Bio: Charles Krauthammer, born March 13, 1950 in NYC. An American… Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist and journalist, and physician. His weekly column is syndicated to over 400 newspapers world wide. Credits: The New Republic (1981-2011), Washington Post, 1985 to present, The Weekly Standard, Inside Washington (1990-2013); also a nightly panelist on Fox News.
Charles Krauthammer: "I love to hear the president whine about FOX News and Talk Radio. I think we aught to be proud of the fact that we annoy him so much. if you look at the line-up on one side, the liberal media, you start with ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS, MSNBC, the elite newspapers, the one remaining news magazine, the universities, Hollywood,-- it doesn't stop anywhere. And, on the other side, talk radio and FOX News.
And, they can't stand the fact that they no longer have a MONOPOLY!
So, I think it aught to be taken as a compliment. What I've always said about Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdock, their genius was understanding and locating a niche in the broadcast cable news, which is half of the American people. The half that have suffered for decades by the fact you get the news presented from a single perspective, over and over again.
Finally, the fact that there is a new perspective, talk radio, and FOX, and they can't stand it. it's a source of pride, I would say."
Walk along Church Avenue and turn east onto McDonald Avenue and you will see where the old standards of working class Brooklyn, aging homes with faded American flags and loose siding, surly bars tucked into the shadows of street corners and the last video stores hanging on to a dying industry give way to mosques and grocery stores selling goat meat.
Mosques grow like mushrooms in basements, cell phone stores offer easy ways to wire money back to Bangladesh and old men glare at interlopers, especially if they are infidel women.
This is where Mohammed Siddiquee settled a dispute the old-fashioned way by beheading his landlord.
Mohammed wasn’t the first man in Brooklyn to use violence to settle a rental dispute, but beheadings are more traditional in his native Bangladesh than in Brooklyn, though over in neighboring Queens, Ashrafuzzaman Khan, Bangladesh’s most wanted war criminal, heads up the local Islamic Circle of North America, whose Islamist thugs beheaded poets and buried professors in mass graves.
Here in Kensington, where the alphabet streets that march across Brooklyn down to the ocean begin, the bars retreat along with the alphabet from those areas marked by the crescent and the angry glare. And there is another one like it at the other end of the alphabet where the Atlantic Ocean terminates the letters at Avenue Z bookending the Brooklyn alphabet with angry old men and phone cards for Bangladesh.
These spots aren’t no-go zones yet. There aren’t enough young men with too much welfare and time on their hands who have learned that the police will back off when they burn enough things and councilmen will visit to get their side of the story. That generation will grow up being neither one thing nor the other, ricocheting from American pop culture to the Koran, from parties with the infidels to mosque study sessions until they explode from the contradictions the way that the Tsarnaevs, who huffed pot and the Koran in equal proportions, did.
It isn’t the old men who plant bombs near 8-year-olds. It isn’t the young women laughing with their friends outside a pizza parlor, knowing that in a year or two they will have to go back home for an arranged marriage. It is the young men who call themselves Freddy or Mo at the local high school or community college, who drink and do drugs and who all their American friends swear aren’t serious about religion, until they suddenly become fatally serious.
For now the Bangladeshi settlements in Brooklyn are quiet places where the tenements and shops close off the streets into small private worlds with their own justice systems, feuds and secrets.
“I feel like I’m living in my own country,” the editor of one of the Bangladeshi newspapers in New York, said. “You don’t have to learn English to live here. That’s a great thing!”
Overhead may be the same sky, but Little Bangladesh has been cut off from Brooklyn and attached to a country thousands of miles away. Immigrants step off a plane from Bangladesh at JFK airport, get into a taxi driven by a Bangladeshi playing Bengali pop tapes and step out into a small slice of Bangladesh on McDonald Avenue.
And when the infidels of Brooklyn wander into their territory, they are glared at as the foreign intruders that they are.
After Mohammed beheaded his landlord Mahmud, he rushed to JFK to catch a flight. It was natural for him to think that having settled matters in the traditional fashion; he could fly away without considering what lay in the intervening spaces of the American Dar al-Harb between the Dar al-Islam of Avenue C and the Dar al-Islam of Bangladesh.
