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		<title>The Islamic Republic Is Not Cuba</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/the-islamic-republic-is-not-cuba/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-islamic-republic-is-not-cuba</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Dec 2014 05:40:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[diplomatic]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[What the Mullahs really think of Obama's surrender to Castro. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/39.si_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248372" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/39.si_-450x253.jpg" alt="39.si" width="329" height="185" /></a>The diplomatic deal between the Obama administration and Raul Castro&#8217;s government and the transformation of the relationship between Cuba and Washington have made some scholars, politicians and policy analysts excited with respect to utilizing the same method in the case of another longstanding foe, the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Some have been calling for applying a Cuban-style deal &#8212; back-channel diplomacy and the lifting of the embargo and economic sanctions &#8212; to Iran in order to restore full diplomatic ties with the ruling clerics.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, this point of view totally ignores the complexity of the Iranian government and the nature of its ideological, political and institutional underpinnings. In other words, an analogy between Cuba and the Islamic Republic falls apart when the reality is examined.</p>
<p>First of all, Iran poses a much stronger geopolitical threat to the US (and its allies) than Cuba does.  The Islamic Republic has been a major player in scuttling US foreign policy objectives and opposing its allies (including Israel) in the Middle East. Cuba, unlike the Islamic Republic, did not repeatedly call for elimination and annihilation of the State of Israel.  In addition, the Iranian government is supporting and is behind the creation of several crucial militia proxies in the region which have led to further destabilization and conflict in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Secondly, a deal with the US would likely be viewed as a zero-sum game for the Iranian leaders. Iran’s ruling clerics would not be likely to accept any compromises on their top foreign policy priorities, such as: Keeping President Bashar al Assad in power; withdrawing its financial, advisory, intelligence, and military support to the Iraqi and Syrian governments; and assisting formidable proxies such as Hezbollah and Shiite militia groups in Iraq and Yemen.</p>
<p>In addition, in the Cuban case, there did not exist any international consensus on the embargo or economic sanctions against the Cuban government. For example, many European countries were doing business with the Cuban government. On the other hand, in the case of the Islamic Republic, the four rounds of economic sanctions on the Iranian government resulted in the approval of the five members of the UN Security Council, including Russian and China. Unlike Cuba, many regional and global powers are dubious about Iran’s nuclear and regional hegemonic ambitions.</p>
<p>More fundamentally, unlike Castro, Khamenei has shown no real interest and willingness in fully normalizing diplomatic ties with the United States. For example, the Obama administration received no positive response from Khamenei through President Obama’s recent letter or through back-channel diplomacy. In addition, there is no official public debate among Iranian politicians, across various spectrums of Iran’s political system, to even allow the opening of a US embassy in Tehran.  The Islamic Republic’s domestic opposition to normalizing ties with the US is much higher in comparison to the Cuban case.  Although the Obama administration has taken some back-channel steps to negotiate with the Islamic Republic, Iran’s Supreme Leader has not responded with signs of willingness to normalize relationships, and he has been clear in not trusting the “Great Satan.”</p>
<p>The signal that Iranian leaders received from the Cuban deal is not what the Western mainstream media depicts: That Iran is optimistic about normalizing ties with the US. The message that Tehran received was that the Islamic Republic has to persist in its policies as well as ideology, and that economic sanctions will ultimately fail. As foreign ministry spokeswoman <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/iran-hails-us-cuba-thaw-proof-sanctions-dont-193418574.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Marzieh Akfham</span></a> articulated, &#8220;The defense by the Cuban government and people of their revolutionary ideals over the past 50 years shows that policies of isolation and sanctions imposed by the major powers against the wishes of independent nations are ineffective.&#8221;</p>
<p>The fundamentals of the Islamic Republic are centered on opposition to the United States, which Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, established. The Supreme Leader derives power and legitimacy from this stance. If the Iranian government changed this fundamental organizing principle, it would not be able to yield power from its loyalists, hard-line constituents, and define itself as the “Islamic” Republic of Iran.</p>
<p>Finally, it is crucial to point out that many young and middle class Iranian people would like to see the normalization of relationship with the United States. Some have expressed their hope through twitter and other social media outlets. However, there is a significant gap between what ordinary Iranian citizens desire to happen, and what the ruling clerics hope to ideologically and geopolitically achieve.</p>
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		<title>Obama’s White Whale</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-r-timmerman/obamas-white-whale/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-white-whale</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2014 05:46:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth R. Timmerman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[After Cuba, could embracing Iran be next?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/rouhani-ayatollah-khomeini.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248067" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/rouhani-ayatollah-khomeini.jpg" alt="rouhani-ayatollah-khomeini" width="305" height="234" /></a>President Obama is not one to be rebuffed.</p>
<p>As he showed when the Castro brothers rejected repeated entreaties to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba, Obama can display exceptional determination, even imagination, in finding a path to surrender.</p>
<p>When the Castros wouldn’t accept his entreaties, Obama turned to the Vatican to offer the candy.</p>
<p>The Castros have no intention of loosening their grip on Cuban society, or of opening the Internet to free speech, <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/mary-ogrady-who-benefits-if-the-embargo-is-lifted-1419205562"><span style="color: #0433ff;">as Obama has claimed</span></a>. But they will take U.S. taxpayer subsidies from the Ex-Im Bank to finance purchases from fellow-Communist China. How’s that for a good deal!</p>
<p>And so, Iran. Obama has now written to Supreme Terrorist – sorry, Supreme Leader &#8211; Ayatollah Khamenei four times since taking office in 2009. And each time, Khamenei has responded with insults and rejection.</p>
<p>The most recent offer was in October 2014, when Obama reportedly offered a whole plate-full of goodies – extensive relief from U.S. economic and financial sanctions, and perhaps much more – in exchange for the Ayatollah accepting Obama’s capitulation on the nuclear agreement.</p>
<p>But that wasn’t good enough for Khamenei, who immediately denounced the United States as a <a href="https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/532514135020695552"><span style="color: #0433ff;">“nuclear criminal”</span></a> &#8211; and on Twitter, no less!</p>
<p>Now we are told that Iran is “cooperating” with the United States in the fight against ISIS, most recently by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/.../iran-airstrikes-hit-islamic-state-in-iraq.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">bombing ISIS targets inside Iraq</span></a>.</p>
<p>But Iranian sources in Europe with access to current regime intelligence told me last week that Iran has provided 30 percent of the weapons ISIS has been using in its offensives in Syria and Iraq, mainly from Chinese sources.</p>
<p>Surprise? Not really. Despite what some “experts” in Islam will tell you about how Shiite Iran is irrevocably opposed to Koran-citing, Sunna-invoking, Sharia-inflicting ISIS, the two have a common cause: the triumph of Islam throughout the world.</p>
<p>Iran’s Islamic regime is also Koran-citing, Sunna-invoking, and Sharia-inflicting. They stone to death female rape-victims for “adultery” and make child-brides of young girls, imitating the example of the Prophet of Islam. They just disagree with ISIS – as they do with Turkish president Erdogan, and the al-Saud family – about who should be leading the Islamic caliphate.</p>
<p>Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin disagreed about whose army should march first into Berlin. Roosevelt caved. Stalin won. A fifty-year Cold War ensued.</p>
<p>Shiite Iran has a long and well-documented history of supporting Sunni terrorist groups. They <a href="http://www.iran911case.com/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">helped al-Qaeda recruit, train, and elude U.S. surveillance</span></a> before the 9/11 plot, and they have sheltered senior al-Qaeda operatives ever since.</p>
<p>They continue to publicly support Sunni jihadi groups including the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Hamas in Gaza.</p>
<p style="color: #202020;"><span style="color: #000000;">In 2011, the U.S. Treasury Department <a href="http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/tg1261.aspx"><span style="color: #0433ff;">exposed Iran</span></a> for sheltering al Qaeda’s top financiers. Earlier this year, <a href="http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/jl2613.aspx"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Treasury identified yet another top al Qaeda financial operative,</span></a> </span>Abdul Mohsen Abdullah Ibrahim al-Sharikh, whom Iran nurtured and protected until he moved to Syria and joined the al-Qaida affiliated Nusra front, “later becoming one of its top strategists.”</p>
<p>So don’t be surprised to see that the Islamic Republic of Iran has provided weapons to the Islamic State (of Iraq and Syria). After all, on most days ISIS uses those weapons to slaughter America’s “allies,” the weak-kneed, slightly less Islamified opposition to Iran’s ally, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.</p>
<p>It’s an old trick of totalitarians everywhere. Light a fire on your enemy’s doorstep, then offer to help him put it out. The Soviets used it repeatedly.</p>
<p>Now the Pentagon wants to provide yet more goodies to Iran. Under the misguided leadership of outgoing SecDef Chuck Hagel, DoD has asked the U.S. Treasury Department to <a href="http://www.nasdaq.com/article/pentagon-sought-sanctions-exemptions-for-iranian-investment-in-afghanistan-20141104-01797"><span style="color: #0433ff;">remove sanctions so U.S. companies can help Iran</span></a> with multi-billion dollar development projects in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Let me spell that out. The Pentagon has identified “worthy” projects in Afghanistan and turned them over to the Iranians, and is now “inviting” U.S. companies to provide financial and technical assistance so the Iranians can make it rich.</p>
<p>There is more than just stupidity at work here.</p>
<p>Listen to “progressive” Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen, <a href="https://docs.zoho.com/writer/ropen.do?rid=b6wwvf87260bd94514057851fd5200ffab291#bookmark=http://video.foxnews.com/v/3951118421001/van-hollen-alan-gross-exchange-a-good-deal-for-us/?"><span style="color: #0433ff;">speaking to Foxnews</span></a> after “bringing back” U.S. hostage Alan Gross from Cuba. (Remember, Alan Gross was jailed five years ago for helping Havana Jews get access to the Internet.)</p>
<p>Cuba’s human rights abuses and its lack of freedom “have resulted from 54 years of failed U.S. policies,” Van Hollen said without even blushing.</p>
<p>For Obama and his acolytes, America is the problem. We have “caused” the world’s problems with our sanctimonious nonsense about God-given freedoms. Any self-respecting Socialist would naturally react to men and women who fear God and love life by banning God and substituting a government that robs citizens of their freedom.</p>
<p>And so, Obama’s mission as president is to make America as small as possible so we can’t continue to spread freedom and the values underpinning it around the world. We are going to stop causing harm by vacating the premises and allowing <i>real</i> bad guys to take over.</p>
<p>Former Brookings Institution scholar Michael Doran calls Obama’s obsession with making bad deals with rogue states his “white whale.”</p>
<p>“The president is dreaming of an historical accommodation with Iran. The pursuit of that accommodation is the great white whale of Obama’s Middle East strategy, and capturing it is all that matters; everything else is insignificant by comparison,” <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2014/08/13-doran-obama-middle-east-policy-danger-to-allies"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Doran wrote earlier this year.</span></a> “The goal looms so large as to influence every other facet of American policy.&#8221;</p>
<p>The ship of state is taking on water in Iraq? Let’s make a deal with Iran and hand it over to them. Afghanistan can’t stay afloat? Not to worry, Obama’s Iranian allies will come to the rescue.</p>
<p>There is only one thing Iran’s leaders can do to prevent Obama from rushing to conclude a deal with them that will allow them to develop a militarily-useful nuclear arsenal, impose their hegemony over the Persian Gulf, swallow up Lebanon and install their genocidal legions on the borders of Israel: they can just say no.</p>
<p>So far, that’s just what Khamenei has been doing. He has swallowed all the goodies Obama has offered without even saying thank-you. And Obama’s response has been to offer more.</p>
<p>Don’t think for an instant that cooler heads will prevail. They won’t. This president is determined to take America down, and he is pursuing that goal with all the single-minded intensity that Captain Ahab displayed in his chase for the white whale.</p>
