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2016

The Left In Power: Clinton to Obama The Democrats’ journey from center to hard Left. Barbara Kay

Below is Barbara Kay’s review of David Horowitz’s new book, The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama, which is volume 7 of The Black Book of the American Left, a multi-volume collection of his conservative writings that will, when completed, be the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to define the Left and its agenda. (Order HERE.) We encourage our readers to visit BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com which features Horowitz’s introductions to Volumes 1-7 of this 9-volume series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.

After the federal election, an African-American child asked at a family dinner if he was now “going to be treated as three-fifths of a human being.” A teacher from a rural black elementary school reported her students were asking her if they would become slaves again. A black student told a guide on an outing to the nation’s capital he was afraid the new president was “going to round up all the black people and kill them.”

Understandable, progressives might say. Considering the racism we saw expressed during the campaign and the people the president-elect has surrounded himself with, who can blame these kids for their fears?

The problem is, these anecdotes did not arise from the 2016 election, but from the 2000 election. No reasonable person can believe George W. Bush is or ever was a racist.

Yet, just as in this election, incredulous that their preferred candidate might lose, there were many irresponsible progressives in 2000 who filled their children’s heads with this damaging nonsense and much other nonsense besides.

In 2004, after his hotly contested narrow loss to Bush, Gore told audiences that Bush had won by stealing a million black votes, even though not a single case of black voter fraud was uncovered by civil rights organizations. The left never really loses an election; elections are stolen from them. Sound familiar in 2016?

I found the anecdotal material above in a column, “How Leftists Play the Race Card,” in the recently-issued seventh volume of David Horowitz’s Black Book of the American Left, The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama.

What Horowitz calls a “climactic place” in his series, this volume was released before the election that against all odds brought Donald Trump to power. Reading it under the assumption Hillary Clinton was going to be the incoming president produces a markedly different response from reading it today.

I know, because I read half before and half after. In my mind it is almost like two different books, as I experienced first despair at all the wrongheadedness and corruption Horowitz’s columns reminded me of that were likely to continue, followed by triumphant elation at the knowledge that the Obama-and-Clinton kakocracies were well and truly behind us.

I see in some of these writings prescience where I might have seen wishful thinking. For example, in his 1997 column, “Conservatives need a heart,” Horowitz addresses the “confusion in conservative ranks.” Conservatives, he writes, have demonstrated three tendencies in their polemics: the “leave us alone” mentality of those advocating for less governmental regulation and intrusion; the emphasis on family values and the re-moralization of society; and the federalists, wanting more power returned to the states. What is missing, Horowitz says, is “a conservatism committed to national greatness.”

It took a while for the American people to internalize the source of their discontent, but that is what has just happened. Volume VII delivers a great deal of satisfaction to right-of-center readers in combing over the glowing ashes of all that has been found wanting in the Clinton-Obama nexus, and why.

“The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama” traces the history of the Democratic Party from center – to hard left. From the muscular anti-communism, civil rights and balanced budgets of JFK, the Dems came to embrace the Marxist agenda of the nanny state, identity politics and retreat from foreign-affairs leadership.

In a word, the party shifted from classic liberalism to progressivism, a benign locution to deodorize the uncomfortably redolent Marxism that greases the wheels of the party’s mission. Under the aegis of Bill and Hillary Clinton (it was never less than a presidential partnership) and Barack Obama, the administration became stacked with far leftists.

Outgoing President Obama (“outgoing”: it dances trippingly off the tongue) marinated his entire pre-presidential life in Islam apologism and the politics of progressivism. Mentored by communists, he came to power with a negative view of America’s history and distrust of the nation-state as a vehicle for human progress. Conversely he held an exaggerated and largely uncritical respect for America’s enemies, like Cuba and Hamas, but Iran especially.

Both Obama and Hillary Clinton took lifelong inspiration from the writings of political guru Saul Alinksy (1909-72), whom students of left-wing radicalism in the U.S. will remember as the American version of Machiavelli. Horowitz devotes a long essay, “Rules for Revolution” in Part III of this book (the original pamphlet form of this essay has been distributed and sold to more than three million people).

