RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama chose the Friday afternoon of Christmas weekend, less than a month before he leaves office, to try to do lasting damage to the State of Israel. He refused to veto a UN Security Council resolution that will serve to intensify Israel’s conflict with Palestinian jihadists.

In other words, as with so much of the Obama foreign policy legacy, we are left reaping the whirlwind sown by a President whose odious doctrine has been characterized by nine words: Undermine our allies. Embolden our enemies. Diminish our country.

The fact that Mr. Obama took this step over the express objections not only of our Israeli allies, but also of his successor, ensures that this action will be repudiated as soon as President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in. It should also decimate U.S. funding for the United Nations.

Good riddance, Barack Obama.

Many Americans and Israelis are outraged at President Obama for betraying the state of Israel yesterday by refusing to veto a Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank and calling Israel’s settlements and continuing construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem a “flagrant violation of international law.”

By allowing this resolution to pass, Obama broke with a long tradition of the United States standing with Israel on council resolutions concerning the Israel–Palestinian conflict and ignored a plea by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to veto the resolution.

What is the significance of this resolution for Middle East security and U.S.–Israel relations? Absolutely nothing. The world knows this resolution was approved because a U.S. president with just a few weeks left in office chose to abandon Israel. They know this president’s positions — especially his hostility to Israel — are not shared by a majority of Americans and will be quickly reversed by President Trump.

Israelis and the American people know what a cowardly act this Security Council vote was by President Obama since it was deliberately delayed until after the presidential election to ensure Hillary Clinton and congressional Democrats would not pay a political price. The vote also took place on Friday afternoon two days before Christmas to limit negative press coverage.

President-elect Trump called on the Obama administration to veto the resolution and indicated he will ignore it when he tweeted: “Things Will Be Different After Jan. 20.” Democratic and Republican congressmen are already siding with Trump on the vote. In an unprecedented statement, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office directly condemned the Obama administration in response to the passage of the anti-Israel resolution and expressed its eagerness to work with President Trump: The Obama administration not only failed to protect Israel against this gang-up at the UN, it colluded with it behind the scenes. Israel looks forward to working with President-elect Trump and with all our friends in Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, to negate the harmful effects of this absurd resolution.

Last week the Obama administration defied both history and international law to grant Palestinian terrorists a grand victory. At a stroke, the administration purported to declare any Israeli claim to any portion of the West Bank — including the Western Wall — illegitimate, and empowered Palestinian terrorists to press for their next round of concessions. It’s a betrayal that will echo far beyond any arms deals with Israel and could conceivably endanger the Jewish state’s very existence.

To put this staggering betrayal into context, one has to understand the long, bloody history of Arab efforts to destroy Israel, efforts that have been aided at every turn by the eternal anti-Semitism of huge swaths of our much-vaunted “international community.”

For the first 25 years of its existence, Israel endured multiple brute-force attempts at its destruction, as Arab powers mobilized large land armies for direct invasions of Israeli territory. That effort failed on a grand scale: Against all odds, Israeli forces prevailed time and again, leaving Israel in control of far more land than it initially possessed on its birth as a state. Undeterred by its conventional military losses, the Arab world turned to different methods, using a combination of lawfare and terrorism to slowly erode Israel’s ability to sustain its nation and culture. It is through the former tactic — the abuse of international law toward ends not achievable on the battlefield — that the international community seeks to deligitimize Israel’s territory and demography.

In other words, anti-Semites define “true” Israel (the only one they’ll recognize) as a much smaller nation that is swollen with literally millions of Palestinian “refugees” who pose an existential threat to the world’s only Jewish state. An Israel jammed into indefensible borders with a majority-Arab population wouldn’t be Israel at all. It would be Palestine, and its Jewish residents would be entirely dependent on the good graces of their enemies to live peacefully in their own ancestral homeland.

No rational nation would agree to its own extinction, though, so a hammer is necessary — one strong enough to drive a nation to make compromises it would never otherwise make. That hammer is terrorism. Whether it’s rockets from Gaza, incursions from Lebanon, or crazed knife attacks in Jerusalem, terrorism is the force that’s supposed to make Israelis ultimately beg for mercy. Of course it’s all “condemned” by the international community. They tut-tut when Jewish children die, but all that violence has to be “understood.” Oppressed people lash out against their oppressors, you see.

One can’t understand the international community’s anti-Semitism without understanding the three great double standards that together gin up fake outrage against Israel and dupe the gullible into believing the Big Lie that Israel is the oppressor and Palestinians its chief victims.

