RUTHFULLY YOURS

The US Congress has swiftly moved to rebuff the efforts by President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry to reverse long-standing American policy in relation to Israel. By a vote of 342:80 Congress resolved on 5 January 2017:

“the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 undermined the long-standing position of the United States to oppose and veto United Nations Security Council resolutions that seek to impose solutions to final status issues, or are one-sided and anti-Israel, reversing decades of bipartisan agreement”

Congress’s decision goes a long way to restoring America’s reputation and integrity.

Vice President-elect Pence has certainly signalled the incoming Trump Administration’s approval of such Congress action with the following tweet:

Congress now needs to rectify Obama’s abandonment of the written commitments made to Israel by President Bush in his letter to then Israeli Prime Minister Sharon on 14 April 2004 (“Commitments”).

Congress has a vested interest in seeing those Commitments restored – because it overwhelmingly approved Bush giving those Commitments to Israel by a massive vote of 502 to 12.

Among those voting to support those Commitments was Senator Hillary Clinton.

Senator John Kerry – whilst not casting a vote in the Senate – made his position very clear to moderator Tim Russert on Meet The Press on 18 April 2004:

Russert: On Thursday, President Bush broke with the tradition and policy of six predecessors when he said that Israel can keep part of the land seized in the 1967 Middle East War and asserted the Palestinian refugees cannot go back to their particular homes. Do you support President Bush?

Kerry: Yes.

Russert: Completely?

Kerry: Yes.

Subsequent decisions by both Clinton and Kerry respectively as Secretary of State played an active role in aiding and abetting Obama’s abandonment of the Bush Commitments – marking a shameful period in American history.

Vice president-elect Mike Pence on Thursday hailed a vote by the US House of Representatives declaring a United Nations Security Council resolution a “one-sided” obstacle to peace.

The House resolution was seen as a rejection of the Obama administration, which did not veto UNSC Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements as illegal.

“Great to see strong bipartisan vote in Congress opposing recent UN resolution against our most cherished ally,” Pence tweeted early Friday morning. “America stands with Israel.”

House Resolution 11 declared the UN motion a “one-sided” effort that is an obstacle to peace, placing disproportionate blame on Israel for the continuation of the conflict and encouraging Palestinians not to engage in direct, bilateral negotiations.

Passed by a vote of 342-80, the measure puts the lower chamber of Congress firmly against President Barack Obama’s decision to withhold the US veto power from shielding Israel against the censure.

WASHINGTON—The House of Representatives on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a measure disavowing a United Nations resolution that condemned Israel’s settlement activities, in a rare show of bipartisan force that doubled as a rebuke to President Barack Obama’s approach to the U.S.-Israel relationship.

On a 342 to 80 vote, more than 100 Democrats joined with a nearly unanimous Republican caucus to back the measure — a significant margin that shows the depth of congressional support for the Jewish state.

A similar measure is expected to be taken up in the Senate, where it has the support of both Republican and Democratic leaders.

The congressional disapproval, which doesn’t carry the force of law, states that the U.S. “should oppose and veto future United Nations Security Council resolutions that seek to impose solutions to final status issues, or are one-sided and anti-Israel.”

The show of support for Israel in Congress comes amid years of frosty relations between Mr. Obama and the conservative government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Though Mr. Obama maintained the traditional security alliance between the two countries and sent unprecedented amounts of military assistance, the leaders have had a difficult relationship, characterized by major clashes over Israeli settlement policy and the U.S-backed international nuclear accord with Iran, among other issues.

The relationship was further strained by the passage last month of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, a non-binding censure that accuses Israel of violating international law with its construction of settlements in the disputed West Bank and East Jerusalem. The UN resolution passed on a vote of 14-0, with the U.S. abstaining.

The U.S. previously used its veto on the Security Council to stop similar resolutions targeted at Israel, but Mr. Obama’s administration decided to allow this resolution to proceed, citing the long-stalled peace process. CONTINUE AT SITE

The deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Defense Department by an enemy agent in modern history was pulled off by a spy working for the Castro regime.

Problem is, the mainstream media treasures their Havana bureaus. So they always strive to avoid any stories that might unduly upset the Stalinist apparatchiks who make these “news” (i.e. propaganda) bureaus possible.

“Cuba as tourist hot-spot!” “The magnanimity of the Castroites as health-care providers!” “The wickedness of the (so-called) U.S. embargo!” “Obama’s wisdom and courage in (unconstitutionally) loopholing the embargo half to death!” These themes pretty much sum up the MSM’s “reporting” on Cuba.