Alinsky wrote the book Rules for Radicals, a how-to manual for revolutionaries, which emphasized strategies of deception rather than open confrontation as the best way to advance a Marxist revolution in the U.S. Don’t sell your agenda as socialism, he urged, sell it as “progressivism” and “social justice.”

Alinsky’s strategy was to work within the system while accruing the power to destroy it. Many of the student radicals who went on to influential political careers were well-versed Alinsky acolytes. In fact, in 1969, a certain Wellesley College student named Hillary Rodham wrote an admiring 92-page senior thesis on Alinsky, likening him in cultural stature to Walt Whitman and Martin Luther King Jr. Barack Obama followed Alinsky’s rules with assiduous attention when he worked for ACORN as a community organizer.

In his column, “Candidate of the Left,” Horowitz reminds us of Obama’s lies that were swallowed uncritically by his starry-eyed followers. Who were they? “[E]very anti-Israel, anti-American, pro-Iranian communist in America is supporting Barack Obama; every pro-Palestinian leftist, every Weatherman terrorist…all Sexties leftists and their disciples…every black racist follower of Louis Farrakhan…every ‘antiwar’ activist who wanted us to leave Saddam in power and then lose the war in Iraq; everyone who believes that America is the bad guy and that our enemies are justly aggrieved; every member of ACORN, the most potent survivor of the Sixties left…along with al-Jazeera and Vladimir Putin and the religious fanatics of Hamas and the PLO.”

Examples of Obama’s lies? One was that he really had no idea who Jeremiah Wright, his pastor of 20 years, was, because the optics of friendship with “a racist, Jew-hating, terrorist-loving acolyte of Minister Farrakhan” didn’t look so good. Another was that unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers was not just “a guy in the neighborhood” as Obama claimed. Obama launched his campaign for a senate seat in Ayers’s living room, it was Ayers’s father who was responsible for Obama’s job at the Sidley Austin law firm, and it was Ayers who “hired Obama to spend the $50 million Ayers had raised to finance an army of anti-American radicals drawn from ACORN and other nihilistic groups to recruit Chicago school children to their political causes.”

But the lie that will never lose traction as the others did, because it affected so many Americans, was “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” Obama lied about his healthcare plan, because, as Horowitz has often stated, “[t]he first truth about progressive missionaries is that the issues they fight for are not the issues. What drives all their agendas is the fantasy of a social transformation that will lead to a paradise of social justice.”

And therefore, as MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber explained, “This bill was written in a tortured way…[because] if you make it explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed, okay? Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.” Lack of transparency has been the hallmark of Obama’s reign and both Clintons’ entire political careers.

UN Resolution 242: The Linchpin of Israel’s Security By Shoshana Bryen

The 1948 restoration of Jewish sovereignty to parts of the historic Jewish homeland, under the auspices of the United Nations, was not accepted by Israel’s Arab neighbors who launched the first of several wars against it. The 1948-49 war resulted in the illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Jordan and Egypt, respectively. Jordan also illegally grabbed the eastern side of Jerusalem from UN control and

laid siege to Jewish residents, eventually driving them out,
destroyed or desecrated as much evidence of Jewish patrimony as possible, and
forbade Jews to come and pray at their holiest site and bury their dead.

Then, in a monstrously stupid decision, the King of Jordan shelled Israel from Jerusalem in 1967 on the fourth day of a Six-day War. Israel’s defense left it in control of the illegally occupied territories, including eastern Jerusalem. Recognizing that the root of the “Arab-Israel conflict” was not where Jews lived, but that they had sovereign rights to a Jewish homeland, and that Israel should not be forced to concede territory as it had in Sinai in 1956 without concrete security, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242.

Last week’s passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 erases the guarantees of UNSCR 242.

