RUTHFULLY YOURS

At the signing ceremony for the Obamacare legislation, Vice President Biden memorably told the president, “This is a big f****** deal.” The foreign policy equivalent of Obamacare is about to be signed by Secretary of State Kerry. It’s an agreement that will ensure Iran develops nuclear weapons in secret and in safety.

The context of the deal is so clear that even the Washington Post got it right. In a Saturday editorial, the Post wrote that the agreement will reward Iran for more than a decade of ignoring UN Security Council resolutions that had the single purpose of preventing it from developing nuclear weapons. Iran has been lying and cheating so long, only those dedicated to ignoring the facts could believe they would live up to any deal that would prevent them from developing and deploying nuclear weapons.

There’s a lot more to the context than the Post wrote. Saudi Arabia didn’t notify us before it formed its own coalition of nations to attack Iran’s proxy forces in Yemen. The reason, according to NBC’s Richard Engel, is that they feared we would leak their plans to Iran. That is a precise measure of how much they dislike and distrust Obama.

“In this world, nothing is certain, except death and taxes:” A line usually attributed to Benjamin Franklin and with which it is difficult to argue; though I can state categorically that I am certainly the son of my mother. On the other hand, certainty in opinions is usually associated with a mule-like stubbornness, or unquestioning obeisance – neither a characteristic we would like to think of as being ours – but ones common among the political and pontificating classes, the latter of which I admit to being a member. Curiosity, openness and skepticism are as proper antonyms for certainty as uncertainty.

“We live in uncertain times…” is a quote from W. Somerset Maugham’s 1938 autobiography, The Summing Up, and has become boringly ubiquitous. Mr. Maugham likely got the idea from the old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times,” with “interesting times” being a euphemism for war. We certainly live in an interesting time. The world is dangerous, manifestly more so than it was six years ago when our newly elected President was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, not for what he had done, but for what the committee was certain he would do. That Mr. Obama has made the world more dangerous adds to uncertainty, raises cynicism and is, in part, responsible for the diminishing trust in our leaders and institutions.

Seventy years ago this month, Anne Frank died in the concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen, leaving behind, stashed in the rooms where she and her family hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam, one of the most valuable historic documents of our time: her diary.

But try telling this story in a Dutch classroom today. “Holocaust Classes? Bulls**t! Say the Students” declared a headline of Dutch newspaper AD. Indeed, large numbers of Dutch students, all of them Muslim, refuse to listen to lessons about the Shoah [the Holocaust], denouncing them as exaggerations and lies, and threatening their teachers. It is a capital example of the kind of exploitation one finds increasingly among radicalized and even non-radicalized Muslim youth in Europe: for even as many question the existence of the concentration camps, the efforts at genocide, they demonstrate in pro-ISIS and anti-Israel rallies chanting “All Jews to the gas” and “Hitler was right.”

A new video has gone up. “British Mandate Part 5: Step Ashore” is now available. You can see it directly via the following link:

http://zionism101.org/NewestVideoVimeo.aspx

Or log in at www.zionism101.org

“British Mandate Part 5: Step Ashore” describes how the Haganah focuses on illegal immigration in its fight against the British. England devotes vast resources to stopping Jewish immigration to Palestine, and is largely successful, but suffers a disaster in terms of world public opinion.

HERBERT LONDON IS PRESIDENT OF THE LONDON CENTER FOR POLICY RESEARCH

The champagne bottles in the White House remain unopened. Despite the vigorous efforts of the Obama team to unseat Netanyahu in the recent Israeli elections, he prevailed. President Obama made clear his vitriolic sentiments towards Bibi Netanyahu are undiminished.

In a stunning rebuke of a foreign head of state, Obama dispatched his chief spokesman to criticize Netanyahu’s campaign strategy, while anonymous administration officials hinted the U.S. could withdraw support for Israel at the United Nations. In an act of gratuitous pettiness, the president delayed the ritual call of congratulations.

President Obama contends that the rhetoric during the course of the campaign was deeply divisive, marginalizing Arab-Israeli citizens. The president neglected to mention the fact that his aides tried to encourage Arab voters even through the Arab party endorses Hamas, an avowed enemy of Israel. And this is the action and sentiment of a presumptive ally. “With friends like that… .”