But in a rare hiccup of honesty (or an oversight) CNN itself admits to some very important Cuba-sponsored unpleasantness, about which most Americans remain ignorant. “The Most Dangerous U.S. Spy You’ve Never Heard of,” is how they titled a special (16 years after her arrest) on this Castro-sponsored spy named Ana Belen Montes.

In brief: the spy’s name is Ana Belen Montes, known as “Castro’s Queen Jewel” in the intelligence community. In 2002 she was convicted of the same crimes as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and today she serves a 25-year sentence in Federal prison. Only a plea bargain spared her from sizzling in the electric chair like the Rosenbergs.

Significantly, Ana Belen Montes was arrested on September 21st 2001. That’s exactly ten days after Al Qaeda demolished the Twin Towers. By then she had been uncovered for a while, but, as is customary in such cases, was being monitored to see if her activities would reveal others within her spy network. That monitoring was scheduled to continue for much longer, but her access to U.S. intelligence secrets unrelated to Cuba (mid-east, for instance) demanded she be shut down—and quickly.

Interestingly, just days after the 9-11 terror attack, Castro’s KGB-founded and mentored intelligence mounted a major deception operation attempting to trip-up our investigation into the terrorist culprits:

“In the six months after the 9/11 attacks,” ran the Miami Herald investigative report, “up to 20 Cubans walked into U.S. embassies around the world and offered information on terrorism threats. Eventually, all were deemed to be Cuban intelligence agents and collaborators, purveying fabricated information. Two Cuba experts said spies sent by Cuba to the United States were part of a permanent intelligence program to mislead, misinform and identify U.S. spies.”

A Cuban spy named Gustavo Machin, who worked under diplomatic cover in Washington D.C. (and thus enjoyed “diplomatic immunity”) along with 14 of his KGB-trained Cuban colleagues, were all booted from the U.S. for serving as accomplices to super-spy Ana Belen Montes.

A week and a half ago President Obama gave the order for the U.S. to abstain on UN Security Council Resolution 2334, thereby—effectively—voting in favor and allowing the resolution to pass.

As I noted, the resolution goes beyond “moral equivalency” by obfuscating Palestinian terror and incitement while branding Jewish life beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines a “flagrant violation under international law” and a “major obstacle…to peace.”

But the administration wasn’t through with Israel. A few days later, with the Middle East aflame from Yemen to Iraq to Syria to Libya to Sudan and Iranian expansionism on the march, Secretary of State Kerry delivered a 75-minute harangue against what he called Israel’s “pernicious policy of settlement construction that is making peace impossible.”

Critics have noted that—in the real world—Israeli construction in settlements under the recent Netanyahu governments has been so modest that it has not affected the Israeli-Palestinian population balance in the West Bank; and that if any and all Israeli presence beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines is “illegal,” then the idea of a “peace process” to settle claims over disputed land appears to be invalidated, since Israel is then nothing but a rapacious thief and the Palestinians its victims seeking redress.

As international-law scholar Eugene Kontorovich notes in the Washington Post:

The…condemnation of any Jewish presence whatsoever in eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank is a unique rule invented for Israel. There has never been a prolonged belligerent occupation—from the U.S. occupation of West Berlin to Turkey’s ongoing occupation of Cyprus to Russia’s of Crimea—where the occupying power has blocked its citizens from living in the territory under its control. Moreover, neither the United Nations nor any other international body has ever suggested they must do so. What is being demanded of Israel in its historical homeland has never been demanded of any other state, and never will be.

The Obama administration’s stepped-up diplomatic and verbal assault on Israel in the last weeks of its tenure has not gone unnoticed, sparking bitter criticism even from Democratic lawmakers and mainstream American Jewish organizations that are far from any right-wing agenda.

But the extent to which the administration listens to such protests, or can be budged from its wholesale endorsement of Palestinian claims regarding the West Bank and Jerusalem, can be gauged from the fact that the Obama-Kerry team has still more in store for Israel.

Some very good points…but same old, same old crapola about a two state dissolution…..an idee fixe that is ahistorical and delusional….rsk

President Obama’s decision to stab Israel in the back at the United Nations could prove to be a blessing in disguise. Obama’s instinct for radical overreach has achieved a reductio ad absurdum of the whole U.S. framework toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and made it far more difficult for President-elect Trump to embrace that framework without wholesale revision. And that could give us something we don’t have now: a realistic path to peace in Palestine.