The first double standard deals with the status of land acquired as a result of waging defensive warfare. Traditionally, when aggressors launch losing wars, they are not permitted to reclaim all the territory they lost without cost or consequence. This truth is uncontroversial and apparent from the distant and recent past. Germany does not control the same land that it did in August 1939, nor does Japan. Yet time and again, the “international community” has taken the view that nations such as Egypt and Syria could and should claim the lands they lost in their own aggressive wars with Israel, including the very lands used as launching pads for those wars. The international community maintains that view in spite of the fact that applying the same reasoning worldwide would cause instability and chaos. Israel, alone among all countries, is thus bound to bear the burden of unwinding its past wars.

Obama Administration’s Betrayal of Israel:

Adding a final shameful chapter to a foreign-policy record that already runneth over with them, Barack Obama on Friday abandoned America’s commitment to Israel’s security, and to the vindication of democracy over sharia-supremacist aggression. In an act of cowardly venom, the president had the United States abstain from — and thereby effectively enact — a United Nations Security Council resolution that condemns Israeli settlement activity. At least, that’s what the resolution ostensibly does. The reality is much more than that. The resolution undertakes to render our ally indefensible. It was a black day in modern American diplomatic history, a flurry of sinister wheeling and dealing while the nation — exhausted by the election, anticipating a weekend of Christmas and Hanukkah celebration — was looking the other way.

Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz calls it “Obama’s ill-advised, lame duck, and undemocratic effort to tie his successor’s hands.”

This is what President Obama has wrought in his ill-advised refusal to do what American presidents have done for decades: exercise their veto in preventing biased, destructive, and one-sided resolutions from being enacted against Israel by the automatic anti-Israel majority that exists in every institution of the UN.

The bad news is that no future president, including President-elect Trump, can undo this pernicious agreement, since a veto not cast can never be retroactively cast. And a resolution once enacted cannot be rescinded unless there is a majority vote against it, with no veto by any of its permanent members, which include Russia and China, who would be sure to veto any attempt to undo this resolution. Obama’s failure to veto this resolution was thus a deliberate ploy to tie the hands of his successors, the consequence of which will be to make it far more difficult for his successors to encourage the Palestinians to accept Israel’s offer to negotiate with no preconditions.

There are a few things President Trump can do to ameliorate the effects of this “bigoted resolution,” Dershowitz says, including “officially recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving its embassy there,” but the damage Obama has done is grievous and will be hard to undo.

There are 22 days left in Obama’s second term. Let’s cross our fingers that there will be no more nasty surprises.

Nations are collections of human beings, and human nature has not changed, despite Obama’s pleadings. For the last eight years, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Susan Rice have sought to rewrite the traditional approach to foreign policy. In various ways, they have warned us about the dangers that a reactionary Trump presidency would pose, on the assumption that their new world order now operates more along the lines of an Ivy League conference than according to the machinations and self-interests of the dog-eat-dog Manhattan real-estate cosmos.

It would be nice if the international order had safe spaces, prohibitions against micro-aggressions, and trigger warnings that warn of hurtful speech, but is the world really one big Harvard or Stanford that runs on loud assertions of sensitivity, guilt, apologies, or even the cynical progressive pieties found in WikiLeaks?

The tempo abroad in the last eight years would suggest that the answer is no: half a million dead in Syria, over a million young Muslim men flooding into Europe, an Iraq in ruins (though Biden once bragged it would be the Obama administration’s “greatest achievement”), the Benghazi catastrophe, North Africa a wasteland and terrorist incubator, Israel and the Gulf states estranged from America, Iran empowered and soon to be nuclear, Russia hell-bent on humiliating the U.S., China quietly forming its own updated Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, an impoverished Cuba and much of Latin America gnawing the limp wrist of U.S. outreach, and the European Union gradually imploding.

Obama’s lead-from-behind foreign policy has becoming something like the seduction of an old house. Its wiring, plumbing, and foundation are shot, but the majestic structure, when given a thin coat of new paint by the seller, proudly goes on the market as “restored” — at least until the new buyer discovers that the Potemkin façade is about to collapse from lax maintenance and deliberate indifference. In other words, Obama’s periodic declamations, Nobel Prize, and adulation from a toady press are all veneers of shiny paint; the Middle East, Russia, China, Iran, and ISIS terrorism are the insidious frayed wiring, corroded pipes, and termites that are about to take down the entire structure from the inside out. Note that the unrepentant seller is always loudly petulant that the new owner, as he makes endless vital repairs, did not appreciate the paint job he inherited.

Reprinted from Breitbart.com.

