<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Sarah N. Stern</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/author/sarahnstern/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 07:56:08 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>Hatred Masquerading as Scholarship in the Classroom</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/sarahnstern/hatred-masquerading-as-scholarship-in-the-classroom/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hatred-masquerading-as-scholarship-in-the-classroom</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/sarahnstern/hatred-masquerading-as-scholarship-in-the-classroom/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Sep 2014 04:35:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sarah N. Stern]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Federal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Funding]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[grant]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Title VI]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[University]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241189</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[... And how your tax dollars fund it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><i><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/1508654364.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241258" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/1508654364-425x350.jpg" alt="1508654364" width="304" height="250" /></a></i></p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;[T]hey will bomb Gaza back to the Stone Age they said, and that they did&#8211;and yet there are very few spots on planet earth today nobler to the human spirit of resistance to tyranny and injustice than Gaza&#8211;now held like a shining jewel on the loving ring of humanity around the globe&#8211;I kiss that noble ground and hold it dearer than cities full of ignoble postmodern architecture built on the stolen land of other people.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8211; Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, referring to Israel&#8217;s Operation Protective Edge; Facebook, August 6, 2014. <a href="https://www.facebook.com/dabashi/photos/a.268551769831776.65317.267326509954302/795332067153741/?type=1"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>(link to source)</i></span></a></p></blockquote>
<p>The above quote, replete with biases and omissions, does not simply represent the viewpoint of one lone professor. It represents an extensively held perspective that has become a rigid orthodoxy that permeates through many of our nation’s Middle Eastern Studies Departments. This bias is being spoon-fed to our nation’s college students and sold to them as scholarship. As American parents who save for years for their youngsters’ college tuitions, many of us should be outraged that this bigotry is masquerading as solid erudition to our youngsters. As American citizens, we should be outraged that this sort of thinking is being subsidized by the American government in the form of Title VI grants to universities, and is shaping the thinking of our current and future American thinkers and leaders.</p>
<p>In fact, so blatant are the biases of the program, that 218 scholars from Middle Eastern Studies programs across the country, ranging from Columbia University and New York University on the East, the University of Chicago University of Illinois, and Michigan State University in the Mid-West to University of California in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, San Diego, Riverside, Santa Cruz, and hundreds of points in between, have all recently signed a petition for an academic boycott of Israeli Universities and any joint program with Israeli scholars.</p>
<p>How did this come about?</p>
<p>Title VI of the Higher Education Opportunities Act, which had formerly been known as The National Defense Education Act was implemented in 1958, during the height of the Cold War, in order to ensure that we were prepared to confront the challenges of the Soviet threat.  At that time, it was felt that our students were woefully ill-equipped to be competitive in the world against the Soviets in their knowledge of foreign languages and regions. It was then determined that certain universities were to be granted sizeable sums of money from the federal government in order to establish and help maintain regional or area studies centers, such as African Studies, Asian Studies, Latin Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies etc. in order to ensure that our nation had a generation of well-trained regional experts to meet the national security and defense challenges arising out of the former Soviet Union.</p>
<p>Our government therefore provided tax payers’ dollars to give birth to a regional studies industry in order to meet a specific national and security need. However, with the ensuing years, the original legislative intent of Title VI was totally ignored, and the universities simply took the money without any sort of oversight.</p>
