{Cross-posted at Jews Down Under, the Elder of Ziyon, and The Jewish Press.}
Writing in Israel National News last week, Tova Dvorin tell us:
It's hard to imagine that at this late date I am still capable of being disgusted by the Obama administration. Yet there it is. Just when I think that they can't sink even lower into the muck, we get stories like the one above.The Obama administration has asked a judge Monday to “carefully consider” the size of the bond demanded from the Palestinian Authority (PA) for its role orchestrating years of terror attacks against Israelis and Jews - directly interfering in a US court case.
In February, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) - the terror group behind the PA - was found liable to pay $218.5 million to victims of terror, a figure that was set to be tripled to $655.5 million according to the anti-terrorism laws under which the case was brought...
In a document entitled “Statement of Interest of the United States of America," the Obama administration expressed concerns over the payments hurting the PA's basic government services.
Forcing the PLO to pay “a significant portion of its revenues would likely severely compromise the P.A.’s ability to operate as a governmental authority,” deputy Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken wrote.
So, the Obama administration is literally siding with the PA and the PLO over their American victims, despite an American court-ruling not in Palestinian-Arab favor. The word "shocking" comes to mind, although I am certain that many of you will not be shocked.
And the reason for this interference in the ruling of the court is because Obama is concerned that the PA will not be able to pay its bills? Well, he has a point. Supporting terrorism does not necessarily come cheaply. But if the PA cannot afford to pay its bills, whose fault is that?
{Oh, Israel's. Naturally. I forgot for a moment.}
We are to believe that the PA-PLO should be shielded by the President of the United States from having to suffer the predictable consequences of their own behavior? A behavior that includes the murder of American citizens? Or does Barack Obama honestly think that it is perpetually Jew hunting season in the Middle East? If the PA can't afford to post bond to the court perhaps they should rethink their rather counterproductive Jew Killing Policy.
But, in truth, would it really be an unfortunate thing if the PA collapsed? The EU and the US are bankrolling a gang of cutthroats who cry out for the genocide of the Jews, who despise the United States, and who name schools after murderers. We should not be in the business of promoting these people, we should be in the business of actively opposing them.
The PA is not quite as heinous as Hamas, but it is close enough, and neither are democratic organizations. Perhaps I am just old fashioned, and maybe my views on such matters are not nearly as sophisticated as our Genius in Chief's, but when I was growing up most people had the notion that one supports one's friends and opposes one's enemies. On a personal level we supported those who supported our well-being and values and opposed those who opposed them.
From a practical foreign policy standpoint what this means is that we should support the secular democracies and not support the non-democratic governments. Above all, we should not be giving financial aid to Islamist organizations, like the Muslim Brotherhood, because the Brotherhood oppresses women, oppresses gay people, and oppresses the Christian Copts. They would oppress Jews there, but there are no Jews there, having been ethnically-cleansed from almost the entire region by the hostile majority population in the middle of the last century.
The truth of the matter, of course, is that having chased the Jews out of land that we lived on for millennia, they now wish to chase Jews out our historical homeland entirely. There are many people out there - all evidence to the contrary - who honestly believe that the Palestinian National Movement is fundamentally grounded in social justice for the "indigenous Arab population," with two states for two peoples. This is a lie on numerous levels.
The first lie is that the Palestinian-Arabs are the indigenous people of Israel. They are not. As it reads on the right side of Israel Thrives, courtesy of the Elder, "Jews are from Judah, Arabs are from Arabia." The broad strokes of Jewish and Arab history in the Land of Israel are not in serious contention among western historians with professional credentials. They all acknowledge that Jews have lived in Judea and Samaria for at least three thousand years, but the Jewish presence predates written history and thereby floats back into the mists of time. Muhammad's armies conquered Jerusalem in 637 CE from the Byzantines, thus the Muslims are rather late to the game by thousands of years.
The Jews are the only living people who can make claims of indigeneity to Eretz Israel. Unless some Jebusites pop out of the ground, only the Jews can make that case.
The second lie is that the Palestinian-Arabs want a state for themselves in peace next to Israel. This is false. What the the Palestinian National Movement wants is the elimination of the Jewish National Movement. Palestinian-Arab national consciousness emerged as a significant social construct toward the end of the twentieth-century. It did so for the express purpose of undermining Jewish well-being on historically Jewish land. If they wanted a state for themselves they have a funny way of showing it, given that they have refused every single offer going back all the way to 1937, with the Peel Commission.
The third lie is that the Palestinian National Movement has any interest whatsoever in liberal notions of social justice. If by "social justice" one means random acts of senseless violence combined with a campaign to spread hatred toward Jews all around the world, then the PA is interested in social justice.
And, sadly, one must wonder if President Barack Obama shares that sense of "social justice"?
Given that he is willing to prop up both the PA and the PLO at the direct expense of their American victims, so it would seem.
It would be nice to see the American president standing up for American victims of terrorism.
ReplyDeleteAs for "social justice" that seems to be something that the progressive-left have chosen to define for themselves. It bears little relation to anything one could recognize.
As well as what is going on in this case, President Obama has, in recent months, promised to give enormous sums of money - and legitimacy - to the brutal theocrats in Iran.
And similar to the brutal totalitarian dictatorship of Cuba. Two countries that have some of the worst human rights records in the world. Both of these decisions have been hailed by the left as "promoting social justice."
Presumably this intervention will be seen in the same light. It does seem to be true that the more particular political organizations or regimes hate America, the more they are deserving of being rewarded.
After a while this sort of ideologically driven worldview gets a little wearisome.
At least to some of us.
It seems that the left's anti-Western frenzy is unstoppable and that maybe it will just have to run its course. Although, where that will lead us is really rather frightening.
