RUTHFULLY YOURS

In an interview with FOX News aired on Sunday, April 10, President Barack Obama said that failing to prepare for the aftermath of the ousting of Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qaddafi was the worst mistake of his presidency. He added that intervening in Libya nevertheless had been “the right thing to do.”

The second part of Obama’s statement is incomprehensible. The intervention was a debacle. No less than Iraq, Libya would have been better off without the U.S. doing “the right thing.” The country has descended into Hobbesian mayhem. It is today a paradigmatic “failed state” ruled by competing militias. Today’s Libya is a safe haven for thousands of battle-hardened jihadists. According to General David Rodriguez, head of U.S. Africa Command, the current number of ISIS fighters in Libya is “around 4 to 6,000,” twice the group’s size estimated last year. The North African redoubt of the Islamic State—strongest by far outside Iraq and Syria—has prompted some of Obama’s advisors to press for a second American military intervention in Libya. The country is the greatest threat to the region’s stability—notably in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, in Nigeria (Boko Haram) and Mali—and it is the main point of departure for hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim migrants flooding into Europe.

Even more alarming is the possibility that the main architect of the Libyan disaster will be the next occupant of the White House. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last January that he thought then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “influence was pivotal in persuading the President to broaden the goal in Libya beyond just saving the people in Benghazi” from the alleged threat presented by Qaddafi’s army, and “essentially focusing more on regime change. The President told me that it was one of the closest decisions he’d ever made, sort of 51-49, and I’m not sure that he would’ve made that decision if Secretary Clinton hadn’t supported it.” Gates later recalled asking, “Can I finish the two wars I’m already in before you guys go looking for a third one?” Colonel Qaddafi, he said, “was not a threat to us anywhere. He was a threat to his own people, and that was about it.”

Since February 2013, Iran has received billions of dollars in sanctions relief as incentives to attend negotiations with the United States and others in Geneva. However, from March 2012, until January 2016, when the U.S. lifted the sanctions, Iranian banks were not connected to the Belgium-based SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system.
“Nobody could pay the Iranians via normal lines, not even in euros,” a European oil trader was quoted saying. Then how did the regime access the payments and the billions of dollars it was given?
Following Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s complaint that Iran’s banks are still under sanctions (due to its sponsorship of international terrorism), the Obama administration decided to circumvent U.S. anti-money laundering laws to help Iran’s economy.
Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has pointed out that the Obama administration’s plan, allowing Iran “access to U.S. dollars through offshore clearinghouses,” undermines U.S. and international anti-money laundering laws.” His Washington Post article last week argued the “U.S. must not aid and abet Iranian money laundering.”
But under the Obama administration, Americans have been witnessing, and many have accustomed to the president’s disregard to laws governing his own country.

I think comparing Trump’s antics and his cooing fans to Nazis or Stalin are wrong. Those mass killers are in a different and more vile league. He is more akin to Latin American tin pot dictators- those who were populists, promised great reforms, challenged the status quo, and corrupt governments, got elected by large margins and went on to ruin their nations’ hopes for change. I think of men like Venezuela’s late and unlamented Hugo Chavez.

In 1998, in a nation with a tanking economy in spite of one of the world’s great oil reserves, and a public distrust of government’s theft and repressions, Chavez began an unlikely quest for the presidency. His populist appeal resonated with a public distrustful of “inside politics” and corruption. By December 5, 1998 he won 56 percent of the votes.

As president he stacked his government with cronies, he abolished term limits, bypassed all existing restraints on presidential powers. He embarked on systematic appropriation of industry, communications, electric, and construction materials such as steel and cement. He nationalized all oil reserves and expropriated farms and woodland. He shut down opposition media and enacted laws making criticism or parody of his government a felony.

He also said outrageous things:

At the UN in March 2007 Chávez compared President Bush to the devil…in his own lofty words: “The devil came here yesterday. Right here … it smells of sulphur still today. It was almost mild compared to his insult on September 2006 when he told the American President : “You are a donkey, Mr. Danger.” On Septembr 12th 2006, he announced that it was very likely that the United States was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Nonetheless, he got a pass from the media and his deluded fans.

In a list compiled by the magazine New Statesman in 2006, he was voted eleventh in the list of “Heroes of our time” and in 2006 he was Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year.”

Trump is not a criminal like Chavez, but he is an unprincipled megalomaniac, whose insatiable lust for power will make him a ruinous president with catastrophic and irreversible consequences.

Steve Chapman the writer and columnist for the Chicago Tribune warned in a column “History Repeating as Farce” in 2007:
“A phony revolution may nonetheless be a durable one. If the Venezuelans who go to the polls give Chávez what he wants, they are likely to discover a paradox: They can bring about dictatorship through democracy, but not the reverse.