<p>Universities have always been the vanguard of the latest political fashions and trends. The very first institutions in Germany to willfully adopt Nazism were the universities. Indeed, Martin Heidegarr who was a famous philosopher and a Nazi sympathizer, fired the James Husserl, the father of phenomenology because he was a Jew.</p>
<p>Many products of the ‘70s, who had been profoundly affected by the anti-Viet Nam war movement, have ended up teaching on college campuses, where a rigid liberal orthodoxy has set in and dominated the classroom instruction.  This was reflected in a classic survey by Prof. Robert Lichter of George Masson University, Professor Stanley Rothman of Smith College and Professor Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto,  which was based on a survey of 1,643 full-time faculty at 183 four-year schools.</p>
<p>The survey found that 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans. In elite universities, the disparity is even greater, with 87 per cent of faculty describing themselves as “liberal” and only 13 per cent describing themselves as “conservative.”</p>
<p>Another study that came out in 2012 by Professor Yoel Inbar and Professor Jorris Lammers, indicated that more than one third of the respondents said that they would discriminate against a conservative candidate for a faculty position. One respondent openly admitted that “if faculty members could figure out who was conservative, they would never have hired them.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the Middle Eastern Studies programs have enthusiastically embraced this liberal orthodoxy as a knee-jerk sympathy for the Palestinian cause, as the under-dog. Most classes reflect no appreciation for the struggles of the state of Israel, which they often describe in the most distorted, vulgar and hateful of terms, as “racist,” “imperialist,” “colonialist,” even as “war criminals” and “Nazi-like.”</p>
<p>Much of what passes for scholarship in the Academy in the United States has emanated from a simplistic treatise by the late professor of comparative English literature of Columbia University Edward Said, entitled, “Orientalism.”  “Orientalism,” which came out in 1978, is considered a foundational text of post-colonial theory that revolutionized the field. It tends to regard as suspect any scholar who, himself, is not a native of the Arab world. So that means scholars such as Bernard Lewis or Efraim Karsh are castigated as “orientalists” who have no <i>real </i>understanding of the field, and Edward Said, and his disciples, such as Joseph Mossad and Rashid Khalidi, are considered to be the <i>genuine </i>experts.</p>
<p>Much of the scholarship is oriented along this rigid, one-sided political agenda and is of an inferior quality, replete with errors of omission and commission. Students who are Jewish or whose beliefs do not conform to this agenda are often made to feel marginalized, as though their beliefs are antiquated and bigoted. Many students have reported being singled out for harassment in the classroom by professors when they challenge any of these ideas.</p>
<p>On the campus, this pseudo-scholarship has given an intellectual patina for the ancient hatred of anti-Semitism. We see this every year as the “Divest-Boycott-Sanctions,” (BDS) movement grows, and “Palestinian Solidarity Week” or “Israel Apartheid Week” grows in popularity on our nations’ college campuses.</p>
<p>A one-sided political agenda, at taxpayer’s expense, has often become a paltry substitute for a good, solid education in regional studies. Many of this is reported in the late Dr. Gary Tobin’s excellent book, “The Uncivil University: Politics &amp; Propaganda in American Education.”</p>
<p>In many of these departments, not only is Israel portrayed as the cause for all the problems in the Middle East, the United Sates is depicted as “the mother of all ills” in the world. Many students who are graduates of Title VI programs tend to be more sympathetic to some of our nation’s foes than to their own nation. It is almost reflexive to blame America first in these programs for our “colonialism” or “imperialism.”</p>
<p>They are equally likely to blame Israel first when anything, whatsoever, erupts in the Middle East, including the Sunni-Shiite conflict, or ISIS taking over parts of Iraq, saying that this is &#8220;the underlying root cause of the problem,” and “our relationship with Israel is the source of our resentment, overseas.”</p>
<p>Of course, the more one studies the Middle East, the more one realizes that this is wholly ludicrous; that the region is replete with many ancient, tribal and atavistic rivalries that are not easily remedied. Yet, when one speaks to most graduates of Middle Eastern programs, they predictably pin the blame for everything that goes awry in the Middle East on this, or as a minimum say, “We will be more likely to win the favor of the parties if we get to the root cause, if we first resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.”</p>
