ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Obama’s Mideast Plan Faces a New Hurdle U.S. officials concerned that Iran-Saudi conflict could undermine broader efforts in Middle East By Jay Solomon

Posted By on January 4th, 2016

The sudden upheaval that shattered ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia over the weekend also saddled the Obama administration with unexpected complications in what already was a long-shot bid to ease the crises of the Middle East.

Administration officials voiced rising concern that the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia could undermine their broader regional efforts—in particular ending the Syrian civil war.

Secretary of State John Kerry had been pressing Tehran and Riyadh for months to establish a direct diplomatic channel to address the Syria conflict.

The two countries reluctantly agreed late in 2015 to join a multinational peace process. That led to a United Nations plan for a cease-fire and peace talks, but the latest developments raise questions about its viability.

The conflict is also exposing deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia under President Barack Obama. Saudi officials have repeatedly pressed the White House to take more-aggressive steps to check what they say is Iran’s regionwide efforts to destabilize Arab countries.

Saudi officials have warned that the nuclear agreement reached in July between world powers and Iran would significantly strengthen Iran’s finances while only scaling back its nuclear capabilities for a few years.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Who Lost the Saudis? Iran and Russia have an interest in toppling the House of Saud.

Posted By on January 4th, 2016

That headline question may seem premature, but it’s worth asking if only to reduce the odds that the Saudis are lost as we enter the last perilous year of the Obama Presidency. Iran and Russia have an interest in toppling the House of Saud, and they may be calculating whether President Obama would do anything to stop them.

This comes to mind watching the furious reaction by Iran and its allies to Saudi Arabia’s New Year execution of 47 men for terrorism. Most of the condemned were Sunnis, including members of al Qaeda, but the Saudis also executed prominent Shiite cleric Nemer al-Nemer, who had led a Shiite uprising in 2011.

“The divine hand of revenge will come back on the tyrants who took his life,” said Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday, among many other denunciations across the Shiite Middle East. Protesters ransacked and set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran before police belatedly stopped them. The Saudis responded by cutting off diplomatic relations with Iran.

Nouri al-Maliki, the Iranian ally and former Prime Minister of Iraq, put regime change on the table by saying the execution “will topple the Saudi regime as the crime of executing the martyr al-Sadr did to Saddam” Hussein. He was referring to the death of another prominent Shiite cleric in Iraq in 1980.

BOOKS Comments turned off

The West Should Stop Apologizing for the Middle East By David Isaac

Posted By on January 4th, 2016

If there is one proposition on which there is a consensus among Middle East experts—from academia to the media, and to politicians who echo them both—it is that the “root cause” of present problems in the region are the Western imperialists who imposed their will on its hapless indigenous peoples. According to this narrative, Western powers had been nibbling at the margins of the Ottoman Empire and seized on the opportunity offered by its siding with Germany in World War I. Secret agreements between imperialist powers determined new political boundaries without regard to the needs or interests of those who lived in the region, or to any promises made in the past.

The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle EastAug 11, 2015

by Efraim Karsh

As he did in his 1999 Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in Middle East (written with his wife Inari), Efraim Karsh, professor emeritus of Middle East Studies at Kings College, London and currently professor at Bar Ilan University, again turns the conventional wisdom on its head. He writes that Britain, France, and Russia begged the Ottoman Empire to stay out of World War I, promising to ensure the Empire’s survival if it did. Moreover, Karsh insists “the depiction of Muslims as hapless victims of the aggressive encroachments of others, too dim to be accountable for their own fate, is not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

DISPATCHES FROM TOM GROSS

Posted By on January 4th, 2016

MEDIA IGNORE THE FACT THAT AN ARAB JUDGE SENTENCED EX-ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER OLMERT

When international media reported at some length last week on the sentencing of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to 18 months in prison by Israel’s Supreme Court, almost no foreign journalist mentioned that the judge who announced the verdict, Justice Salim Joubran, from Haifa, is an Israeli-Arab member of Israel’s Supreme Court.

To mention this would, of course, draw attention to the fact that the “Israeli Apartheid” myth that many of their colleagues in the media promote, is just that – a myth.