Current U.S. policy toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict evolved in support of a goal — the two-state solution — set by President Bill Clinton and formally embraced by President George W. Bush. This goal has become completely disconnected from reality. That is not to say that a two-state solution is not the right ultimate goal; maybe it is. But given the circumstances of today’s Middle East, a negotiated settlement leading to a two-state solution is simply impossible. The combination of Israel’s international isolation, Palestinians’ steadfast commitment to incitement and terrorism, and Iranian ascendancy to regional hegemony and nuclear weapons means that Israel simply can’t risk the concessions that would be necessary for a final settlement of the conflict.

When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the territory immediately became a terrorist safe haven and a platform for missile-fired terrorism. If the same thing happens in the West Bank, which straddles Jerusalem on three sides and abuts most of Israel’s population, it will be the end of Israel. A two-state solution under current circumstances would be suicide. Peace in Palestine requires new circumstances. And the object of U.S. policy should be to create them. Hence, every element of U.S. policy, including the U.S. position on Israeli settlements, should be justifiable as part of a coherent and realistic strategy for getting from here to there.

That includes the U.S. position on Israeli settlements. Settlements are not the reason that the two-state solution is “now in jeopardy,” as Secretary of State John Kerry put it in his mea non culpa speech last week. There is only one reason the two-state solution is in jeopardy, or more accurately dead, and that is Muslim terrorism against innocent Jews. There is only one reason for the harsh security measures imposed in the occupied territories, and that is Muslim terrorism against innocent Jews. There is only one reason for the continuing conflict between Israel and its neighbors, and that is Muslim terrorism against innocent Jews.

Of all Barack Obama’s costumes, the most ill-fitting is that of the hawk. The guise doesn’t work for all sorts of ideological and historical reasons. Plus there’s the fact that he’s rushing to put on the outfit as he’s heading out the door.

The new sanctions against Russia are fine with me on the merits, even if they are remarkably tardy and being sold in no small part for domestic, political reasons.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undermining American interests for a long time now. From the annexation of Crimea and a shadow war in Ukraine to his unabashed support for the butcher Bashar Assad in Syria, Putin has given the Obama administration every excuse to punch back. But until last week, Obama’s response had been to offer various and sundry diplomatic “off-ramps” and a little bit of tongue-lashing. General dovishness combined with the single-minded pursuit of a deal with Iran led Obama to insist that we should avoid “provoking” Russia.

The satirist who goes by the moniker “Iowahawk” cut to the chase on Twitter:

Russia invades Crimea: oh well

Russia shoots down airliner: mistakes happen

John Podesta falls for phishing scam: RESTART THE COLD WAR

Obama’s volte-face should be seen in the larger context of his last-minute legacy-padding and his widely alleged desire to “box in” his successor. The president is preparing to spend the next few decades as a celebrity in liberal circles.

Oh Puleez…you cannot retrofit an evil deal with tyrants…you call the bad deal null and void and then start from scratch on our defense terms and as our renewed leadership of the free world….rsk

As the bipartisan opponents of President Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement prepare to address its many shortcomings, they should beware of unwittingly repeating some of his mistakes.

Instead of relying on more sanctions to dismantle or renegotiate the deal, the most urgent need is restoring U.S. credibility and resolve in opposing Iranian aggression and reshaping the Middle East.

Two fundamental misjudgments led to the disastrous nuclear agreement. First, Mr. Obama eschewed credible military threats and relied on congressionally generated economic sanctions to pressure Iran to negotiate. Second, he focused only on Iran’s nuclear program, ignoring its malignant regional misconduct. Free of pressure and scrutiny, Tehran shaped the agreement’s terms and expanded its aggression and influence.

The current policy debate has ignored these mistakes. Instead, it is focused on using sanctions to enforce and improve the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. This narrow approach is counterproductive. The agreement front-loaded Iran’s economic benefits. But it only mothballed elements of its nuclear program; it did not eradicate it.

The U.S. will need years to rebuild a robust international sanctions regime; Iran requires mere weeks to rebuild its nuclear program. Even if Iran remains within the agreement’s framework, it might respond to sanctions by escalating its regional aggression, exerting its own more immediate and dangerous form of leverage.

A proven necessary ingredient in dealing with Iran is a credible military threat. Two examples: Tehran suspended elements of its nuclear program in 2003-04 following the U.S. overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and it never crossed Israel’s 2012 red line over its nuclear stockpile.

As the Trump administration considers Iran policy, including whether and how to enforce, renegotiate or cancel the nuclear agreement with Tehran, here are five policies it can implement to put Iran on notice and regain the strategic advantage:

First, instruct the Pentagon to update contingency plans for the use of force against Iran, including its nuclear facilities, especially in the event of a significant violation of, or withdrawal from, the nuclear agreement. This will communicate a new robust posture and prepare for what might be necessary. CONTINUE AT SITE