Obama's attitudes towards Israel and the Middle East

Obama on his own Middle East record: Zero Percent Success by Prof. Barry Rubin in PJ Media Oct 10, 2012
  
.... The (Obama Administration's) "peace process" policy has failed.  And this administration has done more to undermine Israel’s security than all the previous presidencies put together. The problems include: pushing Israel to ease the pressure on Hamas in the Gaza Strip; helping a genocide-oriented anti-Israel government into power in Egypt; same thing in Syria; making America’s leading ally in the region a Turkish regime that was viciously anti-Israel; and more.  Read more.
 

Romney's vs. Obama's attitudes on Israel by Daniel Pipes in Israel Hayom Sept 4, 2012

"President [Barack] Obama has thrown allies like Israel under the bus," Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for president, said in his high-profile speech accepting his party's nomination last week, repeating a slang phrase for sacrificing a friend for selfish reasons that he has used before, notably in May 2011 and January this year.

This criticism of Obama fits a persistent Republican critique. Several other recent presidential candidates have also used or endorsed the same "bus" formulation to describe Obama’s attitude to Israel: Herman Cain in May 2011, Rick Perry in September 2011, Newt Gingrich in January 2012, and Rick Santorum in February 2012.

These Republican attacks on Obama's relations with Israel have several important implications for U.S. foreign policy. First, out of the many Middle East-related issues, Israel, and Israel alone, retains a permanent role in U.S. electoral politics, influencing how a significant numbers of voters — not just Jews but also Arabs, Muslims, Evangelical Christians, conservatives and liberals — vote for president.
Read more

DemoCast.TV shows commentary on the course of the Obama Administration's Middle East policies and its impact on the America-Israel relationship.



US Jewry’s cherished values by CAROLINE B. GLICK in The Jerusalem Post  10/11/2012

For 70% of American Jews, party loyalty trumps all of their conceivable rational interests.

Obama’s gutting of Medicare to pay for Obamacare has harmed the medical choices for older Jewish Americans.

His war on tax deductions for charitable contributions has placed synagogues, Jewish schools and nursing homes in financial jeopardy.

So with economics ruled out as a reason to support Obama we are left with American-Jewish values.

But is Obama really advancing those values? What are those values anyway?  Read more

Video chronicle of commentary on US-Israel relations during the Obama Administration from JooTube.TV:



Ms. Glick concludes: "The most disturbing aspect of the surveys of American Jewish voters is not that they are willing to vote for the most hostile US president Israel has ever experienced in order to remain true to their party. The most disturbing aspect of the American Jewish community’s devotion to Obama and the Democrats is that it indicates that the vast majority of American Jews have abandoned their faculties for independent thought and judgment in favor of conformism and slavish partisanship. They have rendered themselves unreachable."

War games: Israel attacks Iran

Israel Matzav: War games: Israel attacks Iran

Makor Rishon, a right-wing newspaper which is mostly available online outside Judea and Samaria, is running a war games scenario in Thursday's editions. They have some pretty impressive participants. The premise is that the attack will take place on October 15-16, and that Obama will protest and then go silent. The scenarios include an attack downing an Israeli civilian jet liner, Israel deciding not to attack Lebanon or Gaza, despite being bombarded with missiles by Hezbullah, but the nuclear facilities are... well, all I can tell you is that there are pictures of them burning on CNN.
Let's go to the videotape, which is - unfortunately for many of you - mostly in Hebrew.

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) defended the Iraq War, opposed Islamism and anti-Semitism

Christopher Hitchens, author and public intellectual, died Friday, 15 December of pneumonia resulting from esophageal cancer in Houston, Texas.

Mr. Hitchens lived one day beyond the ceremony to end the Iraq war. He supported the liberating the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples from Saddam Hussein.