<p>One doubts that it is ever mentioned in the classroom that the Palestinians have been taught to despise and to vilify the Israeli, the Christian and the Jew, and that since 1993, they have been fed a steady diet of anti-Semitism that has metastasized like a cancer throughout the Palestinian body politic. When one of the parties can’t even say they recognize Israel’s right to live as a Jewish state, without choking over the words, that makes the odds of resolving this conflict rather low.</p>
<p>Almost as reflexively, when the United States is forced to enter into any conflict, the United States is almost reflexively blamed in the university classroom for meddling and inflaming the region. President Barack Obama’s policies seem to be almost wholly reflective of this sort of rigid analysis</p>
<p>One readily sees therefore, how the original intent of the Title VI legislation has been turned on its head. By now, many of the students who are graduates of these programs have already entered into positions of leadership, and one does not have to search any further than these programs when one fears that America is in a period of decline in our international standing in the world. Practically any step the United States takes as a moral leader is automatically looked upon with cynicism.</p>
<p>What makes this even more pernicious is that in order to get the Title VI grant from the government, the university professors in these departments must conduct “teacher training workshops” for teachers of kindergarten through twelfth grade, ensuring that these biases get transferred to our most vulnerable and impressionable youngsters who lack critical thinking skills.</p>
<p>From 2004 through 2008, I had been privileged to work with two of the most renowned experts in the field, Martin Kramer, author of many books including the seminal study on Title VI centers, “Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America,” and Stanley Kurtz, himself a former scholar of Indian Studies and renowned columnist for National review Online, in order to work with Congress to correct this.</p>
<p>We were successful in passing certain amendments to Title VI in 2008. These included a statuary requirement for: 1.) The Secretary of Education to develop a survey from a wide range of Federal agencies to find out what it is that they need for expertise in world regions and languages 2.) The Secretary of Education is to assist the universities who were recipients of Title VI funding in developing a survey to students to determine their areas of employment or post-graduate study. This survey should be administered by the university once every two years, and the results of the survey should be reported to the Secretary of Education. And most importantly: 3.) Each university which receives Title VI funding is to reflect “an explanation of how the activities funded by the grant will reflect diverse perspectives and a wide range of views and generate debate.”</p>
<p>The funding for this program is up for congressional renewal this year. From our discussions with educational congressional staffers on Capitol Hill, it appears as though it will automatically be put on “continuous resolution,” (which means, that because they don’t have the time or the inclination to take it up, the program, and its funding will remain in place).</p>
<p>However, it does not appear that any of these legally mandated requirements have been taken seriously. There has been zero congressional oversight, zero accountability and zero transparency to the revisions in the law that I had helped to enact.</p>
<p>I strongly suspect that all of these requirements, particularly the one which asks the university to describe what steps they have taken  “to encourage diverse perspectives,” are wholly glossed over, and that the DOE is simply rubber-stamping any university that applies for a grant from this program.</p>
<p>In the meantime, the use of our taxpayers’ dollars to fund these programs which trade flimsy propaganda as a paltry substitute for firm scholarship continues unabated. Much of this has simply served to give an intellectual patina to the ancient virus of antisemtism, a virus that has survived centuries of mutations, and for which there is no known antidote.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/sarahnstern/hatred-masquerading-as-scholarship-in-the-classroom/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>23</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Palestinian &#8216;Unity&#8217; Deal: The Charade Is Up!</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/sarahnstern/palestinian-unity-the-charade-is-up/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=palestinian-unity-the-charade-is-up</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/sarahnstern/palestinian-unity-the-charade-is-up/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Apr 2014 04:40:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sarah N. Stern]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[unity government]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224342</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Israel's 'peace partners' show their true faces with Hamas partnership. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/abbas-haniyeh-617x462-4.23.14.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224343" alt="abbas-haniyeh-617x462-4.23.14" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/abbas-haniyeh-617x462-4.23.14-450x336.jpg" width="284" height="212" /></a>“Our aim is the liberation of all of historic Palestine from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea, even if the conflict continues for a thousand years or many more generations.” - Faisal Husseini, considered a great Palestinian moderate, in his last interview, shortly before his death in 2001.</span></p>
