September 21, 2012

Charles Krauthammer: Collapse of the Cairo Doctrine - The Washington Post

Charles Krauthammer: Collapse of the Cairo Doctrine - The Washington Post


In the week following 9/11/12 something big happened: the collapse of the Cairo Doctrine, the centerpiece of President Obama’s foreign policy. It was to reset the very course of post-9/11 America, creating, after the (allegedly) brutal depredations of the Bush years, a profound rapprochement with the Islamic world.
Never lacking ambition or self-regard, Obama promised in Cairo, June 4, 2009, “a new beginning” offering Muslims “mutual respect,” unsubtly implying previous disrespect. Curious, as over the previous 20 years, America had six times committed its military forces on behalf of oppressed Muslims, three times for reasons of pure humanitarianism (Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo), where no U.S. interests were at stake.
Charles Krauthammer
Krauthammer writes a politics column that runs on Fridays.
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But no matter. Obama had come to remonstrate and restrain the hyperpower that, by his telling, had lost its way after 9/11, creating Guantanamo, practicing torture, imposing its will with arrogance and presumption.
First, he would cleanse by confession. Then he would heal. Why, given the unique sensitivities of his background — “my sister is half-Indonesian,” he proudly told an interviewer in 2007, amplifying on his exquisite appreciation of Islam — his very election would revolutionize relations.
And his policies of accommodation and concession would consolidate the gains: an outstretched hand to Iran’s mullahs, a first-time presidential admission of the U.S. role in a 1953 coup, a studied and stunning turning away from the Green Revolution; withdrawal from Iraq with no residual presence or influence; a fixed timetable for leaving Afghanistan; returning our ambassador to Damascus (with kind words for Bashar al-Assad — “a reformer,” suggested the secretary of state); deliberately creating distance between the United States and Israel.
These measures would raise our standing in the region, restore affection and respect for the United States and elicit new cooperation from Muslim lands.
It’s now three years since the Cairo speech. Look around. The Islamic world is convulsed with an explosion of anti-Americanism. From Tunisia to Lebanon, American schools, businesses anddiplomatic facilities set ablaze. A U.S. ambassador and three others murdered in Benghazi. The black flag of Salafism, of which al-Qaeda is a prominent element, raised over our embassies in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Sudan.
The administration, staggered and confused,blames it all on a 14-minute trailer for a film no one has seen and may not even exist.
What else can it say? Admit that its doctrinal premises were supremely naive and its policies deeply corrosive to American influence?
Religious provocations are endless. (Ask Salman Rushdie.) Resentment about the five-century decline of the Islamic world is a constant. What’s new — the crucial variable — is the unmistakable sound of a superpower in retreat. Ever since Henry Kissinger flipped Egypt from the Soviet to the American camp in the early 1970s, the United States had dominated the region. No longer.
“It’s time,” declared Obama to wild applause of his convention, “to do some nation-building right here at home.” He’d already announced a strategic pivot from the Middle East to the Pacific. Made possible because “the tide of war is receding.”
Nonsense. From the massacres in Nigeria to the charnel house that is Syria, violence has, if anything, increased. What is receding is Obama’s America.
It’s as axiomatic in statecraft as in physics: Nature abhors a vacuum. Islamists rush in to fill the space and declare their ascendancy. America’s friends are bereft, confused, paralyzed.
Islamists rise across North Africa from Mali to Egypt. Iran repeatedly defies U.S. demands on nuclear enrichment, then, as a measure of its contempt for what America thinks, openly admits that its Revolutionary Guards are deployed in Syria. Russia, after arming Assad, warns America to stay out, while the secretary of state delivers vapid lectures about Assad “meeting” his international “obligations.” The Gulf states beg America to act on Iran; Obama strains mightily to restrain . . . Israel.
Sovereign U.S. territory is breached and U.S. interests are burned. And what is the official response? One administration denunciation after another — of a movie trailer! A request to Google to “review” the trailer’s presence on YouTube. And a sheriff’s deputies’ midnight “voluntary interview” with the suspected filmmaker. This in the land of the First Amendment.
What else can Obama do? At their convention, Democrats endlessly congratulatedthemselves on their one foreign policy success: killing Osama bin Laden. A week later, the Salafist flag flies over four American embassies, even as the mob chants, “Obama, Obama, there are still a billion Osamas.”
A foreign policy in epic collapse. And, by the way, Vladimir Putin just expelled the U.S. Agency for International Development from Russia. Another thank you from another recipient of another grand Obama “reset.”