From Wikipedia:

Christopher Hitchens argued the case for the Iraq War in a 2003 collection of essays entitled A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, and he has held numerous public debates on the topic with George Galloway and Scott Ritter. Though he admits to the numerous failures of the war, and its high civilian casualties, he sticks to the position that deposing Saddam Hussein was a long-overdue responsibility of the United States, after decades of poor policy, and that holding free elections in Iraq has been a success not to be scoffed at. He argues that a continued fight in Iraq against insurgents, whether they be former Saddam loyalists or Islamic extremists, is a fight worth having, and that those insurgents, not American forces, should be the ones taking the brunt of the blame for a slow reconstruction and high civilian casualties.

An updated summary of his views on Iraq and the war on terror can be found in his memoirs Hitch 22. . . .

British politician George Galloway, founder of the socialist Respect Party, on his way to testify in front of a United States Senate sub-committee investigating the scandals in the U.N. Oil-for-Food programme, called Hitchens a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay", to which Hitchens quickly replied, "only some of which is true." Later, in a column for Slate promoting his debate with Galloway which was to take place on 14 September 2005, he elaborated on his prior response: "He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a 'popinjay' (true enough, since the word's original Webster's definition is a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest)."

Journalist Eli Lake eulogizes Mr. Hitchens in the Daily Beast:

Mr. Hitchens never stopped saying and writing that the (Iraq) war was just and that American arms were needed to end the regime of Saddam Hussein. But Christopher did not arrive at this position simply because his old colleagues at the Nation Magazine did not. He came to support the Iraq war after befriending many Iraqis, and particularly Kurds, who told him about the horrors of that dictatorship. For Christopher, supporting the war was an expression of his anti-totalitarianism. He would later say that the war pitted the anti-totalitarian left against the anti-imperialist left.

Eyewitness video of brutal ambush of Israeli troops at sea

Ron Ben Yishai recounts bloody clash aboard Gaza-bound vessel: The lacking crowd-dispersal means, the brutal violence of 'peace activists,' and the attempt to bring down an IDF helicopter 


"Our Navy commandos fell right into the hands of the Gaza mission members. A few minutes before thetakeover attempt aboard the Marmara got underway, the operation commander was told that 20 people were waiting on the deck where a helicopter was to deploy the first team of the elite Flotilla 13 unit. The original plan was to disembark on the top deck, and from there rush to the vessel's bridge and order the Marmara's captain to stop.


Officials estimated that passengers will show slight resistance, and possibly minor violence; for that reason, the operation's commander decided to bring the helicopter directly above the top deck. The first rope that soldiers used in order to descend down to the ship was wrested away by activists, most of them Turks, and tied to an antenna with the hopes of bringing the chopper down. However, Flotilla 13 fighters decided to carry on.

Navy commandoes slid down to the vessel one by one, yet then the unexpected occurred: The passengers that awaited them on the deck pulled out bats, clubs, and slingshots with glass marbles, assaulting each soldier as he disembarked. The fighters were nabbed one by one and were beaten up badly, yet they attempted to fight back.

However, to their misfortune, they were only equipped with paintball rifles used to disperse minor protests, such as the ones held in Bilin. The paintballs obviously made no impression on the activists, who kept on beating the troops up and even attempted to wrest away their weapons.

One soldier who came to the aid of a comrade was captured by the rioters and sustained severe blows. The commandoes were equipped with handguns but were told they should only use them in the face of life-threatening situations. When they came down from the chopper, they kept on shouting to each other "don't shoot, don't shoot," even though they sustained numerous blows.

'I saw the tip of a rifle'

The Navy commandoes were prepared to mostly encounter political activists seeking to hold a protest, rather than trained street fighters. The soldiers were told they were to verbally convince activists who offer resistance to give up, and only then use paintballs. They were permitted to use their handguns only under extreme circumstances.

The planned rush towards the vessel's bridge became impossible, even when a second chopper was brought in with another crew of soldiers. "Throw stun grenades," shouted Flotilla 13's commander who monitored the operation. The Navy chief was not too far, on board a speedboat belonging to Flotilla 13, along with forces who attempted to climb into the back of the ship.

