Tag Archives: Barack Obama

Now on DVD! Frank Gaffney’s ‘Muslim Brotherhood in America’ Series

By popular demand, Frank Gaffney’s The Muslim Brotherhood in America: The Enemy Within is now available on DVD at Amazon.com. The entire 8 hour series is on four volumes priced at $12 each.

The Muslim Brotherhood in America: The Enemy Within addresses a threat most Americans are unaware even exists within our country, let alone the degree of peril it represents. The threat is the totalitarian, supremacist Islamic doctrine its adherents call “shariah” and the organized, disciplined and increasingly successful efforts by such adherents– most especially the Muslim Brotherhood– to bring it here.

Click each volume to buy the DVDs.

 

 

The Muslim Brotherhood
in America, volume 1 ($12.00)

included in this disc:

Part 1: The Threat Doctrine of Shariah & the Muslim Brotherhood. The first section of this briefing explains what shariah is according to the authorities and institutions of Islam and as promoted most aggressively by an organization called the Muslim Brotherhood.

Part 2: The Brotherhood’s ‘Civilization Jihad’ in America. The Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy for realizing its mission of “destroying Western civilization from within” was described in an undated 1991 Muslim Brotherhood document entitled “Phases of the World Underground Movement Plan.” In this part, we investigate what they’re doing to implement it.

 

The Muslim Brotherhood
in America, volume 2 ($12.00)

included in this disc:

Part 3: Brotherhood Influence Operations Against ‘Policy Groups’: Conservatives & the GOP. With this grounding in the nature of shariah, the goals and activities of the Muslim Brotherhood to impose it worldwide and an introduction to the latter’s civilization jihad against the United States, let’s take a closer look at one of the Ikhwan’s most successful influence operations: its penetration and manipulation of the Republican Party and the conservative movement in America.

Part 4: Suhail Khan, A Case Study in Influence Operations. If we are to understand the full nature of the threat posed by the likes of Suhail Khan, we need to examine the Khan case study in closer detail. We’ll explore both Khan’s extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and those he has cultivated in his own right for decades, including what he’s said in public about those ties. Then, we’ll take stock of the real service he has performed for the Islamist cause, both in the past and ongoing.

The Muslim Brotherhood
in America, volume 3 ($12.00)

included in this disc:

Part 5: The Organizations Islamists Are Using to Subvert the Right. The next part of this briefing offers some illustrative examples of the myriad ways in which Grover Norquist and his team are still very actively and purposefully promoting the Islamist agenda — with considerable, and toxic, effect.

Part 6: Electing Islamist Republicans. In this part, we consider how several individuals with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood or other Islamists have been groomed to run for office as Republicans. The careers of Grover Norqust proteges Kamal Nawash, Faisal Gill, and Imad ‘David’ Ramadan are given close scrutiny.

Part 7: Advancing the Islamists’ Agendas. Building infrastructure and running candidates helps with the third part of Grover Norquist’s ongoing Islamist influence operation: advancing the agendas of the civilization jihadists or, at a minimum, promoting agendas that serve the Islamists’ interests. In this part, we take a look at some of those initiatives, including opposition a host of policies that keep America safe.

 

The Muslim Brotherhood
in America, volume 4 ($12.00)

included in this disc:

Part 8: Team Obama & the Islamists. The Obama administration has greatly exacerbated the penetration of the U.S. government achieved during the Bush administration. This part of the course will concentrate on illustrative examples of Muslim Brotherhood-associated individuals who have been allowed access to – and, in some cases, given positions in the Obama administration. This part is a case study of Rashad Hussain, Huma Abedin, Daliah Mogahed, Kifa Mustapha, Momamed Elibiary, and Mohamed Magid.

Part 9: Team Obama & the Islamist Agenda. In 2008, Barack Obama began “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” He has certainly done so with respect to policies favored by Islamists. This part is a two-hour deep drill-down into the disastrous policies of the Obama White House, its State Department, Defense Department, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and more.

Part 10: What’s to be Done? How to defeat the most serious and imminent of such dangers in our time: the Islamist doctrine of shariah and the efforts of its adherents to impose it world-wide, on Muslims and non-Muslims alike, through violent means or by stealth.

Obama ‘Lost’ Egypt

In the past, American presidential campaigns have featured bitter recriminations over foreign policy reverses.  Harry Truman was charged with having “lost China” following the take-over of the Chinese mainland by Mao Tse-Tung’s communists. In subsequent years similar formulations were used to challenge those responsible for the loss to the Free World of Vietnam, Iran and post-Soviet Russia.

