Hillary's Right-Wing Delusions

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at the Times of Israel.}

Ari Yashar, writing in Arutz Sheva, tells us:

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has some biting words for President Barack Obama in her new memoir, saying his push for a construction freeze in Judea and Samaria was a mistake.

Speaking about the 2009 building freeze that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu submitted to, Clinton wrote "in retrospect, our early, hard line on settlements didn't work." The book, entitled "Hard Choices," was received by AP ahead of its release on Tuesday.

Clinton added that the pressure to freeze building exerted by the Obama administration was "one mistake of many" by the US, Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the talks.

According to her, the freeze made PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's position more entrenched, and led him to reject the talks, demanding an official freeze in eastern Jerusalem as well.

So, when did Hillary Clinton become a hard-line, right-wing conservative?

I was making almost precisely that argument 5 years ago, as it was happening, but was suddenly and eerily dismissed as one of those conservative bad people from the other side of the tracks.

This is what I published on December 17, 2009, in a piece entitled, The End of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process:

Obama’s big mistake, if he was hoping to actually bring about peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, was calling for a total settlement freeze in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The demand for total settlement freeze, even within blocs that would likely end up as part of Israel, has resulted in a number of negative consequences that undermine even the slim possibility of a negotiated settlement.

The first negative consequence is that by calling for a total settlement freeze, Obama placed a precondition on negotiations at a time when he should have avoided any move that might decrease the likelihood of the two sides sitting down at the negotiating table. When Obama called for total freeze, Abbas took it as an opportunity to avoid negotiations and insisted that the Palestinians would never sit down with the Israelis until Israel met that demand.

The biggest recent mistake that the diaspora Jewish community has made was in throwing people such as Yosef and Melody to the wolves, not to mention the Fogels.

Because almost all of us believed in the two-state solution as the only viable solution, and because the Arabs complained about a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria, we agreed that what we called "settlement activity" in the "West Bank" had to end.

I certainly thought so all the way through the Oslo process until quite recently.

One of the main differences, I suppose, between myself and other western-left diaspora Jews on this issue is that I have come to the conclusion that we are essentially playing a rigged game.  What the Jewish people in the Middle East want more than anything is to simply be left the hell alone to create their computer software and to litigate against one another.

The Arabs, however, since the time of that Muhammad Guy, have been hell-bent-for-fury in opposition to Jewish sovereignty from the beginning of all of this nonsense.  They opposed Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land in the seventh century, just as they oppose Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land today.  Nothing much has changed, really.  The great Arab majority despised the tiny Jewish minority for theocratic reasons in the seventh century, just as they do so today for precisely those same reasons.

The conclusion that I have been forced to come to in recent years is that the Jews of the Middle East are incapable of making peace with the Arab world because that is simply not what the greater Arab world, or certainly their governments, want.  It does not matter what Israel does or does not do.  It does not matter if Yosef and Melody are kicked out of their homes in Hebron and forced to move into Fortress Israel, within the Green Line, in order to appease Arab-Muslim and western-left prejudices against Jews.

This being the case, it is detrimental to the Jewish people to continue to buy into the Oslo line that peace can be achieved with sufficient Jewish concessions to the hostile majority population.  I know that many would suggest that the majority Arab-Muslim population in the Middle East is only hostile to Israel because Israel is allegedly oppressing the local Arabs.

I would refer those people to Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed, Yale University Press, 2010, pg. 8:

At the time of the Muslim occupation of Palestine in the seventh century, the country's Jewish population ranged in the hundreds of thousands at the very least; by the 1880s, Palestine's Jewish community had been reduced to about 24,000, or some 5 percent of the total population.

So, just where are those magically disappearing Jews in the Middle East?  Were they swept away by typhoons?

I do not bloody think so.

The fact of the matter is that the Arabs suppressed the Jewish minority in the Middle East for thirteen long centuries, thus resulting in the near genocide of the indigenous Jewish population.  In some times and places it was better and in some times and places it was worse, but do we honestly believe that dhimmitude was better than African-Americans had it under Jim Crow in the United States?