Rather than requiring Arab recognition of the legitimacy and permanence of the State of Israel, this newest resolution expresses “grave concern that continuing Israeli settlement activities are dangerously imperiling the viability of the two-State solution based on the 1967 lines.” The Arabs and Palestinians are off the hook for decades of rejecting Israel peace, but the problem has been reduced to Jews building houses where the Arabs don’t want them.

Fury at the Obama administration’s betrayal of America’s ally Israel is fully warranted as is disgust with politically impotent countries such as Senegal, Malaysia, Venezuela, and New Zealand looking for relevance. But more important than venting would be a review of text of UNSCR 242 – the resolution most closely tied to the time and actual events of 1947, 1948, and 1967.

Obama’s Fitting Finish In the list of low points in U.S. foreign policy, the betrayal of Israel ranks high. Bret Stephens

Barack Obama’s decision to abstain from, and therefore allow, last week’s vote to censure Israel at the U.N. Security Council is a fitting capstone for what’s left of his foreign policy. Strategic half-measures, underhanded tactics and moralizing gestures have been the president’s style from the beginning. Israelis aren’t the only people to feel betrayed by the results.

Also betrayed: Iranians, whose 2009 Green Revolution in heroic protest of a stolen election Mr. Obama conspicuously failed to endorse for fear of offending the ruling theocracy.

Iraqis, who were assured of a diplomatic surge to consolidate the gains of the military surge, but who ceased to be of any interest to Mr. Obama the moment U.S. troops were withdrawn, and only concerned him again when ISIS neared the gates of Baghdad.

Syrians, whose initially peaceful uprising against anti-American dictator Bashar Assad Mr. Obama refused to embrace, and whose initially moderate-led uprising Mr. Obama failed to support, and whose sarin- and chlorine-gassed children Mr. Obama refused to rescue, his own red lines notwithstanding.

Ukrainians, who gave up their nuclear weapons in 1994 with formal U.S. assurances that their “existing borders” would be guaranteed, only to see Mr. Obama refuse to supply them with defensive weapons when Vladimir Putin invaded their territory 20 years later.

Pro-American Arab leaders, who expected better than to be given ultimatums from Washington to step down, and who didn’t anticipate the administration’s tilt toward the Muslim Brotherhood as a legitimate political opposition, and toward Tehran as a responsible negotiating partner.

Most betrayed: Americans.

Facing Conservatives, Israel’s Leader Takes Harder Stance on Settlements Lawmakers led by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s rival have called for an end to the notion of a two-state solution By Rory Jones

TEL AVIV—Israel’s settlement-building in disputed areas is accompanied by an edging away from support for a Palestinian state, thanks partly to domestic political rivalries—a trend that helped spur a United Nations condemnation of the country but also could limit the impact of that censure.

Conservative lawmakers, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rival, Naftali Bennett, and emboldened by the election of Donald Trump, have in recent weeks called for the annexation of most of the West Bank and an end to the notion of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The pro-settlement Jewish Home party, led by Mr. Bennett, has also proposed legalizing dozens of currently outlawed settlements in the West Bank.

In response, Mr. Netanyahu has shifted to a more hardline stance on the issue, hinting he could move away from his long-standing support for the two-state solution when Mr. Trump takes office next month. He has also spoken in recent weeks about his government’s “love for settlement.”

That rhetoric was a key reason the Obama administration abstained from the vote Friday in the U.N. Security Council, which allowed a censure of Israeli settlements to pass for the first time in 36 years, according to U.S. envoy to the U.N. Samantha Power.

“The Israeli prime minister recently described his government as more committed to settlements than any in Israel’s history and one of his leading coalition partners recently declared that the era of the two-state solution is over,” Ms. Power said Friday at the U.N. vote, referring to Mr. Bennett. “The prime minister has said that he is still committed to pursuing a two-state solution. But these statements are irreconcilable.”

The U.N. resolution vote comes as tensions between the White House and Mr. Netanyahu’s government have reached a new pitch.

Mr. Netanyahu accused the White House of colluding with Palestinians to put the resolution forward, a charge it denies. He summoned the U.S. ambassador on Sunday to protest while the foreign ministry summoned top diplomats from 10 countries that voted in favor of the resolution.