For the Mohammeds of Brooklyn, the infidels are the empty air between the rungs of a ladder that their foot passes through without noticing. They are little aware of the other Brooklyn that they are pushing aside, the great stretches of the working middle class, the little homes where police officers and firefighters once lived together with teachers and clerks, where plumbers walked to work and bus drivers got on, where the thousands of small businesses from diners to pharmacies turned the grassy stretches of land into neighborhoods.
Bugs Bunny was born here with his Flatbush accent along with a million real workers, soldiers, sailors, inventors, engineers, bums and salesmen who won wars, broke cases, sobbed in bars and brought dinner home to their families. And now, like so much of the urban working class, they are being swept away by time and tide, not from the familiar shores of Coney Island, but by the murkier waters of the Karnaphuli River and the strange world that its tides bring to Brooklyn.
The city has always had its micro communities; Chinatown at the bottom of Manhattan and Little Tokyo near NYU, Little Brazil off Times Square and Koreatown a block up from the Empire State Building. The Russians have their stretch of Brighton Beach with its tea rooms and fur coats and Little Italy’s butcher shops, bakeries and rows of restaurants are still hanging on.
But Islam is not just a culture and the cultures who carry its baggage with them to the old worlds and the new are not toting it along like another ethnic food, a dialect or a national holiday.
In Chinatown, Buddhist temples and protestant churches sit side by side and in Latino neighborhoods, Adventist storefront churches and massive Catholic edifices co-exist; along with them can be found synagogues, Hindu and Zoroastrian temples and the whole dizzying array of religious diversity of a port city defined by its swells and tides of immigrants.
Bangladesh is more than 90 percent Muslim. Hindus are being attacked in the streets of its cities by Islamist mobs because Islam does not co-exist. The other religions of the city do not demand that everyone join them or acknowledge their supremacy and pay them protection money for the right to exist.
Islam does. Its immigration is also a Jihad, a form of supremacist manifest destiny to colonize the Dar al-Harb and subdue it to the will of a dead prophet with sheer numbers or sheer force.
The number of Bangladeshis in New York has increased by 20 percent in only four years to an estimated 74,000. And those numbers don’t take into account the unofficial Mohammeds living in basements while nursing their murderous grudges.
Jamaica, Queens is becoming the center of the Bangladeshi presence in New York. Another Mohammed, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, lived here in a low rise development of indistinguishable buildings crammed together and studded with satellite dishes so the dwellers could watch the television programs of their home countries, and plotted the mass murder of Americans.
“We will not stop until we attain victory or martyrdom,” he said in a video recorded before his planned attack. His modest goal, in his own words, was to “destroy America” and quoted “Sheikh Osama” to justify the killing of American women and children.
Mohammed described the United States as the Dar al-Harb, the realm of war, the territory yet to be conquered by the armies of Islam, and said that the only permissible reason for a Muslim to move to the United States was to conquer it by missionary work or by armed terror.
“I just want something big. Something very big,” Mohammed said, “make one step ahead, for the Muslims . . . that will make us one step closer to run the whole world.”
At this hour no one in Little Korea, Little Italy, Little Brazil, Brighton Beach or Koreatown is plotting to destroy America so that his religion can rule the world. That is what sets the Little Bangladeshes, Little Pakistans, Little Mogadishus and Little Egypts apart from every other immigrant group whose dreams for the future are not overshadowed by the iron dream of Islam.
How did it happen? How did a couple of Jewish kids from humble origins become two of the wealthiest men in America? They are remarkable tales, the stories of Home Depot cofounder Bernie Marcus and Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson. Stories few Americans know. Stories of how wealth is really created in our country. And by whom. Stories that could have happened only in America.
And so we must start these two stories where it’s best to start stories — in the beginning.
Both men grew up during the Great Depression, the children of first-generation Russian immigrants. Their parents didn’t come here to change America; they came here to have America change them. Change their life prospects, and those of their children.
Marcus was born in 1929, the son of a cabinetmaker, and grew up in a tenement in Newark, N.J. Adelson was born a few years later and a few hundred miles north in the tough Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. His father drove a taxi, and his mother ran a knitting shop.
They had little money growing up, but they were not poor; they were lucky to have families that instilled in them the value of self-reliance, accountability, and charity — “the age-old virtues,” Adelson wrote in a 2012 Wall Street Journal column, “that help make our communities prosperous.” Values that would shape their lives and prepare them for the challenges life would throw their way.
They were also lucky to grow up at a time when the culture reinforced those values. The studio moguls and directors of their youth — names such as Louis B. Mayer and Frank Capra — understood the American Dream because they were themselves products of immigrant families who embraced that very same dream.
