RUTHFULLY YOURS

This week, Russian aircraft have probed NATO defenses to a degree unseen since the Cold War. Fighter aircraft from eight NATO members were reportedly scrambled to intercept more than two dozen aircraft just on Tuesday and Wednesday.
As the Wall Street Journal report details, the intercepts of Russian aircraft have occurred more than one hundred times this year, which is about three times the number of intercepts conducted last year.
Though those intercepts didn’t intrude on NATO airspace, they are consistent with the high number of Russian challenges to American air defenses and with the apparent intrusion of a Russian submarine in Sweden’s territorial waters I wrote about last week. It’s not obvious what Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing, but these actions – coupled with his own explanation in a major speech – do lead us to a few conclusions.

Henry Kissinger’s new book, World Order, recounts the many historical world orders both before and since the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648 which, by recognizing the sovereignty of nation-states re-ordered a world order that had previously been ordered by religions. Putin’s speech, delivered on 24 October, was alternately threatening, conciliatory and a statement of what Putin apparently wishes a new ordering of the world to look like.
Putin – who has said that the fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the Twentieth Century – emphasized his view that America’s actions since the Cold War denigrated national sovereignty in an effort to impose universally American ideals. He accuses the United States of destabilizing nations and supporting the rise of “neo-fascists and Islamic radicals.”

Putin’s alternative is to create a world order in terms of institutions such as the UN and regional alliances: “I am certain that if there is a will, we can restore the effectiveness of the international and regional institutions system. We do not even need to build anything anew, from the scratch; this is not a ‘greenfield,’ especially since the institutions created after World War II are quite universal and can be given modern substance, adequate to manage the current situation.”
In short, Putin’s view injects Russia as a regional power with influence everywhere. He would invest the United Nations with the power it had to deter American action and increase Russia’s influence – first regionally, and then globally – to essentially the same power it had during the Cold War.

Last week, the Obama White House finally clarified its Middle East policy. It’s détente with Iran and a cold war with Israel.Our new partners? OUR NEW PARTNERS?

To the administration, Israel isn’t worth the trouble its prime minister causes. As one anonymous Obama official put it to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, what good is Benjamin Netanyahu if he won’t make peace with the Palestinians? Bibi doesn’t have the nerve of Begin, Rabin, or Sharon, said the unnamed source. The current leader of this longstanding U.S. ally, he added, is “a chickens—t.”

It’s hardly surprising that the Obama White House is crudely badmouthing Netanyahu; it has tried to undercut him from the beginning. But this isn’t just about the administration’s petulance and pettiness. There seems to be a strategic purpose to heckling Israel’s prime minister. With a possible deal over Iran’s nuclear weapons program in sight, the White House wants to weaken Netanyahu’s ability to challenge an Iran agreement.

Another unnamed Obama official told Goldberg that Netanyahu is all bluster when it comes to the Islamic Republic. The Israeli leader calls the clerical regime’s nuclear weapons program an existential threat, but he’s done nothing about it. And now, said the official, “It’s too late for him to do anything. Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.”

In other words, the White House is openly boasting that it bought the Iranians enough time to get across the finish line. Obama has insisted for five years that his policy is to prevent a nuclear Iran from emerging. In reality, his policy all along was to deter Israel from striking Iranian nuclear facilities. The way Obama sees it, an Iranian bomb may not be desirable, but it’s clearly preferable to an Israeli attack. Not only would an Israeli strike unleash a wave of Iranian terror throughout the region—and perhaps across Europe and the United States as well—it would also alienate what the White House sees as a potential partner.

Jewish peers in Britain’s upper legislative chamber, the House of Lords, last night engaged in robust defense of Israel during a four-and-a-half hour debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi, told the chamber, “at the outset I declare an interest. I am a Jew. Israel is therefore for me the place where my people were born almost four thousand years ago, the place to which Abraham and Sarah travelled, where Amos voiced his vision of social justice and Isaiah dreamed of a world at peace, where David composed the Psalms and Solomon built the Temple – and this had consequences not only for Jews but also for Christians and Muslims, who claim Abraham as their ancestor in faith, and whose God they take as their own.”