Peace between Israel and the Arabs will not come through Israeli concessions.

I do not believe it because history has proven it not to be so.

This leaves unilateral action as the only possibility.

Now is the day when Jews rely upon ourselves.

I am very much looking forward to the new generation of Israeli leadership - left, right, or center - if only to move beyond the failed Age of Oslo and hopefully into a new period of independence and freedom.

From the comments:

David Modlin June 7 at 12:55pm

Looks like Hillary has started campaigning.

Well, that much is obvious.

ron shapiro June 7 at 8:53pm

And while we are on the hunt for Jewish money to run a Presidential campaign, why not also advocate the elimination of the $500 million of annual aid to the PA. Question. Hillary, "Why did you embrace Suha Arafat"?

I like the way that this gentleman thinks.

Fizziks Hilarity

Michael L.


It is hysterical the way that allegedly intelligent people can simply deny reality when it does not suit them.

My last piece was one for the Elder of Ziyon entitled, The First Jewish President My... Tush.

In that piece I discuss the fact that the Obama administration supports Hamas.

It is not me that says so, but that small, unknown, irrelevant newspaper known as the Wall Street Journal in which we learn:

The 1988 Hamas Charter explicitly commits the Palestinian terror group to murdering Jews. Thanks to the formation this week of an interim government uniting Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which the U.S. supports to the tune of more than $400 million a year, the American taxpayer may soon become an indirect party to that enterprise. 

 Yet, amusingly enough, "fizziks" chimes in with this comment:

Man, peoples' irrational reactions to Obama are hilarious. Clowns on the left get the vapors every time he annihilates an Islamist from the sky with a drone, while at the very same time clowns on the right accuse him of supporting the rise of political Islam.

fizziks apparently thinks that opposing Hamas is "irrational."

He gives no argument or explanation how it is that for diaspora Jews to oppose an Islamist organizaton intent upon our genocide is irrational.

He does not explain how it is that Jewish people should go along with the fact that the Obama administration is now going to fund Hamas.

He merely finds it funny; hilarious, in fact.

The Hamas charter, quoting one of the more vicious hadiths, says this:

The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! 

I would argue that if the history of the Jewish people teaches us anything it is not to be complacent in the face of genocidal threats.

I feel reasonably confident in saying so, given the fact that within living memory half of my family was brutally slaughtered by people who made such threats and acted in a manner which demonstrated their complete sincerity.

I am, however, deeply sorry that a fellow Jew finds such concerns to be humorous.

Sunday Column for the Elder

Michael L.

The Elder was kind enough to publish my latest Sunday column entitled, The First Jewish President, My... Tush.

Here is a tidbit:

It is simply unfathomable that year after year, as the Obama administration bolstered the misnamed "Arab Spring" - which was, in fact, the rise of political Islam - our more naive progressive-left Jewish interlocutors kept telling us that Obama does not support political Islam even as he sent money and heavy weaponry to the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of both Hamas and al-Qaeda. 

How ideologically blinkered one must be, at this late date, to still not grasp the simple fact the president of the United States has no real problem with the rise of political Islam throughout the world and, as part of the historical record, encouraged it?

This is, of course, a piece in response to Obama's unconscionable decision to support the genocidally anti-Semitic Hamas organization.

Here is a question for my Jewish friends on the progressive-left:

How can you possibly still support an administration that is willing to legitimize, and ultimately give US tax dollars to, an organization that calls for the genocide of the Jews directly in its charter?

Anti-Israelism is Having A Real Bad Hair Day In Australia .. Part 1.

geoffff

Not a good week to be an anti-Israel activist down under. 

First punch was in the universities when a BDS motion in the local branch of the academic union of Sydney University got comprehensively shelved with the back of a shovel when it was realised that to provide Jake Lynch, Stuart Rees, Peter Slevak, Nick Riemer et al with a platform to push a toxic policy on the union so malodorous that it might invite a response that will consume the time and resources of the union and distract it from doing bloody silly marginal things such as its job. 