So how did these two men get where they got from where they were from? Did they go to Ivy League colleges or get MBAs and work the halls of corporate management or the canyons of Wall Street?
It turns out that neither attended a fancy college, let alone business school. Marcus attended Rutgers and graduated with a pharmacy degree; Adelson attended New York’s City College and dropped out. Their education was real-life business, their graduate school the school of trial and error. But both men possessed the tenacity to overcome obstacles that no college can impart and the capacity to take risks that MBA programs often crush.
They had varying degrees of success during their 20s and 30s, making good money — and in some cases losing even more. Marcus learned soon after graduating from college that he didn’t want to fill prescriptions for the rest of his life and that his real talent was in retail sales. He racked up big sales numbers wherever he went, and after 20-plus years of work found himself the CEO of Handy Dan Home Improvement Center in Los Angeles. Until he wasn’t. A disagreement with his boss left Marcus out of a job and on the street in his late 40s.
He didn’t know it at the time, but getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to him. In 1978, with the help of investment banker Ken Langone and partner Arthur Blank, he launched The Home Depot. The store revolutionized the home-improvement business with its warehouse concept and turned millions of homeowners into do-it-yourself contractors. And it turned Marcus into a billionaire.
Adelson’s is a classic entrepreneur’s story. He started his first business when he was 12, and he never stopped starting them. After a brief stint in the Army and college, he worked as a mortgage broker and investment adviser and made his first small fortune. In the early 1960s he moved back to Boston and invested in various companies, among them a travel-and-tour business, which were profitable. But the stock-market decline of the mid-1960s came, pushing Adelson into new lines of work. He found himself in the condominium-conversion business in the 1970s and did well for a short time. Until he didn’t.
Then came his big “break.” He bought a company that published magazines, one of which was a computer magazine, which soon led to the creation of the Computer Dealers Expo, or COMDEX. In 1995 he sold COMDEX to a Japanese firm for $860 million, with a personal share of over $500 million.
But Adelson didn’t stop there. He did what entrepreneurs are born to do: He took an even bigger risk and built the $1.5 billion Venetian Resort Hotel Casino and the Sands Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas after a visit to Italy with his wife. Casinos in Macau and Singapore followed.
In 2009, Adelson suffered another blow, losing over 90 percent of his wealth as the stock market — and shares of his casino stock — plummeted. Rumors floated that his businesses were hovering at the edge of bankruptcy. The stock has since rebounded, making him one of the richest men in the world, but his attitude about the decline was consistent with the many economic ups and downs of his life. “So I lost $25 billion,” he told ABC News flippantly. “I started out with zero.”
They are classic underdog stories, the stories of Bernie and Sheldon. They started with nothing and created their wealth not by stealth or chicanery, manipulation or coercion. They did it by building businesses that people flocked to. They didn’t sit on their capital, or cash out early and spend their lives tanning in exotic locales and chasing exotic women. They put their wealth to work and used their God-given talents to create more wealth. They employed hundreds of thousands of people and created great sums of wealth for shareholders, many of whom were working-class Americans with pensions and 401(k)s invested in those businesses.
And yet somehow, men like this have come to be personified as bad guys? As part of the greedy 1 percent who are hurting this country? And making life harder for the middle class?
But it gets even better, this story of two American dreamers. And it reveals the dissonance between the reality of their lives and the caricature of America’s wealth creators and job creators perpetuated by our nation’s media and academic elites.
It turns out that both men weren’t just determined to build wealth; they were equally committed to giving it away. And not because they wanted the tax write-offs, but because charity was — and is — a fundamental part of their upbringing and heritage.
Both men were aware from their earliest days of tzedakah, a Hebrew word commonly used to mean charity. Both were taught from an early age that it was an obligation, not a choice, to give to those less fortunate than themselves.
“Five cents was a major issue in our lives,” Marcus told Philanthropy magazine. Occasionally, as a treat, the nickel would be spent on ice cream, he recalled, but just as often it would be used to help one cause or another. “I grew up knowing that this is what you do. It’s bred into me.”
Marcus and his wife, Billie, have done remarkable work with their wealth, and their wealth has done remarkable things for people with autism, soldiers struggling to make their way back into normal life after serving our country, and countless others. He contributed $250 million of the $300 million that was raised to build the Georgia Aquarium. It revitalized a neighborhood in Atlanta and will thrill kids and adults alike for decades to come. Marcus didn’t name the aquarium after himself, but after the state he calls home.
