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The Obama Intifada By Matthew Continetti

Posted By on October 17th, 2015

More than 30 dead in Israel as Palestinians armed with knives attack innocents. What’s responsible? A campaign of incitement, which slanderously accuses Jews of intruding on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and murdering Arab children in cold blood.

And who is legitimizing this campaign? None other than Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, whom President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have long held up as a peacemaker. “I think nobody would dispute that whatever disagreements you may have with him, he has proven himself to be somebody who has committed to nonviolence and diplomatic efforts to resolve this issue,” Obama told writer Jeffrey Goldberg in 2014.

That’s a strange view of commitment. This is the same Abbas, remember, who rejected then–Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s absurdly generous 2008 peace offer. The same Abbas who resisted negotiations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the ten-month settlement freeze in 2010, which Obama demanded explicitly on the grounds that it would give Abbas the cover he needed to begin talks. Abbas finally relented to Saudi pressure and attended a few meetings with Netanyahu that September. But under no definition of what the word “negotiation” actually means were these meetings for real: The freeze was about to expire, the get-togethers were perfunctory, and nothing of significance was discussed. The farce ended soon after.

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The One-State Solution, Cont’d Palestinian terrorism and Israeli self-defense are not the same thing. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on October 17th, 2015

The next intifada is on, and the Obama administration, as one would expect, is on the wrong side.

There has been a spike in Palestinian terrorism over the past few weeks. One has to call it a spike because Palestinian terrorism is always thrumming — there’s never a real stop. About 70 Israelis have recently been mauled, and some killed, in over two dozen sneak attacks, mostly by stabbing.

The ultimate cause of the rampage is the Palestinian determination to eradicate Israel’s existence as a Jewish state by a two-track campaign of internal violence and international political pressure. As I’ve previously detailed, this is the “one-state solution” preferred by Islamists and Leftists. It is abetted, wittingly or not, by the “two-state solution,” a bipartisan Beltway obsession that entails pressuring Israel to accommodate next-door neighbors who will be satisfied with nothing less than burning its house down.

The proximate cause for the current bloodletting is incitement by Palestinian political leadership, particularly Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas (also known as “Abu Mazen”).

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Obama Explains: ‘Tension and Suspicion’ with Israelis, Palestinians Brews ‘Potential for Misunderstanding and Triggers’ By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on October 17th, 2015

President Obama stressed at a press conference today that it’s “important for both” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas “to try to tamp down rhetoric that may feed violence or anger or misunderstanding” in the region.

At a press conference with South Korean President Park Geun-Hye, Obama — who’s made no secret of wanting a Mideast peace deal as one of his legacy issues — added that “I don’t think we can wait for all of the issues that exist between Israelis and Palestinians to be settled in order for us to try to tamp down the violence right now.”

“I think my views are well known that over time, the only way that Israel is going to be truly secure, and the only way the Palestinians are going be able to meet the aspirations of their people is if they are two states living side by side in peace and security. Those talks, which Secretary Kerry put an enormous effort in, and before that a number of our envoys and Secretary Clinton put enormous effort in, have stalled, and I think it’s gonna be up to the parties, and we stand ready to assist to see if they can restart a more constructive relationship,” he said.

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Hillary Laughs at Email Question, Defends Forwarding Sensitive Info from Sid Blumenthal By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on October 17th, 2015

Hillary Clinton laughed in an interview with Jake Tapper when the CNN anchor pointed out that while Bernie Sanders said “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails,” there are “a lot of people who are not including FBI officials.”

“And this is something else that is very confusing to me. With all your experience, why wouldn’t you anticipate that over the course of four years, handling very sensitive diplomatic negotiations, overseeing military interventions and surveillance, why wouldn’t you anticipate that something classified, whether about North Korea or Iran or drones or an informant for the CIA, that it wouldn’t be e- mailed to you? And why wouldn’t you consider that having it on your personal account with some server in Colorado might be a potential risk?” Tapper asked the Democratic presidential candidate.

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Rubio Unveils Energy Policy at a Standing-Room Only Event in Ohio By Paula Bolyard

Posted By on October 17th, 2015

GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio unveiled his energy policy in Salem, Ohio, on Friday. Speaking to an overflow crowd at BOC Water Hydraulics just outside Youngstown, Rubio was introduced by popular Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel, who extolled his virtues as a father and family man before saying he thinks Rubio is highly qualified to be our next president.

Rubio began by saying that the outdated political establishment in Washington is holding our economy back. He prefaced his policy proposals by saying that ”21st century America has the greatest energy potential of any nation in human history.” Rubio said, “Not only do we have an abundance of oil and coal and natural gas, but we also have an unparalleled capability to leverage these into prosperity through the miracle of American free enterprise.”

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MSNBC uses ‘the map that lies’ about Israel By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on October 17th, 2015

Omri Ceren asks , “@MSNBC have you actually lost your minds?” over the left wing network’s posting of a series of maps originally distributed by years ago by pro-Palestinian groups. The maps alleged depict the loss of land by Palestinians.