<p>A Rubicon has just been crossed. Wednesday’s announcement by Abu Mazen of the Palestinian Authority that he has joined a national unity government with Hamas has unmasked the nature of the Fatah beast, once and for all, and revealed the naked intentions of the P.A. The fig leaf has fallen, and it does not reveal an attractive picture.</p>
<p>Since September 13, 1993, the Palestinian Authority has been playing a double, duplicitous, and highly dangerous game of “Good Cop/Bad Cop”.  On September 13th, when the Oslo Accords were signed, the Palestinians pledged to refrain from acts of violence or from incitement to violence, against Israel. All subsequent agreements have been predicated along that same pledge.</p>
<p>Israel was to trade something real and tangible, land, in exchange for peace. The only currency that the Palestinians had offered up was something illusive and intangible: a promise to refrain from acts of violence or terrorism and to refrain from the incitement towards those acts.</p>
<p>That was the sole condition that has ever been put on the Palestinian Authority.</p>
<p>Yet, scarcely a day goes by when there has not been an egregious comment cited in the Palestinian media applauding suicide bombers and inciting children “to follow in the proud path of the martyrs” ( i.e. to don suicide vests and to blow themselves up in  crowded pizza restaurants or buses.). The map of Palestine is ubiquitous within the disputed territories, including hanging on the walls of every Palestinian school, (yes, even our tax-payer funded UNRWA schools), and every official building, including on the walls under which Secretary of State John Kerry and Ambassador Martin Indyk sit. The map is one that we would recognize as Israel.</p>
<p>It was never their intention to just go back to the 1949 armistice lines, or the pre-1967 borders. If one picture is worth a thousand words, that is the picture that says it all.</p>
<p>There was essentially a division of labor that has existed for the last two decades.  While the Palestinian Authority ended their diplomatic isolation in the community of nations by signing Oslo, Wye, the Roadmap for Middle East Peace, and all subsequent agreements, they have used their enhanced diplomatic status to wage a nonphysical war against Israel through systematic campaigns of distortion and dehumanization of the Israel and the Jew in the international court of public opinion. They have never missed an opportunity to engage in the verbal war of demonization, delegitimization and BDS, (Boycott, Divest and Sanctions), against Israel.</p>
<p>The fact that BDS has caught on to the alarming extent that it has is testament to the success of the Palestinian Authority’s unending verbal war against Israel.</p>
<p>While the verbal war was effectively being fought by Fatah, Hamas engaged in the ongoing physical battle. However, this is not at all to suggest that there were not factions of Fatah who had been engaged in acts of terrorism or violence in the last two decades.</p>
<p>What people within Fatah would do was simply spin off and create other divisions of Fatah, such as the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, which has been responsible for the deaths of scores of innocent civilians in multiple heinous attacks, such as the attack on a Bat Mitzvah celebration on January 17, 2002, when 6 civilians were killed, and 33 were wounded. Or the attack on the central Tel Aviv bus station when 22 civilians were killed on January 5, 2003. Or the 2004 attack on a bus in Jerusalem, when 11 civilians were killed. And the list goes on and on.</p>
<p>However, for the most part, and under the watchful eye of the IDF, they have kept up to their end of the bargain and refrained from physical acts of terror.  That they left to their brothers in Hamas.</p>
<p>However, words eventually can kill. No-one is born wanting to be a suicide bomber. In fact, it is anti-Darwinian, against our natural survival instinct. These acts come about after years of listening to the most heinous  sorts of anti-Semitic and hate-infested propaganda that the Palestinian Authority subjects its people to from the cradle to the unfortunate early grave hat they have been inciting them to go to.</p>
<p>This has been going on for two decades. Life is a series of choices and the P.A. chose to align themselves with Hamas, rather than with Israel. As Prime Minister Netanyahu said, “Does Abbas want peace with Hamas or with Israel?”</p>
<p>Since 1997, Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the State Department, and U.S. law specifically states that it is unlawful for the United States to provide any material support to a foreign terrorist organization or to an entity that contains a foreign terrorist organization.</p>