December 25 marked the 25thanniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. On this occasion, it is urgent for us to reflect on 3 key lessons that the fall of the Evil Empire provided. They are lessons that the new incoming Trump administration must put into action immediately vis-à-vis our enemy in the terror war.

Lesson #1: Go on the Offense Against Islamic Supremacism

While we know that the Soviet Union collapsed, on many realms, from within, the record is clear that President Reagan also fueled the collapse. By moving against détente and beyond containment, Reagan’s aggressive anti-communism saw the U.S. take on a strategic offensive against the Soviet Union which led to victory. As Paul Kengor has documented in his book, The Crusader, Reagan fought not to just contain, but to win. His administration’s massive defense build-up, support of anti-communist rebels around the world, support of dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain, promotion of SDI, and many other aggressive policies put a heavy pressure on the Soviet Union that ultimately broke its already fragile legs.

Thus, we see how in our present-day conflict with Islamic Supremacism, we need to go on the offensive. In order to do that, we must first take two crucial steps. The first step is to name the enemy; the second is to formulate an actual doctrine against him. As Sebastian Gorka urges in Defeating Jihad, the U.S. government needs to lay down a vision, an actual “threat doctrine analysis” in a thorough document, just like George Kennan’s Long Telegram and NSC-68 did in laying out the strategic foundation to fighting communism in the Cold War. The new incoming Trump administration, therefore, must articulate a threat doctrine analysis and then shape it into a Reagan-like doctrine of offense.

Lesson #2: Deceive the Totalitarian Enemy into Being Pluralistic

In Reagan’s War, Peter Schweizer revealed how the Reagan administration cleverly promoted the process of change within the Soviet Union towards a more pluralistic political and economic system. This was a brilliant approach, seeing that Gorbachev’s policies of Glasnost and Perestroika clearly triggered communism’s collapse.

Henry Kissinger has shrewdly delineated how Gorbachev’s effort to reform, as well as to salvage, Soviet communism was the very ingredient that fueled its disintegration. Indeed, once Moscow ended its total and intrusive control of its satellites, and once it allowed free discussion, it signed its own death warrant. Gorbachev wanted to de-Stalinize, yet he could not do so without destroying the regime itself. Kissinger writes:

Gorbachev’s gamble on liberalization was bound to fail. To the degree that the Communist Party had lost its monolithic character, it became demoralized. Liberalization proved incompatible with communist rule — the communists could not turn themselves into democrats without ceasing to be communists, an equation Gorbachev never understood.

To be sure, the whole idea of de-Stalinization was based on the assumption that the Soviet regime could survive without its despotic component; that it could endure a reconciliation with its past. But a legitimate examination of the causes of Stalinism could not occur without an uncensored evaluation of Leninism, which the Soviet system could not allow without risking the de-legitimization of its entire foundation.

This is a crucial lesson for our leadership in the terror war. But first, let us be clear: we must not buy into Natan Sharansky’s naive assumption that all people want freedom. They do not, especially Sharia-believers. The dark consequences of the so-called “Arab Spring” taught us this painful lesson well, as we witnessed the process of “democratization” in the Middle East lead to a totalitarian Islamist Winter.

Barack Obama’s decision to abstain from, and therefore allow, last week’s vote to censure Israel at the U.N. Security Council is a fitting capstone for what’s left of his foreign policy. Strategic half-measures, underhanded tactics and moralizing gestures have been the president’s style from the beginning. Israelis aren’t the only people to feel betrayed by the results.

Also betrayed: Iranians, whose 2009 Green Revolution in heroic protest of a stolen election Mr. Obama conspicuously failed to endorse for fear of offending the ruling theocracy.

Iraqis, who were assured of a diplomatic surge to consolidate the gains of the military surge, but who ceased to be of any interest to Mr. Obama the moment U.S. troops were withdrawn, and only concerned him again when ISIS neared the gates of Baghdad.

Syrians, whose initially peaceful uprising against anti-American dictator Bashar Assad Mr. Obama refused to embrace, and whose initially moderate-led uprising Mr. Obama failed to support, and whose sarin- and chlorine-gassed children Mr. Obama refused to rescue, his own red lines notwithstanding.

Ukrainians, who gave up their nuclear weapons in 1994 with formal U.S. assurances that their “existing borders” would be guaranteed, only to see Mr. Obama refuse to supply them with defensive weapons when Vladimir Putin invaded their territory 20 years later.

Pro-American Arab leaders, who expected better than to be given ultimatums from Washington to step down, and who didn’t anticipate the administration’s tilt toward the Muslim Brotherhood as a legitimate political opposition, and toward Tehran as a responsible negotiating partner.

Most betrayed: Americans.