<p>Will someone please wrench the harpoon out of his hands?</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>
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		<title>Obama Comes to Castro&#8217;s Rescue</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/obama-comes-to-castros-rescue/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-comes-to-castros-rescue</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2014 05:06:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The U.S. becomes the new patron of a monstrous communist regime. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/castro.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247880" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/castro-450x311.jpg" alt="U.S. President Obama greets Cuban President Castro at the memorial service for Mandela in Johannesburg" width="285" height="197" /></a>Did you notice the timing of  President Obama’s economic lifeline to Castro as announced on December 17<sup>th</sup> under the guise of “changing [our] relations with the <i>people </i>[emphasis mine] of Cuba?”</p>
<p>No? But you <i>have </i>noticed the price at the gas pumps, right? These two items are closely related. Oh, and by the way, every atom of evidence shows that the actual <i>people </i>of Cuba actually want U.S. sanctions against the Stalinist regime that tortures them <a href="http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2014/06/over-830-cuban-democracy-activists-sign.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">tightened</span></a>. So perhaps President Obama should stop insulting the intelligence of Cuba-watchers by claiming to speak and act on their behalf.  Here’s their reaction to this week’s early Christmas gift from Obama to the Stalinist dictator who tortures them:</p>
<p>&#8220;Sadly, President Obama made the wrong decision. The freedom and democracy of the Cuban people will not be achieved through these benefits that he&#8217;s giving &#8212; not to the Cuban people &#8212; but to the Cuban government. The Cuban government will only take advantage to strengthen its repressive machinery, to repress civil society, its people and remain in power.&#8221;  (Berta Soler, leader of &#8220;The Ladies in White,&#8221;<i> </i>Cuba’s biggest dissident group.</p>
<p>“[Alan Gross] was not arrested for what he did, but for what could be gained from his arrest. He was simply bait and they were aware of it from the beginning<i>&#8230; </i>Castroism has won.” (Yoani Sanchez, Cuba’s most internationally famous dissident.)</p>
<p>&#8220;I feel as though I have been abandoned on the battlefield.&#8221; (Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet<b>, </b>former Cuban political prisoner awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush.)</p>
<p>The list of back-stabbed and outraged Cuban dissidents <a href="http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2014/12/cuban-dissident-leaders-react-to-obamas.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">is much, much longer.</span></a></p>
<p>At any rate, Cuba’s post-Soviet sugar-daddy (Venezuela) is currently in dire economic straits from the precipitous plunge in the price of oil, Venezuela’s top export. Their economic lifeline to the Castro regime looks shaky, hence the “Here I come to save the day!” by President Obama.</p>
<p>But let’s face it. Castro’s Stalinist regime has jailed, tortured and murdered tens of thousands (including some U.S. citizens) for over half a decade and most Americans don’t seem to give a flying flip. Fine. So let’s consult yet another Cuban dissident who actually serves up some red meat.  Let’s notify Joe Sixpack and Soccer Mom (who quite understandably find all this human-rights stuff regarding a foreign country utterly irrelevant) that maybe it’s time to pay closer attention to the issue:</p>
<p>“If the U.S. allows financing towards Cuba, it will be the U.S. taxpayers who would sustain the Castro regime<i>. </i>Since it has run out of doors to knock on [for credit], the Castro regime is now focused on the United States.&#8221;<i>  </i>(Cuban dissident and three-time Amnesty-International prisoner of conscience Rene Gomez Manzanoin.)</p>
<p>Well, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the farm lobby, Council on Foreign Relations and Castro’s agents of influence (but I repeat myself) understandably avoid this issue like the plague, hence its invisibility in the mainstream media. So please listen up: For over a decade the so-called U.S. embargo, so disparaged by President Obama, has mostly stipulated that Castro’s Stalinist regime pay <i>cash up front</i> through a third-party bank for all U.S. agricultural products; no Ex-Im (U.S. taxpayer) financing of such sales. And that’s what infuriates Castro, and motivates his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>U.S. agents of influence.</i></span></a><i> </i></p>
<p>Enacted by the Bush team in 2001, this cash-up-front policy has been monumentally beneficial to U.S. taxpayers, making them among the few in the world not rooked by the Castro regime, which per capita-wise qualifies as the world’s biggest debtor nation, with a foreign debt estimated at $50 billion, a credit rating nudging Somalia’s and an uninterrupted record of defaults. Standard &amp; Poors refuses even to rate Cuba, regarding the economic figures released by its Stalinist apparatchiks as utterly bogus. Just this year the Russians wrote off almost $30 billion Castro still owed them.</p>
<p>Interesting that a Cuban dissident should plumb this matter more accurately than those “champions of the U.S. taxpayers,” Rand Paul and Jeff Flake, who loudly applauded President Obama’s Christmas present to Castro this week. From the White House “Fact Sheet; Charting a New Course on Cuba”:</p>
<p>* U.S. institutions will be permitted to open correspondent accounts at Cuban financial institutions to facilitate the processing of authorized transactions.</p>
<p>* The regulatory definition of the statutory term “cash in advance” <i>will be revised to specify that it means “cash before transfer of title”; this will provide more efficient financing of authorized trade with Cuba.</i></p>
<p>Whoops! Though still a bit sketchy, it certainly sounds like we’re moving in the direction Rene Gomez warned against. This matter was recently explained in more detail by a Townhall columnist on Canada’s <a href="http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/video/3949008632001"><span style="color: #0433ff;">SunNews network.</span></a></p>
<p>Obama claims we’ve been “isolating” Cuba. Again, stop insulting our intelligence, Mr. President. To wit:</p>
<p>In 1957 when Cuba was a “U.S. economic colony,” as we’re constantly told by the media (though U.S. investments in Cuba accounted for only 14 per cent the island’s GNP), the U.S. exported $347.5 million worth of goods to Cuba.</p>
<p>In 2013 (when Cuba was being “strangled by a U.S. economic blockade,” was we’re constantly told by the media) the U.S. exported $457.3 million to Cuba. In fact for every year Obama has been in office the “Cuba-embargoing” U.S. has exported more goods to Cuba than it did in 1957.</p>
<p>In 1957 (when Cuba was a “playground for U.S. tourists,” as we’re constantly told by the media) 263,000 people visited Cuba from the U.S</p>
<p>In 2013 (when Cuba was being diabolically “blockaded” by the U.S., according to the media) an estimated 500,000 people visited Cuba from the U.S.  So under Obama <i>twice as many people</i> are visiting Cuba as in the golden 1950s.</p>
<p>In 1958 with Cuba under a “U.S.-backed dictator,” with the U.S. “controlling Cuba’s economy,” (according to the media, though in fact, U.S. companies employed 7 percent of Cuba’s workforce) the staff of the U.S. embassy in Cuba numbered 87, including Cuban employees.</p>
<p>Today with supposedly no diplomatic relations with Cuba (according to the media) the staff of the U.S. Interest Section in Havana numbers 351, including Cuban employees. In fact, for well over a decade the U.S. has had <i>twice </i>as many diplomatic personnel in Havana as Canada and Mexico <i>combined.</i> In the Twilight Zone occupied by the U.S. media this is termed “diplomatic isolation.”</p>
<p>In executive order after executive order, President Obama has already abolished President Bush’s travel and remittance restrictions to Castro’s terror-sponsoring fiefdom and opened the pipeline to a point where the cash-flow from the U.S. to Cuba last year was estimated at $4 billion a year. While a proud Soviet satrapy Cuba received $3-5 billion annually from the Soviets. In brief, almost every year since Obama took office more cash has been flowing from the U.S. to Cuba than used to flow there from the Soviets at the height of their Cuba-sponsorship. In the Twilight Zone occupied by the mainstream media this is known as an “economic embargo.”</p>
<p>In sum, the proof is long in: record tourism and foreign investment into Cuba = record repression for the Cuban people. Every shred of observable evidence proves that travel to Cuba and business with its Stalinist mafia enriches and entrenches these KGB-trained and heavily-armed owners of Cuba’s economy. Thus they remain the most highly motivated guardians of Cuba’s Stalinist and Terror-Sponsoring status-quo.</p>
<p>This week they’re all toasting Obama, snickering and rubbing their hands. So <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova"><span style="color: #0433ff;">grab your wallets, amigos.</span></a></p>
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		<title>Senators Vow to Halt Obama&#8217;s Castro Odyssey</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/senators-vow-to-halt-cuban-relations-thawsenators-vow-to-halt-obamas-castro-odyssey/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=senators-vow-to-halt-cuban-relations-thawsenators-vow-to-halt-obamas-castro-odyssey</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2014 05:58:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247801</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[But is Congress a match for the president's pen and phone?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/obama-on-cuba.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247802" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/obama-on-cuba-450x300.jpg" alt="Barack Obama" width="375" height="250" /></a>Lawmakers opposed to President Obama&#8217;s sudden move to cozy up to Communist Cuba are vowing a full-court press to prevent official diplomatic recognition of the tropical prison republic from going forward.</p>
<p>But it is far from clear if lawmakers will be able to do much about Obama&#8217;s Cuban escapades. Presidents typically enjoy great latitude in foreign policy, especially concerning recognition of foreign governments. Lawmakers are probably on stronger ground in resisting repeal of the trade embargo that has been in place since the 1960s. On the other hand, Obama has a pen and a phone, as he likes to say, a reference to his brazen contempt for the rule of law and the strictures of the Constitution.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s dramatic actions are setting off a feeding frenzy as American companies salivate at the prospect of doing business in Cuba. Little do they realize that Cuba, a dilapidated Stalinist state that, thanks to the absence of good paying jobs, serves largely as a seedy sex tourism destination for Europeans and hardly has an economy at all. Some business restrictions were already eased by the U.S. around 2000. Some companies are allowed to sell medical equipment to the Cuban government. There is not much money to be made, at least not initially.</p>
<p>Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who are both of Cuban ancestry, have made strong statements about their intentions.</p>
<p>Rubio said it mattered not a whit to him if &#8220;99 percent of people in polls&#8221; disagreed with his position. &#8220;Appeasing the Castro brothers will only cause other tyrants from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang to see that they can take advantage of President Obama&#8217;s naivete during his final two years in office.&#8221;</p>
<p>Rubio said he reserved the right &#8220;to do everything within the rules of the Senate to prevent that sort of individual from ever even coming up for a vote,&#8221; a reference to confirmation proceedings for a prospective U.S. ambassador to Cuba.</p>
<p>Menendez said he was &#8220;deeply disappointed&#8221; and that it was &#8220;a fallacy to believe that Cuba will reform because an American president opens his hands and the Castro brothers will suddenly unclench their fists.&#8221;</p>
<p>The chill in relations between the two countries has its roots in the Cold War.</p>
<p>Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, whose forces overthrew the comparatively mild authoritarian regime of Fulgencio Batista, tried to start a nuclear war with the United States and in 1963 openly called for the assassination of President John Kennedy and his brother Robert, the U.S. attorney general. War was only narrowly averted after the Soviet Union turned around ships that were carrying nuclear weapons to Cuba. A short time later one of Castro&#8217;s followers, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald, murdered President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Cuba is a longtime state sponsor of terrorism and has meddled militarily and otherwise in the affairs of its neighbors and in faraway countries such as Angola. President Reagan ordered an invasion of Grenada after its Marxist dictatorship grew too close to Cuba and he struggled heroically to aid the anticommunist contras in their war against the Cuban-backed Communist regime in Nicaragua.</p>
<p>Many conservatives in Congress and elsewhere are saying Obama is a weak leader.</p>
<p>For example, former Ambassador to the UN John Bolton said on the Fox News Channel on Wednesday that Obama&#8217;s moves on Cuba constitute &#8220;appeasement&#8221; and are a &#8220;very, very bad signal of weakness and lack of resolve by the president of the United States.&#8221;</p>
<p>Bolton and others are correct in terms of how the U.S. is perceived abroad under Obama but this does not reflect weak leadership on Obama&#8217;s part. This president knows what he is doing and when given the opportunity to do the right thing reliably chooses to do the wrong thing. Obama is taking the country&#8217;s foreign policy in exactly the right direction in terms of his sinister ideology. Obama does not mean well. He does not, unlike traditional U.S. presidents, think of himself as the leader of the free world. He wants to fundamentally transform America inside and out and is quite content to enfeeble the nation by crippling its military, betraying its allies, and embracing its enemies.</p>
