RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”