RUTHFULLY YOURS

The problem is that in exchange for the expanded military aid, Obama is demanding that Israel surrender its diplomatic and military independence to the White House.

This week, MK Michael Oren stood up to his boss in the Kulanu party, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, to the political Left, including hundreds of retired security brass, and to the IDF General Staff. The former ambassador to Washington urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to sign the multi-year security assistance deal that US President Barack Obama demands Israel accept.

The problem isn’t the money. By all accounts, Obama’s multi-year military assistance package is generous.

The problem is that in exchange for the expanded military aid, Obama is demanding that Israel surrender its diplomatic and military independence to the White House.

For more than 40 years, every US administration – including the Obama administration – that has sought to harm Israel in any way has hit up against an unmovable obstacle. Whether the White House wanted to enable the UN Security Council to pass an anti-Israel resolution, place an embargo on military exports or bureaucratically slow them down to force Israel to stand down during wartime; whether the White House wanted block expanded trade deals, crowd out Israel’s military industries, or sell game changing weapons systems to Israel’s enemies, the US Congress has always stopped it in its tracks.

Israel-haters in the US speak endlessly about the supposedly all powerful and malign “Israel lobby,” which controls US foreign affairs. But the simple truth is that it wouldn’t matter all that much if AIPAC were to shut down tomorrow. Even without AIPAC, Israel would enjoy the support of Congress.

It would continue to enjoy that support because the vast majority of Americans support Israel and expect their representatives in Congress to support Israel.

In other words, the “Israel lobby” is none other than the American people.

As Oren warned, Obama’s military assistance package would disenfranchise the American public when it comes to US policy toward Israel. The agreement bars Israel from asking that Congress augment the assistance that Obama has offered and bars Congress from acting. So if a future administration chooses to breach the agreement, or to suspend it, or if conditions change and Israel requires other assistance, Congress would be barred from stepping into the breach.

Then there is the assistance agreement’s assault on Israel’s military independence.

Apparently truth is not a valued commodity in Washington. By now, most people have read the profile of Ben Rhodes in the New York Times by David Samuels in which Mr. Rhodes, who is described as Obama’s “foreign policy guru” created an echo chamber—a fictitious reality of under-educated, newly minted journalists — to make the Islamic Republic of Iran appear much more benign than it actually is in order to sell the Iranian nuclear agreement to a skeptical American Congress and public.

I had expected heads to roll over this. Yet, not a single person has been fired. In fact, those who are most culpable have only been promoted up the ladder in the Obama administration where total fictions are peddled as truths, and where empty bromides are offered about how they would like ISIS and other radical Islamist terrorists to be treated.

For example, yesterday, while visiting grieving families of the 49 loved ones who were murdered by Omar Mateen in Pulse, a gay bar in Orlando, Attorney General Loretta Lynch prescribed how we should respond to this tragedy. “Our most effective weapon is compassion, unity and love … We need to find our common humanity,” remarked the Attorney General.

Love? Tell that to someone whose son’s head has been savagely cut off by ISIS or whose daughter has been kidnapped and raped and then sold into slavery.

There is currently a rigid dogma among some inside the beltway now, not to acknowledge that ISIS hates Yazidis, Christians, Shiites-or any Muslim who does not practice their precise brand of Islam, Hindus, Buddhists, Rastafarians and (of course) Jews, as well as gays.

Recently, members of my staff were in a Democratic congressional office, and the staffer refused to acknowledge that simple fact. He insisted that this was simply an LGBT issue. (Period. End of story.)

This administration has substituted wishful thinking for realistic sound policy, and it has become contagious. And one of the cornerstones of this wishful thinking is that Islam, in all its many varieties, is a religion of peace.

And when the facts do not fit their paradigm, then just edit out the facts. This is what occurred last Sunday, June 19th on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd when the Attorney General had announced that they were to “release the partial transcripts of the killer’s calls with law enforcement” that night when Omar Mateen killed 49 people on Saturday, June 11th.

Each generation looks back at the generation behind it and weeps. Surely these children will be the death of our society, they think. Well, people looking at the current crop of American college students — and the administrators who enable them — while thinking such things may very well be right.

On top of the myriad other nonsense on college campuses, it now seems that some professors are being investigated for admitting that the Official Line ™ isn’t the only opinion out there:

Two professors at the University of Northern Colorado were investigated after students complained that they were forced to hear opposing viewpoints.

The complaints were made to Northern Colorado’s “Bias Response Team,” an Orwellian office on campus that asks students to report their peers and professors for anything that upsets or offends them. When the news outlet Heat Street made an open records request for some of the complaints, it discovered that two students had become so upset about having to hear an opinion they disagreed with they filed reports with school administrators.

And rather than telling the students to buck up because they might hear those opinions outside of college or on the news or in the media, the schools told the professors to stop teaching that there’s an alternate viewpoint.

In at least one of the cases, a transgendered student was offended merely because the professor acknowledged the opinion that some believe transgender isn’t a real thing.

He’s not accused of arguing that position, even for the sake of argument. Nope. Just admitting that it exists was too offensive.

Whether transgender is a real thing, a psychological condition, or the result of a science fiction experiment brought to life by a howler monkey on meth is irrelevant. Honestly, the professor not having expressed his personal opinions on the matter is irrelevant. What is relevant is that American college students just can’t handle opinions different from their own.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas lies about Israel not only as a matter of course but as one of policy. It was no surprise, then, when he stood up at the European Parliament on Thursday and regurgitated a claim made this week that rabbinical figures in the Jewish state had urged the government to poison Palestinian wells.

Abbas knew that this classically anti-Semitic blood libel was as false as a similar one, spread last week, that claimed Israel forced Palestinians from a certain village to flee by drying up their water supply during Ramadan. In fact, a pipe had burst, and it was immediately repaired. But not — as media watchdog HonestReporting pointed out — before the “water apartheid” lie, first “reported” by Al Jazeera, was picked up by The Independent, the International Business Times, Radio New Zealand and The Times of London.

In keeping with the tradition of his predecessor, the late PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, Abbas encourages the invention of all kinds of blood libels, which he then states as fact, both to his own people and to the international community. Each libel is more ludicrous than the previous one, and they would be funny if they weren’t reminiscent of Nazi propaganda and didn’t serve the same purpose: to foster the kind of Jew-loathing that enables genocide.

But annihilating Israel and the Jews is not the real reason that Abbas perpetuates utterly insane accusations against the only democracy in the Middle East. More immediate personal concerns preoccupy the PA leader, who knows his days are numbered, literally and figuratively, if he does not remain relevant at home and abroad.

Indeed, Abbas constantly faces the possibility of being ousted by members of his own faction, Fatah, and by Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules Gaza. He manages to survive by enlisting financial and political support from the United States, Europe and the United Nations.