<p>Now is finally time to stop this deadly charade.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/sarahnstern/palestinian-unity-the-charade-is-up/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>66</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>A Hollow Victory</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/sarahnstern/a-hollow-victory/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-hollow-victory</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/sarahnstern/a-hollow-victory/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 17 Jan 2014 05:12:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sarah N. Stern]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[deal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear Weapons]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=216641</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What's in Obama's secret deal with Iran? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Iran-Kerry-3_2728466b.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-216646" alt="Iran-Kerry-3_2728466b" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Iran-Kerry-3_2728466b-431x350.jpg" width="302" height="245" /></a>“They should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road.”</p>
<p><em>&#8211; Sir Winston Churchill</em></p>
<p>Once again, Secretary of State John Kerry came home from Geneva this past Sunday, amidst a great deal of euphoria, boasting of an agreement between the P5 plus 1 nations and Iran that is scheduled to take effect on January 20th, saying, “As of that day, for the first time in almost a decade, Iran’s nuclear program will not be able to advance, and parts of it will be rolled back, while we start negotiating a comprehensive agreement to address the international community’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear program.”</p>
<p>These triumphant words were over a signed agreement, the details of which are so fabulous that the Obama administration absolutely refuses to reveal them to journalists or the public at large.</p>
<p>This sense of triumphalism over the agreement has not been shared by most Americans. According to a Pew Research and USA Today Poll, (taken December 2nd through 9th), 43 percent of Americans disapprove of the deal, while only 32 percent approve of it.</p>
<p>However, the triumphalism is shared in Iran, where on Wednesday morning, President Rouhani spoke before a demonstration of throngs of thousands of ecstatic supporters, where he boasted, ‘Do you know what the Geneva agreement means? It means the surrender of great international powers against the nation of Iran.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister, Abbas Araqchi, told the country’s state-run television on Sunday, “We will in no way, never, dismantle our nuclear centrifuges.”</p>
<p>Yet they are getting an estimated 20 to 25 billion dollars in sanctions relief, plus an additional 8 billion dollars from the unfreezing of the assets that have been frozen in America since the 1979 Islamic revolution. There is a tremendous economic, psychological boost. Businesses from many regions in the world are flying into Tehran seeking new markets. The stock market in Tehran is soaring.</p>
<p>The Iranian mullahs are nothing, if not masters in cunning. They understand this American president, and its war-weary population.  They understand that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the American taxpayer over 4 trillion dollars, and more importantly that over 4,400 American servicemen lost their lives in Iraq, and 2,108 in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>They know that President Obama repeatedly pledged that when it came to Iran’s nuclear program, “all options are on the table.”</p>
<p>The Iranians are very careful observers. They watched vigilantly when President Obama had vowed in a press conference on August 20, 2012:</p>
<blockquote><p>“We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Then on August 21, 2013 in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, the unthinkable happened. At the hands of Syrian leader Bashir Assad, over 1,429 people, including 426 children were brutally gassed to death. Our television screens showed the ghastly images of rows and rows children lined up, some flinching and quaking in agony, screaming and writhing in pain, without bullet wounds or scars. It was obvious that these were victims of a chemical attack.</p>
<p>At which point, Secretary of State John Kerry took to the airwaves and made an impassioned plea. “A thug and a murderer like Assad is trying to get away with this,” Kerry said, adding, “We are the USA, the country that’s tried to honor a set of universal values around which we’ve organized our lives…This crime against conscience, this crime against humanity, this matters to us. It matters to us and who we are. It matters to leadership and our credibility in the world. It matters if nothing is done-if the world speaks out in condemnation, and nothing happens.”</p>