Today, the question for voters in the 2012 election to ponder might be posed as “Who lost Egypt?”  To make matters worse, it is likely that the losses won’t stop there. 

Indeed, before it’s over, we may well see nearly all the Middle East fall under the sway of the team President Obama has helped come to power in Cairo – the Muslim Brotherhood, to the grave detriment of the people most immediately affected, of Israel and of our interests, there and here.

To be sure, it is unclear at the moment exactly how things will shake-out in Egypt.  The Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party succeeded in having its candidate, Mohammed Morsi, elected president in recent weeks and installed in that office on Saturday.  But the Egyptian military continues to be very much a force to be reckoned with and the extent and timing of any formal relinquishing of its current control of virtually all aspects of the government – from the armed services to the many industries they own to the parliament and constitution-writing mechanisms – remains to be seen.

Still, the direction Morsi seeks to take his country is unmistakable and should be deeply worrying to all who hoped for an authentic Arab Spring in Egypt and fear the emergence there and elsewhere of an Islamist Winter.  While the newly installed president has professed that he will be the leader of all Egyptians and promised to give tangible expression to that commitment by appointing as his vice presidents a Coptic Christian, a woman and a secular political figure, these will be, atbest mere window-dressing if he sticks to his pledge to impose shariah on all his countrymen.

For example, as captured in an Egyptian television report of May 13, 2012 translated by the indispensable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reLigeHGKzE&feature=player_embedded&noredirect=1) – Morsi espoused during the course of the campaign the key tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood: “The Quran is our constitution. Jihad is our path. And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration.”  He went on to add, “This nation will enjoy blessing and revival only through Islamic shariah.”  Morsi concluded by saying, “I take an oath before Allah and before you all that regardless of the actual text of  [the constitution], Allah willing, the text will truly reflect shariah.”

Now in office, Mohammed Morsi is making clear that this direction may have dire implications for us, as well as for the people of Egypt.  He has declared that one of his priorities as president will be to secure the release from a life-sentence in U.S. federal prison of Omar Abdul Rahman.  Abdul Rahman is better known as the Blind Sheikh and the prime-moverbehind various terrorist plots – including trying to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993.  Morsi wants himrepatriated to Egypt, ostensibly so he can serve out the rest of his sentence there.  Fat chance.

Which brings us to Team Obama.  President Obama was instrumental in assisting the Muslim Brotherhood emerge from the shadows and come to power.  For example, over the strenuous objections of his hosts, Mr. Obama demanded that the Brotherhood’s representatives be included in his June 2009 “outreach to the Muslim world” address at Cairo University.   

Less than two years later, Mr. Obama declared that Hosni Mubarak had to yield power within days of the Muslim Brotherhood’s operatives and other demonstrators taking to the streets demanding his overthrow.  In the months that followed, his administration began “engaging” with the Brotherhood and its formal political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party.

Then, a few months ago, in the face of bipartisan objections from Capitol Hill, the Obama administration transferred $1.5 billion in a lump-sum, no-strings-attached grant to the Egyptian government.  This occurred at a time when Muslim Brotherhood and allied “Salafist” legislators were in charge of its parliament and drawing up a new constitution.

Most recently, Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have welcomed the ascendancy of the Brotherhood’s Morsi.  They are evidently considering giving tangible expression to that sentiment by accommodating his demand for the release the Blind Sheikh as they allowed Hani Noor Eldin, a top member of Abdul Raman’s terrorist Gema’a al-Islamiyaa organization, to enter the U.S. and discuss the idea with their subordinates.

Should Team Obama now take this step, it would have an absolutely devastating effect – and not just in Egypt, where it would validate America’s utter submission to the Brotherhood agenda.  It will also be seen as further evidence that the global Islamist enterprise, of which the Brotherhood is the institutional and ideological vanguard, is succeeding inmaking the West – as the Quran puts it – “feel subdued.”

In short, the practical effect of “losing” Egypt in this way will be, pursuant to the doctrine of shariah, to invite aredoubled effort, including through the use of violence, to achieve the Brotherhood goals of imposing that totalitarian, repressive and supremacist code worldwide.  President Barack Obama must be held accountable for the consequences.

Who ‘Lost’ Egypt?