Adelson, too, has given generously to many causes. He and his wife, Miriam, a physician by training, have given to projects ranging from education to health, with a particular focus on medical research in the area of neural repair and rehabilitation. They have also given generously to Birthright Israel, which finances Jewish youth trips to Israel, and to Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Why do we know so little about either of these men? Or the lives of so many of the entrepreneurs who have built great American businesses? And given away so much of the wealth they’ve created? Because their life stories don’t comport with the narrative of those in charge of America’s cultural narrative.
The fact is that the lives of Bernie Marcus and Sheldon Adelson are a rebuttal to much of what passes for conventional wisdom about wealth creation in America’s newsrooms, studios, and media conglomerates, and too many economics departments in our finest colleges.
That’s why most Americans don’t know their stories, or the stories of so many other Americans who’ve turned their small businesses into bigger ones. And it’s why so many Americans know so little about how wealth is actually created — big and small fortunes alike.
It’s become harder to do — grow a business or accumulate savings. Ask any entrepreneur, and he’ll tell you the same thing: One of the biggest obstacles to success is our own government. Ask most hard-working Americans, and they’ll tell you the same thing about getting ahead: The government keeps expanding, and their paychecks keep shrinking.
Americans would love to learn how to build wealth — because we are builders by nature. And we learn best from storytelling. From the stories we hear from our culture.
In what may be the richest of ironies, it turns out that the means of production that matters most in America — the cultural means of production — is dominated by people who either don’t understand how wealth is created or don’t care. Many of them — most, I would bet — actually believe wealth redistribution is a better mechanism to improve the quality of ordinary Americans’ lives than is free enterprise.
What can be done? It’s not that complicated, actually. Our great wealth creators need to help build cultural means of production of our own. And get our stories to the American people. Because if we don’t tell them, no one will.
— Lee Habeeb is the vice president of content at Salem Radio Network and a senior adviser to AmericaStrong. He lives in Oxford, Miss., with his wife, Valerie
In a shocking move that makes counter-terrorism measures worthless, the Obama Administration is working to secure the “resettling” of some 30,000 Syrian Islamists within the United States. Syria’s civil war has displaced thousands of people. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that thousands of Syrians need new countries of residence, and the International Rescue Committee is making sure this happens. With this, the IRC made the audacious statement through Vice President for Public Policy Sharon Waxman, calling on the “US and other countries to open their doors to vulnerable Syrian refugees and notes that resettlement must be an integral part of the humanitarian response.” Forget all counter-terrorism measures that are put into place for the protection of this country. The Muslim Obama Administration will make sure that Syrian Islamists have a new home in America, that no jihadi will be turned away.
The gates of Hell have been opened, thanks to President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and radical progressives across the country. In successfully working to end “racial” profiling, albeit Muslim profiling, the next move is to secure the “settlement” of 30,000 Syrian Islamists within the United States. It won’t be done all at once, but if Obama and his minions of Muslim lovers have there way, at least 30,000 Islamists, and many more, will be calling America their home. For a President that has so openly supported Al-Qaeda in Syria recently, this is their open invitation to make a permanent home in the U.S., all under the guise of a “humanitarian outreach.”
The Wall Street Journal article, which was published on January 10, 2014 and written by Miriam Jordan reports:
U.S. plans to resettle thousands of Syrians displaced by their country’s civil war could hinge on those refugees receiving exemptions from laws aimed at preventing terrorists from entering the country.
A U.S. official stated publicly for the first time this week that some of the 30,000 especially vulnerable Syrians the United Nations hopes to resettle by the end of 2014 will be referred to the U.S. for resettlement.
More than two million Syrians have fled their country since the war erupted in 2011, creating the worst refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide, advocates say. About 20 countries, mostly in Europe, have agreed to take 18,000 Syrians, according to United Nations High Commission for Refugees, or UNHCR, the agency charged with referrals.
The U.S. has not set a specific target for how many refugees it will resettle. But at a Senate hearing Tuesday, State Department Assistant Secretary Anne Richard said, “We expect to accept referrals for several thousand Syrian refugees in 2014.”