An Israeli official said Mr. Netanyahu had advised officials to limit travel to countries that voted in favor of the resolution, but hadn’t suspended relations. Following the U.N. vote, he recalled his ambassadors to New Zealand and Senegal. Israel also cancelled a meeting between Mr. Netanyahu and Ukraine’s leader. The Ukrainian government summoned the Israeli ambassador to Kiev as a result.

Israel also fears a speech by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, scheduled for as soon as this week, could lead to further action at the U.N. on the conflict. Mr. Kerry could lay out parameters for a future peace deal, which could then be enshrined in another U.N. resolution, Israeli officials fear. Such a resolution would increase international pressure on Israel, which worries it would embolden Palestinians not to compromise in any peace talks.

Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, suggested there was the prospect of a new resolution during an interview Monday on MSNBC. “We’re not sure that this is the end of it,” he said. “We may get a new U.N. Security Council resolution in the waning days of the administration.”

However, administration officials said Monday there are no plans for any additional U.N. resolution.

Friday’s U.N. vote was a stark reminder of the gulf between Israel on one side and the U.S. and international community on the other over how to approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict moving forward.

Mr. Netanyahu’s official policy is to pursue a separate Palestinian state. But he has also overseen an increase of more than 100,000 settlers since winning power for the second time in 2009. His diverging policy has caused Western diplomats to question his real goals and plans to solve the conflict.

Mr. Bennett has been much clearer in his approach. He advocates annexing the West Bank, giving Palestinians autonomy in their cities and increasing spending on infrastructure to benefit both Jews and Arabs living in the territory. However, this falls far short of longstanding Palestinian demands for their own state.

Mr. Netanyahu’s forceful response to the U.N. vote is aimed at placating the conservative members of his own government and is part of a one-upmanship with Mr. Bennett, said Yehudit Auerbach, a political scientist at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv.

“It’s kind of a contest or competition about who will be the future leader of the right in Israel,” said Ms. Auerbach. “Is it Bibi Netanyahu or is it Bennett?” she added, using a nickname for the prime minister. CONTINUE AT SITE

Joe Morgentern‘Silence’ Review: Torturous Tests of Faith Martin Scorsese’s film follows two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who travel to Japan in the 17th century

In the filmmaking world a passion project can be prompted by anything from cherished books first read in childhood to obscure oddities that no one wanted to finance. Martin Scorsese’s “Silence” redefines the category. It’s a film that Mr. Scorsese has wanted to make for almost three decades, and passion is its subject—the spiritual passion of two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who travel to Japan in the 17th century to find their mentor, a priest believed to be an apostate, and living as a Japanese with a Japanese wife. This is filmmaking as an act of devotion, and exploration—not just of the nature of faith but of faith’s obverse, abject doubt. The production is physically beautiful, and evokes the beauties of classic Japanese films, but the substance makes few concessions to conventional notions of entertainment. What the missionaries endure at the hands of their Japanese tormentors—torture, isolation and more torture—is almost unendurably violent, and, at a running time of 161 minutes, punishingly repetitive.

The film is based on the novel of the same name by Shusaku Endo; Jay Cocks and the director wrote the screenplay. Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver are the missionaries, Rodrigues and Garrpe. Their performances are obviously not meant to be entertaining, and never venture into so much as the outskirts of enjoyable. But they’re notable, all the same, for their intensity and focus—two modern movie stars giving themselves over entirely to roles that require steadfast self-effacement. (Liam Neeson is Ferreira, the mentor they seek.)

