Displaying posts published in

2016

David Pryce-Jones Societies of Endless Destruction

“Israel is the one exception in the region. Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, and it has enabled them to create a First World nation-state, a centre of excellence in the sciences and the arts. Its democratic institutions incorporate a variety of ethnicities, religious faiths and sects. To give just one example of its inclusiveness, the judge who condemned a previous President of Israel to prison for sexual misdemeanour is an Arab. Traditionally, Muslims have been accustomed to see Jews as second-class people, by nature shameful, and it is intolerable for them and their honour that a Jewish liberation movement should succeed in their midst. Ranging from boycotts and sanctions to outright war, attempts to attack Israel are so many triumphs of ignorance and irrationality, incitements to pile up more corpses, and altogether a standing insult to civilisation.”

When Arabs ask me, as they sometimes do, why I take an interest in their society and their culture, I am at a loss to give a definitive answer. Nostalgia has a part in it, because as a small boy I spent some time in Morocco, in Tangier, and the throng of the Petit Socco, the bazaar and the almost painful blue of the sky have stayed with me. I kicked a football about with others my age. Their heads were shaven except for a long tuft in the middle of the scalp, to enable Allah to lift them up to him if he was so inclined. As far as I know, that is no longer done to little boys even in the Caliphate. Also unforgettable was the witch-doctor, the fqih, who used to sit cross-legged at the entrance of the house, showing the soles of her feet dyed orange with henna and muttering her blessings and curses. After a lapse of twenty-five years, I went back, and there was Muhammad Driss, still the gardener just as I remembered him. Recognising me, he wept, and I wept.

I was nineteen and doing my military service when Gamal Abdul Nasser sprang the surprise of nationalising the Suez Canal. I had to explain to my platoon why we had been given the order to prepare to invade Egypt, keeping to myself my thoughts that we shouldn’t be doing this. This was one of the most mismanaged episodes in the history of the British army. The regiment in fact stayed at home, and the time had come for me to go up to Oxford. Pretty well everyone in the university believed that the wrongs of the world were mostly the fault of the British. By now that is received opinion. Nobody turns a hair when a book like Piers Brendon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, published in 2007, portrays that empire as a criminal enterprise set up for murder and looting, taking it for granted that there’s nothing more to be said. Yet if no power keeps the peace, there won’t be any.

Daniel Johnson :Politics, Civilisation and Survival

Neither the Right nor the Left is doing a good job of defending, representing or embodying the values of our civilisation. Meanwhile, our public opinion is seduced by the dream of a world without enemies, by the pathologies of relativism—cultural, moral and epistemological.
The future of Western civilisation will depend on how well the present can mobilise the intellectual resources of the past to meet the challenges of the future. Today, we are threatened by an unprecedented array of external adversaries and dangers, ranging from Islamist terror and Russian or Chinese aggression to the fall-out from failed states. We also face internal threats—above all the collapse of confidence in Judeo-Christian values and democratic capitalism. Can either the Left or the Right rise to the challenge of the present crisis? Or are both political traditions mired in self-destructive mind-sets that prevent them from grasping the scale of the task, let alone reversing the decline?

I want to begin with the Right, because the crisis of conservatism in Europe, America and here in Australia seems too deep to be explained by the vagaries of individual personalities or parties. Most leaders of the centre-Right in the Western democracies appear to be the prisoners of their own anxieties: the fear of proscription by the self-appointed guardians of self-righteousness; the fear of humiliation for failure to flatter those who parade their status as victims; and the fear of oblivion for simply ignoring the clamour to do something when there is nothing useful to be done. The watchword of many a conservative statesman used to be masterly inactivity; now it is miserly depravity. There seems no place for the old-fashioned conservative who steers a steady course, is frugal and firm yet decent and honest; who, rather than pick people’s pockets, leaves their money to fructify there—in short, the John Howards of this world. When Theresa May, a strong prime minister in this tradition, took office two months ago after the vote for Brexit, she felt the need to make gestures to the nanny state: an “industrial policy” and an “equality audit”. Why does she think the British state, whose record of central planning and social engineering is lamentable, should repeat the follies of the past? Could it be that Mrs May still feels the need to appease the gods of socialism, in which nobody, least of all she, still believes? It seems scarcely credible. Yet the same phenomenon is observable everywhere. Conservatism as a living tradition, a coherent conceptual framework for freedom under the law, has been hollowed out and filled with the detritus of defunct ideologies.