September 16, 2012

In Prosecutors, Debt Collectors Find a Partner - NYTimes.com

In Prosecutors, Debt Collectors Find a Partner - NYTimes.com

Disgrace in Benghazi - National Review Online

Disgrace in Benghazi - National Review Online

So, on a highly symbolic date, mobs storm American diplomatic facilities and drag the corpse of a U.S. ambassador through the streets. Then the president flies to Vegas for a fundraiser. No, no, a novelist would say; that’s too pat, too neat in its symbolic contrast. Make it Cleveland, or Des Moines.

The president is surrounded by delirious fanbois and fangurls screaming “We love you,” too drunk on his celebrity to understand this is the first photo-op in the aftermath of a national humiliation. No, no, a filmmaker would say; too crass, too blunt. Make them sober, middle-aged midwesterners, shocked at first, but then quiet and respectful.

The president is too lazy and cocksure to have learned any prepared remarks or mastered the appropriate tone, notwithstanding that a government that spends more money than any government in the history of the planet has ever spent can surely provide him with both a speechwriting team and a quiet corner on his private wide-bodied jet to consider what might be fitting for the occasion. So instead he sloughs off the words, bloodless and unfelt: “And obviously our hearts are broken . . . ” Yeah, it’s totally obvious.

And he’s even more drunk on his celebrity than the fanbois, so in his slapdashery he winds up comparing the sacrifice of a diplomat lynched by a pack of savages with the enthusiasm of his own campaign bobbysoxers. No, no, says the Broadway director; that’s too crude, too ham-fisted. How about the crowd is cheering and distracted, but he’s the president, he understands the gravity of the hour, and he’s the greatest orator of his generation, so he’s thought about what he’s going to say, and it takes a few moments but his words are so moving that they still the cheers of the fanbois, and at the end there’s complete silence and a few muffled sobs, and even in party-town they understand the sacrifice and loss of their compatriots on the other side of the world.

But no, that would be an utterly fantastical America. In the real America, the president is too busy to attend the security briefing on the morning after a national debacle, but he does have time to do Letterman and appear on a hip-hop radio show hosted by “The Pimp with a Limp.” In the real State Department, the U.S. embassy in Cairo is guarded by Marines with no ammunition, but they do enjoy the soft-power muscle of a Foreign Service officer, one Lloyd Schwartz, tweeting frenziedly into cyberspace (including a whole chain directed at my own Twitter handle, for some reason) about how America deplores insensitive people who are so insensitively insensitive that they don’t respectfully respect all religions equally respectfully and sensitively, even as the raging mob is pouring through the gates.

When it comes to a flailing, blundering superpower, I am generally wary of ascribing to malevolence what is more often sheer stupidity and incompetence. For example, we’re told that, because the consulate in Benghazi was designated as an “interim facility,” it did not warrant the level of security and protection that, say, an embassy in Scandinavia would have. This seems all too plausible — that security decisions are made not by individual human judgment but according to whichever rule-book sub-clause at the Federal Agency of Bureaucratic Facilities Regulation it happens to fall under. However, the very next day the embassy in Yemen, which is a permanent facility, was also overrun, as was the embassy in Tunisia the day after. Look, these are tough crowds, as the president might say at Caesar’s Palace. But we spend more money on these joints than anybody else, and they’re as easy to overrun as the Belgian consulate.

As I say, I’m inclined to be generous, and put some of this down to the natural torpor and ineptitude of government. But Hillary Clinton and General Martin Dempsey are guilty of something worse, in the secretary of state’s weirdly obsessive remarks about an obscure film supposedly disrespectful of Mohammed and the chairman of the joint chiefs’ telephone call to a private citizen asking him if he could please ease up on the old Islamophobia.

Forget the free-speech arguments. In this case, as Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher’s teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: That’s not a spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a “safe house,” and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for ten hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.