And though “Silence” is obviously not a genre film in the usual sense, the story functions as a search, or trackdown, if you will, through fascinating territory—and across land- and seascapes photographed with quiet elegance by Rodrigo Prieto. The feudal Japan that the missionaries discover is a savage place where Christianity is seen as something akin to the plague, an alien infestation to be stamped out wherever it’s discovered, and always by the same methods—threats of death, backed up by pitiless torture, that force Christians into public displays of apostasy. And the Christianity that Rodrigues and Garrpe discover is, as Mr. Scorsese portrays it, a re-enactment of the origins of the faith, with secret gatherings of congregants in caves. CONTINUE AT SITE

PRIME MINISTER NETANAYHU ON THE UN RESOLUTION….SEE NOTE PLEASE

Well said but will he now do the courageous thing and call the two state dissolution process null and void? rsk

From a Hanukkah message by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

All American presidents since Carter upheld the American commitment not to try to dictate permanent settlement terms to Israel at the Security Council. And yesterday, in complete contradiction of this commitment, including an explicit commitment by President Obama himself in 2011, the Obama administration carried out a shameful anti-Israel ploy at the UN.

I would like to tell you that the resolution that was adopted, not only doesn’t bring peace closer, it drives it further away. It hurts justice; it hurts the truth. Think about this absurdity, half a million human beings are being slaughtered in Syria. Tens of thousands are being butchered in Sudan. The entire Middle East is going up in flames and the Obama administration and the Security Council choose to gang up on the only democracy in the Middle East—the State of Israel. What a disgrace.

Obama’s Parting Betrayal of Israel Trump must ensure there are consequences for supporting U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334.By John Bolton

Last Friday, on the eve of Hanukkah and Christmas, Barack Obama stabbed Israel in the front. The departing president refused to veto United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334—a measure ostensibly about Israeli settlement policy, but clearly intended to tip the peace process toward the Palestinians. Its adoption wasn’t pretty. But, sadly, it was predictable.

Mr. Obama’s refusal to use Washington’s veto was more than a graceless parting gesture. Its consequences pose major challenges for American interests. President-elect Donald Trump should echo Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s defiant and ringing 1975 response to the U.N.’s “Zionism is racism” resolution: that America “does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.”

Mr. Obama argues that Resolution 2334 continues a bipartisan American policy toward the Middle East. It does precisely the opposite. The White House has abandoned any pretense that the actual parties to the conflict must resolve their differences. Instead, the president has essentially endorsed the Palestinian politico-legal narrative about territory formerly under League of Nations’ mandate, but not already under Israeli control after the 1948-49 war of independence.

Resolution 2334 implicitly repeals the iconic Resolution 242, which affirmed, in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War, that all affected nations, obviously including Israel, had a “right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” It provided further that Israel should withdraw “from territories occupied in the recent conflict”—but did not require withdrawal from “the” or “all” territories, thereby countenancing less-than-total withdrawal. In this way Resolution 242 embodied the “land for peace” theory central to America’s policy in the Middle East ever since.

By contrast, Resolution 2334 refuses to “recognize any changes to the [1967] lines, including those with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations.” This language effectively defines Israel’s borders, even while superficially affirming direct talks. Chatter about Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is nothing but a truism, equally applicable to the U.S. and Canada, or to any nations resolving trivial border disputes.

There can be no “land for peace”—with Israel retroceding territory in exchange for peace, as in the 1979 Camp David agreement with Egypt—if the land is not legitimately Israel’s to give up in the first place. Anti-Israel imagineers have used this linguistic jujitsu as their central tactic since 1967, trying to create “facts on the ground” in the U.N.’s corridors rather than by actually negotiating with Israel. Mr. Obama has given them an indefinite hall pass.

The Suicide of Germany by Guy Millière

Of the 1.2 million migrants who arrived in Germany in 2014 and 2015, only 34,000 found work.

Angela Merkel went to lay white roses at the scene of the Christmas market attack in Berlin. Thousands of Germans did the same. Many brought candles and cried. But anger and the will to combat the threat remained largely absent.

Nothing better describes the present state of Germany than the sad fate of Maria Landenburger, a 19-year-old girl, murdered at the beginning of December. A member of a refugee relief organization, Landenburger was among those who welcomed migrants in 2015. She was raped and murdered by one of the people she was helping. Her family asked anyone who wanted to pay tribute to their daughter to give money to refugee associations, so that more refugees could come to Germany.