Now there’s a sobering thought forTrump’s deluded supporters…..rsk

Claremont Review of Books

“No, Iran Isn’t Destabilizing the Middle East.” Paul Pillar’s article in The National Interest a month before the Iran nuclear deal was signed attacked critics of the negotiations. Pillar disputed the “badly mistaken myth” that Tehran is “‘destabilizing’ the Middle East or seeking to ‘dominate’ it or exercise ‘hegemony’ over it, or that it is ‘on the march’ to take over the region.” On the contrary, while we might dislike Iran’s conduct—bolstering the Assad regime in Syria, backing Hezbollah in Lebanon, nourishing Hamas in Gaza, dominating what’s left of Iraq, funding and training the Taliban in Afghanistan, and arming Islamist rebels in Yemen—Iran is simply reacting to its circumstances as any other state would. Iran’s distinctive ideological character and stated goals, in other words, are at best peripheral to understanding and evaluating its conduct.

Pillar spent nearly thirty years as a senior intelligence analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, and holds impeccable academic credentials. He can hardly be dismissed as a fringe figure. Indeed, the gist of his view—that we shouldn’t worry about Iran’s distinctive ideological character—informs the Obama administration’s approach to Iran. The Obama team acknowledges Iran’s pervasive violation of rights domestically, its wholesale backing of Islamist terrorism, and its ominous nuclear program. But these actions have little to do with one another, or with any larger strategic threat. Moreover, despite the weekly “death to America” chants (merely “rhetorical excess,” according to John Kerry) and the stated desire to wipe Israel off the map, Iran’s leaders supposedly care chiefly about “regime survival” and the economic aspirations of their citizens—as if a brutal theocracy, deep down, wants what’s best for its people. On the unstated premise that everyone in politics has a price, Obama has even suggested that the nuclear deal could entice Iran to improve its conduct while taking on its “rightful role” in the community of nations.

“Anti-Semitism is a light sleeper” from The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism (1986)

O’Brien, known as “the Cruiser” was an Irish politician, diplomat, journalist and author. In 1982, as editor of “The Observer”, responding to the avalanche of anti Israel sentiment, he published a series of columns defending Israel and justifying the Lebanon War. In his columns he argued that the Israelis should never return the “Occupied Territories” to the Arabs because it would lead to Israel’s strategic demise, and he declared that many of Israel’s detractors were anti-Semites. He then decided to write a short book on the history of Israel, to give “‘a somewhat better idea of how Israel came to be what and where it is, and why it cannot be other than what it is’. The “short”book grew and became a 789 page history of Zionism, Jewish destiny, the Palestine Mandate, British betrayals, and a state in permanent siege.

The greatest praise I can give this excellent book is that “The London Review of Books” trashed it. They prefer the ahistorical libels of Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris.

Foreign Minister Zarif dismisses US counterpart’s suggestion of negotiations on ballistic rockets as ‘baseless’; defense minister calls plan ‘nonsense’.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Sunday rebuffed US Secretary of State John Kerry’s proposal Thursday to negotiate a “new arrangement” for Tehran’s ballistic missile program.

Speaking at a joint press conference in Tehran with Estonia’s foreign minister, Zarif said that Iran’s missile and defense programs are nonnegotiable, echoing similar statements by other Iranian officials over the weekend.

Washington has denounced Iran’s ballistic missiles program, including a March 9 test of two ballistic missiles, as a violation of a United Nations ban. Iran maintains they not covered by the UN ban, which is linked to last year’s landmark nuclear agreement.

Kerry said the US and its partners were telling Iran that they were “prepared to work on a new arrangement to find a peaceful solution,” but that Iran first had to “make it clear to everybody that they are prepared to cease these kinds of activities that raise questions about credibility and questions about intentions.”

Zarif retorted Sunday saying Kerry’s comments were “baseless.” He said that if the US were serious about the issue, it should stop selling weapons “which are used for killing innocent Yemenis or used by the Zionist regime against civilians,” the Iranian Students’ News Agency reported.

After a recent surge in threatening behavior by Iran and reports that it may soon be given access to the U.S. financial system, the House Intelligence Committee opened an investigation into whether Obama officials misled Congress about the July 2015 nuclear deal with Iran (the Joint Comprehensive plan of Action, or JCPOA). The “historic” deal, they said, would help bring Iran into the “community of nations” and lead to improved relations between Iran and the United States.

While this congressional investigation is a welcome development, it is too little and too late to reverse the Obama administration’s policy of offering any and all concessions – including over $100 billion in sanctions relief – to get a nuclear agreement with Iran. Most members of Congress thought the JCPOA was a bad deal; the majority of them voted against it last fall. But many now realize that this agreement is in fact an enormous fraud that is undermining Middle East and international security.