Olmert is the first Israeli prime minister to be convicted of a crime. A lower Israeli court had sentenced him to six years in jail for two counts of bribery, but the Supreme Court overturned one of the convictions on appeal last week. (Olmert was found guilty of accepting a relatively small sum in bribes – certainly small compared to the bribery and corruption rife throughout much of the world, and even in some EU countries.)

A correspondent for the Israeli daily Haaretz wrote “Israel is the only country in the world where a president and a prime minister have both been sent to prison by a court, without a coup or revolution.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Saudi Arabia in Policy Hell By David Goldman

Posted By on January 4th, 2016

Last week’s mass executions in Saudi Arabia suggest panic at the highest level of the monarchy. The action is without precedent, even by the grim standards of Saudi repression. In 1980 Riyadh killed 63 jihadists who had attacked the Grand Mosque of Mecca, but that was fresh after the event. Most of the 47 prisoners shot and beheaded on Jan. 2 had sat in Saudi jails for a decade. The decision to kill the prominent Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr, the most prominent spokesman for restive Saudi Shia Muslims in Eastern Province, betrays fear of subversion with Iranian sponsorship.

Why kill them all now? It is very hard to evaluate the scale of internal threats to the Saudi monarchy, but the broader context for its concern is clear: Saudi Arabia finds itself isolated, abandoned by its longstanding American ally, at odds with China, and pressured by Russia’s sudden preeminence in the region. The Saudi-backed Army of Conquest in Syria seems to be crumbling under Russian attack. The Saudi intervention in Yemen against Iran-backed Houthi rebels has gone poorly. And its Turkish ally-of-convenience is consumed by a low-level civil war. Nothing has gone right for Riyadh.

Worst of all, the collapse of Saudi oil revenues threatens to exhaust the kingdom’s $700 billion in financial reserves within five years, according to an October estimate by the International Monetary Fund (as I discussed here). The House of Saud relies on subsidies to buy the loyalty of the vast majority of its subjects, and its reduced spending power is the biggest threat to its rule. Last week Riyadh cut subsidies for water, electricity and gasoline. The timing of the executions may be more than coincidence: the royal family’s capacity to buy popular support is eroding just as its regional security policy has fallen apart.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

LOW MOMENT IN 2015: SWEDISH FOREIGN MINISTER WALLSTROM LINKED MOSLEM ATTACK IN PARIS TO ARAB GRIPES WITH ISRAEL…SEE NOTE

Posted By on January 3rd, 2016

WALLSTROM IS ALL THE RAGE NOW WITH EURO FEMINISTS BECAUSE SHE CRITICIZED SAUDI ARABIA….BUT SHE IS A VICIOUS ROTTWEILER WHEN IT COMES TO ISRAEL…RSK

Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström linked Palestinian grievances with Israel to the Islamist terror attacks that killed 129 people in Paris.

“Obviously, we have reason to be worried, not just in Sweden but across the world—because there are so many that are being radicalized. Here, once again, we are brought back to situations like the one in the Middle East, where not least, the Palestinians see that there is not a future. We must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence,” Wallström said in a television interview.

In response to Wallström’s comments, Israel summoned Sweden’s ambassador to the Jewish state for an urgent meeting with Israeli Foreign Ministry Director-General Dore Gold, calling the Swedish minister’s remarks “brazen,” “shocking,” and “hostile.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Perilous Year for European Unity Terror threat and migrant crisis are just two of many challenges confronting the bloc in 2016 Stephen Fidler

Posted By on January 3rd, 2016

Pithy comment from a Belgian reader “Again this lack of common sense. Why on earth can’t you link terrorism and migration? Isnt it obvious that the more you import the Middle East and Africa having unrestricted flows the more terrorism and less freedom you will have? All terrorists in Europe in 2015 were Muslim immigrants or the children of Muslim immigrants. Showing that the problem is within Islam itself. Europe sticking its head in the sand on the Islamic migration issue is the last thing Europe needs. ”
Troubles crowded in on Europe in 2015. In 2016, they could shake the foundations of European economic and political integration.