<p>All of this excitement follows the sudden release Wednesday of Alan Gross, a U.S. development worker held in a Cuban prison. (An intelligence operative loyal to the U.S. was also released as part of the deal. Details about that individual are scarce.) Gross is a garden-variety leftist who is being used by President Obama to justify establishing diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba.</p>
<p>Obama is repaying a debt to his Marxist friends and allies. Just as President Bill Clinton rewarded his neo-communist supporters by pardoning Marxist Puerto Rican terrorists, Obama is rewarding his Castro-admiring base by freeing Communist spies working for a hostile foreign power.</p>
<p>Gross was reportedly a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is frequently a home for meddling left-wing activists. He reportedly worked on a program aimed at improving Internet access for Cuban Jews. Why the Obama administration would knowingly send an American into Cuba to perform services they had to have known were considered illegal by Cuban authorities is not clear. The free flow of information is a threat to any totalitarian regime, so a Cuban court convicted Gross of crimes against the state in 2011, sentencing him to a 15-year prison term.</p>
<p>Under a deal that Pope Francis, among others, helped to facilitate, Gross was <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/12/17/meet-the-cuban-five-at-the-center-of-the-blockbuster-u-s-announcement-on-cuba/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">exchanged</span></a> for the remaining three members of the so-called Cuban Five &#8212; Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, and Ramón Labañino &#8212; who had been held in U.S. prisons.  All five Cuban nationals were convicted of spying in 2001. They gathered information on Cuban exiles in the U.S. in order to lay the ground for violent action against them in the future. Hernández was also convicted of conspiring to commit murder.</p>
<p>As Gross prepared for his press conference Wednesday, there was a portrait of  Communist mass murderer Che Guevara <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/12/17/why-does-freed-cuban-prisoners-lawyer-have-a-picture-of-che-on-his-wall/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">clearly visible</span></a> in the Washington, D.C. office of Gross&#8217;s lawyer, high-profile attorney Scott D. Gilbert of Gilbert LLP. The bloodthirsty Guevara was minister of industry and president of the Cuban National Bank. He also administered kangaroo courts that condemned enemies of Fidel Castro&#8217;s regime to death. In other words, as Gross prepared his statement about being freed from a Cuban jail, an iconic photograph honoring Cuba&#8217;s most infamous jailer stared down at him.</p>
<p>Guevara, incidentally, wanted to annihilate the United States.</p>
<p>&#8220;If the nuclear missiles [from the missile crisis] had remained [in Cuba] we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City,&#8221; he said. &#8220;The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.&#8221;</p>
<p>In the press conference Gross maligned the U.S., <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/12/17/Freed-Prisoner-Alan-Gross-Slams-Two-Governments-Mutually-Belligerent-Policies"><span style="color: #0433ff;">pulling</span></a> a cowardly pox-on-both-your-houses stunt. Gross drew a moral equivalency between the U.S. and the ruthless authoritarian regime he just escaped:</p>
<blockquote><p>I also feel compelled to share with you my utmost respect for and fondness of the people of Cuba. In no way are they responsible for the ordeal to which my family and I have been subjected. To me <i>cubanos</i>,<i> </i>or at least most of them, are incredibly kind, generous and talented. <strong><i>It pains me to see them treated so unjustly as a consequence of two governments&#8217; mutually belligerent policies.  Five and a half decades of history show us such belligerence inhibits better judgment. Two wrongs never make a right. I truly hope that we can now get beyond these mutually belligerent policies and I was very happy to hear what the president had to say today.</i></strong> It was particularly cool to be sitting next to the secretary of state as he was hearing about his job description for the next couple of months. In all seriousness, this is a game-changer, which I fully support. [Emphasis added.]</p></blockquote>
<p>Who condemns his own countrymen as imperialist warmongers after they cut a deal to get him repatriated from the clutches of a dictatorship? And why would he use his opportunity in the spotlight to praise President Obama’s decision to normalize relations with the regime that he believes unjustly imprisoned him?</p>
<p>The whole thing doesn&#8217;t smell right. Clearly it was in the works for a long time.</p>
<p>Interestingly enough, Gross thanked Jill Zuckman of left-wing PR firm SKDKnickerbocker for helping to free him. SKDKnickerbocker also employs former resident Maoist in the Obama White House, Anita Dunn, and Democrat operative Hilary Rosen. Gross also thanked Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Communist-friendly lawmakers Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) for freeing him.</p>
<p>Those who follow President Obama&#8217;s policy initiatives already know that he delights in trading Americans who hate America for foreign terrorists and murderers who also hate America. Not so long ago there was the swap of U.S Army deserter and Taliban collaborator Bowe Bergdahl for five members of the Taliban&#8217;s high command.  Not exactly a good deal for America.</p>
<p>What&#8217;s next for Obama, who is hellbent to knock America down a few pegs?</p>
<p>Diplomatic recognition for Iran? At first glance such a development might seem unlikely, but Obama does harbor deep affection for hardline Islamic states. He aided Mohamed Morsi&#8217;s Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and during anti-government unrest that began in Iran in 2009, Obama effectively propped up the Islamist regime there by doing nothing to oppose it.</p>
<p>Anything could happen with Obama in his final two years in the White House.</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>
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		<title>Obama’s Bailout for Communist Dictators</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-bailout-for-communist-dictators/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-bailout-for-communist-dictators</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2014 05:44:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Alan Gross]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247702</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why Americans will suffer for Obama’s dirty deal with Castro.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Getty_121013_ObamaCastro.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247703" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Getty_121013_ObamaCastro-416x350.jpg" alt="Mandela memorial service (30)" width="289" height="243" /></a>The Soviet Union did not have to fall. If Carter had won a second term and Mondale had succeeded him, the Communist dictatorship might have received the outside help it needed to survive.</p>
<p>And we would still be living under the shadow of the Cold War.</p>
<p>Carter couldn’t save the Soviet Union, but he did <a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/humbertofontova/2011/04/02/jimmy_carter_charms_the_castro_brothers_in_havana/page/full"><span style="color: #0433ff;">his best to save Castro</span></a>, visiting Fidel and Raul in Cuba where the second worst president in American history described his meeting with Castro as a greeting among “old friends”.</p>
<p>Raul Castro called Carter “the best of all U.S. presidents.”</p>
<p>Obama’s dirty deal with Raul will make the worst president in American history, Castro’s new best friend.</p>
<p>Carter couldn’t save Castro, but Obama did. This was not a prisoner exchange. This was a Communist bailout.</p>
<p>Obama boasted that he would increase the flow of money to Cuba from businesses, from bank accounts and from trade. When he said, “We’re significantly increasing the amount of money that can be sent to Cuba”, that was his real mission statement.</p>
<p>The Castro regime is on its last legs. Its sponsors in Moscow and Caracas are going bankrupt due to failing energy prices. The last hope of the Butcher of Havana was a bailout from Washington D.C.</p>
<p>And that’s exactly what Obama gave him.</p>
<p>Obama has protected the Castros from regime change as if Communist dictators are an endangered species.</p>
<p>From the beginning, Obama put his foreign policy at the disposal of Havana when he backed Honduran leftist thug Manuel Zelaya’s attempt to shred its Constitution over the protests of the country’s Congress and Supreme Court. And its military, which refused to obey his illegal orders.</p>
<p>Obama’s support for an elected dictator in Honduras should have warned Americans that their newly elected leader viewed men like Zelaya favorably and constitutions and the separation of powers between the branches of government unfavorably. It also showcased his agenda for Latin America.</p>
<p>His embrace of Raul Castro brings that agenda out into the open even if he still insists in wrapping it in dishonest claims about “freedom” and “openness” while bailing out a Communist dictatorship.</p>
<p>Obama began his Castro speech with a lie, declaring, “The United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba.”</p>
<p>The Cuban people have no relationship with the United States because they have no free elections and no say in how they are governed. The only Cubans who have a relationship with the United States fled here on rafts.</p>
<p>Obama did not make his dirty deal with the Cuban people. He made it in a marathon phone call with the Cuban dictator.</p>
<p>When Obama claims that his deal with Raul Castro represents a new relationship with the people of Cuba, he is endorsing a Communist dictatorship as the legitimate representative of the Cuban people.</p>
<p>This is a retroactive endorsement of the Castro regime and its entire history of mass murder and political terror. Obama is not trying to “open up” Cuba as he claimed. He likes Cuba just the way it is; Communist and closed.</p>
<p>Obama did not consult the Cuban people, just as he did not consult the American people. He disregarded the embargo, Congress, the Constitution and the freedom of the Cuban people.</p>
<p>His dictatorial disregard of the embargo, which can only be eliminated by Congress, in order to support a dictatorship, is a disturbing reminder that the road he is walking down leads to a miserable tyranny.</p>
<p>Cuban-American senators from both parties have been unanimous in condemning the move. These senators are the closest thing to Cuban elected officials. But Obama disregarded Senator Menendez, a man of his own party, Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Ted Cruz.</p>
<p>Instead Obama chose to stand with Raul Castro and his Communist dictatorship.</p>
<p>Obama tried to whitewash his crime by exploiting Alan Gross, a USAID contractor who was imprisoned and abused by the Castro regime, as if the release of an American hostage justified helping the men holding him hostage stay in power. And the media, which was reprinting Castro’s propaganda claiming that Gross’ imprisonment was justified, is busy now pretending that it cares about his release.</p>
<p>He had similarly tried to whitewash his Taliban amnesty by using Bergdahl and his parents as cover. If a deal is struck with Iran, the release of Robert Levinson, Saeed Abedini or Amir Hekmati will almost certainly be used to divert attention from the fact that their own government has collaborated with the thugs and terrorists who took them hostage.</p>
<p>Even though Obama criticized European countries for paying financial ransoms to ISIS, his own ransom paid to the Castros is worth countless billions. And the blood money pouring out of American banks into the Castro regime will encourage other dictatorships to take Americans hostage as leverage for obtaining concessions from the United States. Americans abroad will suffer for Obama’s dirty deal.</p>
<p>No European country recognized ISIS in exchange for the release of hostages. Only Obama was willing to go that far with Cuba, not only opening diplomatic and economic relations, but promising to remove the Communist dictatorship from the list of state sponsors of terror despite the fact that the last State Department review found that Cuba continued to support the leftist narco-terrorists of FARC.</p>
<p>FARC had taken its own American hostages who were starved and beaten, tortured and abused.</p>
<p>Now Obama has <a href="http://freebeacon.com/national-security/cuba-demands-removal-from-list-of-state-sponsors-of-terrorism/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">given in to the demand of a state</span></a> sponsor of terror to be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for releasing a hostage.</p>
<p>Obama has sent a message to Iran that the best way to secure a deal is by wrapping it in an American hostage. He has told ISIS that we do negotiate with terrorists. And he has once again demonstrated that his vaunted “smart power” is nothing more than appeasement wrapped in excuses and lies.</p>
<p>But Obama did not act to help Alan Gross. He did not even act because he genuinely thought that diplomatic relations would open up Cuba. In his speech, Obama used the claim commonly put forward by Castro apologists that the very fact that the Castros were still in power proved that sanctions had failed. Yet the lack of sanctions against Cuba by the rest of the world certainly did not usher in the new spirit of openness that Obama is promising. Rewarding dictators with cash never frees a nation.</p>
<p>This was not about saving Alan Gross. It was about saving Raul Castro.</p>
<p>Obama and Castro are both weakened leaders of the left. Like the Castros, Obama has lost international influence and his own people have turned on him. The only thing he has left is unilateral rule.</p>
<p>If Obama saw something of his own hopes and aspirations to engage in a populist transformation of the United States in Manuel Zelaya or Hugo Chavez, his horizons have narrowed down to those of Raul Castro. His ability to remake the world has vanished and the American people are revolting against his collectivization efforts. They want open health care markets, free speech and honest government.</p>