The law that condemns incitement to hatred, presumably intended to prevent a return to Nazi ideas, is held like a sword over whoever speaks too harshly of the growing Islamization of the country.

The great majority of the Germans do not want to see that Germany is at war, because a merciless enemy has declared war on them. They do not want to see that war has been declared on Western civilization. They accept defeat and docilely do what jihadists want them to do: they submit.

If Angela Merkel does not see the difference between Jews exterminated by the Nazis, and Muslims threatening to exterminate Christians, Jews and other Muslims, she is even more clueless than it seems.

The attack in Berlin on December 19, 2016 was predictable. German Chancellor Angela Merkel created the conditions that made it possible. She bears an overwhelming responsibility. Geert Wilders, a member of Parliament in the Netherlands and one of Europe’s only clear-sighted political leaders, accused her of having blood on her hands. He is right.

When she decided to open the doors of Germany to hundreds of thousands of Muslims from the Middle East and more distant countries, she must have known that jihadists were hidden among the people flooding in. She also must have known that the German police had no way of controlling the mass that entered and would be quickly overwhelmed by the number of people it would have to control. She did it anyway.

When hundreds of rapes and sexual assaults took place in Cologne and other cities in Germany on last year’s New Year’s Eve, she said that the perpetrators should be punished “regardless of their origin”, but she did not change her policy. When attacks took place in Hanover, Essen, Wurzburg, and Munich, she delayed comments, then pronounced sanitized sentences on the “need” to fight crime and terror. But she still did not change policy.

She only changed her position recently, it seems because she wants to be a candidate again in 2017, and saw her popularity declining.

The comments she made immediately after the December 19 attacks were mind-numbing. She said that “if the perpetrator is a refugee”, it will be “very difficult to bear” and it will be “particularly repugnant for all Germans who help refugees on a daily basis.”

Such remarks could be considered simply naïve if someone were not informed, but Angela Merkel does not have that excuse. She could not ignore warnings from German and U.S. intelligence services saying that Islamic State terrorists hiding among refugees were planning to use trucks in Christmas-related attacks. The situation endured by Germans has been extremely difficult to bear for more than a year. Crime had “skyrocketed”; diseases extinct for decades have been brought in with no vaccines — long since discontinued — to treat them; second homes are seized by the government without compensation to shelter migrants, and so on. It did not take long to discover that the main suspect in the Berlin attack was an asylum seeker living in a refugee shelter.

The UN Declares War on Judeo-Christian Civilization by Giulio Meotti

How is it that Western jurisprudence, created after the Second World War to prevent more crimes against humanity, is now being used to perpetuate more crimes and against democracies?

It is a dreadful manipulation to try erase all Jewish and Christian history, to make believe that all the world was originally and forever only Islamic. That is what a jihad looks like. It is not just orange jumpsuits, beheadings and slavery. If one can erase and rewrite history, one can redirect the future.

If Palestinian men beat their wives, it’s Israel’s fault, argued UN expert Dubravka Simonovic, with a straight face.

A few days ago, the President of the UN General Assembly sported the famous keffiyah scarf, a symbol of the “Palestinian resistance” (read terrorism). This is simply the continuation of the cultural obliteration of Israel, which is supposed to justify next its physical obliteration.

The UN’s war on the Israel’s Jews is, at heart, a war against the West. The UN and its backers are briskly paving the way for the European Caliphate.

2016 has been a sumptuous year for the anti-Semites at the United Nations. The UN Security Council just targeted the only democracy in the Middle East: the State of Israel. The outgoing Obama Administration reportedly orchestrated what even Haaretz called a “hit and run” campaign in UN to denigrate the Jewish State and leave it to a fate where only conflict and hate loom. This is a cultural genocide that is no less dangerous than terror attacks. It is based on anti-Semitic lies and creates the atmosphere not for achieving “peace”, as disingenuously claimed, but for perpetuating war.