The conflict in Syria has blown back devastatingly into Europe, spurring terror attacks and a refugee crisis over which policy makers appear to have little influence.

Border controls, viewed as a thing of the past across much of the continent, have been raised at many national frontiers, and leading politicians have acknowledged that the Schengen passport-free travel zone, one of the great successes of European integration, is under threat.

To the east, the Ukraine conflict remains unresolved and Russia’s foreign-policy posture more aggressive than at any time since the end of the Cold War.

Meanwhile, the recovery of the eurozone economy has been faltering and economic vulnerabilities remain in some countries in the form of high debts and weak banks, even with official interest rates close to zero.

Added to that, the U.K. could deliver a blow to the European Union in a referendum, likely to be held in 2016, over whether the country should become the first ever to leave the 28-nation bloc.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Palestinian Kids Have a New Favorite Game: ‘Stab the Jew’ By Michael van der Galien See video

Posted By on January 3rd, 2016

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/1/2/palestinian-kids-have-a-new-favorite-game-stab-the-jew

More evidence that Palestinian children are the new Hitler Youth: a video has appeared on YouTube showing Palestinian kids in a refugee camp (Far’a near Jenin) playing a new game: stab the Jew.

MEDIA, POLITICS Comments turned off

Peggy Noonan and the left’s prom dress By Richard F. Miniter ****

Posted By on January 3rd, 2016

Ray Kroc, the man who built McDonald’s, once said that if his competition was drowning, “he’d stick a hose in his mouth.” A very American attitude toward life and winning, which hasn’t taken root in today’s Republican establishment standard-bearers. Odd, since it was Reagan who famously said, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War. We win. They lose” – or, more germane to the politics of 2016, quipped that he was reluctant to allow a government shutdown until one day he asked himself, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

But almost as if Reagan never lived, the sad fact is that you almost always find Republican establishment types today parading around in the 1950s prom dress liberals hand them to wear – a mentality they’re encouraged in by conservative establishment pundits like Charles Krauthammer, or most particularly Peggy Noonan, when, in “A Rash Leader in a Grave Time” (12/18/15), knocking Trump, she says this:

[O]ne thing an effective leader must always do is know what can be misunderstood and guard against it, what can be misconstrued and used to paint you – and your followers – as bigoted. Leaders try hard not to let that happen. It is the due diligence of politics.

Whew! Coming from Ms. Noonan, I suppose this is the gold standard of establishment thinking. But what a way in which to define leadership or diligence. I remember Ms. Noonan sideswiping Sarah Palin (during McCain’s campaign?) with the comment that we need leaders who can think through problems. Reading this mush, you’re forced to ask – what manner of thinking through does it take to conclude that effective leadership requires one not to say that which can be “misconstrued and used to paint you—and your followers—as bigoted”? News flash: Democrats always misconstrue and paint Republicans as bigoted. It’s what they do, the fetid air they thrive on. Indeed, there’s nothing Republicans can say, ever, that Democrats won’t misconstrue or lie about. Pretending there is just means you allow the left to control the debate.

BOOKS Comments turned off

New Year’s Wish: A Worthwhile Palestinian Partner for Peace by Jagdish N. Singh

Posted By on January 3rd, 2016

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has never been a man of peace. Even now, he continues calling for Jewish blood. Israel, however, has offered peace deal after peace deal – never even to receive even so much as a single counter-offer.

Sometimes, Abbas harps on Israel’s settlement policy as the sole reason for the absence of peace in the region. But before 1967 there were no settlements — and still no peace. What, then, was the PLO thinking of liberating? If you look at any current map of “Palestine” from the Palestinian Authority or Hamas, it blankets the entire country of Israel.

“For how long will this protracted Israeli occupation of our land last? After 67 years, how long?” — Mahmoud Abbas, saying recently that the “occupation” has existed since Israel’s creation in 1948.

One wonders if or when the U.S. administration and the Europeans might ever be serious about promoting real peace and prosperity in the disputed Palestinian territories. Sadly, the White House, in pinning all its hopes on Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, has just been trying to hook its cart to someone not only with a shelf-life that officially expired years ago, but who is also too corrupt to be of any help to his people.