Much of what is popular in so-called “populism” is drawn from the discarded stock of conservative thought, dressed up in revolutionary rhetoric. A good example is patriotism, which has always been at the heart of conservative theory and practice, but is now expressed by politicians of the centre-Right only gingerly, accompanied by apologies and caveats, leaving the demagogues with their cynical appeals to xenophobia to exploit the natural pride that people feel in their country. Two centuries ago, Samuel Johnson already made the distinction between true and false patriotism when he famously remarked: “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” He probably had in mind William Pitt the Elder, the Earl of Chatham, known as the “Patriot Minister”, who was by no means a scoundrel; but we have plenty of false patriots who are. What has made them plausible, however, is the feeble expression of true patriotic pride by mainstream conservatives.

The nation-state is nothing to be ashamed of, especially those of the Anglosphere, and there is no virtue in politicians making apologies for historical events that took place before they or the putative victims were born. There is a phoniness about the way some liberal conservatives now talk about the past: for them society is no longer, in Burke’s immortal formulation, “a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”. Instead, it is a perpetual conflict between the old and the young, the not yet past and the only just present, in which right is invariably on the side of the latter, the newcomers. It is a society in which the sagacity and generosity of age are not only denied their due, but positively excluded from consideration, in favour of the principle that the youngest are wisest. The Left is now less inclined than the Right to worship youth; the Bernie Sanders phenomenon is by no means unusual. What makes this pursuit of the ignis fatuus of novelty so counter-intuitive is that we live in ageing societies, the older members of which are both more prosperous and more likely to vote.

This may not be unconnected to another phenomenon: most Western democracies are moving slowly but steadily to the Right. Social democratic parties are shrinking everywhere; parties of the centre-Right are dominant. No longer do electorates feel intimidated by liberal elites, however much these elites scold them for rejecting their own liberalism, which ordinary people have noticed is often quite illiberal. The conservative problem, then, is not that the voters do not share conservative values; it is that the voters intuitively sense that the established representatives of the Right are themselves dismissive of those values. Conservative politicians for the most part just aren’t conservative enough. Corrupted by power, they have become inauthentic and duplicitous. Voters just don’t trust them to defend their own back yards, let alone Western civilisation.

If the Right is struggling to appeal to voters who doubt the good faith of its conventional politicians, the Left has the opposite problem. The same electorate that doubts whether slick conservatives mean what they say, also fears that bearded socialists might indeed say what they mean. My example here comes from Britain: Jeremy Corbyn, the Che Guevara of North London, now Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. In comparison with his Brooklyn-born counterpart Bernie Sanders, Corbyn comes off emphatically second-best. Corbyn lacks the natural eloquence of Sanders that enabled the Vermont senator to run Hillary Clinton so close in the Democratic primaries. But Corbyn is no less popular than Sanders with a privileged and vociferous section of the young, by promoting their interests, such as free university tuition, combined with much talk of inequality and injustice at home and abroad. The basic repertoire has not changed in nearly half a century, but the old tunes have found new audiences in both hemispheres—not large enough to win elections, but quite enough to recommence the long march through the institutions that has carried the Corbyns and Sanderses further than Gramsci ever imagined.

The anti-Western ideology that New Left academics such as Noam Chomsky were peddling in the 1960s is still being peddled by none other than … Noam Chomsky. The Cold War may have ended more than quarter of a century ago, but a war of ideas against the West is still being waged by the Marxists and their fellow travellers with undiminished ferocity. Corbyn, whose public utterances are scripted for him by the former Guardian columnist Seumas Milne (an unrepentant Stalinist), appears to be untroubled by the genocidal role of the ideology he espouses during the last century. Like Robespierre, the “sea-green incorruptible” as Carlyle called him, Corbyn believes that he himself is the people. Anyone who doubts that is a traitor.

But the cadaverous Corbyn is already being eclipsed by the new Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who also hails from the far-Left, but is well aware of what is needed to woo middle-class voters who have much to lose by penal taxation and are deterred by socialist slogans. The fact that Khan has associated himself with fifty-seven varieties of Islamist extremist does not preclude him from following Tony Blair’s electoral playbook. It may be hard to imagine Jeremy Corbyn entering Downing Street as Britain’s first Marxist Prime Minister; it is not at all hard to imagine Sadiq Khan there as our first Muslim one.

