Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Israel undermined, by Obama and Kerry

NEITHER PRESIDENT OBAMA or his Secretary of State, John Kerry have any particular love for Israel or its prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is sad that at this moment in history of the United States, that there is such a pair governing their nation and managing the free world.
            
            Both Obama and Kerry have made off the cuff remarks about Israel and its prime minister; the comments were made off camera showing their personal rather than public attitude toward Israel and its prime minister.
           
            A piece written in the Wall Street Journal and reported in Israel Hayom[1]; reflects a growing consensus among many in the West: "Since coming to office, Obama administration policy toward Israel has alternated between animus and incompetence," The Wall Street Journal said. "No wonder the Israelis are upset. It's one thing to hear from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that he wants to wipe you off the map: At least it has the ring of honesty. It's quite another to hear from President Obama that he has your back, even as his administration tries to sell to the public a make-believe world in which Iran's nuclear intentions are potentially peaceful, sanctions are working and diplomacy hasn't failed after three and half years."         
            
            It was Kerry, who in April of this year, opined that Israel was becoming an apartheid state, thus trumpeting the familiar liberal mantra. He was urged by House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, to apologise to Israel; while Republican Senator Ted Cruz called for his resignation .
            
            By the end of the day Kerry was forced into an apology[2]: "I have been around long enough to also know the power of words to create a misimpression, even when unintentional, and if I could rewind the tape, I would have chosen a different word to describe my firm belief that the only way in the long term to have a Jewish state and two nations and two peoples living side by side in peace and security is through a two state solution.” You can find other such instances of such overwhelming support for that state of Israel, by these two on-line. The circumstantial evidence for them being pro-Palestine is overwhelming.
            
             Both president and secretary of state are liberals, and if there were an extreme variant of this timid beast, they would both fit into it. After leaving the navy in 1970, Kerry took to the streets with members of the anti-Vietnam war movement, and he typified that 60's generation of naive idealists; that to this day still harbour the same naivety within their breasts.

BUT LET US PAUSE FOR MOMENT. Let us put Obama's hostility to Israel to one side. Because Obama has also proved his own inherent liberal feebleness to act in another area of crucial foreign policy for the West.
            When Assad of Syria was said to have been using chemical weapons against his citizens; Obama said if this proved to be true then Assad would have crossed a red-line and he would act. In the end it was crossed and Obama twisted and turned from belligerency in the morning to capitulation by the evening - as I wrote at the time in 2013: "President Obama blinked last week; while Assad smiled. The 'Great Satan' was merely a paper tiger[3] after all. If Obama's conscience got the better of him between am last Friday when he was prepared to take limited military action; and pm, when he decided to abdicate his responsibility to Congress; then he should have had the courage to stand down and let his vice president do what he threatened to do when he declared his 'red line' was crossed."
           
             As I wrote, the last thing the West needs at this moment in its history are two arch liberals, each seemingly competing to become America's Neville Chamberlin; who to them, no doubt, was an honourable man who, like Jimmy Carter wanted only peace in their time, at whatever the price to the West.
            
             I am not an anti-Democrat; for I think if Hillary Clinton had remained secretary of state she would have proven to be a far greater ally to Israel than the current incumbent of  her former position as secretary of state, including the one who governs in what she hopes will be her future position come the next American Presidential election.
            
            Israel is the West's one hope in the Middle East – a democratic oasis in a dessert of overreaching anarchy and dictatorship. It has always been the case. Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, etcetera: all are tribal societies ill-fitted to democracy, as has already been proven by the dispatch of Hosni Mubarak, Saddam Hussein, Muammar al-Gaddafi  and the attempted delivery to his purgatory of Assad of Syria.
            
            Israel is the one stabilising factor in the region that the West may come to regret not going to greater lengths to support, who provides a watchtower of intelligence in the region. If the West, as they profess wishes to bring democracy to the Middle East; then Israel is its only exemplary example; and so-called democrats had better rally behind it – the Left will not; because historically, they live quite happily with totalitarianism as long as it fulfils their socialist dream, and rails, like Hamas, against the West.

AS SOMEONE who lives in a nation ready to sell its soul off to a European Union; I find Israel's determination to remain a Jewish nation state almost intoxicating. The nation state embraces a singular identity; a singular culture; and a singularity of sovereignty incorporating  finance, the law, and above all a history. The very functions, in fact, that country's such as India and China readily subscribe to, and would not tolerate multiculturalism for one moment; and who could blame them?
            
            Israel only wished a small strip of land to bring its people too, to create a Jewish state after the Nazi Holocaust, and when the Jews could no longer trust Europe to care for them and treat them with any kind of equanimity within the Diaspora.
            
            In 1948, the Jews were given, by the UN, the right of statehood, and were then given a sliver of land which had been, after all, once part of the territory of ancient Judea, and proved perfectly adequate for the future Israel. The founders then cultivated the dessert and created fertile soil. They prospered. Orange groves replaced sterile sand; and in the years following the Six Day and Yom Kippur wars; Israel started to settle.
            The state of Israel from its very inception in 1948, attracted the hostility of its Arab neighbours who tried militarily to undermine and hopefully vanquish the Jewish presence  once and for all; and Hamas and Hezbollah, are continuing with what is becoming an age old tradition.

THE TERRIBLE SUFFERING experienced by the civilian population of Gaza can be ended by one simple instruction by Hamas to the world - ceasefire . Israel are in the right and no matter how much the suffering being inflicted on the Gazan people, this will not change. Hamas has gotten away with the appalling way they treat their own people for far too long, using them as human shields and welcoming in the porno-journalists from Sky and the BBC, and then taking them on a guided tour of the human misery unfolding to photograph, and emote over, knowing that Israel will be skewered by those sympathetic BBC journalists – Hamas' useful idiots.
            The BBC boasts that they are the most trusted news broadcaster; and it may have once been true, but it is no longer the case: especially, but not exclusively, as far as the Israel-Palestinian conflict is concerned. There needs to be a new perspective; one which replaces not the Palestinian people but Hamas, as the real villains instead of Israel – and the Western media are as yet proving incapable adapting to this reality.           
           

           

           




[1] This is where we stand.
[2] Fox.
[3] As Chairman Mao described the USA

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