<p>Obama can no longer remake the Middle East, he certainly can’t bring the Soviet Union back from the dead, but he could still bail out Raul Castro and maintain Communist rule in Cuba.</p>
<p>No matter how often Obama claims to be “on the right side of history”, the Castros are a living reminder that to be on the left is to be on the wrong side of history.</p>
<p>Obama did not want to see the “Berlin Wall” fall in Havana on his watch. After watching his own grip on the United States collapse, he did not want to see the left fail again.</p>
<p>We can never know how history might have been different if Carter had gotten a second term or if Mondale had replaced Reagan. But Obama’s deal with Castro reminds us that the end of the USSR was not inevitable. It happened because we stood up against the tyrants in the Kremlin and their useful idiots in the White House.</p>
<p>A good man like Reagan could make a difference by bringing down the USSR. A bad man like Obama can make a difference by keeping Cuba Communist.</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>
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		<title>Losing India</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/vijeta-uniyal/losing-india/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=losing-india</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Feb 2014 05:20:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vijeta Uniyal]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218704</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Surely not an option, even for Obama?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="article_body">
<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/360_india_call_center_1016.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218730" alt="360_india_call_center_1016" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/360_india_call_center_1016.jpg" width="288" height="188" /></a></em><strong>Originally published by <a href="http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4712/losing_india_surely_not_an_option_even_for_obama">The Commentator</a>. </strong></p>
<p>Last week saw India&#8217;s envoy to the US air discontent over imminent moves by US Lawmakers to tighten visa regulations on high-tech firms as part of a larger immigration reform. This move would restrict the ability of US based Indian IT firms to source their employees from India.</p>
<p>It is interesting to note that the uncanny and resigned tone of the envoy&#8217;s statement has come to define US-India relations in recent years. Once seen as blooming and dynamic, this relationship is now showing signs of deep trouble.</p>
<p>Those working in the US State Department and New Delhi&#8217;s South Block on &#8220;diplomatic solutions&#8221; to these increasingly frequent impasses might not succeed in the long run. For these are mere symptoms of a greater malady.</p>
<p>The reason for this deteriorating relationship is two-fold. The first directly arises from President Obama&#8217;s new foreign policy approach. He promised voters in 2008 that as President he would talk to enemies and this is a promise he really <em>has</em> delivered on.</p>
<p>It is a laudable approach to &#8220;positively engage&#8221; enemies, provided we live in an ideal world where good deeds are reciprocated. But the extended hand of friendship by the US has been seen by adversaries as a sign of weakness; encouraging despots like Assad to play &#8220;Russian roulette&#8221; with his chemical weapon stockpile, Iran to carry on Uranium enrichment and China to employ strong-arm tactics on Japan.</p>
<p>It has another unintended effect as well. This approach incentivizes bad behavior by enemies and at times penalizes loyal allies. The concessions made to adversaries have come too often at the cost of loyal friends. India has been quick to notice that in the region and has made no secret of her discontent.</p>
<p>The second aspect of this problem might be related to the first one, but has a &#8220;values&#8221; dimension to it. The current US administration does not seek to be the moral leader of the world. &#8220;American Exceptionalism&#8221; is not a guiding principle of foreign policy.</p>
<p>The US seeks to reduce its geo-political footprint and assume a more &#8220;equitable role&#8221; in the world. Another altruistic position, one might think, but it has an impact on India beyond the framework of disengagement politics undertaken by the current administration.</p>
<p>To put it candidly, India&#8217;s political leadership did not embrace free market capitalism as a result of an acquired conviction, but it was forced upon them after a balance-of-payments crisis in 1991. The initially painful steps imposed on India paved the way for her growth story. The US at that point played the role of a catalyst nudging India to overcome her initial hesitations and embrace free market capitalism.</p>
<p>India&#8217;s economic growth and her foreign policy tilt towards the U.S. have occurred simultaneously and that is by no means a coincidence. India&#8217;s initial ascent on the world economic stage was a direct result of her embracing quintessentially American values.</p>
<p>By curbing government control on private enterprise, cutting taxes, and reducing the size of the government bureaucracy through privatization, India unleashed the entrepreneurship of her hard working and ingenious people.</p>
<p>If one was to summarize India&#8217;s success in one word, it would be &#8220;incentives&#8221;. For the first time in the history of modern India millions of families had a real chance of lifting themselves from poverty, not through government programs, but as a direct result of economic growth and private enterprise.</p>
<p>Economic mobility dented the rigid and inhumane Cast System. Indian women broke new ground and were empowered by their increased participation at all levels of the economy.</p>
<p>However, the last decade saw India falter on this path. Rather than pushing ahead with economic liberalization and focusing on growth, the government is again resorting to the remedy of &#8220;social programs&#8221;.</p>
<p>The US that India had been dealing from the early 90s was assured of the superiority of its values and willing to inspire others to follow her. But with the present US administration focusing on reducing America&#8217;s &#8216;footprint&#8217; and reluctant to even assert the correctness of its values, let alone defend them, India has lost a vital pillar of support.</p>
<p>That said, India does not seem to have any good option but to push through with her economic reforms and re-embark on her long walk to prosperity. India has a billion reasons to do so.</p>
<p>The coming general elections this summer could be a defining moment for India&#8217;s economic future. India has a chance to overcome current political indecisiveness and get back to the path of much needed economic growth by modernizing governance and liberalizing the economy.</p>
<p>However, if India does falter it will have dire consequence for the world&#8217;s largest democracy, and the U.S will surely come to see that as a cause for profound regret.</p>
<p><em>Vijeta Uniyal is an Indian-born analyst based in Germany.</em></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>
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		<title>German-Israeli Relations Sliding Downward</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/german-israeli-relations-sliding-downward/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=german-israeli-relations-sliding-downward</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 28 Jan 2014 05:05:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A reliable friend changes course. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/pic8.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217274" alt="pic8" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/pic8-450x347.png" width="315" height="243" /></a>Earlier this month (January 12, and 13, 2014), Israel welcomed the freshly appointed Social Democrat (SPD) German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Considered a close friend of Israel, Steinmeier has returned to the post he held during Christian Democrat (CDU) Chancellor Angela Merkel’s first term that began in 2005. This visit is Steinmeier’s first foray outside Europe, ostensibly to attend former Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon’s funeral. It is the deteriorating relationship between Germany and Israel, particularly as it related to Israeli construction in Judea and Samaria that is in the background of Steinmeier’s visit.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Speaking to journalists in Jerusalem, Steinmeier pointed out that the destination for his first non-European official visit in his second term of office “bore </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/47d4e277b48d9d3685256ddc00612265/48c45d451d089bf585257c60006f4737?OpenDocument">testimony</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to the close relations between Germany and Israel.” While in Ramallah however, Steinmeier said that he expected the ‘settlements’ to be a focus of discussion at the next EU Foreign Ministers meeting (January 20, 2014). Steinmeier stated that he already issued a public statement following the first announcement of new building in the settlements, describing it as </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/47d4e277b48d9d3685256ddc00612265/48c45d451d089bf585257c60006f4737?OpenDocument">destructive</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for Secretary of State Kerry’s efforts, and urged that there be no further announcements.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The historical irony is that Germany has been one of the few reliable friends Israel has had in the EU. The former Warsaw Pact nations of Czech Republic and Poland are the others. However for a long time, Germany was Israel’s closest friend in Europe.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Germany and Israel have had a ‘special relationship’ since the Federal Republic of Germany was resurrected from the ashes of Nazi Germany. With the Nazi Holocaust perpetrated by Germans of the Third Reich as a backdrop, and the Murder of Six million European Jews, including a million and one half Jewish children, Germany launched the policy it called &#8220;Wiedergutmachung.”  It refers to reparations that the German government agreed to pay in 1953 to the direct survivors of the Holocaust, to those who were made to work as forced labor and those who otherwise became victims of the Nazis.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The moral responsibility Germans have towards Jews and the Jewish State goes beyond reparations. In Israel, throughout the 1950’s, any contact with Germany was a moral outrage, and the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin railed against accepting “blood money” from Germany. Germany’s historic guilt and moral responsibility is not just for the deliberate murder of European Jews, it is also to the “living Jews” in the Jewish State. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Christoph Heusgen, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s powerful advisor on national security, is one of those German’s who wants, as he calls it, to “normalize relations” with Israel at the expense of the “special relations” Germany has had with the Jewish state. What Heusgen seeks above all else is legitimization to remove Germany’s historical responsibility for its crimes against the Jewish people and treat Israel as all other nations, based on national interests.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">According to a cable from the U.S. embassy in Berlin in 2010, revealed by WikiLeaks, Heusgen urged the U.S. to tone down its opposition to the UN’s anti-Israel Goldstone Report, (which Goldstone later recanted) in order to force Israel to freeze settlement construction (which are legal by anyone’s standards). Chancellor Angela Merkel’s often repeated declarations in Israel’s Knesset and to the U.S. Congress that the Jewish State’s security is non-negotiable for Germany, appears somewhat empty in view of her retention of Heusgen on her staff, with his anti-Israel positions.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A more recent row between Israel and Germany occurred in September, 2012, as the Palestinians sought to bring to the UN General Assembly their request to upgrade their status as an Observer State at the UN. Israel mobilized the former German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle to persuade the majority of its EU partners to abstain, but he failed. Germany agreed with Israel that in case it was unable to convince its partners to abstain, it would vote against the Palestinian request. In the moment of truth, Germany broke its promise to Israel and abstained rather than vote against the Palestinian upgraded status application. If it was up to Heusgen, Germany would have voted in support of the Palestinians along with the other EU members.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Germany is eager to throw the Holocaust guilt off its back, and with encouragement from the European media and academia, it has found the excuses in Israel’s alleged “bad” treatment of the Palestinians, and construction in the ‘settlements,’ which are in fact, communities and towns within Area C, legally administered by Israel. Anti-Semitic expressions in Germany are allowed as long as it is directed towards the Jewish State. According to a 2013 </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.globescan.com/images/images/pressreleases/bbc2013_country_ratings/2013_country_rating_poll_bbc_globescan.pdf">BBC</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> World Service Poll, 8% of Germans view Israel’s influence as positive and 67% view it as negative.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chancellor Angela Merkel has been nevertheless, the most pro-Israel leader of Germany. She had arranged for the German and Israeli cabinet meetings in Israel in March, 2008, which was the first time the German cabinet met with another cabinet outside of Europe. During her unprecedented speech at Israel’s Knesset in March, 2008, Merkel spoke of Germany’s “Holocaust shame,” and pledged her support for the Jewish state. She said that “The “Holocaust fills us with </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/03/18/germany.israel/index.html">shame</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. I bow my head before the survivors and I bow my head before you in tribute to the fact that you were able to survive.” Referring to Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s threat “to wipe Israel off the map,” Merkel said, “Israel’s right to exist is not open to negotiation. These are not just empty words; Germany would support further sanctions on Iran if it fails to cooperate.” </span></p>
