It would be a stretch to say that President Obama lost Israel’s election. But our president has made it pretty clear what he thinks of Benjamin Netanyahu, and last night, Israeli voters made it pretty clear what they think of him too. Netanyahu’s Likud party easily beat its closest rival, and now appears likely to head a conservative coalition or a centrist unity government. President Obama’s distaste for Israel’s reelected leader has two explanations. Netanyahu is the most articulate, most forceful global critic of Obama’s rabid desire for a deal with Iran. He is also the world leader who does the best job providing an alternative to the president’s Pollyannaish approach to Islamic terror. Of course, Israeli voters were considering many issues during this election, and much of the disagreement among Israeli parties is about domestic and social debates, not security policy. Because of the gravity of their situation, Israelis increasingly agree on questions of defense. But it is important that they reelected the loudest, most impassioned defender of their consensus. President Obama’s contempt for Netanyahu is disturbing because he is supposed to — and at times pretends to — have special solicitude for Israel’s security.
Doing so need not mean agreeing with its prime minister on every single question, but the president’s discomfort with the avatar of Israeli strength runs deeper than day-to-day debates. This is not confined to the president, either: It was obvious in the Western liberal hope and expectation that Israeli voters might share their contempt or boot a paranoid like Netanyahu because they care more about housing costs or income inequality. Many Americans are disturbed by the Netanyahu–Obama animosity, and for good reason. In part, it is because they worry what it portends for Israel, which needs allies. But it also reminds them that they lack a leader who has a clear-eyed view of evil and understands peace through strength. Israel reelected a man like that; we will have to wait a little longer to elect our own.
When Republicans complained that Obama refused to talk about Islamic terrorism, he accused them of playing into the hands of ISIS by demanding that he identify the enemy we’re fighting.
When they spoke out against his Iranian nuclear sellout, he accused them of “wanting to make common cause with the hardliners in Iran”. Those hardliners would presumably toe a harder line than Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who responded to Obama’s outreach in his first term by saying, “The Islamic peoples all over the world chant ‘Death to America!’” and who stated last year that “This battle will only end when the society can get rid of the oppressors’ front with America at the head of it.”
(The Supreme Leader of a country which stones teenage rape victims and rapes teenage girls so that they don’t die as virgins, also claimed that “The European races are barbaric.”)
If the moderate Supreme Leader that Obama is dealing with wants Death to America, what could the real hardliners want for America that’s even worse than death? A third term of Obama?
Meanwhile Joe Biden, Obama’s number two, accused Republicans of undermining Obama. This would be the same Biden who threatened to impeach President Bush if he bombed Iran’s nuclear program and who blasted Bush and the idea of an Axis of Evil at a fundraiser in the home of a pro-Iran figure.
In his 1964 acceptance speech for the Republican nomination, Barry Goldwater said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice…” In that same speech Mr. Goldwater issued a warning more meaningful to today: “Those who seek absolute power [read: extremists], even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth…they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies.” Seven years later Saul Alinsky, the “father of community organizing” and whose work influenced the young community organizer Barack Obama, published “Rules for Radicals.” Its opening sentence: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what is to what they believe it should be.” On October 30, 2008, candidate Barack Obama said: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming America.”
“Radicalism” is defined by Merriam-Webster: “The opinions and behavior of people who favor extreme change, especially in government.” There is no question that what Mr. Alinsky was advocating was extremism. However, during the 2008 campaign only a few “extremists” and “racists” brought attention to the radicals who had influenced Mr. Obama as a young man. Nevertheless, the names and the numbers are legion, and include among others Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, Tom Hayden, Saul Mendelson, Dr. John Drew and Professor Charles Ogletree.
This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Humberto Fontova, the author of four books including his latest, The Longest Romance; The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro.
Humberto came on the show to discuss Obama Comes to Castro’s Rescue, unveiling how the Radical-in-Chief threw a lifeline to a dying tyranny. The dialogue occurred in the context of The Truth About the Cuban ‘Embargo’.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/obama-comes-to-castros-rescue-on-the-glazov-gang/print/
Seeming to give credence to Orwell’s quip that “some ideas are so stupid they could only have been thought of by intellectuals,” faculty at the University of Southampton in England will be sponsoring a three-day conference in April, “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism,” conceived of to “explore the relatedness of the suffering and injustice in Palestine to the foundation and protection of a state of such nature and asks what role International Law should play in the situation.”
Not content with the way history and law have worked out independent of their intellectual meddling, the conference sponsors claim that the event will have great scholarly value and “. . . is unique because it concerns the legitimacy in International Law of the Jewish state of Israel” and “will focus on exploring themes of Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism; all of which are posed by Israel’s very nature.”