For whatever reason, Secretary Clinton chose to double down on misleading the American people. “Libyans carried Chris’s body to the hospital,” said Mrs. Clinton. That’s one way of putting it. The photographs at the Arab TV network al-Mayadeen show Chris Stevens’s body being dragged through the streets, while the locals take souvenir photographs on their cell phones. A man in a red striped shirt photographs the dead-eyed ambassador from above; another immediately behind his head moves the splayed arm and holds his cell-phone camera an inch from the ambassador’s nose. Some years ago, I had occasion to assist in moving the body of a dead man: We did not stop to take photographs en route. Even allowing for cultural differences, this looks less like “carrying Chris’s body to the hospital” and more like barbarians gleefully feasting on the spoils of savagery.

In a rare appearance on a non-showbiz outlet, President Obama, winging it on Telemundo, told his host that Egypt was neither an ally nor an enemy. I can understand why it can be difficult to figure out, but here’s an easy way to tell: Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, said some years ago that America risked being seen as harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend. At the Benghazi consulate, the looters stole “sensitive” papers revealing the names of Libyans who’ve cooperated with the United States. Oh, well. As the president would say, obviously our hearts are with you.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the local doctor who fingered bin Laden to the Americans sits in jail. In other words, while America’s clod vice president staggers around pimping limply that only Obama had the guts to take the toughest decision anyone’s ever had to take, the poor schlub who actually did have the guts, who actually took the tough decision in a part of the world where taking tough decisions can get you killed, languishes in a cell because Washington would not lift a finger to help him.

Like I said, no novelist would contrast Chris Stevens on the streets of Benghazi and Barack Obama on stage in Vegas. Too crude, too telling, too devastating.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

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September 07, 2012

Obama’s War on Jewish Jerusalem | FrontPage Magazine

Obama’s War on Jewish Jerusalem | FrontPage Magazine


Obama’s War on Jewish Jerusalem
Posted By P. David Hornik On September 7, 2012 @ 12:45 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 4 Comments
On Wednesday we heard that Jerusalem (along with, no less significantly, the Palestinian “right of return” and Hamas) had been omitted from the Democratic Party’s platform for 2012. On Thursday we heard that Jerusalem had been reinstated—by means of the ludicrous voice vote shown in this already viral video, in which it is not at all clear that the ayes really have a two-thirds majority or even a majority at all.
Whether or not the original omission was President Obama’s doing, it was certainly consistent with the content of another much-viewed video from slightly over a month ago, in which White House spokesman Jay Carney, by refusing to say what city the White House considers the capital of Israel, made perfectly clear that the city is not Jerusalem. It is also consistent with Obama’s failure to visit Israel since being president—which would entail coming to Jerusalem in pomp and splendor and at least tacitly acknowledging it as the capital, a message the president does not want to convey to the surrounding countries.
Back in June 2008, candidate Obama, in a speech to AIPAC, surprised everyone by declaring that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” That drew a sharp rebuff from Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas among others. And one day after his AIPAC statement Obama backtracked, telling CNN: “Well, obviously, it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations.”
If that at least sounded like neutrality, it quickly got worse when candidate Obama became President Obama. In his Cairo speech in June 2009, in which he spent several paragraphs vilifying Israeli communities over the 1967 line to a largely Islamic-extremist audience, Obama said:
All of us have a responsibility to work for the day…when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.
If that too may have sounded like a kind of neutrality, it actually pointedly excluded any reference to the political status of Jerusalem or even part of Jerusalem—in the present or the future—as Israel’s capital. It came, in other words, from the same territory as the Carney press conference and the platform omission; except that it was delivered to an audience all too accepting of the message that—whatever Israel may say—Jerusalem currently has no established political status at all.
It was, of course, nine months later, in March 2010, that all hell broke loose when, during a visit to Jerusalem by Vice-President Joseph Biden, a zoning board announced plans to build apartments for Jews in Ramat Shlomo, an already-existing neighborhood of 20,000 in the part of Jerusalem that was under illegal Jordanian rule from 1949 to 1967. “I condemn,” stormed Biden, “the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in east Jerusalem.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for her part, called the zoning board’s announcement “an insult to the United States” and telephoned Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to excoriate him over the transgression for 45 minutes.
Two weeks later Obama himself got directly into the act. When Netanyahu came to the White House in an effort to calm the winds, he found himself snubbed by Obama in what may have been the most insolent treatment ever meted out by a U.S. president to a visiting head of government.
The next November in Jakarta, asked at a press conference about approvals that had been issued to build 1300 homes—for Jews, of course—in two Jerusalem neighborhoods, Obama replied: “This kind of activity is never helpful when it comes to peace negotiations.” As I noted at the time, Indonesia is a country that forbids Israeli citizens to visit, is one of 19 UN member states that do not recognize Israel as a state, and does not allow overflights by Israeli planes.
Then, in May 2011, Obama said in a speech to the State Department:
The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt…. We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps….
That, in a radical break with previous U.S. policy that left the issue of borders open, meant Israel had no right to any of the territory it had captured in 1967—not the strategically indispensable Jordan Valley and not the liberated parts of Jerusalem including the Old City, the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount—and would have to “swap” parts of pre-1967 Israel for what little it managed to keep.
The consternation was so great that a few days later Obama—in a speech to AIPAC—seemed to backtrack in the other direction, saying that “the parties themselves—Israelis and Palestinians—will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967.” By now, though, the president’s attitudes toward Jerusalem and Israel were clear enough.
The most recent events are, then, just the continuation of a pattern. The fact that there was so much difficulty voice-voting Jerusalem back into the Democratic platform—if it was actually done at all—reflects the fact that the problem goes beyond Obama himself and includes a sizable portion of the Democratic Party.