The deadline for the Iranian nuclear negotiations is almost at hand, and the proposed deal appears to be even worse than expected. Number of centrifuges, decommissioning of Fordow, previous work on military applications — the Obama administration’s negotiators have backed down on issue after issue. The one thing that seems to be certain is that sanctions will be removed, sooner rather than later.

President Obama has said that he would rather see no deal than a bad deal, but the behavior of his negotiators is making a liar out of him. In fact, an Iranian press aide who defected to the West while covering the talks in Switzerland said that “the US negotiating team are mainly there to speak on Iran’s behalf with other members of the 5+1 countries and convince them of a deal.”

A good deal makes the Middle East a safer place. A bad one makes matters worse. Here are some issues to keep in mind if nuclear talks lead to a provisional agreement.

I’m in Berlin, not Lausanne, and I haven’t spoken to anyone associated with the Iran nuclear negotiations in more than a week. Though there is a lot of good journalism being produced out of the talks, it is still difficult to discern what is actually happening at this moment. Those predisposed to believe that these negotiations will bring about a non-violent solution to the Iranian challenge, and also quite possibly encourage the Iranians to be more moderate in their approach to their neighbors, seem somewhat optimistic that the West will make the necessary compromises to win Iranian approval. Those who believe that the West is about to capitulate to Ayatollah Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, and set him on a path to the nuclear threshold seem to be praying that Iranian shortsightedness, or dumb luck on the part of the West, subvert these talks.

On Tuesday I spent some time with the reelected prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. I think he was happy to take a short break from his Herculean labors of putting together a government and dealing with controversies galore. So we engaged in some small talk and exchanged compliments and stories about our parents. I particularly enjoyed his fascinating account of his father’s work with the great Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the last year of Jabotinsky’s life, and his father’s subsequent efforts to rally support in the United States during World War II for European Jewry and for the creation of the state of Israel. His failure on the first front and his success in the second is a useful reminder of the extent to which, in politics, tragedy and triumph are not alternatives but cousins.

Speaking of triumphs, I did of course congratulate the prime minister on his reelection victory. But he had no interest in dwelling on that, and, indeed, his manner was in no way triumphalist or even exuberant. The prime minister was sober, and he was alarmed.

While Hillary Clinton won’t say anything of substance herself, the New York Times reports her views on Israel via a third party, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations:

“Secretary Clinton thinks we need to all work together to return the special U.S.-Israel relationship to constructive footing, to get back to basic shared concerns and interests, including a two-state solution pursued through direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians,” Mr. Hoenlein said in a statement issued by his organization on Sunday evening. “We must ensure that Israel never becomes a partisan issue,” he quoted her as saying. Mrs. Clinton knows Mr. Hoenlein from her time in the Senate.

My dear friend and e-pal Alyssa A. Lappen is pleased to announce the April 21 launch of her first full-length poetry book, The Minstrel’s Song (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2015), at 6:15 p.m. at the Brooklyn Heights Library. The event is sponsored in honor of National Poetry Month by the Friends of the Brooklyn Heights Library. Cross-Cultural Communications Editor and Publisher Stanley H. Barkan will also be present.Ms. Lappen’s poetry has been widely published; she won the 2000 annual chapbook award from Ruah: A Journal of Spiritual Poetry, and received a Harvard Summer Poetry Prize. She is also an investigative journalist focusing on the Middle East and Islam.

The Minstrel’s Song, a 96-page volume, features seven sections of verse, as well as seven original art works by Israeli artist Helen Bar-Lev.

THE PLAN

Into the arid space between earth and sky,
the cracks in the human soul seep. They fill

with hail of stones from the Temple Mount,
the Waqf’s iron door slammed, barring Jews

who wish to pray in a small circle of ten,
their blue-fringed shawls worth lives

of 69 martyrs—if only the shawls stay
folded, unused, and grow drenched

with suicides’ blood. Stones play well
in the press. So come, puppet children

and hurl them. My poor little slaves
of hate, make of my Iago a saint.

October 6, 2000

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Note: The Waqf is a body of Muslim clerics, to which Israel gave control of the Temple Mount in 1967 out of respect for Muslim belief—although it is Judaism’s holiest site, where the second temple stood until its destruction in 70 C.E. The Waqf has long denied access to any minyan—the minimum of ten men required by Jewish law to offer prayers.