RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Memorandum of Understanding that President Barack Obama concluded last week with Israel regarding US military aid to Israel for the next decade is classic Obama.

Since he entered office nearly eight years ago, Obama’s foreign policy has always sought to kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, his policies are geared toward fundamentally transforming the US’s global posture. On the other, they work to weaken if not entirely neutralize his congressional opponents at home.

The second goal is no mean task. After all, the US Constitution empowers Congress with the foreign policy powers aimed at checking and balancing the president’s.

For instance, to ensure that no president could adopt foreign policies that harm US national interests or undercut the will of the people, the Constitution required that all treaties be approved by two-thirds of the Senate before they can take effect.

Were it not for Obama’s double tracked foreign policy, that constitutional provision should have blocked Obama’s radical and dangerous nuclear deal with Iran. Understanding that he lacked not merely the support of two-thirds of the Senate but of even a bare majority of senators for his deal, Obama decided to sideline the Senate.

To this end, Obama speciously claimed that the deal was not significant enough to be considered a treaty. The Iran deal of course is a more radical course change than the US’s approval of the UN Charter and the NATO Treaty. The nuclear deal radically changes not only the US’s policy toward Iran and toward every nation, friend and foe, in the Middle East. As former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Schultz argued during the nuclear negotiations, it upends 70 years of US nuclear policy, undermining the foundations of the US’s nonproliferation policies.

Precisely because he has a colder view of international affairs than Obama, Netanyahu’s leadership has made Israel stronger than ever.

Peter Baker notices something important in his dispatch this morning: at this year’s UNGA, the Israel/Palestine issue is no longer the center of attention. From The New York Times:

They took the stage, one after the other, two aging actors in a long-running drama that has begun to lose its audience. As the Israeli and Palestinian leaders recited their lines in the grand hall of the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, many in the orchestra seats recognized the script.

“Heinous crimes,” charged Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. “Historic catastrophe.”

“Fanaticism,” countered Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. “Inhumanity.”

Mr. Abbas and Mr. Netanyahu have been at this for so long that between them they have addressed the world body 19 times, every year cajoling, lecturing, warning and guilt-tripping the international community into seeing their side of the bloody struggle between their two peoples. Their speeches are filled with grievance and bristling with resentment, as they summon the ghosts of history from hundreds and even thousands of years ago to make their case.

While each year finds some new twist, often nuanced, sometimes incendiary, the argument has been running long enough that the world has begun to move on. Where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once dominated the annual meeting of the United Nations, this year it has become a side show as Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas compete for attention against seemingly more urgent crises like the civil war in Syria and the threat from the Islamic State.

Baker (and presumably many of his readers) don’t go on to the next, obvious question: What does this tell us about the relative success or failure of the leaders involved? The piece presents both Netanyahu and Abbas as irrelevant. They used to command the world stage, but now nobody is interested in their interminable quarrel.
What the piece doesn’t say is that this situation is exactly what Israel wants, and is a terrible defeat for the Palestinians. Abbas is the one whose strategy depends on keeping the Palestinian issue front and center in world politics; Bibi wants the issue to fade quietly away. What we saw at the UN this week is that however much Abbas and the Palestinians’ many sympathizers might protest, events are moving in Bibi’s direction.There is perhaps only one thing harder for the American mind to process than the fact that President Obama has been a terrible foreign policy president, and that is that Bibi Netanyahu is an extraordinarily successful Israeli Prime Minister. In Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, Israel’s diplomacy is moving from strength to strength. Virtually every Arab and Middle Eastern leader thinks that Bibi is smarter and stronger than President Obama, and as American prestige across the Middle East has waned under Obama, Israel’s prestige — even among people who hate it — has grown. Bibi’s reset with Russia, unlike Obama’s, actually worked. His pivot to Asia has been more successful than Obama’s. He has had far more success building bridges to Sunni Muslims than President Obama, and both Russia and Iran take Bibi and his red lines much more seriously than they take Obama’s expostulations and pious hopes.The reason that Bibi has been more successful than Obama is that Bibi understands how the world works better than Obama does. Bibi believes that in the harsh world of international politics, power wisely used matters more than good intentions eloquently phrased. Obama sought to build bridges to Sunni Muslims by making eloquent speeches in Cairo and Istanbul while ignoring the power political realities that Sunni states cared most about — like the rise of Iran and the Sunni cause in Syria. Bibi read the Sunnis more clearly than Obama did; the value of Israeli power to a Sunni world worried about Iran has led to something close to a revolution in Israel’s regional position. Again, Obama thought that reaching out to the Muslim Brotherhood (including its Palestinian affiliate, Hamas) would help American diplomacy and Middle Eastern democracy.