State Dept. Again Refuses to Name Capital of Israel! | The Weekly Standard

State Dept. Again Refuses to Name Capital of Israel! | The Weekly Standard

The State Department today again refused to name the capital of Israel, even after being questioned by the press and even after the Democratic party (President Obama's party) voted yesterday to add language to its platform stating that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.
Here's the remarkable exchange from today's press briefing, with reporters and press secretary Patrick Ventrell:  
QUESTION: On Israel?
MR. VENTRELL: Yeah.
QUESTION: Which city does the U.S. Government recognize as the capital in the – Israel?
MR. VENTRELL: Well, as you know, longstanding Administration policy, both in this Administration and in previous administrations across both parties, is that the status of Jerusalem is an issue that should be resolved in final status negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. So that’s longstanding Administration policy and continues to be so.
QUESTION: I mean, no city is recognized as a capital by the U.S. Government?
MR. VENTRELL: Again, I just stated our position, and it’s one we’ve said here many times before.
QUESTION: That means Jerusalem is not a part of Israel?
MR. VENTRELL: What it means is that the status of Jerusalem must be resolved in final status negotiations.
QUESTION: But you do have an Embassy in a city which is not Jerusalem.
MR. VENTRELL: Our Embassy is in Tel Aviv, and we have a Consulate General in Jerusalem.
QUESTION: Right. But I mean, if you have an Embassy, usually it’s in the capital; so therefore, it would appear that you believe that Tel Aviv is the capital.
MR. VENTRELL: What we believe is that the status of Jerusalem should be determined in final status negotiations between the two parties. And currently, our Embassy is in Tel Aviv.
QUESTION: Are there any other countries in the world where the U.S. doesn’t know what the capital is or won’t say what the capital of a country is?
QUESTION: What does the U.S. think the capital of Israel is? What do you --
MR. VENTRELL: As I’ve just said, we believe that the status of Jerusalem is an issue that should be resolved in final status --
QUESTION: I’m not asking you that question. I’m asking you what you think the capital is.
MR. VENTRELL: And my response is that Jerusalem is an issue that should be resolved in final status negotiations.
QUESTION: She didn’t ask about Jerusalem, though.
MR. VENTRELL: Look, this is something we’ve been through at this podium. Toria has been through it before. We’ve repeated it many times. You know that the position is. It hasn’t changed for decades.
QUESTION: Wait, I know that. And I don’t want to play the verbal game, I’m just very curious if you actually have a position about a capital of that country. And if you don’t, if – I just would like to hear you say you don’t.
MR. VENTRELL: Well, right now, Nicole --
QUESTION: Yes.
MR. VENTRELL: -- the situation is that we have an Embassy in Tel Aviv that represents our interests with the Government of Israel but that the issue of Jerusalem is one that has to be resolved between the two parties. That’s all I can say on this.
Anything else? Thank you.