The hypocrisy involved in all of this is breathtaking. Again.
At the moment in the UK the left is eating itself. While manically supporting someone who has cozied up to every dictator you can think of and who hangs out with Holocaust deniers, 9/11 truthers, and people who advocate stoning women to death for adultery and killing gay people for being gay.
Not to mention Jew-hating terrorists. But that last one is par for the course.
Somewhat amusingly, the liberal media and social media are now jammed full of leftists denouncing their own as "Tories" and various other aggressively unpleasant insults if they happen to not be supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. The Guardian newspaper has now been denounced as a "Tory rag" by much of its own readership. ( The only reason the Guardian is not supporting Corbyn is because they don't think he can win a general election, otherwise they would.)
Their belief in their own moral purity is absolute.
Whatever commitment to "social justice" used to be, it isn't
that anymore. But one wonders how much of it really meant anything in the first place when you see all this unfolding.
Some of us have been wondering that for some time now.
Kate,
Deleteam I correct in thinking that the Left - Right division in the UK is considerably more intense than it is in the US?
It seems obvious, but I simply want to put the notion out there so that maybe you will address it.
In the US, the political divide between Left and Right can get ugly, but one thing that I like to remind people of, concerning American politics, is that we are all, essentially, liberals... in the western rationalist Enlightenment sense of that word.
That is, in the US, Left and Right, Democrat and Republican, we all believe in the founding notions as derived, ultimately, from Magna Carta and eventually expressed in the Constitution of the United States.
We believe in habeas corpus, we believe in freedom of the press, we believe in democracy, and we believe in freedom of / and from religion. I do not need to plunge into detailing this idea, at this point, because I know that you get me. What unites Americans is far more significant than what divides us by party.
I just wish more Americans understood that so that they would stop hating on the other side.
I don't know why Obama doesn't tell Hollywood Jews to pay the bill FOR the Arabs.
ReplyDeleteMike.
DeleteI don't think the left right division is much different than in the States.
It is true that we have more political parties and that there is a hard-left wing of the Labour party which is always looking to take the party in that direction.
That's what is happening at the moment.
The hard-left is winning with the Corbyn vote. It doesn't help that the Labour party changed its rules and regulations on who could vote in a leadership race recently. Those changes have allowed this to happen. People who have never voted Labour have been allowed to pay three quid and sign up to participate in this election. That effectively leaves the vote wide open to manipulation by activists and Greens etc. And, importantly, has rendered the vote of the parliamentary Labour party almost pointless.
It's a horrible mess.
The left hate the Tories in much the same way as Democrats hate Republicans. I don't think the American political landscape has ever been more polarized in modern times. In reality, the centre of the Labour party is not that different than the moderate Tory party. New Labour rather proved that point, and won three elections in a row. A crime the left cannot forgive them for.
The left hate Tony Blair ( the most successful Labour leader of modern times) more than they hate anyone else.
The keywords are "Torylite" and "Neoliberalism" which get bandied about as the worst insults other than "Zionist" and so it goes on.
By the way, no-one can actually define " neoliberalism" as it doesn't really mean anything and is just the latest code for capitalism. But that seems to be irrelevant.
The people who nominated Corbyn did it to "broaden the debate" and have been bitten rather unexpectedly by what has happened. It's unleashed a lot of really unpleasant bile as well as infighting, and it is difficult to see how that can be repaired.
I would say that in the US your version of the " hard-left" is very much alive and well. It just lies more in community organizing and grass-root activists. But they are very influential in your political landscape. Very. They have a lot of influence, and pressure groups which affect much of the Democratic party. I think.They just tend not to be seen as "hard-left" because they're often concerned with" identity politics" and " social justice" etc.
Odd how people who are supposedly fighting for " social justice" are so frequently the most hateful people around.
2)
DeleteI should qualify what I said about the American political landscape: It's the climate and culture that make it so polarized. The actual real political differences are slighter than is suggested. The tribalism is so great that many people - particularly young people - have a completely distorted view of what the other side actually think and believe. The things that bind you together are much more important. It is a crying shame that the tribalism, particularly on the left, has created this situation. Many people of a more conservative leaning are perfectly reasonable and decent people who just have some different views about the role of government in society. Some of those views are entirely understandable and well-worth listening to. Not that you'll ever hear a card-carrying Democrat admit that. Maybe they are so prejudiced that they cannot see that that many of their fellow citizens are unlikely to be wrong about everything. ( As well as being supposedly stupid and evil and racist, of course.)
It is similar in the UK, people on the left talk about conservative voters as if they are from another species.
It gets very tiring. And counterproductive.
I rather like the fact that Corbyn may attain real power. It will signal a period where honest to god state sponsored pogroms will happen all over Britain. For the 190,000 Jews in the UK about half will never leave no matter what. Leaving 95,000 or so who will choose to flee. Many will have to go to Israel as no other country will take more than a tiny handful of them in. And it would be insane for them to flee to another country in Europe. This will be good for Israel and the clattering classes in Britain to say nothing of the liberal, DNC aligned press in the US will be falling over themselves to defend the ethnic cleansing, assuming they talk about it at all. But at the least it will be very entertaining to watch progressives and liberals finally put on their brownshirts and armbands and march under the Nazi flag or Monhammed's black flag or whatever.
ReplyDeleteI suspect in decade people will read PK Dick's "The Man in the High Castle" and look at it as less a dystopian warning and more of a how-to manual.
Phillip K. Dick, eh?
DeleteAs I write this I am looking at my copy of A Scanner Darkly.
Terrific writer and a true lunatic.
It could not have been easy being him.