The forces hurled stun grenades, yet the rioters on the top deck, whose number swelled up to 30 by that time, kept on beating up about 30 commandoes who kept gliding their way one by one from the helicopter. At one point, the attackers nabbed one commando, wrested away his handgun, and threw him down from the top deck to the lower deck, 30 feet below. The soldier sustained a serious head wound and lost his consciousness.

Only after this injury did Flotilla 13 troops ask for permission to use live fire. The commander approved it: You can go ahead and fire. The soldiers pulled out their handguns and started shooting at the rioters' legs, a move that ultimately neutralized them. Meanwhile, the rioters started to fire back at the commandoes.

"I saw the tip of a rifle sticking out of the stairwell," one commando said. "He fired at us and we fired back. We didn't see if we hit him. We looked for him later but couldn't find him." Two soldiers sustained gunshot wounds to their knee and stomach after rioters apparently fired at them using guns wrested away from troops.

2 errors

During the commotion, another commando was stabbed with a knife. In a later search aboard the Marmara, soldiers found caches of bats, clubs, knives, and slingshots used by the rioters ahead of the IDF takeover. It appeared the activists were well prepared for a fight.

Some passengers on the ship stood at the back and pounded the soldiers' hands as they attempted to climb on board. Only after a 30-minute shootout and brutal assaults using clubs and knifes did commandoes manage to reach the bridge and take over the Marmara.

It appears that the error in planning the operation was the estimate that passengers were indeed political activists and members of humanitarian groups who seek a political provocation, but would not resort to brutal violence. The soldiers thought they will encounter Bilin-style violence; instead, they got Bangkok. The forces that disembarked from the helicopters were few; just dozens of troops – not enough to contend with the large group awaiting them.

The second error was that commanders did not address seriously enough the fact that a group of men were expecting the soldiers on the top deck. Had they addressed this more seriously, they may have hurled tear-gas grenades and smoke grenades from the helicopter to create a screen that would have enabled them to carry out their mission, without the fighters falling right into the hands of the rioters, who severely assaulted them."  (YNet) 

Israel election campaign: how did Israelis prioritize existential threats of the global jihad against the world? Watch coverage from Israeli television

How did Israelis prioritize the importance of security vs domestic social issues?
Watch Israel's national Network 2 TV coverage of Israeli elections for a new Knesset (Parliament) here.

The Republican Convention's withheld biography of American Vice Presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin

At the Republican National Convention, Mayor Rudy Giulliani's introduction of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin ran over-time. The RNC prepared a biography video, which to keep ahead of TV schedule, they pre-empted showing. This enabled her to complete her speech- which was viewed by 37.2 million American households. Here (courtesy of Stop the ACLU) is 'The Sarah Palin video biography'.

How viewers watched Gov. Palin's subsequent speech: MSNBC.com reports: "Fox News Channel led the way Wednesday, with 9.2 million people watching Palin’s speech on the cable channel. It was the third-largest audience in its history, behind only President Bush’s speech on Iraq in March 2003 and a Bush-Kerry presidential debate in 2004.

For each night of the GOP convention so far, Fox’s audience has been bigger than any of the other cable or broadcast networks. That duplicates a feat accomplished at the 2004 Republican convention for Fox, the first time a cable network had outdrawn broadcasters for a major news event.

NBC had 7.7 million viewers for Palin’s speech, followed in order by CNN, ABC, CBS and MSNBC, Nielsen said.

Israel's Struggle for Peace Among Muslim Neighbors

We commemorate the second anniversary of Israel sacrificing Jewish civilization in Gaza towards establishing Judenrein (without Jewish people) Palestinian autonomy alongside Israel.

View a history of Israel's miraculous prevailing over perpetual Muslim rejection of and aggression to destroy the autonomous state of Israel. This Arab-Israeli-perspectived documentary, "Israel - 50 Years of War" was broadcast in 1999 on PBS and bears watching by anyone interested in learning both sides of the conflict.



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