As I have explained here on National Review Online, in “Obama’s Iran Deal Is the Opposite of What He Promised the American People,” the negotiations that produced the JCPOA were an endless series of fallacies and deceptions. To get Iran to the negotiating table, the Obama administration foolishly agreed that the mullahs could continue to enrich uranium and develop advanced enrichment centrifuges. This means that the timeline for an Iranian nuclear weapon will shorten when the JCPOA is in effect, because Iran will all the while be improving its capability to produce nuclear fuel.

Obama officials made several misleading statements about the JCPOA last July that have come back to haunt them. These will be the focus of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation.

One of the most controversial of these statements was President Obama’s and Secretary Kerry’s assertion that under this agreement, Iran agreed to comply with U.N. Security Council resolutions barring missile tests for eight years. But there is no language barring missile tests in the JCPOA; this provision is buried in a U.N. Security Council resolution (Resolution 2231) that merely endorsed the JCPOA.

Rita Gam, one of the last surviving cast members of a controversial 1940s Zionist play, passed away recently at age 88.

Gam made her theatrical debut as a minor character in “A Flag is Born,” a Ben Hecht play that opened on Broadway seventy years ago this fall. The play was intended to stir up American public support for the cause of creating a Jewish state in British Mandatory Palestine but it ended up also playing an unexpected role in promoting racial desegregation in the United States.

With Holocaust survivors languishing in European Displaced Persons camps and the British permitting just a trickle of Jewish immigration to Palestine, Hecht conceived of the idea of using Broadway to promote the Zionist cause.

The play was produced by the Bergson Group, a Jewish activist committee with which Hecht was active. The group’s leader, Hillel Kook (better known as Peter Bergson), would later become a member of Knesset.

The play featured Yiddish theater stars Paul Muni and Celia Adler as elderly Jewish refugees making their way across postwar Europe. In a cemetery, they encounter a fiery young Zionist, played by 22 year-old Marlon Brando in one of his earliest major acting roles. Brando’s impassioned monologues about the need for a Jewish state form the emotional centerpiece of the play.

American theater critics were for the most part strongly impressed. Walter Winchell, for example, wrote that “Flag” was “worth seeing, worth hearing, and worth remembering…it will wring your heart and eyes dry…bring at least eleven handkerchiefs.”

There is much justified hand-wringing about anti-Israel bias in education. As I wrote recently “The liberal media and academic elite deride “Creationists”–those who deny the theory of evolution and believe that the world and all its creatures were created in six calendar days. However, they encourage Mideast “creationism”–namely, a belief that the Arab/Israel conflict occurred as the result of six calendar days in 1967 when a land grab by Israel established an unjust occupation of ancient Arab lands.” How does one counter this libel and misinformation?

David Isaac created a documentary series – there will be over 45 films all told – of quality educational materials on Zionist history. These materials are needed now more than ever. The film project is having an impact where it’s needed. His films have been incorporated into the curriculum of 60 Jewish Day schools and should be made available to libraries and university departments of Middle East studies and history.

So I’m asking all of you for the second time to step up and help him. You can reach his crowdfunding campaign here:

http://jewcer.com/project/zionism-101-the-documentary-series

After appeal to UN over Tehran’s violation of ballistic missiles resolution, Kerry says White House ‘prepared to work for peaceful solution’
United States suggested Thursday it was open to a “new arrangement” with Iran for peacefully resolving disputes such as Tehran’s recent ballistic missile tests.

Setting the stage for President Barack Obama’s summit with regional leaders in Saudi Arabia later this month, US Secretary of State John Kerry met with the foreign ministers of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council to advance a series of proposals aimed at easing Arabs’ concerns about last year’s Iran nuclear deal and the warming of ties between the US and Iran. These include providing new counterterrorism, conventional military, missile defense and cybersecurity capabilities.

Washington has denounced Iran’s ballistic missiles program, including a March 9 test of two missiles, as a violation of a United Nations ban.

But Kerry, a moment after declaring America was united with Persian Gulf countries against the Iranian missile tests, said the US and its partners were telling Iran that they were “prepared to work on a new arrangement to find a peaceful solution to these issues.”

He said Iran first had to “make it clear to everybody that they are prepared to cease these kinds of activities that raise questions about credibility and questions about intentions.”

Kerry did not elaborate further.

The US, France, Britain and Germany had previously called on the UN Security Council to formulate an “appropriate response” to Iran’s recent ballistic missile tests which they say were carried out in defiance of a UN resolution and to threaten Israel. An Iranian news agency said had the phrase “Israel must be wiped out” written on them in Hebrew.