What does that elevated and academically-inane doublespeak actually mean? Obviously, it is clear, both by the questions posited as the themes of inquiry of the conference, not to mention the list of toxic intellectuals who will present papers at the event, that the purpose and end product of the conference is yet another formalized indictment of Israel—nicely disguised as a bit of academic inquiry and brave new scholarship.
For thousands of years the Jews dreamed of reclaiming their country. The left had another dream.
It dreamed of a country run by bureaucrats that worked only three days a week. It dreamed of unions running monopolies that worked whenever they liked and charged whatever they wanted. It dreamed of children raised on collective farms without parents and of government as a Socialist café debate.
Most of all it dreamed of a country without conservatives. It still hasn’t gotten that wish.
Netanyahu’s victory hit hardest in Tel Aviv where, as Haaretz, the paper of the left, reports, “Leftist, secular Tel Aviv went to sleep last night cautiously optimistic only to wake up this morning in a state of utter and absolute devastation.”
Howard Jacobson’s latest novel really got to me. I have been reading Jacobson with pleasure since his 1983 debut novel Coming from Behind and was happily surprised when he was awarded the 2010 Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, although in my opinion he ought also to have won it earlier for his darker novel Kalooki Nights. Jacobson is a world master of the art of disturbing comedy and each new work of his advances the genre—this one by a giant step.
J, or more preciselyJ, begins with a challenge, first to typesetters and then to readers, to crack the code of the double lines that cross the eponymous letter. Kevern “Coco” Cohen’s father would always “put two fingers across his mouth, like a tramp sucking on a cigarette butt . . . to stifle the letter j before it left his lips.” Kevern follows his father’s custom, which might have been taken over from his father. But if this is a family sport, it is not much fun for the son who would have liked to understand this habit of erasure. As a reader who sees the potential jew in every jewel, I was certain I grasped what Kevern doesn’t, but my anxiety then focused on the whys and wherefores of striking or muzzling that portentous consonant.
For the past few days, the Times has been particularly consumed with the issue of income disparity and extreme inequality. First came Paul Krugman who found the presence of this disparity in Israel to be the worst in the advanced world with portentous consequences in store. On Wednesday, the lead editorial with the noxious headline “An Israeli Election Turns Ugly,” bemoaned the fact that “although the economy has grown, the country (Israel) itself has experienced widening income disparities and is now one of the most unequal societies in the advanced world.” (NYT 3/18) So it is with a proper degree of head-scratching that I call your attention to today’s review in the Food Section of Eleven Madison Park, a four-star restaurant which offers a tasting menu for $225/per each one-percenter.
When Muslims themselves now understand there is an issue, politicians and key decision makers throughout the West might do well to understand this, too — and seriously support them.
Another level that will have to be addressed is how Islam is presented in Europe’s education system. The Norwegian translation of the Koran has been abridged to take out the less-charming parts. Islam is presented as if were already reformed. It is as if Einar Berg, the translator of the Koran, were shocked by by what he translated, and tried to package it in a more charming light.
The crucial question is: Will Islam now be reformed to meet the version found in the textbooks? Or will the textbooks be altered to accurately describe Islam’s stated ideology?
This self-censorship — whether voluntary or the result of some implicit threat — is the death of enlightenmnet, humanism and the foundation of all science: the spirit of free inquiry.
Possibly more important is the pervasive, divisive focus on non-believers — the insistence on disparaging them and killing them — and how this might well condition the minds of many Muslims, especially children.
London Citizens, which receives tens of thousands of pounds from the government every year, is a coalition of faith groups that include extremist Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood organizations. London Citizens’ deputy chairman before 2014 was Junaid Ahmed, an Islamist activist who describes Hamas founder and leader Ahmed Yassin as a “hero” and has said that, “Every single [Palestinian] resistance fighter is an example for all of us to follow.”
In February, Britain’s largest Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle disclosed that Yitzchak Schochet, a Rabbi in North London, was removed as patron of an interfaith charity because “the government believed he was too extreme.” It reported:
“According to a source close to the charity, the decision was taken after the Department for Communities and Local Government threatened to remove funding for other groups run by the charity’s head.”
Rabbi Schochet has undoubtedly made some troubling comments. In January, after the Islamist terror attacks in Paris, he stated that the staff of Charlie Hebdo “committed a sin against society,” and that, “Any sensitive human being who cares about the rights of another will find these cartoons abhorrent.” Islamist media outlets have condemned a tweet sent by Schochet, in which he told an anti-Israel activist: “I have a spare Israeli flag if you want to hang yourself on it.”