Qatar’s Shopping Spree to Buy and Displace the West? by Giulio Meotti

Qatar sits on the executive board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UN agency for culture and science has just deleted three thousand years of Jewish history in Jerusalem, and has set its sights on the main chair at Unesco: as the successor of Unesco’s secretary general, Irina Bokova.

Human rights organizations have already promoted a campaign to prevent Kawari from taking the UNESCO seat. Citing a vast amount of anti-Semitic material present at the Doha Literature fair, Kawari’s flagship, the Wiesenthal Center launched a campaign against his candidacy.

Qatar is the puppeteer of UNESCO’s anti-Semitic resolution on Jerusalem and a world center of Islamic extremism…. Qatar does not make any mystery of trying to submit Western culture to the Muslim crescent.

The Soviet Union, during the Cold War, invested in propaganda operations in the West to subvert capitalism and democracy. Communism found precious allies in the so-called “useful idiots” who facilitated Soviet work in academia, newspapers and publishing houses. Political Islam has been using the same convenient outlets and mechanisms to spread Islamic sharia law in the West.

The old role of Soviet propaganda has now been taken up by Islamic regimes. Qatar, for instance, is not only interested in buying large segments of Europe’s economy (Hochtief, Volkswagen, Porsche, Canary Wharf and Deutsche Bank), but also in playing a key role in Europe’s culture.

Qatar sits on the executive board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UN agency that has just erased 3000 years of Jewish history in Jerusalem, and has set its sights on the main chair at UNESCO: as the successor of UNESCO’s secretary general, Irina Bokova.

U. of Michigan Gives Students Play-Doh, Coloring Books to Cope With Trump By Tom Knighton

For the vast majority of Americans, November 9 only differed from the week preceding it in the lack of political ads permeating their media. For many, it was a welcome end to months upon months of hateful rhetoric and horrible slanders.

On many college campuses, however, it wasn’t the end of the campaign, but the beginning of Armaggedon or something.

At Yale University, supposedly one of the most elite institutions of higher learning in the country, an anonymous professor has decided to let students skip their midterms:

“I am getting many heartfelt notes from students who are in shock over the election returns,” the professor wrote in an email to his students, according to Yale Daily News Managing Editor Jon Victor tweeted.

“The ones I find most upsetting are those who fear, rightly or wrongly, for their own families. These students are requesting that the exam be postponed. On the other hand, I am sure that many students have sacrificed to prepare for the test …Therefore, I am making the exam optional.”

The professor told the class he would “calculate each student’s grade both with and without” the exam.

Remember when asking a professor to postpone an exam for anything short of a natural disaster was grounds to be laughed at? Ah, good times. Good times.

However, that professor’s decision was far from being the silliest example:

At Tufts University, arts and crafts were on offer. And the University of Kansas reminded students via social media of the therapy dogs available for comfort every other Wednesday.

Colleges nationwide scrambled to help students process Republican Donald Trump’s stunning election victory. They’re acknowledging that many students were up late watching results and so may not be at their sharpest in early-morning lectures. More so, they’re responding to a widespread sense of shock and despair on campuses to the victory of a candidate who offended Mexicans, Gold Star mothers, Muslims and the disabled during the course of the campaign.

[…]

“People are frustrated, people are just really sad and shocked,” said Trey Boynton, the director of multi-ethnic student affairs at the University of Michigan. “A lot of people are feeling like there has been a loss. We talked about grief today and about the loss of hope that this election would solidify the progress that was being made.”

There was a steady flow of students entering Ms. Boynton’s office Wednesday. They spent the day sprawled around the center, playing with Play-Doh and coloring in coloring books, as they sought comfort and distraction.

Play-Doh and coloring.

And they wonder why people don’t take them seriously.

In addition to the above examples, Cornell University hosted a “cry-in,” where staff provided distraught students with tissues and hot chocolate. CONTINUE AT SITE

Unsolicited Advice for the Trump Transition Team on National Security Intelligence By Andrew C. McCarthy

It was encouraging Wednesday to hear that President Obama intends to emulate President Bush, who generously provided Obama with a highly informative and smooth transition process.