<p>And then, President Obama put his finger to the wind, and realized he did not have the support of the American people. He then decided to take it to Congress, and when he realized he did not have the votes in Congress for the authorization for the use of force, he did an interesting little international pirouette, and made Iran and Russia responsible for the disposal of their chemical weapons (which is about as responsible as letting two known pedophiles baby sit for your children).</p>
<p>Not only did that elevate the status of both of those countries’ international credibility, it sharply diminished ours. To make matters, worse, in a press conference in Stockholm, President Obama stated, “I did not set a red line. The world set a red line.”</p>
<p>The Iranian mullahs have been taking careful notes. They appreciate the fact that this administration is, despite the strong rhetoric, almost constitutionally adverse to any renewed military action. They also understand that the biting sanctions that had been put in place by the United States Congress and the international community were breaking their economy, although it had little or no impact on the nuclear program.</p>
<p>They realized that their former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s honest rhetoric about “wiping Israel off the map,” was serving to isolate them economically. So they allowed a pretty, fresh face to run, that of Hussein Rouhani. Of course, Mr. Rouhani had to be approved by the reigning mullahs. And it is hardly known that Mr. Rouhani was a close friend and confidant of both Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei, or that he had been part of the committee that had planned the attack on the Argentenian Jewish Center in 1994.</p>
<p>The overall Iranian objectives of regional and global hegemony and Shiite supremacy, let alone their genocidal intentions, have never diminished one iota. Their tactics, however, changed.</p>
<p>While running for office last May, Mr. Rouhani was interviewed on Iranian National television, in which he boasted about how, when he was chief negotiator for the Iranian nuclear program between 2003 and 2005, the Iranians went from 150 centrifuges to 1,750; that he introduced the yellowcake, and the heavy water plutonium enrichment facility in Arak.</p>
<p>When elected, papers such as The New York Times and the Washington Post wrote glowing editorials about him as a “reformer” and a “moderate.”  They failed to mention that the very day before Mr. Rouhani came to New York to embark upon his charm offensive, he spoke in front of a military parade where a fleet of trucks carried a convoy of Shahab II missiles that can easily reach Tel Aviv with the words in English, Farsi and Arabic, “Israel shall cease to exist.”</p>
<p>Mr. Rouhani came to the United Nations and delivered a speech on September 25th that seems reminiscent of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, or Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream Speech.”  Among the lovely words of Mr. Rouhani were phrases such as, “Nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction have no place in Iran’s security and defense doctrine, and contradict our fundamental religious and ethical convictions.” He expressed the hope of “universal acceptance by the people and the elite all across the globe of ‘yes’ to peace and ‘no’ to war, the hope of preference of dialogue to conflict, and moderation over extremism.”</p>
<p>Like offering candy to a baby, the trap had been eloquently set. Mr. Rouhani was speaking Mr. Obama’s language. Never one to distinguish reality from rhetoric, President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have done everything in their power to ignore the ominous signs coming out of Iran and have decided to proceed with a package of inducements, including the lifting of sanctions.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, none of us mere mortals are actually able to see what this agreement is that has been signed. According to an article on January 13th in the Los Angeles Times, Abbas Araqhi said that there is a 30-page side document or non-paper, where many significant details about how the deal is implemented are outlined.</p>
<p>The State Department of course vociferously denies the existence of the non-paper. When asked about the details of the agreement, State Department Spokeswoman Marie Harf, said, “We will make the details available to Congress and the public as it becomes available.”</p>
<p>Of course the questions become: If we have already signed it, why is it not available? And, if it is such a good deal, why all the secrecy?</p>
<p>Secretary of State John Kerry was right when he said, “…This crime against humanity, this matters to us. It matters to leadership and our credibility in the world. It matters if nothing is done-if the world speaks out in condemnation, and nothing happens.”</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/sarahnstern/a-hollow-victory/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>19</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 466/496 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 06:34:27 by W3 Total Cache -->