The Algemeiner recently reported that “After weeks of escalating criticism of Israel by the Obama Administration, Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and the leading 2016 Democratic presidential contender, on Sunday called for the renewal of the ‘special’ relationship between the US and the Jewish state. In a telephone conversation with Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Clinton said that she ‘thinks we need to all work together to return the special US-Israel relationship to constructive footing, to get back to basic shared concerns and interests.’”
The Pineapple Revolt is from Jack Engelhard’s memoir Escape from Mount Moriah.
“There was only fear on this ship, and pineapples, several hundred passengers, a million pineapples.
We were on the Serpa Pinto, on the high seas destined from Hitler to FDR, or whoever would take us in. FDR refused.
So we were headed for Philadelphia, and after that, who knew?
But along with the rest of the huddled men, women and children on board, we were the few who had managed to escape.
Mischief at the U.N.
Obama toys with cutting Israel adrift in the Security Council.
Immediately after Israel’s March 17 election, Obama administration officials threatened to allow (or even encourage) the U.N. Security Council to recognize a Palestinian state and confine Israel to its pre-1967 borders. Within days, the president himself joined in, publicly criticizing not just Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom Obama has had notoriously bad relations, but sectors of Israeli opinion and even Israel itself.
The administration leaks suggesting that Israel be cut adrift in the Security Council in effect threatened “collective punishment” as a weapon in U.S.-Israel relations. This is especially ironic coming from “progressives” who have repeatedly accused Israel of “collective punishment” by forcefully retaliating against terrorist attacks. But more important, exposing Israel to the tender mercies of its Security Council opponents harms not only Israel’s interests, but America’s in equal measure. Roughly half of Washington’s Security Council vetoes have been cast against draft resolutions contrary to our Middle East interest
“But it’s Israel, a land populated by the eternally persecuted, that according to the U.N. eclipses all others in a world of egregious atrocity. Israel has turned the other cheek to violence, oppression, and subjugation throughout history. To rank Israel atop countries with well-known and well-documented histories of civil rights and human rights violations is an inexcusable insult and quite indicative of the sorry state of affairs within the U.N. and within our own diplomatic circles.”
The U.N. wants the world to believe that Israel is leading the globe in human rights violations, partly as a result of the shameless propaganda war perpetrated by Hamas during and since the war in the Gaza Strip last summer. The war was precipitated by numerous Hamas and Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, the last straw being the bloody massacre of an entire Israeli family, including their newborn baby.
Only the uninformed could pass judgement on Israel for the unavoidable collateral damage on civilians which any warring state has been guilty of ranging from minimal to egregious. The United States is no stranger to civilian collateral damage. We routinely kill civilians as a result of our drone executions which take place near daily all over the Middle East. How does the U.S. handle the repercussions of killing civilians in order to execute high-value targets? We pay them cash money. In the Mideast, it’s referred to as “blood money”, and in Islam, paying that debt brings balance to the scales of justice.
Barack Obama wants to fundamentally transform something besides America.
As most informed Americans know by now, Barack Obama is a man with grandiose visions of himself.
According to Barack Obama, President Obama’s accomplishments have vaulted him into the pantheon of the greats: Lincoln, Roosevelt and Johnson. His nomination victory speech marked the moment “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal” according to, once again, Barack Obama. He was a better political director than his political director and a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, reported…Barack Obama. The sense of grandiosity is dangerous in any president as is the view that a president can do whatever he wants — the conception of the presidency as held by …you guessed it…Barack Obama. When Barack Obama declared he yearned to go full Bulworth in his second term when he would no longer be on the ballot, pundits pondered how he would wield his power.
One primary goal has become increasingly apparent. He wants to fundamentally transform America’s feelings towards and support of Israel, one of our most reliable and key allies. He has been doing so in ways that should offend every America, because the methods he has used are contrary to our best and most honored traditions.
Not terrorism? Will this one be billed as a crossdresser protest gone sour????rsk
One person was killed and another injured this morning when a car tried to go through the security checkpoint at the National Security Agency gate.
According to a statement from NSA Director for Strategic Communication Jonathan Freed, a vehicle with “two individuals attempted an unauthorized entry” just before 9 a.m.
“The vehicle failed to stop and barriers were deployed,” Freed said. “The vehicle accelerated toward an NSA Police vehicle blocking the road. NSA Police fired at the vehicle when it refused to stop. The unauthorized vehicle crashed into the NSA Police vehicle.”
Bait-and-Switch: Will Obama Still Back Suicidal Iran Deal?
Ayatollah Khamenei is doing everything in his power, through extreme demands, to quash the Iran nuclear deal, which has a deadline of tomorrow night. The question: Will Obama cave anyway? Perhaps Khamenei should ask for everything the U.S. gives Israel, including its own Iron Dome system. Obama would likely do it.
In the latest mullah bait-and-switch, the Iranians are now, at the last minute, refusing to give up their enriched uranium stockpile. Don’t believe it? Well, it’s being reported by Obama’s best loyalists, the New York Times [1]:
LAUSANNE, Switzerland — With a negotiating deadline just two days away, Iranian officials on Sunday backed away from a critical element of a proposed nuclear agreement, saying they are no longer willing to ship their atomic fuel out of the country.
The Buchananites have vanished from the GOP, while the left turns against the Jewish state.
Will history mark the Obama years as the moment American Jewry split with the Democratic Party?
The question has a special resonance in a month in which Barack Obama warns the Israelis they may no longer presume U.S. backing at the United Nations—and dispatches his chief of staff to deliver a speech denouncing the “50-year occupation” of Palestinian lands.
The Obama administration refuses to negotiate openly, lest the extent of its diplomatic surrender to Iran be prematurely and fatally exposed.For a sense of the magnitude of the capitulation represented by Barack Obama’s Iran diplomacy, it’s worth recalling what the president said when he was trying to sell his interim nuclear agreement to a Washington, D.C., audience in December 2013.
“We know they don’t need to have an underground, fortified facility like Fordo in order to have a peaceful program,” Mr. Obama said of the Iranians in an interview with Haim Saban, the Israeli-American billionaire philanthropist. “They certainly don’t need a heavy-water reactor at Arak in order to have a peaceful nuclear program. They don’t need some of the advanced centrifuges that they currently possess in order to have a limited, peaceful nuclear program.”
Hardly more than a year later, on the eve of what might be deal-day, here is where those promises stand:
Fordo: “The United States is considering letting Tehran run hundreds of centrifuges at a once-secret, fortified underground bunker in exchange for limits on centrifuge work and research and development at other sites.”—Associated Press, March 26.
Arak: “Today, the six powers negotiating with Iran . . . want the reactor at Arak, still under construction, reconfigured to produce less plutonium, the other bomb fuel.”—The New York Times, March 7.
Maybe Ellen Pao lost her suit because it defied logic. Firms need talent to prosper, no matter the gender.
ASan Francisco jury late last week rejected a $16 million gender-discrimination lawsuit against a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm. This triumph of common sense, though, represents merely a minor setback in the feminist crusade against America’s most vibrant economic sector. The chance that Silicon Valley can preserve its ruthlessly meritocratic culture under a continuing feminist onslaught is slim.
In 2005 plaintiff Ellen Pao got an MBA’s dream job: technical chief of staff to John Doerr, a renowned senior partner with the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Kleiner Perkins was a pioneer in high-tech entrepreneurship, making lucrative early investments in Google and Amazon, among other giants of the Internet age. Mr. Doerr mentored Ms. Pao, treating her, as Ms. Pao put it in an email to him, as a “surrogate daughter.”