Running the executive branch is a daunting task, so there is no aspect of the transition to a new administration that is unimportant. But obviously, the most crucial focus for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is heading up President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team, must be national security.

That transition is going to be more complicated than it should be, but there are things Gov. Christie can do – better to say, people he ought to consult — to make sure his team is getting accurate information.

The Bush National Security Council was very good about putting together briefing books so their successors could hit the ground running. The problem now, however, is the trustworthiness of what is in those books.

As PJ Media has reported, a highly disturbing report by a congressional task force this summer found that the Obama administration had politicized its intelligence product.

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS), who has been stellar on national security issues and was among the leaders of the task force (comprised of the Intelligence, Armed Services, and Appropriations Committees), put it this way when the report was issued:

After months of investigation, this much is very clear: from the middle of 2014 to the middle of 2015, the United States Central Command’s most senior intelligence leaders manipulated the command’s intelligence products to downplay the threat from ISIS in Iraq.

The result: consumers of those intelligence products were provided a consistently “rosy” view of U.S. operational success against ISIS. That may well have resulted in putting American troops at risk as policymakers relied on this intelligence when formulating policy and allocating resources for the fight.

The intelligence manipulation became a controversy in 2015, when 50 intelligence-community whistleblowers complained that their reports on the Islamic State and al-Qaeda terror networks were being altered.

Out-Rigging the Vote Never Underestimate the inexplicable. By David Solway

There can be no doubt that the voting process was rigged against Donald Trump in more ways than one. According to reports, fiscal criminal and youthful Nazi collaborator George Soros’ vast fortune was in play to swing the election Hillary’s way, including fomenting violence at Trump’s rallies (for which Trump himself was blamed). Clinton cash, illegally gained, bankrolled a promotional campaign that blitzed the nation. Dead voters, multiple voters, illegal voters, and opportunely-pardoned felons, loyal Democrats all, were evident at the polls in considerable force, like the zombies swarming the last bastion of civilization in the 2016 film Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. “Today’s voter lists,” writes former into-tech management consultant Paul Murphy, “are generally thought to include something like 1.8 million dead voters, 6.4 million illegals, 1.8 million ineligible felons, and perhaps 2.7 million people registered to vote in more than one state.” And of course the polls were skewed in Hillary’s favor through selective sampling techniques in what is known as a psyops strategy to influence the behavior of voters, creating the impression that Clinton was gathering momentum.

And yet Trump won against the odds, prompting the question: Were there really enough votes in flyover country and leftover country to offset the oleaginous corruption greasing Hillary’s route to the White House and to discount the vote-rich conurbations and coastal corridors, the mentally vacant celebrity class, the entire left-liberal elite, the fraudulent pollsters, the lying media, the deceased, the duped, the traumatic feminists, the compromised academics, the blizzard of snowflake students blanketing the eduscape, the Muslim fifth column, the disaffected Libertarians voting for nonsense candidates, and the turncoat Republicans who may as well have registered as Democratic operatives? This seems a rather implausible assumption.

I have a theory, which I will share with bemused readers. I believe the key factor in producing so improbable an electoral outcome was, frankly speaking, Israel, not the country itself but the all-powerful Cosmocrator who rules the universe, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. For the Lord knew that the policies of Barack Obama’s administration had put Israel at critical risk in the most volatile region in the world, and that the leaders of Iran, taking a page from their ancestor Haman the Agagite, were plotting the wholesale destruction of the Jewish state. The Lord also knew that Hillary Clinton and the crime syndicate known as the Democratic Party would advance Iran’s genocidal project.

Neither did He forget the plight of the American people under a venal and iniquitous regime nor America’s covenantal vocation. Did not the Pilgrims see themselves as Israelites in the wilderness—“We shall find that the God of Israel is among us” John Winthrop preached in his 1630 sermon A Modell of Christian Charity—and did not the Declaration of Independence echo the Sinai covenant? Did not John Adams write in a letter to Thomas Jefferson “I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize man than any other nation” and did not Lincoln at Independence Hall in Philadelphia quote from the imprecatory Psalm 137? Were not Jerusalem and the New Jerusalem bound together? CONTINUE AT SITE

The Unbearable Lightness of Anti-Trump Hysterics By Patricia McCarthy

Donald Trump’s victory on November 8 was a shock to liberals all over the country, all over the world. So confident of their own brilliance, superiority and their own rightness in all things, his win was a major shock to their tender but blinkered sensibilities. It had apparently not occurred to them that he could actually win. So out of touch with the American people outside of their personal space, they were completely taken by surprise by his electoral success.