Later on in his speech, Sacks declared: “The Islamists also know that the only way they can win the sympathy of the West is by demonizing Israel. They know you can’t win support for ISIS, Boko Haram or Islamic Jihad, but if you can blame Israel you will gain the support of academics, unions and the media and you will distract attention from the massacres in Syria and Iraq, the slow descent of other countries into chaos, and the ethnic cleansing of Christians throughout the region.”

Another Jewish peer, Lord Mitchell, frankly told the Lords: “Around the world, atrocities are being committed and we all wring our hands and do precious little, but when Israel alone defends herself, everybody goes ballistic. At best it can be called hypocrisy, and at worst it is called something else.”

Mitchell added that he agreed with iconic British Jewish actress Maureen Lipman “when she says Labour and [party leader] Ed Miliband have got it wrong.” As The Algemeiner reported yesterday, in an article for the current issue of Standpoint magazine, Lipman, who had a starring role in Roman Polanski’s 2002 film about the Holocaust, The Pianist, excoriated Miliband for his support for British recognition of a Palestinian state independently of any negotiations with Israel.

Column: Deputy National Security Adviser: Iran Deal ‘Is Healthcare For Us’

Deputy National Security Adviser and MFA in creative writing Ben Rhodes likened an Iranian nuclear deal to Obamacare in a talk to progressive activists last January, according to audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The remarks, made at a since-discontinued regular meeting of White House personnel and representatives of liberal interest groups, reveal the importance of a rapprochement with Iran to President Obama, who is looking to establish his legacy as his presidency enters its lame-duck phase.

“Bottom line is, this is the best opportunity we’ve had to resolve the Iranian issue diplomatically, certainly since President Obama came to office, and probably since the beginning of the Iraq war,” Rhodes said. “So no small opportunity, it’s a big deal. This is probably the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy. This is healthcare for us, just to put it in context.”

Rhodes made the comparison as the White House was reeling from the botched rollout of the $2 billion Healthcare.gov. Polls continue to show that the health law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, remains unpopular.

Rhodes also said the White House wants to avoid congressional scrutiny of any deal.

“We’re already kind of thinking through, how do we structure a deal so we don’t necessarily require legislative action right away,” Rhodes said. “And there are ways to do that.”

That is similar to what an unnamed senior administration official told David Sanger of the New York Times last week for a piece headlined “Obama Sees an Iran Deal That Could Avoid Congress”: “We wouldn’t seek congressional legislation in any comprehensive agreement for years.”

Secretary of State John Kerry denounced the word “chickenshit” to describe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as a senior administration official told The Atlantic, but in the same breath described the country as one that “wants to be a Jewish state.”

As soon as the article was brought up to Kerry today at the Washington Ideas Forum, he said “the long game, as everybody knows from the investment I made much of last year, is to find a way to bring the parties to make peace in the Middle East.”

“We still believe it is doable, but it takes courage, it takes strength. You have to be prepared — both sides have to be prepared to compromise in order to do it,” he said. “Here’s what I know, and I think all of you know this, viscerally and intellectually. And I’ve asked this question of people in the Middle East.”

“One of the great challenges for Israel is obviously not to be a bi-national state. It wants to be a Jewish state. To be a Jewish state, you clearly have to resolve the issue of two states.”

Kerry argued that “if you don’t and you are a unitary state and people have equal rights to vote and participate as citizens, is Israel going to have a Palestinian prime minister?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think so. Not going to happen.”

Netanyahu regularly refers to Israel as the Jewish state.

“So therefore, what is the solution here? How do you move forward?” Kerry said. “And what we’re trying to do is evenhandedly and hopefully thoughtfully strengthen Israel’s ability to free of rockets — not strengthen, to make it free of rockets, to — to end this perpetual conflict in a way that provides for the complete security of Israel, which has a right totally to be free of tunnels coming into its country, terrorists jumping out of a tunnel with handcuffs, with tranquilizer drugs, guns next to a kibbutz. No country would tolerate that.”

I have never in my increasingly long life felt vulnerable as a Jew in America. I never even dreamed it would happen. But it has now — with the Obama administration.

Something is seriously wrong. At almost every opportunity, Obama and his minions have criticized Israel out of all proportion to the actions of the Jewish state, particularly during the recent Gaza War when there was a constant barrage of warnings from our State Department about harming civilians. (This is a criticism State would never turn on itself. Who knows how many innocents have died in the U.S. air attacks on ISIS — no one even says a word about it.)