<p>Merkel went on to say “what do we do when a majority says the greatest threat to the world comes from Israel and not from Iran? Do we bow our heads? Do we give up our efforts to combat the Iranian threat? However inconvenient and uncomfortable the alternative is, we do not do that. If we were to do that, then we would not have understood our historical responsibility, nor would we be able to properly develop a way to deal with the challenges of our day…” Yet, Payvand Iran News reported on December 2, 2008 that “total German-Iranian <a href="http://www.payvand.com/news/08/dec/1021.html">trade volume rose 7.8%</a> between January and September (2008) compared to the same corresponding period in 2007. The overall bilateral trade volume stood at 3.233865 billion euros. German exports to Iran increased 8.9% and comprised 84.7% of the total German-Iranian trade volume.”</p>
<p>Germany is moreover a signatory to the six-month interim agreement with Iran, signed by the P5+1 (Iran, and U.S., UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China) on November 24, 2013. The agreement clears the way for the partial suspension of U.S. and EU sanctions, and would see thousands of German companies flocking to Iran to do business deals. Around 50 German firms have their own branch offices in Iran and more than 12,000 firms have their own trade representatives in Iran.</p>
<p>Merkel’s words about Iran in her 2008 speech in Israel’s Knesset, and her statements about Germany’s responsibility and support for the Jewish State’s security are negated by Germany’s recent actions. Germany’s continued trade with Iran is a betrayal of Israel and the Jewish people, especially since the Islamic Republic of Iran is committed to the destruction of the Jewish state.</p>
<p>Germany’s position on the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians is skewed as well. Berlin has chosen to overlook the Palestinians quest to replace the Jewish state with an Arab-Muslim one. Germany has preferred to ignore Ramallah’s incitement against Israel by official actions and pronouncements in the Palestinian media, schools, and mosques. Steinmeier’s visit cannot change the fact that Germany seeks to end its “special relations” with the Jewish state, and join the EU anti-Israel chorus.</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>
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		<title>The Vatican, the Jews and Israel</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 14 Oct 2013 04:32:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A look back at the two popes who changed Catholic-Jewish relations forever. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/catholic_jewish_relations_3.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-207266" alt="catholic_jewish_relations_3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/catholic_jewish_relations_3.jpg" width="291" height="232" /></a>The Vatican announced on September 30, 2013 that deceased Popes John XXIII and John Paul II will be canonized as saints at a Vatican ceremony, which will take place on April 27, 2014.  By happenstance, these two popes did more than any others to foster close ties with the Jews and the Jewish State. Pope John XXIII was pontiff from 1958-1963, and the Polish-born Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian Pope in 400 years, led the Catholic Church from 1978-2005.  Their heroic actions cleared the way for ever warmer relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish State.</p>
<p>It was Pope John Paul II’s (born Karol Jozef Wojtyla) lifelong Jewish friend and schoolmate from his Polish hometown of Wadowice, Jerzy Kluger, who influenced him to make the historic visit to the great Rome Synagogue on April 13, 1986.  There, in a memorable expression of respect for Judaism, he intoned, “You are our dearly beloved brothers, and in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers.”  His visit is acknowledged as the first by a pope since the early history of the Roman Catholic Church.  Pope John Paul II prayed together with the Chief Rabbi of Rome at the time, Elio Toaff, in an attempt to show solidarity with Jews and Judaism.</p>
<p>Earlier in 1979, John Paul II became the first pope to visit the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp">Auschwitz concentration camp</a> in Poland where many of his compatriots (mostly <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland">Polish Jews</a>) perished during the Nazi occupation during World War II. In 1998 he issued <i>“We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” </i>which outlined his thinking on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust">Holocaust</a>.</p>
<p>On December 30, 1993, the Vatican established diplomatic relations with the Jewish State.  A Vatican Nunciature in Jerusalem, Israel, and an Israeli embassy in Rome were established in January 1994.  For Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Church this meant reconciliation with the Jewish people, and it was viewed by the Israeli government as normalization.  Prior to the establishment of diplomatic relations, the Vatican’s interests were handled by the Apostolic Delegate to Jerusalem and Palestine, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Custodian of the Holy Land.</p>
<p>In 2000, Pope John Paul II visited Israel where he publicly apologized for the persecution of the Jews over the centuries by the Catholics, including the Holocaust (he, as Karol Wojtyla, saved a 13-old Jewish girl during the war and helped many other Jews). He also left a note in the Western Wall pleading for forgiveness.</p>
<p>In order to understand how far the Catholic Church was moved by both popes it is important to look at the actions of another pope, Pius X, who had a private meeting with Theodore Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism and the spiritual founder of the Jewish State of Israel, on January 25, 1904.</p>
<p>Following the first Zionist Congress in 1897, which took place in Basel, Switzerland, Herzl sought out Pope Pius X in the hopes of gaining his sympathetic understanding of the Zionist cause.  The meeting came in the wake of devastating pogroms against Jews of Russia, Poland, and other Eastern European lands, and rabid anti-Semitism in Western Europe.  At issue was the return of these persecuted Jews to their ancestral home.  Pope Pius X’s reaction was: “<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=ITQVJjUGM2gC&amp;pg=PA73&amp;dq=Pope+John+Paul+II:+%E2%80%9CFor+the+Jewish+people+who+live+in+the+State+of+Israel+and+who+preserve+in+that+land+such+precious+testimonies+to+their+history+and+their+faith,+we+must+ask+for+the+desired+security+and+the+due+tranquillity+that+are+the+prerogative+of+every+nation+.+.+.%E2%80%9D&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=AaBUUrHKK9Xd4APbzYCgAQ&amp;ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=Pope%20John%20Paul%20II%3A%20%E2%80%9CFor%20the%20Jewish%20people%20who%20live%20in%20the%20State%20of%20Israel%20and%20who%20preserve%20in%20that%20land%20such%20precious%20testimonies%20to%20their%20history%20and%20their%20faith%2C%20we%20mu">We are unable to favor the movement</a> [Zionism].  We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem, but we could never sanction it.  The ground of Jerusalem has been sanctified by the life of Christ.  As head of the Church, I cannot answer you otherwise.  The Jews have not recognized our Lord; therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish People.”</p>
<p>The Church’s hostile stance continued despite the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel on May 14, 1948.  The <i>Osservatore Romano</i>, the official organ of the Vatican proclaimed at that time, “Modern Israel is not the authentic heir of biblical Israel, but constitutes a lay state. This is why the holy land and its sacred places belong to Christianity, the veritable Israel.”</p>
<p>In contrast are the words of Pope John Paul II who said in a 1994 interview with Tad Szulc published in<i> Parade magazine: “</i>It must be understood that Jews, who for two thousand years were dispersed among the nations of the world, had decided to return to the land of their ancestors.  <a href="http://ns1.makeahistory.com/index.php/recent-news/42996-fourth-reich-in-disguise-how-germany-is-using-the-financial-crisis-to-conquer-europe">This is their right</a>.  And this right is recognized even by those who look upon the nation of Israel with an unsympathetic eye.  This right was also recognized from the outset by the Holy See, and the act of establishing diplomatic relations with Israel is simply an international affirmation of this relationship.”</p>
<p>Italian-born Monsignor Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, later to become Pope John XXIII, will forever be remembered as the Pope that truly changed Catholic-Jewish relations.  The Second Vatican Council and the declaration, Nostra Aetate (In Our Time), are the most critical landmarks in this relationship. During WWII, Msgr. Roncalli, then the Apostolic Delegate to Turkey, saved Jews fleeing the Nazis by providing them with baptismal certificates.  He worked with the delegation of the Jewish Agency of Palestine in Istanbul in the undercover delivery of immigration certificates to Palestine for Jewish refugees in Europe.  Additionally, he urged Pope Pius XII to receive then Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Yitzhak Halevy Herzog, who wished to plead personally for the rescue of Jews throughout Eastern Europe.  Pope Pius XII flatly refused to see him.</p>
<p>Immediately upon becoming Pope John XXIII, on October 28, 1958, he announced his intention of calling for an Ecumenical Council (held on January 20, 1959).  On the ‘Declaration on Jews’ dealing with the alleged collective guilt of the Jews in the death of Jesus, 1821 delegates rejected the charge of Jewish collective guilt, while 188 (mostly Arab-Christians) approved.  And the delegates, by a vote of 1821 to 245, determined that ‘Jews must not be represented as accursed or rejected by God.’ Another vote, regarding “rejecting persecution against the Jewish people,” passed 1905 to 199.</p>
<p>Pope John XXIII ordered the Church to delete the expression “perfidious Jews” from the Good Friday prayers.</p>
<p>These positive changes in the Catholic Church towards the Jewish people were influenced by facts.  The Holocaust in Christian Europe left no doubt that the Church’s anti-Judaism (as Cardinal Cassidy once termed it in response to a question posed by this writer as to whether the pogrom in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kielce">Kielce</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland">Poland</a> on July 4, 1946, soon after the Holocaust was anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism) had transformed into murderous anti-Semitism, and that the Church’s teachings must change.  The re-establishment of the Jewish State of Israel in 1948, forced the Church to recognize the reality of Jewish revival.  Finally, the stunning Six-Day War Israeli victory, against all odds, convinced the Church that God, after all, is protecting his covenanted people.</p>
<p>The two-covenant theology proposed by the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, which argued that Jews are already with the Father (God), and need no intercession of Jesus, was gradually absorbed into Christian thinking.  It is indeed reflected in the words of the <i>Nostra Aetate</i> which declares: “God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes.” Nor does God abrogate his covenant with His people …</p>
<p>Reverend Dr. Bill Harter, a Presbyterian Church USA pastor, commented to this writer that he hopes that mainline Protestant churches will reach the same understanding the Catholic Church has reached in their relationship with Jews and Israel.</p>
<p>Nostra Aetate and subsequent changes in Catholic teaching regarding Jews have had positive effects in both North America, and the West &#8212; due in large measure to the two great and truly humanitarian popes, Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II.</p>
<p>Both Israel and Jewish communities worldwide should enthusiastically welcome the canonization and sainthood of these two great Catholic leaders.</p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Power and Its Limitations</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 27 Sep 2013 04:52:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=205594</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Israel may have more cards to use against the U.S. president's bullying than it realizes. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/gty_obama_netanyahu_press_conference_ll_130320_wg.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-205596" alt="gty_obama_netanyahu_press_conference_ll_130320_wg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/gty_obama_netanyahu_press_conference_ll_130320_wg-450x316.jpg" width="270" height="190" /></a>Originally published in <a href="http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=327188">The Jerusalem Post.</a> </em></p>
<p>US President Barack Obama&#8217;s rapidly changing positions on Syria have produced many odd spectacles.</p>
<p>One of odder ones was the sight of hundreds of lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee fanning out on Capitol Hill to lobby members of the House and Senate to support Obama&#8217;s plan to launch what Secretary of State John Kerry called &#8220;unbelievably small&#8221; air strikes against empty regime controlled buildings in Syria.</p>
<p>AIPAC officials claimed they were doing this because the air strikes would help Israel.</p>
<p>But this claim was easily undone. Obama and Kerry insisted nothing the US would do would have any impact on the outcome of the Syrian civil war. This was supposed to be the strikes&#8217; selling point. But by launching worthless strikes, Obama was poised to wreck America&#8217;s deterrent posture, transforming the world&#8217;s superpower into an international joke.</p>
<p>In harming America&#8217;s deterrent capabilities by speaking loudly and carrying an &#8220;unbelievably small&#8221; stick, Kerry and Obama also harmed Israel&#8217;s deterrent posture.</p>
<p>Israel&#8217;s deterrence relies in no small measure on its strategic alliance with the US.</p>
<p>Once the US is no longer feared, a key part of Israeli deterrence is removed.</p>