Hillary and her inner circle were shocked as well. It never occurred to them that her many crimes, her foundation schemes to enrich herself, her lifetime of lying and her carelessness about national security would filter down to voters. They assumed regular people, those stupid people Jonathan Gruber counted on to accept the nonsense that is Obamacare, would not know about or read the thousands of leaked Podesta emails that expose the totally self-serving nature of the Clintons and their staff. The emails prove that they care nothing about the country, the shrinking middle class, ISIS, or Iran’s nuclear ambitions. They care only about winning, keeping power and staying rich. Liberals routinely and mistakenly view the American people as beneath them, as ignorant. To their great shock, the deplorables are more informed than Clinton and the DNC ever thought possible.

Van Jones on CNN of course blamed the defeat of HRC on racism. He called it a “whitelash.” Clever? Not so much. He is among the most racist pundits we have had to endure these past eight years. His hatred of white people oozes out of every pore. He has no clue about the country he is so in the habit of vilifying. He is an Al Sharpton, a typical race hustler, in a fancy suit and expensive glasses.

Cokie Roberts reliably blamed sexism. Hillary lost because she is a woman. Men just don’t want to see a woman in the White House! Nonsense. It curiously has not occurred to her that it might be Hillary’s record abent of any achievement, her criminal history, her pathological lying, or her abuse of victimized women in the furtherance of her husband’s career that turned voters against her.

The worst example of mind-numbed bias was Martha Raddatz, a long-time progressive who was inexplicably allowed to “moderate” one of the debates. Fighting back tears, not only did she describe Trump’s victory as a victory for racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia — all the usual accusations that spill so easily off the tongues of liberals when describing conservatives — she claimed no military servicemen would be safe under a Trump administration because he so clearly knows nothing about the military or foreign policy.

Excuse me! Barack Obama has done such terrible damage to our men and women who serve that he should be in the brig. He tied the hands of his generals who stayed. He fired those, hundreds of them, who refused to do his anti-military bidding. Obama’s ridiculous rules of engagement have been the cause of hundreds, maybe even thousands of American deaths in Afghanistan. Our guys are hardly allowed to defend themselves. Trump will change that. Raddatz is sadly typical of the uninformed left. So oblivious to facts that do not fit with her own ideology, she has become as ignorant as she thinks Trump’s irredeemable voters are.

A Note to the boo-hoo crowd -Dry your tears, blow your noses, and grow up!! By Ruth King

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/11/a_note_to_the_boohoo_crowd.html

A friend whom I love told me yesterday that his teenaged daughter cried herself to sleep when Trump won and that in school (a private and tony school… natch) “counselors” comforted the students in their grief. This was repeated throughout the city in public as well as private schools and in colleges.

He was quite outraged at my scorn, having expected more empathy. When I asked how she felt about the senatorial and congressional election — after all, Congress can halt those dreadful actions that a Trump “dictatorship” would enact… it was clear that neither father nor daughter knew who ran and on what issues.

After that jarring conversation I reflected on those things that affected me at her age, although I generally don’t engage in smarmy nostalgia.

When I was a teenager the words “iron lung” terrified us as we saw schoolmates maimed and felled by a raging polio epidemic. We had to absorb a genocide that killed one of every three Jews in the world, including my grandparents and all my cousins, uncles, and aunts. We were affronted by racial laws that discriminated against Negroes in the South and denied hiring and educational opportunities throughout the rest of the country; signs that said “no dogs and no Jews”; poverty and joblessness that afflicted and rendered whole families homeless as their possessions were placed on the sidewalks following their evictions; and the banning of books, films, and music.

But we did have the freedom to engage in debate and to differ with one another and agree on protesting the foregoing policies that were inimical to a proper democracy. And we did pass around clandestine copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer — both banned for their explicit sex.

At the Bronx High School of Science, we argued over Eisenhower versus Stevenson, over the use of nuclear weapons to end the war in Japan, over the death penalty for the Rosenbergs, over the Korean War and the firing of General MacArthur, over the threat of Communism, over local and national policies and politics and foreign policy.