Checking out the size and fit for a racist policy will do that. We have seen this before in universities everywhere. More frequently and recently than you might care to think about.  

Right now is a good time to ask why our universities are nesting these "peace and conflict" departments given how whiffy is the pedigree of the discipline globally and that's just for a start. It is a pretty good question any time but when universities are under pressure and there is a risk of loss of real academics surely the question becomes more pressing.

This is the introduction but read it all. An unusually balanced and fair account from New Matilda which is under new management. Jumping Jake Lynch earlier piece is linked below that.

Then my comment.

Union Backs Away From BDS Motion

By Nick Rowbotham

Keywords: 

university of sydney

nteu

jake lynch

nick rowbotham

A motion to discuss support for a boycott of Israel has been voted down by members of the University of Sydney NTEU, after the issue again reared its head at the sandstone institution. Nick Rowbotham reports.

The Sydney University branch of the national academic union has overturned a previous vote in support of a “broad discussion” around endorsing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Approximately 120 members attended a meeting on Wednesday at which the General Secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), Grahame McCulloch, spoke against “a Union-sponsored debate on the merits of the BDS.”

“At a time when universities and trade unions are under siege from the Abbott Government, an NTEU Branch as important as the University of Sydney cannot afford the division and fruitless procedural wrangling that has been generated by this ill-conceived general meeting decision,” he wrote in an email before the meeting.

Sydney University NTEU members had voted to support a debate about BDS at a branch meeting on May 15. The vote was overruled by the union’s executive branch committee the following week, triggering outrage from pro-BDS members of the union, which led to the resignation of branch Vice President Damien Cahill and the eventual involvement of the national General Secretary.

On Wednesday, members voted 68-56 against a debate on BDS in the branch, overturning the vote on May 15, which is understood to have passed almost unanimously with around 35 NTEU members in attendance.

This follows  from an article on 4 June by Sydney University's Jumping Jake Lynch himself, Mr BDS Australia, four years running, where the pitifully losing case was put and appears here for the record only.

Jumping Jake and his mates simply can not understand why they and Palestine are not the centre of everything for everyone. 

BDS is racism. There is no doubt about it. If you look it straight in the eye you can actually see the spit and the snarl. You either know what is meant by that or you do not. That antizionism is antisemitism is a truth that really should not need explanation by this stage of this old and sad game. Indeed antisemitism is the lowest form of racism as some one on one of these threads has noted.

BDS is intellectually contemptible.  It relies on a sleight of hand that allow its proponents to avoid saying exactly where they stand especially about the existentialist stench that overhangs the whole stage. Avoid even thinking about it really. Like most radical leftist and other lethal campaigns it is designed to give all the wiggle room needed to keep the populist appeal about 'occupation” and “settlements”  strong while dodging wedges and pain that might flow from the knowledge that this is essentially just another racist and violent movement from a political culture that is steeped in brutal bigotry and knows little else.

If you are in a campaign that gets all hazy and snappy about what exactly is the end game then maybe you should get out a map and check exactly where you are standing under the nearest light.  Most  activists are clear and upfront about their objectives. Proud of what they stand for. Zionists are.

BDS is an exception. Getting them to admit that they stand for the destruction of Israel as the sovereign Jewish state is beyond boring.  They squish and flap around like a flounder on a rock.  

It's as if BDS and its urgers in the universities and the fringe parties are so ashamed of the only end game they could rationally have in mind that they have to hide it in the papers in the attic like a dirty family secret. 

Lets face the truth here. This mob has always had a problem with Jews, Zionism and Israel. At least since the days of Marx and Trotsky . Not to mention Stalin.

Universities have always harboured academics who were antisemitic or otherwise racist.  At times it has reached fever pitch. The idea of gas chambers to put down the genetically inferior, including races, first came from leading US scientists of the influential eugenics movement in the 1920's.  

By the 1930's these various schools of thought were dripping from university balustrades from Boston to Sydney in one guise or another. Something like BDS is now only with a different kind of nazi in the background.   .