Post-9/11 immigration laws designed to keep out terrorists have had the unintended consequence of ensnaring some innocent people. For example, some of the provisions treat providing food or services to rebels—even those supported by the U.S.—as “material support” to terrorism.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), a key proponent of refugee resettlement, said the “overly broad” provisions would prevent a Syrian who gave a cigarette or a sandwich to a Free Syrian Army soldier from coming to the U.S. as a refugee.
al-qaedasyriaIf the idea of an influx of Syrian Islamists doesn’t send the American public into a full scale uproar, nothing will. This is an open Al-Qaeda immigration invitation. The great myth of the Left is that these people are simply “refugees,” and pose no harm. They are Syrian Islamists and they will wage jihad. Interestingly, nothing is ever brought up about the plight of Syrian Christians. All anyone is worried about are the lethal Islamists.
Jordan went on to add:
Molly Groom, acting deputy secretary for the Office of Immigration and Border Security at the Department of Homeland Security, acknowledged that “broad definitions” of terrorist activity under U.S. law were “often a hurdle to resettling otherwise eligible refugees who pose no security threat.” She said agencies were consulting to develop exemptions for the Syrians.
In recent years, DHS and the State and Justice Departments have exercised their authority to offer exemptions to some applicants, such as ethnic Burmese who provided food to guerrillas, and Iraqis who paid ransoms to groups for the release of kidnapped family members.
Anwen Hughes, a lawyer at Human Rights First who has studied the laws’ impact, said that the government has been “reactive, slow,” about giving exemptions up to now, and urged a swifter process, given the magnitude of the Syrian crisis.
The advocacy group has called on the U.S. to work to resettle 15,000 Syrians a year. The International Rescue Committee, another advocacy organization, is pressing the U.S. to set a goal of 12,000 Syrian refugees this year.
The U.S. leads the world in refugee resettlement. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the U.S. received 70,000 refugees from 65 countries, including more than 19,000 from Iraq. In that year, more than 1,340 Syrians already in the U.S. applied for asylum.
The Huffington Post published an op-ed by Sharon Waxman, the Vice President of the International Rescue Committee, entitled “Open The Door To Syrian Refugees.”
Long-term resettlement will require an internationally coordinated strategy. Countries bordering Syria have been opening their doors for nearly three years and providing safe haven. They deserve enormous praise — and assistance — to support their efforts. But they cannot do it alone. Countries outside the region need to help by opening their borders to vulnerable Syrians.
In the short term, the international community must quickly make plans to resettle the 30,000 Syrian refugees proposed by the UN refugee agency. This represents merely 1.27 percent of the refugees who have so far fled Syria. The 20 countries around the world that together have committed to provide refuge to 18,300 vulnerable Syrians should be applauded. But they need to do far more to begin to meet the enormous and growing need. Three years into the civil war, resettlement must be a robust component of a multinational response.
The U.S.has expressed an interest in welcoming Syrian refugees for resettlement in 2014, but unlike other countries, it has not specified how many refugees it will seek to admit. The U.S. must delineate a clear policy. Consistent with its long-standing tradition of providing refuge for those fleeing persecution, the United States should announce its intention to resettle 12,000 Syrian refugees this year to address UNHCR’s call to resettle a total of 30,000 and more in future years.
Surely at some point the “transparent” Obama Administration was going to make Americans aware of the fact that there was going to be a “minor” influx of 30,000 jihadists into the United States. This is an outrage, but with out-of-control progressives calling this a “humanitarian mission” instead of what it really is, mass Syrian Islamic jihadist immigration, the truth gets lost among the lies. The only for sure outcome of this is deadly jihad, enough to cripple this already near capsized nation.
Read more at http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/01/obama-to-pave-way-for-30000-syrian-islamists-to-resettle-in-america/#MtdPEmfxwtFYAI0R.99
The only parties whose lot is improved by the Obama administration’s Middle East policies are Iran, the PLO and the Muslim Brotherhood.
To hear it from the White House, and from Israel’s leftist media, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon is a major liability. As half the planet now knows, Ya’alon is harshly critical of US Secretary of State John Kerry’s persistent efforts to force Israel to surrender its land and ability to defend itself to the PLO.
In a private conversation that Ya’alon did not expect to be made public, he criticized Kerry’s so-called security plan that offers Israel advanced technology in exchange for PLO control over its eastern border. Ya’alon also rejected the notion that the PLO is interested in making peace. And he stated the inconvenient fact that PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas is only in power because Israel has security control over Judea and Samaria.