‘The graveyards are full of indispensable men,” said De Gaulle, or his predecessor Georges Clemenceau, or New York publisher Elbert Hubbard, or one of several other less famous people with a good turn of phrase, according to the scrupulously careful online Quote Investigator. Be that as it may, it’s looking increasingly likely that the (political) graveyard will soon be welcoming an “indispensable” woman, recently sanctified as such on the cover of The Economist, namely German chancellor Angela Merkel. Her Christian Democrat party fell to third place in Berlin’s local elections last week and may not stay long in the city’s governing coalition. Two thirds of German voters now want her gone. And the names of successors are being freely canvassed.

This decline and the associated rise of the right-wing Alternative for Germany party are being blamed on Merkel’s unqualified invitation to Syrian refugees to come to Germany last year. More than 1 million migrants have done so in the intervening twelve months — many of them neither Syrian nor refugees — and they have led to a large rise in violent and “hate” crimes, some committed by them, some by those protesting their arrival. These things are frightening not only the voters, but also nervous members of Merkel’s own parliamentary party devoted to their own careers before hers. For them, the writing is on the Berlin Wall.

Even those drafting her advance obituaries, however, seem to regard her tenure as chancellor as having been an overall success marked by prudence and achievement. She is generally still seen as “a safe pair of hands” — and indeed the best election poster for the CDU last time was a simple picture of a pair of hands. You can make that case — I’ll do so in a moment as a kind of exercise — but only on grounds that would alarm her admirers and threaten her reputation. By any respectable criterion, she is a klutz on a heroic scale.

Consider the following examples:

Merkel’s energy policy was based upon a combination of nuclear power and “renewables” in order to close down power stations dependent on fossil fuels, and help Germany lead the European Union and the world toward a carbon-free future. She had been a strong defender of nuclear energy against SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s attempts to phase it out. Within a few weeks of the Japanese nuclear disaster at Fukushima, though, she panicked, reversed herself, and closed down Germany’s entire nuclear program. Her Energiewende since then has led to a massive increase in power bills for consumers and industry, the movement abroad of German companies heavily reliant on energy, and, more recently, a phasing out of the phasing out of coal-fired power stations. Merkel and the nuclear companies are still haggling over how much the German government will pay for the estimated €23 billion cost of shutting down their plants. Meanwhile, no one believes that Germany and Europe will meet their official goal of reducing carbon emissions 80-95 percent from their 1990 levels by the year 2050.
The refugee crisis is all too plainly a vast mistake, as Merkel herself has admitted. But some of its side-effects have produced other crises almost as severe. Example one: though Merkel welcomed “Syrian refugees” without consulting even her colleagues in the German government, she immediately demanded that other European states within the then-borderless Schengen Zone should accept them as well. That demand was resisted (and still is) by other governments, and there’s been a long-running “existential” (Jean-Claude Juncker’s word, not mine) crisis in the EU ever since. Example two: Merkel reduced the flow of Middle Eastern migrants into the EU through a deal with Turkish strongman Recep Tayyik Erdogan to control the border. But the price was high: the EU’s silence over Erdogan’s arbitrary arrest of thousands of soldiers, police, lawyers, and journalists, and visa-free entry into the EU for 80 million Turks, which could mean another migrant crisis down the road. There’s no guarantee that Erdogan — who’s skilled at selling the same horse twice — won’t ask for additional concessions from a desperate Merkel and EU, either.
Whether Brexit is a good idea for Britain —

In thirty years, France has undergone an accelerated process of Islamization.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the main Islamic movement in France, explained how Muslims living in the West have to proceed: they may use terror, they may use seduction, exploit Westerners’ sense of guilt, grab public spaces, change laws, and create their own society inside Western societies until they become Muslim societies.