Now they have called Israel’s prime minister a “chickensh*t,” a “coward” and who knows what else, using adjectives for Benjamin Netanyahu they don’t employ with Kim Jung-un, Vladimir Putin, Hassan Nasrallah, Bashar Assad or even the murderous Islamic State’s al-Baghdadi, not to mention — and this is probably crucial — the potentially most homicidal of all, Ayatollah Khamenei of the Islamic State of Iran. (One of the more sinister aspects of Jeff Goldberg’s article that generated this controversy was that one of his leakers bragged they had scared cowardly Netanyahu into not attacking Iran’s nuclear installations, as if this were a good thing, the implication being that the administration can now look good for making an Iran deal — that would ultimately give the mullahs the bomb.) It’s as if Netanyahu, not the aforementioned maniacs, were the administration’s worst enemy.

Meanwhile, the attempts to make nice to the Israelis over the vicious personal slurs from the article, which apparently came from two high and thus far unpunished administration officials, have been perfunctory, so perfunctory that you know they are not meant to be taken seriously, quite the contrary. In fact, an attempted terrorist assassination of a prominent American-Israeli in Jerusalem yesterday that caused the Israeli government to put the Temple Mount on lockdown has already generated more chastisement of the Israelis from our secretary of State. All this against an unprecedented, at least since World War II, rise in global anti-Semitism.

The administration claims to be making these “constructive” criticisms for Israel’s sake, but the Jewish state has better allies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia than they do in an Obama administration that seems to prefer Islamofascist Qatar — those same oil sheiks that bankroll Hamas, the terror organization whose charter exhorts all Muslims to kill every Jew hiding behind a tree anywhere in the world.

And you wonder why I feel like I’m living in Berlin in 1937.

Key figures at six of America’s most prominent Islamist organizations have favored Democrats over Republicans by a ratio of 12 to 1 since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

An analysis of federal campaign contributions finds that key figures at six of America’s most prominent Islamist organizations have favored Democrats over Republicans by a ratio of 12 to 1 since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This trend began with multiple donations to Cynthia McKinney dated September 11, 2001, reversing a previous pattern that had seen Islamist officials spend slightly more on Republicans. Their preference for Democrats has solidified during the past 13 years and shows no signs of waning. What does this say about the politicians who benefit from Islamist largesse?

Islamist Watch [1], a project of the Middle East Forum [2], recently launched Islamist Money in Politics [3] (IMIP [3]), to monitor Islamists’ influence in the halls of power, inform the public about which politicians accept their tainted money, and hold accountable those who do. IMIP’s inaugural data release [4] focuses on the national organizations of six Islamist entities [5] — the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR [6]), Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA [7]), Islamic Society of North America (ISNA [8]), Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA [9]), Muslim American Society (MAS [10]), and Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC [11]) — as well as CAIR’s many local chapters.

Names of important personnel [12], both current and former, were mined from the groups’ Internal Revenue Service filings and/or website listings, some going back more than a decade. The Federal Election Commission’s online database [13], which spans the late 1990s to the present, was then searched for donations to candidates, joint fundraising committees, relevant political action committees, and parties. IMIP employed biographical information to select only those contributions that could reasonably be attributed to the individuals of interest, rejecting ones likely to have been made by unrelated persons who share their names. See IMIP’s description of methodology [14] for details and a discussion of the challenges.

As of now, the IMIP database [3] tabulates nearly $700,000 in donations. Surely many more people and contributions remain to be added, but the data already constitute a large and representative sample that is sufficient for an initial pass at quantifying Islamists’ political affinities.

The Obama Administration is disappointed, insulted, unhappy and even downright angry with the government of Israel. This isn’t news, and hasn’t been almost from the time President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both came to office in 2009. But the feud is increasingly bitter and out in the open, thanks to a series of Administration leaks and snubs.

The latest eruption began last week, after a visit to Washington by Moshe Yaalon. The Israeli Defense Minister met with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and agreed that Israel would buy a second squadron of F-35 jets in a $2.75 billion deal. That’s good news for defense contractor Lockheed Martin , which has struggled to persuade foreign customers like Canada to stick with the troubled fighter.

The visit was also supposed to be an opportunity for Mr. Yaalon to make personal amends to John Kerry for remarks earlier this year when he called the Secretary of State “obsessive and messianic” and lamented that U.S. policy toward Iran was “showing weakness.” The remarks were made in private, and Mr. Yaalon publicly apologized.