For a comprehensive debunking of the map, see this essay by the Elder of Zion dating from 2012, dubbing it “the map that lies.”

A more accurate depiction is this, also 3 years old:

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/10/msnbc_uses_the_map_that_lies_about_israel.html#ixzz3op7muoot
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A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse By Henry A. Kissinger See note please

Posted By on October 17th, 2015

Wrong again Dr. Kissinger….. “the American role in stabilizing the Middle East order that emerged from the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.” That role orchestrated by you was vicious and counterproductive. You insisted that Israel bow to the demands of the aggressor Anwar Sadat who, in company with Assad (father) of Syria led a surprise attack in the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, you betrayed our ally Israel. You warned that beleaguered nation that almost lost that war by threatening ” a reassessment of the America/Israel relationship” if Israel did not accede to your demands. These suggestions of yours now are prattle, as were your policies of “detente” and “realpolitick”and total failure to see resurgent radical Islam as the curse of the Middle East ….rsk

“With Russia in Syria, a geopolitical structure that lasted four decades is in shambles. The U.S. needs a new strategy and priorities.

The debate about whether the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran regarding its nuclear program stabilized the Middle East’s strategic framework had barely begun when the region’s geopolitical framework collapsed. Russia’s unilateral military action in Syria is the latest symptom of the disintegration of the American role in stabilizing the Middle East order that emerged from the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.

In the aftermath of that conflict, Egypt abandoned its military ties with the Soviet Union and joined an American-backed negotiating process that produced peace treaties between Israel and Egypt, and Israel and Jordan, a United Nations-supervised disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria, which has been observed for over four decades (even by the parties of the Syrian civil war), and international support of Lebanon’s sovereign territorial integrity. Later, Saddam Hussein’s war to incorporate Kuwait into Iraq was defeated by an international coalition under U.S. leadership. American forces led the war against terror in Iraq and Afghanistan. Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States were our allies in all these efforts. The Russian military presence disappeared from the region.

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‘Gross Negligence’ The espionage law Mrs. Clinton might have broken. By James Taranto

Posted By on October 17th, 2015

If you’re Bernie Sanders, you’ll want to stop reading now, because you’re sick and tired of hearing about the subject of today’s column. For everyone else:

Fox News reports that the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s illicit email server “is now focused on whether there were violations of an Espionage Act subsection pertaining to ‘gross negligence’ in the safekeeping of national defense information”—this according to “an intelligence source familiar with the investigation”:

Under 18 USC 793 subsection F, the information does not have to be classified to count as a violation. The intelligence source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity citing the sensitivity of the ongoing probe, said the subsection requires the “lawful possession” of national defense information by a security clearance holder who “through gross negligence,” such as the use of an unsecure computer network, permits the material to be removed or abstracted from its proper, secure location.

Subsection F also requires the clearance holder “to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer. “A failure to do so “shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”

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Missile Defense for Korea The U.S. and its ally can deploy a new system, unless China gets a veto.

Posted By on October 17th, 2015

North Korea could have as many as 100 nuclear bombs within five years and may already be able to mount warheads on missiles capable of reaching the United States. Those are the latest estimates of Pyongyang’s atomic capabilities, and they will be at the center of the discussion Barack Obama will have with Park Geun-hye when the South Korean President visits the White House Friday. So it’s good the two democracies can do something about it.

That’s thanks to Thaad, or Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense. This U.S.-built system’s powerful radar and sophisticated interceptors would allow U.S. and South Korean forces to intercept missiles across distances of up to 200 kilometers, compared with about 35 kilometers with the Patriot systems currently deployed around the Korean peninsula.

Deploying Thaad would integrate South Korean defenses into a regional network of U.S. and Japanese sensors, enabling more accurate detection and interception of missiles from multiple angles and at multiple points in their flight path. Trilateral cooperation might also soothe some of the enduring tensions between South Korea and Japan over the latter’s militarist past.

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The Clintons and the Emirates Secretary Clinton’s top aide was paid to negotiate a private deal.

Posted By on October 17th, 2015

This week the Washington Post reported that Cheryl Mills, who served as Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, was simultaneously being paid by a private organization to negotiate with a foreign government. And that foreign government has been particularly generous to the Clintons.

In 2009, while Ms. Mills held the second most powerful job at State, she also represented New York University as it negotiated with officials from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The school was preparing to open a campus there funded by the Abu Dhabi government. The campus opened in 2010 and welcomed Bill Clinton as a speaker at its inaugural commencement ceremony in 2014.

According to the Post, Ms. Mills was not paid by the U.S. government during the early months of the new Obama Administration, but was instead “officially designated as a temporary expert-consultant—a status that allowed her to continue to collect outside income while serving as chief of staff.” Outside of the Clintons and their staff, who else thinks it’s a good idea for senior State Department officials to be paid by private institutions to cut side deals with Middle Eastern dictatorships—or any foreign governments?