France used to be a country where religious neutrality in the public space was seen as an essential principle. Muslim extremists appear to be using Islamic veils and head-coverings as visible symbols to create the impression that Islam is everywhere.

Politicians claim that they respect human rights, but they seem to have forgotten the human rights of the women who do not cover up — of those who suffer from Islamization, who are no longer free to write, think, or go for a walk on the street.

Politicians refused to “stigmatize” Islam and do not want to see the consequences: harassment, rapes, the destruction of freedom.

French journalists write under the threat of trial or assault, and almost never use the phrase “Islamic terrorism.” Almost all books on Islam in French bookstores are written by Islamists or by authors praising Islam.

Have non-Muslims lost the will to fight?

In Sisco, Corsica, on August 13, a group of Muslim men arrived on a beach in the company of women wearing “burkinis” (full-body bathing costumes). The Muslim men firmly asked the tourists on the beach to leave and posted signs saying “No Entry”. When a few teenagers resisted, the Muslim men responded with a harpoon and baseball bats. The police intervened — but it was just the beginning.

Islamic State combatants were no doubt jumping with joy following botched airstrikes against them by American, Australian and British warplanes in Syria that accidentally killed at least 60 Syrian soldiers and wounded more than 100.

The 15-member United Nations (UN) Security Council met on 17 September after Russia demanded an emergency session to discuss the American-led airstrike fiasco.

The U.S. ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, chastised Russia for the move:

“Russia really needs to stop the cheap point scoring and the grandstanding and the stunts and focus on what matters, which is implementation of something we negotiated in good faith with them”

Russia made no bones about its feelings:

“We are reaching a really terrifying conclusion for the whole world: That the White House is defending Islamic State. Now there can be no doubts about that,” the RIA Novosti news agency quoted Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as saying.”

The boot was however on the other foot with America blaming Russia for an airstrike a few days later that killed 20 Syrian Red Crescent aid workers and truck drivers delivering humanitarian aid relief to 78000 civilians trapped in Aleppo province.

Islamic State no doubt relishes these recriminations and counter recriminations that will guarantee the end of the current tenuous ceasefire.

This disastrous state of affairs could have been avoided had Russia, America and their respective cohorts agreed to concentrate on jointly destroying their common agreed enemy – Islamic State – under a UN mandated Security Council Resolution, rather than acting independently of each other.

President Obama’s decision to intrude uninvited upon Syrian sovereign territory in September 2014 without the backing of a Chapter VII UN Security Council Resolution has seen America behind the eight ball ever since.

President Putin warned in his speech at the UN just one year ago of the perils of operating outside a UN Security Council resolution:

“Russia stands ready to work together with its partners on the basis of full consensus, but we consider the attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the United Nations as extremely dangerous. They could lead to a collapse of the entire architecture of international organizations, and then indeed there would be no other rules left but the rule of force.”

The chickens are now coming home to roost for America as the consequences of its by-passing the UN unfolded this past week.

Three months ago, Britain voted decisively to leave the European Union. Britain’s integration into a federal Europe has been a fixed — and wrong-headed — article of faith of American foreign policy for more than half a century. Across the spectrum of U.S. foreign-policy experts, opinion was united in favor of Britain’s continuing EU membership. Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal informed British voters that it would be imprudent for them to vote for independence. A couple of days after the vote, the dean of foreign-policy pundits, the Council on Foreign Relations’s Richard Haass, predicted that the United Kingdom would disappear within five years. Closer to home, military historian Anthony Beevor warned that in the event of a vote to leave that accelerated the EU’s unravelling, “We will instantly achieve most-hated nation status, not just in Europe but far beyond.” One doesn’t Brexit in polite society.