By then the boycotts in the universities had well set in.

It is likely that the incidence of anti- Israelism and antisemitism has always been much higher among academics than it is in the general population. In Europe this has been proven. It is a curious phenomenon. It says much.   

Boycotts are about attacks on people because of who they are perceived to be. To excuse an affront to an individual by asserting that it was really an act against the group to which she is perceived to be a member, whatever group,... institution, nation, race... whatever ... is the oldest and glibbest  line in bigotry. 

Very soon there will be an allegation that the "Zionists" are behind this big BDS fail in Sydney. BDS has been "silenced" at this university they will say. Mark my words. They will say this. They always do.

The truth is the opposite. The more talk the better I say. Everything is an opportunity to educate. The problem for BDS is that it does not bear much scrutiny.  A racist movement, a catastrophic failure in its impact on events as it was always certain to be, bullying, astonishingly hypocritical,  at times threatening, at times comical, always venal and capricious, especially when it attacks artists and musicians, and with a message so thin, flash and dopey it makes the Gays for Sharia Mardi Gras float look like the Next Big Thing.

No wonder they are ashamed of themselves. 

That'll help the Palestinians. 

cross posted Geoffff's Joint

G-d Bless Australia!

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at Jews Down Under and Geoffff's Joint.}

Tom Wilson writing in Commentary tells us:

Australia has announced that it will no longer refer to East Jerusalem as “occupied territory.” Tony Abbott’s government has put out an uncompromising statement of intent, informing the world that, “The description of East Jerusalem as ‘occupied’ East Jerusalem is a term freighted with pejorative implications which is neither appropriate nor useful. It should not and will not be the practice of the Australian government to describe areas of negotiation in such judgmental language.” This announcement is made all the more significant on account of the fact that back in January Australia’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop publicly disputed the notion that Israel’s settlements should be considered illegal either. 

This is terrific news and Australia is proving itself to be a true friend and partner to both the Jewish people and the Jewish State of Israel.  Of course, the Obama administration and the European Union remain supportive of Hamas while complaining about the fact that Jews build housing for ourselves on historically Jewish land.

Wilson writes:

In recent days both the United States and the European Union have mounted vocal protest against Israeli plans to build new homes in existing Jewish neighborhoods of eastern Jerusalem. This is an astounding response that exposes the full extent of the hostility toward the Jewish state that emanates from both the EU and the Obama administration. For while the newly formed Hamas-backed Palestinian government has received endorsement from both the White House and the Europeans, building homes for Jews in the ancient Jewish holy city of Jerusalem has provoked a degree of condemnation out of all proportion with reality.

The Obama administration continues to make the very same mistakes over and over and over again.  Their opposition to Jews who build housing for themselves even as they embrace the genocidal organization, Hamas, as a "peace partner" clearly demonstrates the general tone of anti-Jewish / anti-Israel hostility emanating from the European capitals with Obama leading the charge from behind.

Of course, neither the EU, nor the Obama administration, could have gotten away with the ridiculous notion that Jews building housing for themselves on Jewish land is some crime against humanity were it not for progressive-left diaspora Jews who assured them that they were correct to focus their ire on those other Jews over there, the bad ones - like our friends Yosef and Melody - who live where neither Barack Obama, nor Mahmoud Abbas, want them to live.

If western-left diaspora Jews blame their fellow Jews for the attacks against those Jews, then how could we possibly expect anything less from non-Jewish western leaders?  If we will not stand up for ourselves, why in this world would we expect them to stand up for us?

The fact of the matter is that diaspora Jewry made a highly consequential error when it agreed with Mahmoud Abbas that Jews should not be allowed to build housing for themselves in Judea.  Obama and the Europeans could not make a stink about Jews building homes were it not for the fact that western Jews went along with it.  Certainly it would have been far more difficult for someone like Obama to object to Jews who build housing for themselves if his Jewish friends and advisers had not gone along and if the diaspora Jewish community had not done so.

We have no one to blame but ourselves, but in the meanwhile we still have some friends in the world.

Thank you, Australia.