Instead, Mr. Yaalon was denied a private meeting with Mr. Kerry, as he was with Vice President Joe Biden . (He did meet with U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, who apparently didn’t get the memo that the Israeli was under quarantine.) For bad measure, Administration officials leaked the story of the snubs to an Israeli newspaper as Mr. Yaalon was returning to Israel—guaranteeing his public embarrassment.

Then on Tuesday Jeffrey Goldberg—the Administration’s media spokesman on Israel—reported a conversation with a senior Administration source who described Mr. Netanyahu, a former elite commando who was wounded in a 1972 hostage rescue operation, as a “chicken—.”

Another official quoted by Mr. Goldberg called Mr. Netanyahu a “coward” on the Iranian nuclear issue, presumably because Israel has done what the Administration asked and not bombed Iran’s nuclear installations, especially before the 2012 election. On Wednesday Press Secretary Josh Earnest tried to disavow the comments, but the damage was done.

This public show of condescension makes no sense for an Administration facing multiple Mideast crises and struggling to keep the friends it has. It makes even less sense if Mr. Obama strikes a nuclear deal with Iran next month. The White House has leaked that it intends to bypass Congress to conclude a deal, but it cannot unilaterally overturn sanctions passed by Congress. Broadcasting its dislike for the Jewish state won’t instill confidence in Congress and the public that such a deal won’t mortally threaten Israel.

So we hear that Hillary Clinton ’s Wall Street admirers are concerned about her comments last week, at a rally with Senator Elizabeth Warren, that businesses don’t create jobs. They better get used to it, because this is only the beginning of Mrs. Clinton’s dance with Liz as the former first lady adapts to the leftward shift of her party while making another run at the White House.

“Don’t let anybody tell you that corporations and businesses create jobs,” Mrs. Clinton said in Boston. She added that “I love watching Elizabeth, you know, give it to those who deserve to get it.” She didn’t say who deserved it, but Sen. Warren has a long target list.

Mrs. Clinton tried to backtrack on Monday. “Trickle down economics has failed. I short-handed this point the other day, so let me be absolutely clear about what I’ve been saying for a couple of decades,” she said. “Our economy grows when businesses and entrepreneurs create good-paying jobs here in America and workers and families are empowered to build from the bottom up and the middle out—not when we hand out tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs or stash their profits overseas.”

Bill Clinton must have helped on that one, and it’s nice to know she thinks some businesses create jobs. But the real importance of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign remarks is what they say about the direction of the Democratic Party since she and Bill lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Democratic economic policy has moved sharply to the anti-business left. President Obama ’s soak-the-rich rhetoric has led the shift, but even he hasn’t gone far enough for the Warren wing. This accounts for the Massachusetts Senator’s star status on the stump this year, as she bashes bankers and proposes even higher taxes on business.

One tongue-in-cheek question that began circulating after Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic quoted an anonymous American official bad-mouthing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week is: “How do you say ‘chickenshit’ in Hebrew?”

The Israeli media did not bother too much with the translation, mostly using the English phrase and providing a few parenthetical synonyms for “cowardice.” They did, however, devote endless discussion to the significance of such an expression of disdain toward Netanyahu coming from the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu responded by setting the record straight about his illustrious military history, and pro-Israel commentators at home and abroad juxtaposed this with President Barack Obama’s past as a dope-smoking radical.

What neither Netanyahu nor his defenders emphasized, though, was the paradoxical nature of the slur. On the one hand, the Israeli leader is ostensibly a wimp because he will not take risks for peace. On the other, he is hesitant to go to war, and missed the opportunity to bomb Iran.

Oh, and he cares about keeping his job — unlike, say, every politician who ever lived.

In other words, nothing Netanyahu does or does not do is acceptable to the Capitol Hill crew.

Ironically, this latest display of hostility from Washington gave a boost to Netanyahu’s popularity. Even his opponents had to admit that calling the prime minister “chickenshit” was distasteful.

Where the political divide lies is over the issue of whom to blame for the ever-souring relations between the U.S. and Israel. The left side of the spectrum is faulting Netanyahu for “provocations,” such as housing construction. The Right is reiterating its mantra that Netanyahu should ignore the admonitions of an anti-Israel White House and State Department, and safeguard the interests of his own people.