<p>Obama did not announce his intention to bomb empty buildings in Syria in order to impact the deterrent posture of either the US or Israel. He probably gave them little thought. The only one who stood to gain from those strikes &#8211; aside from Syrian President Bashar Assad who would earn bragging rights for standing down the US military &#8211; was Obama himself.</p>
<p>Obama wanted to launch the unbelievably small strikes to prove that he wasn&#8217;t lying when he said that Syria would cross a red line if it used chemical weapons.</p>
<p>So if the strikes were going to harm the US and Israel, why did AIPAC dispatch its lobbyists to Capitol Hill to lobby in favor of them?</p>
<p>Because Obama made them.</p>
<p>Obama ordered AIPAC to go to Capitol Hill to lobby for the Syria strikes. He did so knowing that its involvement would weaken public support for AIPAC and Israel. Both would be widely perceived as pushing the US to send military forces into harm&#8217;s way to defend Israel.</p>
<p>Then, with hundreds of AIPAC lobbyist racing from one Congressional office to the next, Obama left them in a lurch. He announced he was cutting a deal with Russia and had decided not to attack Syria after all.</p>
<p>What did AIPAC get for its self-defeating efforts on Obama&#8217;s behalf?</p>
<p>Obama is now courting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in the hopes of making a deal that Iran will use as cover for completing its nuclear weapons program. Such a deal may well involve ending sanctions on Iran&#8217;s oil exports and its central bank &#8211; sanctions that AIPAC expended years of effort getting Congress to pass.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s not all. Monday, as Obama meets with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at the UN General Assembly in New York, Vice President Joe Biden will become the highest ranking administration official to date to address the J Street conference.</p>
<p>J Street was formed in order to weaken AIPAC, and force it to the left. Sending Biden to headline at the J Street conference is an act of aggression against AIPAC. It also signals that Obama remains committed to strengthening the anti-Israel voices at the margins of the American Jewish community at the expense of the pro- Israel majority.</p>
<p>The question is why is AIPAC cooperating with Obama as he abuses it? Why didn&#8217;t they just say no?</p>
<p>Because they couldn&#8217;t.</p>
<p>AIPAC is not strong enough to stand up to the president of the United States, particularly one as hostile as Obama.</p>
<p>Not only would it have suffered direct retaliation for its refusal, Obama would have also punished Israel for its friend&#8217;s recalcitrance.</p>
<p>In a recent interview with The Times of Israel, Eitan Haber, late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin&#8217;s closest aide, made the case that Israel is powerless in the face of White House pressure. Haber claimed that only when a person becomes prime minister does he understand &#8220;to what extent the State of Israel is dependent on America. For absolutely everything&#8230; we are dependent on America.&#8221;</p>
<p>Haber noted that the US can collapse every aspect of Israel. From this he concluded that no Israeli leader can stand up to Washington.</p>
<p>Haber recalled a menacing conversation Rabin had with then-US secretary of state James Baker during which Baker became angry at Rabin.</p>
<p>&#8220;America is right even when it is wrong,&#8221; Baker admonished the Israeli leader.</p>
<p>Haber warned that Israel cannot stand up to the US even when the US is behaving in a manner that endangers Israel. &#8220;It&#8217;s possible that they don&#8217;t understand the region and that they are naïve and stupid,&#8221; he said, &#8220;But they are America.&#8221;</p>
<p>Haber was right that that the White House can destroy Israel&#8217;s economy, defenses and diplomatic position any time it wishes. In the past administration threats of economic sanctions or delays in sending spare parts for weapons platforms have been sufficient to make Israeli leaders fall into line.</p>
<p>For the past five and a half years Obama has dangled US diplomatic support at the UN Security Council over Israel&#8217;s head like the Sword of Damocles.</p>
<p>Obama forced Netanyahu to make concession after concession to secure his veto of the PLO&#8217;s request that the UN Security Council accept &#8220;Palestine&#8221; as a member state two years ago. Netanyahu&#8217;s sudden support for Palestinian statehood and his 10- month long freeze on Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria were the most public concessions he was forced to cough up.</p>
<p>The timing of the EU announcement that it was barring EU entities from forging ties with Israelis that operate beyond the 1949 armistice lines was revealing in this context. The EU announced its economic sanctions the day Kerry announced the start of negotiations between Israel and the PLO. The message to Israel was absolutely clear: Do what we order you to or you will face economic sanctions far more damaging.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s appointment of Samantha Power to serve as US ambassador to the UN was another signal of ill intent. Power became the object of fear and fury for Israel supporters after YouTube videos of a 2002 interview she gave went viral during the 2008 elections. In that interview Power called for the US to send &#8220;a mammoth protection force&#8221; to Israel to protect the Palestinians from &#8220;genocide&#8221; that Israel would commit. That is, she called for the US to go to war against Israel to protect the Palestinians from a nonexistent threat maliciously attributed to the only human rights-respecting state in the Middle East.</p>
<p>And just after his reelection, Obama sent Power to the epicenter of international blood libels and attempts to outlaw the Jewish state.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s deal with Russia President Vladimir Putin was also a signal of aggression, if not an act of aggression in and of itself. The ink had barely dried on their unenforceable agreement that leaves Iran&#8217;s Arab client in power, when Putin turned his guns on Israel. As Putin put it, Syria only developed its chemical arsenal &#8220;as an alternative to the nuclear weapons of Israel.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Obama administration itself has a track record in putting Israel&#8217;s presumptive nuclear arsenal on the international diplomatic chopping block. In 2010 Netanyahu was compelled to cancel his participation in Obama&#8217;s nuclear weapons conference when he learned that Egypt and Turkey intended to use Obama&#8217;s conference to demand that Israel sign the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s behavior demonstrates his bad intentions. So Israelis and our American supporters need to ask whether Haber is right. Is Israel powerless in the face of a hostile US administration?</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s reconsider Obama&#8217;s decision to turn to AIPAC for support on Syria.</p>
<p>Why did he do that? Why did he turn to an organization he wishes to harm and order it to go to the mattresses for him?</p>
<p>Obama turned to AIPAC primarily because AIPAC could help him. AIPAC hold sway on Capitol Hill.</p>
<p>Where does that power come from? Does AIPAC wield influence because it frightens members into submission?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>AIPAC is powerful because it serves as a mouthpiece for the overwhelming majority of Americans. The American people support Israel. If something will help Israel, then most Americans will support it. Obama wanted Congressional support. He couldn&#8217;t win it on the merits of his feckless plan. So he sent in AIPAC to pretend that his strikes would benefit Israel.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s demand that AIPAC help him is reality&#8217;s response to Haber&#8217;s protestations of Israeli powerlessness.</p>
<p>Israel&#8217;s alliance with the US, upon which it is so dependent, was not built with America&#8217;s political or foreign policy elites. Saudi Arabia&#8217;s alliance with the US was built on such ties.</p>
<p>Israel&#8217;s alliance with the US is built on the American public&#8217;s support for Israel. And although Obama himself doesn&#8217;t need to face American voters again, his Democratic colleagues do. Moreover, even lame duck presidents cannot veer too far away from the national consensus.</p>
<p>It is because of this consensus that Obama has to send signals to Israel &#8211; like the EU sanctions, and Power&#8217;s appointment to the UN &#8211; rather than openly part ways with Jerusalem.</p>
<p>Obama is powerful. And he threatens Israel. But Israel is not as powerless as Haber believes. Israel can make its case to the American public.</p>
<p>And assuming the American people support Israel&#8217;s case, Obama&#8217;s freedom of action can be constrained.</p>
<p>For instance, on the Palestinian issue, Haber said Israel has to accept whatever Obama says. But that isn&#8217;t true. Netanyahu can set out the international legal basis for Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria and explain why Israel&#8217;s rights are stronger than the Palestinians&#8217;.</p>
<p>The government can expose the fact that the demographic doomsday scenario that forms the basis of support for the two-state formula is grounded on falsified data concocted by the PLO.</p>
<p>Demography, like international law, is actually one of Israel&#8217;s strategic assets.</p>
<p>Then there is Iran.</p>
<p>Were Netanyahu to defy Obama and order the IDF to attack Iran&#8217;s nuclear installations, he would be pushing the boundaries of the US political consensus less than Menachem Begin did when he ordered the air force to destroy Iraq&#8217;s nuclear reactor in 1981. He would also be pushing the US consensus less than Rabin did when he embraced Yasser Arafat in 1993.</p>
<p>No, Israel cannot say no to everything that Obama wishes to do in the Middle East.</p>
<p>And yes, it needs to make concessions where it can to placate the White House. AIPAC&#8217;s decision to take a bullet for Obama on Syria may have been the better part of wisdom.</p>
<p>Israel has three-and-a-half more years with Obama. They won&#8217;t be easy. And there is no telling who will succeed him. But this needn&#8217;t be a catastrophe. Our cards are limited. But we have cards. And if we play them wisely, we will be fine.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama: Back to the Racist Future</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/obama-back-to-the-future/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-back-to-the-future</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 28 Aug 2013 04:55:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Black]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hatred]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Racism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[relations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=202244</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The president and Democrats take us back to the race hatred and violence of 60 years ago. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/obama-angry1-600x350.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-202253 alignleft" alt="obama-angry1-600x350" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/obama-angry1-600x350-450x329.jpg" width="270" height="197" /></a>America is enduring an ever-increasing spiral of heinous black-on-white violence. Less than a week after 22-year-old Australian baseball player Christopher Lane was allegedly executed by three &#8220;bored&#8221; wannabe gang-bangers, 88-year-old World War II veteran Delbert “Shorty” Belton was allegedly <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/23/world-war-ii-veteran-beaten-to-death-by-2-teenagers-in-washington-parking-lot/">beaten</a> to death by two 16-year-old black American teens, Demetrius Glenn and Kenan D. Adams-Kinard, both of whom have <a href="http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2013/aug/23/police-arrest-one-suspect-wwii-vet-beating-death/">histories</a> of violent crime. In Poughkeepsie, NY, 20-year-old Javon Tyrek Rogers has been <a href="http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20130826/NEWS05/308260013/Murder-suspect-face-court?gcheck=1&amp;nclick_check=1">charged</a> with first degree murder and first degree burglary in the killing of 99-year-old Fannie Gumbinger. On August 13, two black male youths and their female accomplice were <a href="http://downtown.wmctv.com/news/news/185832-three-suspects-charged-deadly-shooting-south-main">charged</a> with robbing and killing 27-year-old David Santucci in Memphis, TN. Despite these and other incidents, President Obama, Democrats, and the usual gaggle of racial arsonists remain conspicuously silent. That is no accident. All of them have a vested interest in turning back the clock on race relations and they have all played a role in where we are today.</p>
<p>Despite their selective caution in bringing race politics into cases such as those mentioned above, President Obama and his race agitator allies have no problem whatsoever with rushing to judgment and rashly injecting themselves into highly sensitive and controversial situations. Recall when Cambridge police arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Obama said it was self-evident that the department &#8220;acted stupidly&#8221; for arresting someone at their own house, ceding to the narrative that the police likely only arrested Gates because he was black and therefore suspicious. In fact, the police only arrested Gates because he embarked on an enraged tirade and became belligerent and disorderly.</p>
<p>In the Trayvon Martin case, Obama <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/19/remarks-president-trayvon-martin">contended</a> a son of his would look like Martin, or that he himself could have been Martin &#8220;35 years ago.&#8221; In his second speech regarding Martin, Obama did comment on the reality of runaway violence committed overwhelmingly by black American males, but then excused the behavior because &#8220;some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.&#8221;</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the president&#8217;s solutions for stemming the violence implied that &#8220;the system&#8221; was to blame and that it needed to be fixed. Obama urged his followers to &#8220;work with law enforcement about training at the state and local levels in order to reduce the kind of mistrust in the system that sometimes currently exists&#8221; and &#8220;to examine some state and local laws to see if it&#8211;if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential altercations.&#8221;</p>