UNSC Resolution 2334 is the culmination of a dizzyingly fruitful year for anti-Semites. Last November, committees of the UN General Assembly in a single day adopted 10 resolutions against Israel, the only open society in the Middle East. How many resolutions have been approved against Syria? One. How many against the rogue state of North Korea? One. How many against Russia when it annexed Crimea? One.

TRUMP AND JERUSALEM: By MORTON KLEIN, DANIEL MANDEL

Why has the Embassy Act, passed by massive majorities in the Senate (93-5) and House (374-37), remained a dead letter for 21 years?
The media has been abuzz with reports that President-elect Donald Trump intends to honor his pre-election promise to act on the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act – whose implementation has been deferred by six monthly waivers invoked by successive presidents, most recently last week by President Obama – and move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Why has the Embassy Act, passed by massive majorities in the Senate (93-5) and House (374-37), remained a dead letter for 21 years? Fear of enraging the Arab street and the Muslim world, most of which has neither reconciled itself to Israel’s existence nor even the peoplehood of the Jews and thus the Jewish immemorial association and claim to the city, is the short answer.
This clamor and fixation on Jerusalem, quite recent in Muslim history, has led many to conclude that Jerusalem is holy to Islam; therefore any US move ahead of a peace settlement is premature.

As it happens, however, it is a propaganda lie that Jerusalem is holy to Islam or central to Palestinian Arab life. Though possessing Muslim shrines, including the Dome of the Rock and al-Aksa mosques, the city itself holds no great significance for Islam, as history shows.

Jerusalem is not mentioned even once in the Koran, nor is it the direction in which Muslims turn to pray. References in the Koran and hadith to the ‘farthest mosque,’ an allusion to which al-Aksa Mosque is named, and which has sometimes been invoked to connect Islam to Jerusalem since its earliest days, clearly doesn’t refer to a mosque which didn’t exist in Muhammad’s day.

Indeed, the site of the biblical temples is called Temple Mount, not the Mosque Mount, and – in contrast to innumerable Palestinian Authority statements today – was acknowledged as such for decades in the Jerusalem Muslim Supreme Council’s publication, A Brief Guide to the Haram Al-Sharif,’ which states on p. 4 that ‘Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute.”

(After 1954, all such references to the biblical temples disappeared from this publication.) During the illegal annexation and rule of the historic eastern half of Jerusalem by Jordan (1948-67), Amman remained the country’s capital, not Jerusalem.

Under Jordanian rule, Jews were entirely driven out, the Old City’s 58 synagogues destroyed, and Jewish gravestones used to pave roads and latrines. Jewish access to the Western Wall was forbidden, in contravention of Article 8 of the 1949 Israeli/Jordanian armistice.

Indeed, the eastern half of the city became a backwater town, with infrastructure like water and sewerage scanty or non-existent, and its Christian population, denied the right to purchase church property in the city, also declined. No Arab ruler, other than Jordan’s King Hussein, ever visited. As Israeli elder statesman Abba Eban put it, “the secular delights of Beirut held more attraction.”

Significantly, neither the PLO’s National Charter nor the Fatah Covenant, drafted during Jordanian rule, even mention Jerusalem, let alone call for its establishment as a Palestinian capital.

This would never be obvious from the tenor and content of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim pronouncements on the city today, which are as emphatic as to the Arab, Muslim and Palestinian primacy of the city as they are in denying its Jewish provenance.

Conversely, Jerusalem, the capital of the biblical Jewish kingdoms, is the site of three millennia of Jewish habitation — hence the ‘Jerusalem 3000’ celebrations initiated by the government of Yitzhak Rabin.

The holiest of Judaism’s four holy cities, Jerusalem is mentioned 669 times in the Bible, and alluded to in countless prayers.

Major Jewish rituals, including the conclusion of the Passover Seder and Yom Kippur service, end with the age-old affirmation, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Jerusalem is the only city in the world in which Jews have formed a majority since the 1880s. Today, in addition to being home to Judaism’s greatest sanctuaries, Jerusalem is the seat of Israel’s government, the Knesset, the Supreme Court, the National Library and the Hebrew University. Its population is twothirds Jewish.