Ya’alon also said, again in a private conversation, that Kerry’s razor-sharp focus on Israel and the PLO owes to an “incomprehensible obsession,” and that by neurotically pushing for a deal that has no chance of being concluded or achieving peace, Kerry is exhibiting “messianic” character traits.
Ya’alon’s private statements about Kerry were no harsher than public statements that the Saudis have made regarding the Obama administration’s regional policies. Last November, journalist Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed Saudi Prince Alaweed bin Talal. According to Goldberg, the Saudi royal attacked US President Barack Obama “with a directness that would make Benjamin Netanyahu blush.”
Among other things, Alaweed said, “There’s no confidence in the Obama administration doing the right thing with Iran. We’re really concerned – Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Middle Eastern countries about this.”
Alaweed questioned Obama’s motives in negotiating with Iran, saying the president is “wounded,” and appeasing Iran in order to win back the support of Democratic lawmakers who oppose Obamacare. In his words, “Thirty-nine members of his own party in the House have already moved away from him on Obamacare. That’s scary for him.”
It is hard to think of harsher criticism than Alaweed’s. And yet, the administration had nothing to say about it. Neither he, nor his fellow Saudi prince Bandar Bin Sultan al-Saud, the Saudi intelligence chief who said last month that he is scaling back intelligence cooperation with the US, was personally attacked by the administration.
No umbrage was taken at their statements.
And again, their public statements were no less harsh than what Ya’alon said in a private conversation about Kerry.
Neither the Israeli people, nor the US’s traditional Sunni Arab allies support Obama’s policies in the region. They believe Obama’s policies are dangerous for them, and antithetical to US interests.
Indeed, Ya’alon’s assessments of the administration are not only in line with regional opinion, the vast majority of Israelis share his views.
According to a poll published last week by Makor Rishon, 80 percent of Israelis think that Kerry’s peace plan has no chance of bringing peace. Seventy-three percent oppose his security plan for the Jordan Valley. And 53% object to the entire premise of his talks – that Israel should surrender almost all of Judea and Samaria to the PLO.
Moreover, the average man on the Israeli street sees the destruction wreaked by the Obama administration’s policy throughout the Middle East, and he cannot figure out what Kerry wants with us.
Syria is a humanitarian and geopolitical nightmare with global implications.
Rather than do everything possible to strengthen moderate forces in Syria, like the Kurds, and cultivate, train and arm regime opponents who can fight both the Assad regime and al-Qaida rebels, Kerry has devoted himself to demanding that Israel release more Palestinian terrorist murderers from prison.
Rather than protect Lebanon from the predations of Iran and Syria to ensure its independence, Kerry is holding marathon meetings with Netanyahu to try to coerce him into helping the PLO build another Jew-free terrorist state in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.
Rather than try to blunt the growing power of Hezbollah – Iran’s terrorist army – in Syria, the US’s policy is inviting Iran, the party most responsible for the war, to join the phony peacemakers club at Geneva.
As for the rest of the region, from Tunisia to Bahrain, from Egypt and Libya to Iraq, and Yemen, Kerry and the Obama administration as a whole are content to watch on the sidelines as al-Qaida reemerges as a significant force, and as Iran undermines stability in country after country.
Then of course, there is Iran itself, and its nuclear weapons program.
After the six-party nuclear deal with Iran was concluded on Monday, Iran’s leaders declared victory over the US. They boasted that the most dangerous components of their nuclear weapons program are unaffected by the deal they just concluded with the Americans. They laid a wreath on the grave of Hezbollah arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, who masterminded the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 243 US servicemen. And they forced Lebanon’s Sunnis to accept a Hezbollah-dominated government.
For its part, the Obama administration continues to insist that the greatest threat to peace is the US Congress, because its members wish to pass an additional sanctions bill against Iran that would only come into force in a year if the Iranians do not abide by the agreement.
The only parties whose lot is improved by the Obama administration’s Middle East policies are Iran, the PLO and the Muslim Brotherhood. But none of them will praise those policies, because they all hold the US in contempt.
This is why the Palestinian leadership continues to incite against Israel and reject the Jewish state even as the US is acting as their surrogate in talks with Israel.
This is why the Iranians mock the US, even though the White House just cleared the way for Iran to develop nuclear weapons, and develop its economy and has allowed it to take over Iraq and Lebanon, and defend its puppet regime in Syria.