<p>Perhaps the president could explain how &#8220;mistrust in the system&#8221; caused two black 16-year-olds to douse a 13-year-old white boy with gasoline and <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/teenagers-poured-gasoline-boy-walking-home-school-set-fire-cops-article-1.1033062">set</a> him on fire in Kansas City in March of 2012. Or why a group of black neighbors brutally <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/26/victims-sister-mobile-ala-black-on-white-beating-sparked-by-theft-not-basketball/">assaulted</a> Matthew Owen with with bats, brass knuckles, a chair, a paint can and other objects &#8220;for Trayvon&#8221; in Mobile, AL in April of 2012. Or why six &#8220;bored&#8221; black youths <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ohio-man-beaten-teens-year-dies-article-1.1399794">beat</a> a 46-year-old white Ohio man so savagely last August that they may face additional charges in the man&#8217;s death this past July. Or why 18-year-old De’Marquise Elkins allegedly <a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-21/national/41433562_1_karimah-elkins-sherry-west-killed-baby">murdered</a> 13-month-old Antonio Santiago. Or why three 15-year-old black teens brutally <a href="http://foxnewsinsider.com/2013/08/05/disturbing-video-13-year-old-florida-boy-brutally-beaten-school-bus-driver-refuses">beat up</a> a 13-year-old white teen on a Florida school bus earlier this month.</p>
<p>None of those incidents, or the disturbing phenomenon of black flash mob <a href="http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/082213-668481-oklahoma-shooting-blacks-white-victim-obama-trayvon.htm?p=2">attacks</a> on whites that regularly occur in cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Milwaukee, or Washington, D.C. had anything to do with the &#8220;system,&#8221; nor did they merit a single word of condemnation from the president, or any other the demagogues who usually seek to turn any incident of white on black crime into a national conversation &#8212; a one-sided conversation that is invariably an indictment of an irredeemably racist America itself.</p>
<p>These race agitators, however, never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity to put the blame exactly where it belongs, namely, on the legions of violent thugs who commit murder and mayhem without the slightest hint of remorse. As for the poverty and dysfunction that allegedly underpins this mayhem, it&#8217;s about time the Democratic Party owned up to the reality that no one has facilitated that history more than Democrats themselves, courtesy of Great Society programs that incentivized the destruction of the nuclear family, and an out-of-wedlock birth rate in the black American community that has now <a href="http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/2013/07/27/3605554/bill-oreilly-address-out-of-wedlock.html">reached</a> 73 percent.</p>
<p>Furthermore, Democrats can&#8217;t plead ignorance about those consequences. They were <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/229730/moynihan-report-and-ongoing-family-breakdown/rich-lowry">warned</a> by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wrote &#8220;The Negro Family: The Case for National Action&#8221; in 1965<i>.</i> “There is one unmistakable lesson in American history,” Moynihan said, “a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring rational expectations about the future&#8211;that community asks for and gets chaos.” Naturally, Moynihan was excoriated and his report was <a href="http://www.profam.org/pub/fia/fia_1810.htm">dismissed</a> as &#8220;racist propaganda.&#8221;</p>
<p>Nearly 50 years later, nothing in that regard has changed. Even as the chaos and social disintegration occurring on a routine basis in many black American communities continues, anyone who challenges the Democratic contention that black Americans are largely victims of forces beyond their control &#8212; all of which require big-government solutions implemented by Democrats &#8212; is branded a racist. But few things are more racist, hypocritical and immoral than the political party that founded the KKK espousing a mode of governance that has robbed millions of black American youths of their dignity, integrity and, ultimately, their decency, while they themselves look the other way and lead lynch mobs against racial scapegoats.</p>
<p>Yet for the self-anointed &#8220;civil rights&#8221; leaders such a status quo is something to be encouraged, not disbanded. Perpetual dependency is good for the party that promotes dependency, and perpetual race conflict is good for the party that purports to be devoted to &#8220;addressing&#8221; race conflicts. Nurturing the racial divide is a core component of the Democratic Party&#8217;s political strategy. As long as the perception of white mistreatment of blacks is alive, the left&#8217;s race-hatred industry will always be relevant. The more distorted and exaggerated the fear, the more power flows to those who would exploit it. The more it is exploited, the more we are divided.</p>
<p>The Obama administration has been at the forefront of this exploitation. Eric Holder, who spoke out against voter ID laws and the Supreme Court decision overturning Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act at the Washington rally, continues to perpetrate the racial polarization that has become the hallmark of his tenure as head of the Justice Department. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/sebelius-obamacare-opponents-are-those-who-opposed-civil-rights">compared</a> opponents of ObamaCare to those who resisted the civil rights reforms of the 1960s. Former Assistant Attorney General and current Labor Secretary Thomas Perez has <a href="http://www.justice.gov/crt/speeches/2010/crt-speech-100420.html">promoted</a> hate crimes prosecution <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7dOvFzQSnk">insisting</a>, despite <a href="http://www.colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.html">overwhelming evidence</a> to the contrary, that such crimes remain a mostly white-on-black problem.</p>
<p>And then there is Ayo Kimathi. The acquisitions officer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement&#8211;in charge of buying weapons and ammunition for the government&#8211;was <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/08/24/dhs-employee-behind-website-promoting-race-war-on-paid-leave/">put</a> on <i>paid leave</i> by the DHS, for running a website on which he warned Americans about the coming race war. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the website declares, “in order for Black people to survive the 21st century, we are going to have to kill a lot of whites&#8211;more than our Christian hearts can possibly count.” One of his former supervisors was &#8220;astounded he&#8217;s employed by the federal government, let alone Homeland Security.&#8221;</p>
<p>Sadly, it isn&#8217;t astounding, any more than the deafening silence of a president who is in the unprecedented position of being the one leader who could speak to black America with the kind of credibility no one else can match. But as long as Obama, Democrats, the racial agitators and their media enablers can exploit the carnage, turning back the clock on race relations is a winning scenario. For the rest of the nation, it is an unmitigated tragedy.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>How Obama Poisoned Race Relations in America</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/how-obama-poisoned-race-relations-in-america/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-obama-poisoned-race-relations-in-america</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Jul 2013 04:55:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al sharpton]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Eric Holder]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A legacy of race hatred.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/barack-obama-race304.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-198293" alt="barack obama race*304" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/barack-obama-race304.jpg" width="243" height="187" /></a>A new <a href="http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/A_Politics/_Today_Stories_Teases/130724-July-NBC-WSJ-poll.pdf">poll</a> by NBC News and the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> reveals that public perceptions about race relations in America have taken a devastating <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/25/race-relations-have-plummeted-since-obama-took-office-according-to-poll/">hit</a> since the election of Barack Obama. At the beginning of the president&#8217;s first term, 79 percent of whites and 63 percent of blacks had a positive view of American race relations. Those numbers have plummeted to 52 percent and 38 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, 45 percent of whites now consider race relations fairly or very bad, compared with 20 percent in 2009, and the negative views held by black Americans has jumped from 30 percent to 58 percent. Thus, the idea that the election of Barack Obama would usher in a golden age of so-called post-racial relations has exploded. And the president and his administration bear the lion&#8217;s share of the responsibility for lighting the fuse.</p>
<p>The poll, conducted in mid-July by Hart Research Associations and Public Opinion Strategies, has tracked Americans&#8217; attitudes about race since 1994. And despite only a single poll question regarding the Zimmerman trial, which asked whether the outcome increased, decreased, or didn&#8217;t affect one&#8217;s confidence in the legal system, the steepest decline in positive views, and greatest increase in negative views, occurred in the last two years. That the timeframe largely coincides with the Trayvon Martin shooting controversy is likely no coincidence.</p>
<p>The Trayvon Martin case is one of the most visible examples of the Obama administration&#8217;s deliberate poisoning of race relations; all in coordination with the NAACP, the racial grievance industry and the corrupt leftist media. We now know that the administration had direct involvement in fanning the flames of racial discord that brought the case to the national stage. The Eric Holder-led Justice Department&#8217;s Community Relations Service (CRA) was sent to Sanford, FL to <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/21/former-doj-official-civil-rights-unit-sent-to-mediate-anti-zimmerman-protests-has-history-of-advocacy/">help</a> set up meetings and organize protests. Among other services, the administration <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/07/10/did-justice-department-support-anti-zimmerman-protests-after-trayvon-shooting/">arranged</a> an escort for college students participating in a 40-mile march to &#8220;demand justice&#8221; for Trayvon. When the situation erupted, Obama then famously took the racial motif national, saying, &#8220;If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.&#8221;</p>
<p>Even after the jury rendered its not guilty verdict in the Zimmerman trial, Obama, once again, <a href="http://swampland.time.com/2013/07/19/obama-speaks-trayvon-martin-could-have-been-me-35-years-ago/">injected</a> himself into the case, this time noting that &#8220;Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,&#8221; and launching into a lecture on race &#8212; despite the fact that a Martin family <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/trayvon-martin-trial-prosecution-star-witness-grilled-article-1.1384074">lawyer</a>, Trayvon&#8217;s <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2013/06/29/Trayvon-Martins-STEPMOTHER-I-Dont-Think-Zimmerman-Picked-Him-Out-Because-He-Was-Black">stepmother</a>, the Sanford <a href="http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/rights_rap_unlikely_OC3TAXeSdC80gDuo7dkm1I">police</a>, and an investigation <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/07/12/155918/more-evidence-released-in-trayvon.html#.UeXrLWQkE5W">conducted</a> by the FBI all concluded the case had nothing to do with race.</p>
<p>However, well before the Trayvon Martin shooting, Obama made clear he would use the presidency to provide a platform for the race agitation industry. Prior to his election in 2008, the president sought to <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2008/04/11/obama-on-small-town-voters-bitter-xenophobic-religious/">belittle</a> small town &#8220;bitter clingers&#8221; who demonstrate &#8220;antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment[.]&#8221; In July 2009, when black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=8148986&amp;page=1">arrested</a> in front of his Cambridge home after antagonizing police, Obama, despite admitting that he had not seen &#8220;all the facts,&#8221; still came to the conclusion that &#8220;the Cambridge police acted stupidly.&#8221; In a radio interview that aired on Univision in 2010, the president <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2010/10/25/obamas-turnout-pitch-to-latinos-get-out-there-and-punish-your-enemies/">urged</a> his Latino supporters to &#8220;punish our enemies and reward our friends,&#8221; in the upcoming election. That was the same year he made an unsubtle reference to Rosa Parks and segregation in order to <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/10/25/obama-tells-republicans-sit/">belittle</a> Republicans. &#8220;We don&#8217;t mind the Republicans joining us,&#8221; the president told supporters in Rhode Island. &#8220;They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.&#8221;</p>
<p>At a January 2012 Washington fundraiser, the president made <a href="http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2012/01/10/obama-plays-race-card/">subtle references</a> to the idea that if he weren&#8217;t reelected, minorities would be denied opportunities to pursue the American dream, while he implied Republicans would be the ones do the denying. &#8220;The notion that we’re all in this together, that we look out for one another&#8211;that’s at stake in this election,&#8221; he warned. &#8220;Don’t take my word for it. Watch some of these [Republican] debates that have been going on up in New Hampshire.&#8221; The following August in Colorado, Obama kept that meme alive, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/08/08/obama-romney-would-take-health-care-back-to-150s/">insisting</a> that Republicans, &#8220;want to take us back to the policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century.&#8221;</p>