The immediate aftermath of the referendum tended to bear out the Brexit Cassandras. A political vacuum was created when David Cameron announced he was quitting as prime minister but would stay in place until September. Leave campaigners behaved as if they were a provisional government, and London had an air of St. Petersburg in 1917 between the March and October revolutions. Meanwhile north of the border between England and Scotland, there was a huge spike in favor of Scottish independence. To some observers, it seemed like the United Kingdom was falling apart.

Contrasting the Leave vote in the Brexit referendum with the remain vote in the referendum on Scottish independence two years earlier, a Northern Irish Catholic friend was closer to the mark. “The English had the strength of their convictions to vote for what the Scots didn’t dare to do,” he told me three days after the referendum. By early September, a poll showed that support for Scottish independence had retreated back close to the level of the 2014 referendum and only 37 percent of Scots wanted a second referendum on leaving the United Kingdom. In fact, the main effect of Scottish nationalism has been to destroy Labour’s historic dominance of Scotland, making Labour’s path to a majority at Westminster extremely difficult. A mere 19 days after David Cameron had announced his resignation, a new Conservative prime minister was stepping through the door of No. 10. As in May 1940, Britain’s constitution was ruthlessly efficient at ejecting a failed prime minister and providing fresh leadership.

It was England that had led the Brexit vote, with Wales following, opposed by Scotland and Northern Ireland. One month after the referendum, Cambridge historian Robert Tombs provided an alternative historical interpretation to Beevor’s. “If England is exceptional,” Tombs wrote in the New Statesman, “its exceptional characteristic is its long-standing and settled scepticism about the European project in principle, greater than in any other EU country.” The argument, constantly trotted out, that European integration was necessary to prevent war received less support in Britain, especially England, than elsewhere. Britain’s experience of the 20th century had been far less traumatic; “loyalty to the nation was not tarnished with fascism, but was rather the buttress of freedom and democracy.”

The 52–48 margin for Leave, Tombs argues, understates the public’s disengagement from the EU. “What galvanised the vote for Brexit,” Tombs writes, “was a core attachment to national democracy: the only sort of democracy that exists in Europe.” Only 6 percent of Britons supported deeper European integration — the lowest level of any member state — while two thirds wanted powers returned to Britain from Brussels, with a majority even among the relatively Europhile young. Tombs’s conclusion is stark: “In retrospect, joining the Common Market in 1973 has proved an immense historic error.”

Tombs’s Brexit essay forms a coda to his extraordinary The English and Their History, published two years ago. In a December 2015 review in The Atlantic, David Frum called it “spectacular,” a book crammed with explosives “carefully arranged to blow to smithereens three-quarters of a century of accumulated conventional wisdom.” It is a history of a people, of a nation, and of a civilization that changed the world, one stretching back to well before the ninth century when an Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to record the national history was commissioned, most probably by King Alfred, to be written in English.

This article is not meant to, or intended to be interpreted as a political endorsement, or lack thereof, of any political candidate. Family Security Matters takes no political point of view whatsoever.

I am gravely concerned that the Obama-Clinton team is involved in an ongoing subversion policy not only on a national scale but on a global one. Certainly, as far as Israel is concerned there is a grand deception going on.

In his UN General Assembly speech, President Obama spoke about “deep fault lines in the existing international order.” He’s right. He’s responsible for a lot of the mess.

Unfortunately, politicians like Obama like to see what they want to see and ignore gross realities that do not jive with what they want to achieve. Take the Israeli-Palestinian issue, for example. At the UN podium Obama said, “Surely Israelis and Palestinian will be better off if Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel, but Israel recognizes that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land.”

To the uninitiated (i.e. the progressives who live in a virtual world that enables them to block out sounds and truth that invades their cocooned ‘safe spaces’), massive and ongoing Palestinian terror coming at Israeli civilians from the Hamas political front based in Gaza and the Fatah political front based in Ramallah is ignored, tippexed out of his song sheet. In his narrative, it simply doesn’t exist.

In this he is backed by Ban Ki Moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, who sang off the same song sheet. “Ten years lost to illegal settlement expansion. Ten years lost to intra-Palestinian divide, growing polarization and hopelessness. This is madness.”