This is why the Muslim Brotherhood condemns the US even as the Obama administration upended the US alliance with Egypt in order to support the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Obama administration has responded to these demonstrations of contempt and bad faith with extreme reticence. Either it issues written, general condemnations, or it claims, as in the case of Palestinian incitement, that it doesn’t believe it is productive to publicly criticize the Palestinians.
Given this behavior, the Obama administration’s response to Yediot Aharonot’s publication of Ya’alon’s private statements can be fairly describe as apoplectic. It was also mean-spirited.
Shortly after Yediot published his private remarks, the administration launched a full-bore public attack on Ya’alon, and by implication, the government. As White House spokesman Jay Carney put it, “The remarks of the Israeli defense minister, if accurate, are offensive and inappropriate, especially in light of everything that the United States is doing to support Israel’s security needs.”
In other words, the Obama administration just accused Israel of ingratitude.
But there is nothing ungrateful about Israel’s treatment of the US.
Americans are getting the same message from allies throughout the Middle East. Under Obama, America’s regional policies are so counterproductive that the US has come to be seen as the foreign policy equivalent of a drunk driver.
As the US’s strongest ally, and also as a country that has depended for decades on US support, Israel is a passenger in the back seat of the car. On the one hand, we are happy for the ride. On the other hand, the administration’s driving is endangering our survival.
It is only because our leaders are grateful to the US for its support that the government is going along with Kerry’s ridiculous peace-processing.
More important, what is gratitude, exactly? Is it shutting up and watching your closest friend drive both of you over a cliff? Of course not.
To be a good ally – and a grateful one – requires you to warn your ally when his actions are ill-advised and dangerous. And that is precisely what Israel has done. Israel’s behavior is the definition of proper behavior.
Aside from being dead wrong, the anti-Semitic undertones of the administration’s castigation of the Jewish state as ungrateful are hard to miss.
State Department spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki lashed out at Ya’alon saying, “Secretary Kerry and his team, including General John Allen, have been working day and night to try and promote a secure peace for Israel, because of the secretary’s deep concern for Israel’s future.”
These words, and nearly identical ones intoned by Carney, play into the anti-Jewish stereotype according to which Jews are quarrelsome but hapless wretches.
The flipside of this stereotype is the all-powerful Jewish conspiracy that manipulates non-Jews into doing its dirty work. That slur reverberated strongly in the administration’s condemnations of Netanyahu and US Jewish groups for advocating the passage of additional sanctions against Iran.
In both cases, the White House’s message is the same. Unlike other groups critical of US policies, Israel and supporters of the Jewish state have no right to speak.
Presumably the administration’s resort to these anti-Jewish tropes is inadvertent, but the fact that they have been used repeatedly is deeply disconcerting, and bespeaks, at a minimum, alarming insensitivity.
Under tremendous pressure from the administration, Ya’alon apologized for his leaked remarks and Netanyahu took to the Knesset podium to praise Israel’s ties to the US and thank the US for its support for Israel.
But this was not enough for the Obama administration.
They want Netanyahu disavow Ya’alon’s thoughts and withdraw the defense minister from the negotiations.
According to AFP, a senior State Department official said, “We expect the prime minister to put this right by expressing publicly his disagreement with the statements against Secretary Kerry, the negotiations with the Palestinians and Kerry’s commitment to Israel’s security.”
For his part, Kerry said he will only speak to Israeli leaders who agree with him. In his words, “I will work with the willing participants who are committed to peace and to this process.”
In other words, the Obama administration is using Ya’alon’s private remarks, leaked by an unidentified source to a newspaper with an anti-Netanyahu editorial agenda, as a means to neutralize the most powerful voice opposing Kerry’s obsessive, messianic behavior in the Israeli government. They want to use American umbrage at the tone of Ya’alon’s private statements to upend Israeli policy and force Israel to embrace the substance of the Obama administration’s delusional and destructive actions. And to advance this goal, they are using anti-Semitic signals to castigate Israel and deny it the right to speak on its own behalf.
Israelis love America. And for that reason, it is compelled to do what anyone strapped into the back seat of a car driven by a drunk would do: try to convince him to stop driving. As a grateful ally of the United States, Israel should publicly tell the Obama administration that what Ya’alon said in private is the truth.