<p>If such a divisive attitude were limited to the president himself, maybe race relations might not have soured as much as they have. Unfortunately, many members of his administration have also been more than willing to fan the flames of racial discord. Former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, who <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/03/raw-data-van-jones-words/">referred</a> to Republicans as &#8220;assholes,&#8221; insisted that &#8220;white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities.&#8221; Addressing the annual NAACP convention in Orlando, FL on July 17, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/sebelius-obamacare-opponents-are-those-who-opposed-civil-rights">likened</a> those who oppose ObamaCare to those who opposed civil rights legislation in the 1960s, comparing the fight against them to “the fight against lynching and the fight for desegregation.” On August 14, 2012, Vice President Joe Biden <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/08/vp-biden-says-republicans-are-going-to-put-yall-back-in-chains/">told</a> a largely black audience in Danville, Virginia, that Republicans wanted to &#8220;put y’all back in chains.” Former Assistant Attorney General and current Labor Secretary Thomas Perez viewed virtually every aspect of his former job through a racialist lens, from <a href="http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/052013-656882-proof-obama-cabinet-nominee-perez-framed-banks.htm?p=full">prosecuting</a> banks for lending discrimination based on dubious &#8220;disparate  impact&#8221; studies, to <a href="http://www.justice.gov/crt/speeches/2010/crt-speech-100420.html">promoting</a> the expansion of hate crimes prosecution, which he <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7dOvFzQSnk">insisted </a>was a largely white-on-black problem.</p>
<p>And then there is Eric Holder. Holder, who runs the most racially polarized Justice Department in modern history, wasted no time burnishing his racialist credentials, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/18/holder.race.relations/">telling</a> Americans soon after he was confirmed in 2009 that &#8220;in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.&#8221; In 2010, after being stonewalled by his own department, Christopher Coates, former voting chief for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, testified that Holder&#8217;s decision to drop an already-won voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party was due to &#8220;pressure&#8221; from the NAACP. Furthermore, he corroborated earlier testimony by J. Christian Adams, a former DOJ attorney, revealing that the DOJ cultivates a &#8220;hostile atmosphere&#8221; against &#8220;race-neutral enforcement&#8221; of the Voting Rights Act.</p>
<p>Holder also turned a blind eye when the Panthers <a href="http://www.christianpost.com/news/black-panthers-10000-bounty-to-capture-george-zimmerman-dead-or-alive-was-from-2012-video-100428/">offered</a> a $10,000 bounty to capture George Zimmerman &#8220;dead or alive.&#8221; As for race-neutral enforcement of the the Voting Rights Act, as recently as yesterday Holder <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324110404578627692123727574.html">vowed</a> to continue insisting that states &#8220;pre-clear&#8221; with the DOJ any changes to their voting laws. This represents nothing less than a determination to defy a recent Supreme Court ruling that effectively nullified his ability to do so. Texas is his current focus, but in a speech in Philadelphia, he promised that the decision to target the Lone Star State &#8220;will not be our last.&#8221; The motivation of this effort is clear: to portray red states and whites in general as abusive toward minority voters &#8212; as seeking to reinstitute &#8220;Jim Crow&#8221; through commonsense voter ID laws, as the Democratic Party propaganda goes.</p>
<p>This follows Holder&#8217;s decision to continue pursuing the possibility of civil rights charges against George Zimmerman, without a shred of evidence for doing so, making good on a promise he first made during an appearance at racial arsonist Al Sharpton&#8217;s National Action Network on April 11, 2012. After praising Sharpton “for your partnership, your friendship, and your tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless, and to shine a light on the problems we must solve, and the promises we must fulfill,&#8221; Holder made his intentions clear. “If we find evidence of a potential federal criminal civil rights crime, we will take appropriate action,” he warned. To that end, Holder has <a href="http://www.orlandosentinel.com/os-george-zimmerman-doj-investigation,0,4338518.story">set up</a> &#8220;tip lines&#8221; trolling for information he can use to prosecute Zimmerman. The &#8220;investigation&#8221; has now been ongoing for over a year.</p>
<p>The reason for fomenting this sort of racial animosity is transparently political. Just like in 2010, and 2012, Obama is determined to agitate and mobilize voters for the 2014 election and beyond and to weaken the Republicans with racial innuendo and accusations. He has tainted Democrats by presiding over the weakest recovery on record, one which is currently losing even more steam, with growth rates being revised downward, and one of the <a href="http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/here_prince_of_an_idea_VbPT2NNp29fkf1Arrl6eRM">worst</a> corporate revenue performances on record. The same is true of ObamaCare, which will be so damaging to Democrats that the administration unilaterally decided to postpone the employer mandate until 2015, <a href="http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/congress-debates-if-obama-could-unilaterally-delay-employer-mandate">usurping</a> congressional authority in the process. This is to say nothing of Democrat-led foreign policy, with Egypt and Syria in free fall, Iraq and Afghanistan on the verge of reverting back to the failed states they were, Iran pursuing nuclear weapons absent any fear whatsoever, and both China and Russia signaling their intentions to fill the leadership vacuum the president’s &#8220;leading from behind&#8221; approach has produced.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, minority populations continue to suffer and grow disaffected under the reign of liberal policies. Majority-black Detroit is bankrupt. Chicago seethes with black-on-black gun crime, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/08/chicago-shootings_n_3561407.html?view=print&amp;comm_ref=false">including</a> 62 people wounded and 12 killed during the Fourth of July holiday weekend alone. Black <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/22/black-unemployment_n_3624725.html">unemployment</a> is 13.7 percent, compared to 6.7 percent for the nation as a whole. The black American illegitimacy rate, one of the surest predictors of poverty, is <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324281004578356422222235976.html">approaching</a> 75 percent.</p>
<p>Yet in his most recent <a href="http://spectator.org/archives/2013/07/25/economic-malpractice-and-polit">speech</a> on economics, Obama addresses none of these realities, preferring to blame the lot on Republicans (who have only ever controlled the House since 2010) and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/full-text-of-president-obamas-remarks-on-the-economy-at-knox-college-as-prepared-for-delivery/2013/07/24/fd580f6a-f47f-11e2-a2f1-a7acf9bd5d3a_story_4.html">warning</a> that if America fails to embrace his policies, &#8220;[S]ocial tensions will rise as various groups fight to hold on to what they have, or start blaming somebody else for why their position isn&#8217;t improving.&#8221; In the Obama era, this should be interpreted as an ultimatum.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s going to be a long, divisive slog to the 2014 elections, and racial division continually promoted by the Obama administration is guaranteed to be an integral part of the mix. The fact that Americans view race relations as far worse than they&#8217;ve been in years should surely be an embarrassment for the first elected president of African descent. Odds are, however, he views it as an electoral boon for his party.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama’s Courting of the Mullahs</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/obamas-courting-of-the-mullahs/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-courting-of-the-mullahs</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Oct 2012 04:50:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[P. David Hornik]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[khomeini]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mullahs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear Weapons]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[relations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[New revelations about the president's failed outreach to the fanatical Iranian regime. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/obamas-courting-of-the-mullahs/20120614_large_mullahs/" rel="attachment wp-att-163247"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-163247" title="20120614_LARGE_Mullahs" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/20120614_LARGE_Mullahs.gif" alt="" width="315" height="228" /></a>It turns out that soon after taking office, President Obama tried to make friends—totally—with the mullahs’ regime in Iran.</p>
<p>The aim was to start with the opening of interest sections in Washington and Tehran, then progress to “full diplomatic ties, including U.S. and Iranian embassies and ambassadors in each other’s capitals, security cooperation…, [and] direct flights between the U.S. and Iran….” All this amity, it was presumed, would get Iran to give up its nuclear program.</p>
<p>So, at least, reports the Israeli daily <em>Maariv</em> (Hebrew original <a href="http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/411/797.html?hp=1&amp;cat=666">here</a>; English report in <em>The Times of Israel </em><a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/obama-offered-to-reestablish-ties-with-iran-paper-reports/">here</a>), basing itself on “two Western diplomats very close to the administration.”</p>
<p><em>Maariv</em> says that, beginning in summer 2009, there were at least two U.S.-Iranian diplomatic meetings in this context. The second was between Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and chief Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili in Geneva in October 2009, on the sidelines of nuclear talks between Tehran and the P5+1 countries.</p>
<p>But Tehran, as they say, wasn’t into it. An Israeli source told <em>Maariv</em> that the regime “opposed any sign of normalization with the U.S., and refused to grant a ‘prize’ to the Americans.”</p>
<p>On Obama’s part, all this would have been in the spirit of his <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/20/AR2009032000398.html">holiday video greeting</a> to Iran in March 2009—and, more generally, his wooing of the Islamic world and apologizing for America’s supposed sins, most notably in his June 2009 <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-cairo-university-6-04-09">Cairo speech</a>.</p>
<p>In the mullahs’ case, Obama’s belief that he could talk them into friendship is particularly striking. U.S.-Iranian relations took something of a hit when the newly installed Ayatollah Khomeini regime seized 52 American diplomats as hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, holding them for 444 days. Last week the <em>Wall Street Journal’</em>s Bret Stephens <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203630604578072452443447568.html">listed</a> some additional “American victims of Iranian aggression” since that time:</p>
<blockquote><p>The 17 Americans killed in April 1983 at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut by the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad Organization, later known as Hezbollah. The 241 U.S. servicemen killed by Islamic Jihad at the Marine barracks in Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983. Master Chief Robert Dean Stethem, beaten to death in June 1985 by a Hezbollah terrorist in Beirut aboard TWA flight 847. William Francis Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, tortured to death by Hezbollah that same month. Marine Col. William Higgins, taken hostage in 1988 while serving with U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon and hanged by Hezbollah sometime later. The 19 U.S. Air Force personnel killed in June 1996 in the Khobar Towers bombing, for which several members of Saudi Hezbollah were indicted in U.S. federal court.</p>
<p>And then there are the thousands of U.S. troops killed by improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most lethal IEDs were manufactured in Iran for the purpose of killing Americans.</p></blockquote>
<p>Obama’s belief that America was at fault in having wronged and angered Iran must have been very strong to regard this record as something that could have been overcome between friends—to the extent that he was familiar with it.</p>
<p>The trouble is that, three years later, there are signs that Obama is still unable to grasp the fact that the Iranian regime is implacably hostile to America. It was last March, just as Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu was in Washington warning that Iran was closing in on the bomb, that Obama chose to renew diplomatic talks with Iran—talks that, as acknowledged by all, have been an empty sham that has merely bought Tehran time just as Israel had warned.</p>
<p>True, meanwhile Obama—under heavy pressure from Congress—has finally, along with other Western countries, imposed sanctions on Iran that are taking a real toll. Just two weeks ago, though, a report by the Congressional Research Service <a href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RS20871.pdf">acknowledged</a> a “consensus” that these have in no way slowed Iran’s march toward nukes.</p>
<p>And it was just last week that the <em>New York Times</em> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/world/iran-said-ready-to-talk-to-us-about-nuclear-program.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=1&amp;">reported</a> that the U.S. and Iran had agreed to still more nuclear talks after November 6. The White House denied the specifics of the report—but, incorrigibly convinced of Tehran’s potential amicability, said it remained ready, as ever, to meet with the mullahs and hash out the differences.</p>
<p>In other words, there are worrisome indications that, when it comes to Iran’s Islamist regime, the U.S. chief executive remains dangerously delusive.</p>
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