. You can make all the excuses in the world for Obama’s legacy; this is an indelible stain. I use ‘indelible’ advisedly because the resolution can’t be undone. Any counter resolution is sure to be vetoed by Russia or China and probably (and pathetically) by France or the UK.This infamy is Obama’s lasting legacy. Was his personal enmity towards Netanyahu behind it? Unfortunately, it would not be the least surprising. His going can’t come soon enough. Good riddance!”
…..A petty, vainglorious and failed president has made a scorched-earth policy his exit strategy, sowing his successor’s path with last-minute executive edicts. No surprise, really. Slipping away from the messes he creates has been the Obama style for eight disastrous years.
It is seldom that we know that a new year will start well. Or, to put it more circumspectly, lest the jealous gods take umbrage, that one hugely pleasant event will occur in January – on the 20th to be precise. No, I am not referring to Donald Trump’s inauguration (though that is hugely pleasant too) but to Barack Obama’s exit.

Hussein is his middle name and mayhem and malaise will be his lasting shame. His legacy is a weakened America and, correspondingly, an infinitely more dysfunctional and violent Middle East than when he came to power. Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have all grown more belligerent. ISIS – “the JV team” — was spawned and grew on his feckless watch. Millions of Syrian and other Muslim refugees fleeing conflicts have streamed into Europe creating havoc. And then we have his last dastardly deed; an abject betrayal of Israel, which I will come to.

At home in the US he encouraged identity politics and racial division. Among numbers of prejudicial utterances, who can forget him saying that the black thug Trayvon Martin, killed in self-defense by George Zimmerman, could have been his son. And how about the frequent visits of Black Lives Matter shysters to the White House – you know, the leaders of a racist anti-cop rabble, built on the lie that another black thug, Michael Brown, was unjustifiable killed by a cop. And the result: cops gunned down and inner-city black neighborhoods less safe for law-abiding people. According to the Chicago Tribune, shooting victims numbered 2989 in Chicago in 2015. By Christmas Day in 2016 the number had reached 4291.

He also presided over an insipid economic performance. He is the first president in history to not have one year of 3% GDP growth. Incomes have been stagnant. Millions more people have been forced out of the workforce and onto food stamps. The national debt has doubled. A stream of new regulations, including EPA rules forlornly designed to cool the planet, are estimated by the Heritage Foundation to cost business over $100 billion per year. They have dampened growth and killed jobs. Then we have Obamacare, “the craziest thing in the world,” according to Bill Clinton before he tried to walk-back his ‘honest’ verdict.

Unfortunately, President Obama lives in his own world where all of his policies are meritorious. I would like to know his secret. That way I could see my own life of missteps and mishaps in a more positive light. Okay, it would be delusional but I would be happier. As it is brutal reality breaks through. This makes me much less happy but at least, maybe, I have learnt something. Maybe!

There is no chance of Obama learning anything. Hence he intends to go out trying to augment his lame legacy whatever the cost to the USA. He shows no class in his lame-duck days. His plan is to queer the pitch for The Donald, whose success, if it were to occur, would leave Obama’s legacy in shreds, in the dustbin of history. He would qualify to join the likes of James Buchanan (1857-61) and Warren Harding (1921-23) among the worst of presidential flops.

His rearguard trick is to do things which are not reversible or at least reversible only with time-consuming difficulty. Giving away $1.7 billion to the Iranians is irreversible. The Iranians are not going to give it back. He is hurrying to transfer another 22 Islamic terrorists from Guantanamo Bay (GITMO) before Trump gets the White House keys. They won’t volunteer to return.

John Kerry to Give Speech Wednesday on Middle East Peace Process Speech expected to lay out administration’s vision for resolving conflict between Israel, Palestinians By Felicia Schwartz

WASHINGTON—Secretary of State John Kerry will give a speech Wednesday laying out the Obama administration’s vision for resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.

Mr. Kerry’s speech comes nearly a week after the Obama administration allowed the passage of a United Nations resolution harshly criticizing Israel’s expansion of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories, a move that inflamed tensions between the longtime allies. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summoned the U.S. ambassador to Israel over the weekend to lodge a formal complaint.

Mr. Toner said Tuesday that Mr. Kerry would touch on the United Nations resolution, but that he would more broadly address a path forward toward peace. Frank Lowenstein, the State Department’s special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, told reporters Friday that Mr. Kerry’s talk would be informed by his experience trying to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians while serving as the U.S.’s top diplomat.

“The secretary has obviously put a great deal of time and effort over the course of the last four years to negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians…not only with the parties but also with key players in the region and other stakeholders around the world,” Mr. Lowenstein said. “Out of that, I think he’s got some ideas about where we go from here.”

‘If I Had Run Again’ Coach Obama says his team’s big loss wasn’t his fault.

In the post-election annals of “woulda, coulda, shoulda,” it will be hard to top departing President Barack Obama’s boast that he would have defeated Donald Trump “if I had run again.”

This, it goes without saying, triggered a tweet from Mr. Trump: “He should say that but I say NO WAY!”

How edifying to witness an American President and President-elect exchanging taunts like two eighth-graders in the schoolyard.

Mr. Obama unburdened himself of this analysis in a podcast with his former White House adviser David Axelrod. Though Mr. Obama is fond of sports analogies, one he seems not to have noticed is that most coaches after a Super Bowl loss don’t blame it on their own quarterback, the diabolical opposition or the media.

Mr. Obama said that Hillary Clinton, who ran as a third Obama term, “played it safe.” People felt the country was on the wrong track because Mitch McConnell threw “sand in the gears” of Washington. His advice to Democrats now is “not thinking that somehow just a great set of progressive policies that we present to the New York Times editorial board will win the day.”

The serious thought inside Mr. Obama’s late hit is whether progressive ideas need revision, or merely need to be recycled with a different messenger, like him. We doubt all Democrats will be as enthusiastic about running again on the economic and foreign-policy record of 2009-2016.