Our debates were loud but civilized. When Adlai Stevenson lost the election to General Dwight Eisenhower many students were in shock that the “intellectual” lost to a military man. The faculty, which was very liberal, offered no safe spaces and no counseling. We did not need them.

What has happened to these coddled and spoiled and illiberal young people today?

A European Migrant Reckoning Mainstream European leaders are beginning to think about real solutions to the crisis.

Europe’s migration crisis may have reached a turning point. With populist and far-right parties on the march across the Continent, mainstream European leaders are starting to listen to voters’ concerns about absorbing more than a million newcomers from the Middle East and Africa. It’s about time.

One sign came Sunday, when the German Interior Ministry called for aggressive interception of refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa. “The elimination of the prospect of reaching the European coast could convince migrants to avoid embarking on the life-threatening and costly journey,” an Interior Ministry official told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

The Mediterranean crossing from Libya to Italy is one of two major routes used by migrants to reach Europe, and it is by far the more perilous. With revenues down, smugglers are stuffing more would-be migrants aboard unseaworthy boats for a crossing on choppy waters that can take several hours. One in every 44 doesn’t make it.

Even so, some 164,000 crossed through the Libya-Italy route this year. The German proposal could dramatically reduce that number by rerouting intercepted migrants back to African countries such as Egypt and Tunisia. Currently, intercepted boats are towed to the Italian coast. Once rerouted, the migrants would be allowed to apply for asylum through legal channels.

This model, which we have long championed, has the benefit of imposing order on a chaotic situation. It also reduces the incentives for the smuggler business model, since the traffickers’ clients—the migrants—will understand that they are wasting their money and risking their lives in vain.

Which brings us to the second migrant route, from Turkey to the Balkans via the Greek islands. About 170,000 have arrived via the so-called Western Balkan Corridor so far this year, and here, too, there are signs that European officials are getting serious. To wit, Austrian Defense Minister Hans Peter Doskozil over the weekend warned that a Brussels deal with Ankara to intercept migrants may not last, and that European governments must be prepared to police EU borders on their own.

Trump Adviser: Israeli Settlement Building Not an Impediment to Peace Jason Greenblatt told Israeli radio the president-elect doesn’t see the settlement activity as problematic By Felicia Schwartz

A top policy adviser to Donald Trump during his campaign said the president-elect doesn’t view Israeli settlements built in disputed areas as an obstacle to peace, a position sharply at odds with Obama administration policy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Obama administration opposes Israel’s settlement building, and has ramped up criticism from previous administrations—both Republican and Democratic—of the activity.

Jason Greenblatt, who Mr. Trump named co-chair of an Israel policy committee during his campaign in July, on Thursday played down any risk from the building activity to peace prospects.

“Mr. Trump does not view the settlements as being an obstacle for peace,” Mr. Greenblatt told Israel’s Army Radio. “The two sides are going to have to decide how to deal with that region, but it’s certainly not Mr. Trump’s view that settlement activity should be condemned and that it is an obstacle to peace. It is not the obstacle to peace.”

Mr. Greenblatt is an executive vice president and chief legal officer of the Trump Organization. He said he would be honored to serve in a Trump administration and work on issues including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but that it was too early to say whether he would.

President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and other U.S. officials have said Israel’s construction of settlements is hindering the possibilities to reach a peace deal providing for side-by-side Jewish and Palestinian states, a U.S. goal since the 1980s.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday that Mr. Greenblatt’s comments contradict years of bipartisan U.S. policy.

“Trying to change facts on the ground only puts a negotiated settlement, a resolution of differences between the two parties, further away,” Mr. Earnest said at a press briefing. “So, the president views that kind of continued settlement expansion as counterproductive.”

Conservative Israeli lawmakers and Jewish settlers have welcomed the election of Mr. Trump as president, hoping he will move away from the decadeslong U.S. policy pursuing a two-state solution.

Mr. Trump in the past has been quoted approving of the Israeli settlements. On the campaign trail, he has promised to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The U.S. doesn’t recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital as it awaits a two-state solution.

Aaron David Miller, a former adviser to Republican and Democratic secretaries of State, said Mr. Greenblatt’s comments suggest that the Trump administration is unlikely to raise the issue of settlement building with Israel as a potential problem. Mr. Trump has made contradictory statements that make it hard to predict what he might do, Mr. Miller said. CONTINUE AT SITE