September 06, 2012

The "Two Jerusalems" Myth - Op-Eds - Israel National News

The "Two Jerusalems" Myth - Op-Eds - Israel National News


Jerusalem has always been one city, the one the Jews are connected to through the millenia of history.


Palestinian Arabs have nurtured a myth that historically there were two Jerusalems - an Arab 'East Jerusalem' and a Jewish 'West Jerusalem.'
Jerusalem was never an Arab city; Jews have held a majority in Jerusalem since 1870, and 'east-west' is a geographic, not political designation. It is no different than claiming the Eastern shore of Maryland should be aseparate political entity from the rest of the state.
With an overall population of nearly 800,000 today, separating East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem is as viable and acceptable as the notion of splitting Berlin into two cities again, or separating East Harlem from the rest of Manhattan.
Arab claims to Jerusalem, a Jewish city by all definitions, reflect the "what's-mine-is-mine, what's-yours-is-mine" mentality underlying Palestinian Arab concepts of how to end the Arab-Israeli conflict. That concept is also expressed in the demand for the 'Right of Return,' not just in Jerusalem - Israel's capital, but 'inside the Green Line' as well.
Allthough uniting the city transformed all of Jerusalem into the largest city in Israel and a bustling metropolis, even moderate Palestinian Arab leaders reject the idea of a united city. Their minimal demand for “just East Jerusalem” really means the Jewish holy sites (including the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall), which Arabs have failed to protect, and the return of neighborhoods that house a significant percentage of Jerusalem’s present-day Jewish population.
Most of those neighborhoods in the city are built on rock-strewn empty land around the city that was in the public domain for the past 44 years.
Destroying History
Arabs deny the bond between Jews and Jerusalem; they sabotage and destroy archaeological evidence, even at the holiest place in Judaism – the Temple Mount.
Arabs continually denied the legitimacy of the Jewish people’s connection to Jerusalem.
Arafat and other Arab leaders insisted - Abbas did it just recently - that there never were Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount. They also claimed the Western Wall was really an Islamic holy site to which Muslims have historical rights. Putting rhetoric into action, Islamic clerics who manage the Temple Mount have demonstrated flagrant disrespect and contempt for the archaeological evidence of a Jewish presence.
Between 1999 and 2001, the Muslim Waqf removed and dumped more than 13,000 tons of what it termed rubble from the Mount and its substructure, including archaeological remains from the Jerusalem First and Second Temple periods, which Israelis found at dumping sites.
During construction of a new underground mosque in a subterranean hall believed to date back to the time of Herod, and the paving of an “open air” mosque elsewhere on the Temple Mount, the Waqf barred the Israel Antiquities Authority from supervising, or even observing, work. When archaeological finds from any period – Jewish or otherwise – are uncovered in the course of construction work, the Authority is mandated by law to supervise and observe everywhere in Israel – legislation that dates back to 1922 and documented in the international accord of the League of Nations – the “Mandate for Palestine.” 
Such gross disregard for the pre-Islamic Jewish heritage of Jerusalem – particularly on Judaism’s holiest historic site – is a far more insidious form of the same Islamic intolerance that motivated the Taliban to demolish two gigantic pre-Islamic statues of Buddha carved into a cliff in Afghanistan..
Arab attitudes have not changed since the words below were written over 100 years ago, when the name Palestine was used to denote the Jewish link to the land. :
THE JEWS IN JERUSALEM by Edwin S. Wallace, former U.S. Consul, Constantinople, Published by Cosmopolitan Magazine – 1898
(Excerpts)
“It is hardly exact to call Palestine “the Land,” or Jerusalem “the City, of the Jews” to-day. But Palestine is the land of Judaism and its chief city is beyond doubt the world’s capital of this particular form of religious belief.
“In this City of the Jews, where the Jewish population outnumbers all others three to one, the Jew has few rights that the Mohammedan or average Christian is bound to respect.”
(For more, see http://www.mythsandfacts.org/)