Yes it is, Ban Ki. It’s madness not to see the violent passion to destroy Israel. He spoke as Israel endured another weekend of Palestinian terror attacks, eight in number. It’s madness for them to talk about Israel “illegally occupying Palestinian land” when 2000-year-old Jewish coins were recently dug up on land that was evidently Jewish.

On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with U.S. President Barack Obama at the Lotte New York Palace Hotel, on the sidelines of the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly.

Having just signed a Memorandum of Understanding on the “largest-ever” military-aid package granted to Israel by an American administration, Netanyahu had no choice but to grin and bear it when Obama issued a typical, not-so-veiled threat to the Jewish state.

Though the precise words that were exchanged between the two behind closed doors are not known, Netanyahu was well aware of what to expect ahead of the tete-a-tete — likely, and thankfully, the last he needs to have with the hostile American president. And if he had harbored any illusions about being spared yet another of Obama’s tiresome lectures on the plight of the Palestinians, Obama dispelled them while talking to reporters, just before the meeting.

“There is great danger of terrorism and flare-ups of violence, and we also have concerns about settlement activity,” Obama said, creating moral parity between evil deeds and benign ones. “We want to see how Israel sees the next few years … because we want to make sure that we keep alive this possibility of a stable, secure Israel at peace with its neighbors, and a Palestinian homeland that meets the aspirations of the Palestinian people.”

What Obama meant to say — and surely did say behind closed doors — was that Israelis living in any areas that the Palestinian Authority wants cleansed of Jews are the cause of the stabbing attacks, shootings, car-rammings, Molotov cocktail-throwing and bombings to which they have been subjected for decades. And now that he has given them a pile of money with which to protect themselves over the next decade, Netanyahu had better start capitulating to any and every Palestinian demand. You know, just as Obama did last year with the mullah-led regime in Tehran.

Netanyahu, too, spoke in code prior to the meeting. “The greatest challenge is, of course, the unremitting fanaticism,” he said. “The greatest opportunity is to advance peace. That’s a goal that I and the people of Israel will never give up on. We’ve been fortunate that in pursuing these two tasks, Israel has no greater friend than the United States of America.”

Netanyahu was actually conveying that Israel — a liberal democracy like America — has never been at fault for its enemies’ extremism. The trouble with this assertion is that Obama believes the United States is just as much to blame for the wrath of those bent on its destruction as Israel.

According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, a senior U.S. official said that during the meeting, Obama raised “profound concerns about the corrosive effect that settlement activity, which continues as the occupation enters its 50th year, is having on the prospect of a two-state solution.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicted in his address to the United Nations General Assembly today that “the days when UN ambassadors reflexively condemn Israel, those days are coming to an end.”

But he spared no withering criticism for the world body, reminding members that what was “begun as a moral force has become a moral farce.”

“What I’m about to say is going to shock you: Israel has a bright future at the UN,” he began the speech. “Now I know that hearing that from me must surely come as a surprise, because year after year I’ve stood at this very podium and slammed the UN for its obsessive bias against Israel. And the UN deserved every scathing word – for the disgrace of the General Assembly that last year passed 20 resolutions against the democratic state of Israel and a grand total of three resolutions against all the other countries on the planet.”

Netanyahu called the UN Human Rights Council a “joke” and noted that the UN’s Commission on Women condemned only Israel this year — “Israel, where women fly fighter jets, lead major corporations, head universities, preside – twice – over the Supreme Court, and have served as speaker of the Knesset and prime minister.”

He touted the diplomatic, economic and security relationships Israel has with various nations outside of the UN framework, underscoring that “world leaders increasingly appreciate that Israel is a powerful country with one of the best intelligence services on earth.”

“Because of our unmatched experience and proven capabilities in fighting terrorism, many of your governments seek our help in keeping your countries safe,” he said. “…Governments are changing their attitudes towards Israel because they know that Israel can help them protect their peoples, can help them feed them, can help them better their lives.”

Netanyahu said he had one key message for the delegates: “Lay down your arms. The war against Israel at the UN is over.”