In the past, American presidential campaigns have featured bitter recriminations over foreign policy reverses.  Harry Truman was charged with having “lost China” following the take-over of the Chinese mainland by Mao Tse-Tung’s communists. In subsequent years similar formulations were used to challenge those responsible for the loss to the Free World of Vietnam, Iran and post-Soviet Russia.

Today, the question for voters in the 2012 election to ponder might be posed as “Who lost Egypt?”  To make matters worse, it is likely that the losses won’t stop there. 

Indeed, before it’s over, we may well see nearly all the Middle East fall under the sway of the team President Obama has helped come to power in Cairo – the Muslim Brotherhood, to the grave detriment of the people most immediately affected, of Israel and of our interests, there and here.

To be sure, it is unclear at the moment exactly how things will shake-out in Egypt.  The Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party succeeded in having its candidate, Mohammed Morsi, elected president in recent weeks and installed in that office on Saturday.  But the Egyptian military continues to be very much a force to be reckoned with and the extent and timing of any formal relinquishing of its current control of virtually all aspects of the government – from the armed services to the many industries they own to the parliament and constitution-writing mechanisms – remains to be seen.

Still, the direction Morsi seeks to take his country is unmistakable and should be deeply worrying to all who hoped for an authentic Arab Spring in Egypt and fear the emergence there and elsewhere of an Islamist Winter.  While the newly installed president has professed that he will be the leader of all Egyptians and promised to give tangible expression to that commitment by appointing as his vice presidents a Coptic Christian, a woman and a secular political figure, these will be, atbest mere window-dressing if he sticks to his pledge to impose shariah on all his countrymen.

For example, as captured in an Egyptian television report of May 13, 2012 translated by the indispensable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reLigeHGKzE&feature=player_embedded&noredirect=1) – Morsi espoused during the course of the campaign the key tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood: “The Quran is our constitution. Jihad is our path. And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration.”  He went on to add, “This nation will enjoy blessing and revival only through Islamic shariah.”  Morsi concluded by saying, “I take an oath before Allah and before you all that regardless of the actual text of  [the constitution], Allah willing, the text will truly reflect shariah.”

Now in office, Mohammed Morsi is making clear that this direction may have dire implications for us, as well as for the people of Egypt.  He has declared that one of his priorities as president will be to secure the release from a life-sentence in U.S. federal prison of Omar Abdul Rahman.  Abdul Rahman is better known as the Blind Sheikh and the prime-moverbehind various terrorist plots – including trying to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993.  Morsi wants himrepatriated to Egypt, ostensibly so he can serve out the rest of his sentence there.  Fat chance.

Which brings us to Team Obama.  President Obama was instrumental in assisting the Muslim Brotherhood emerge from the shadows and come to power.  For example, over the strenuous objections of his hosts, Mr. Obama demanded that the Brotherhood’s representatives be included in his June 2009 “outreach to the Muslim world” address at Cairo University.   

Less than two years later, Mr. Obama declared that Hosni Mubarak had to yield power within days of the Muslim Brotherhood’s operatives and other demonstrators taking to the streets demanding his overthrow.  In the months that followed, his administration began “engaging” with the Brotherhood and its formal political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party.

Then, a few months ago, in the face of bipartisan objections from Capitol Hill, the Obama administration transferred $1.5 billion in a lump-sum, no-strings-attached grant to the Egyptian government.  This occurred at a time when Muslim Brotherhood and allied “Salafist” legislators were in charge of its parliament and drawing up a new constitution.

Most recently, Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have welcomed the ascendancy of the Brotherhood’s Morsi.  They are evidently considering giving tangible expression to that sentiment by accommodating his demand for the release the Blind Sheikh as they allowed Hani Noor Eldin, a top member of Abdul Raman’s terrorist Gema’a al-Islamiyaa organization, to enter the U.S. and discuss the idea with their subordinates.

Should Team Obama now take this step, it would have an absolutely devastating effect – and not just in Egypt, where it would validate America’s utter submission to the Brotherhood agenda.  It will also be seen as further evidence that the global Islamist enterprise, of which the Brotherhood is the institutional and ideological vanguard, is succeeding inmaking the West – as the Quran puts it – “feel subdued.”

In short, the practical effect of “losing” Egypt in this way will be, pursuant to the doctrine of shariah, to invite aredoubled effort, including through the use of violence, to achieve the Brotherhood goals of imposing that totalitarian, repressive and supremacist code worldwide.  President Barack Obama must be held accountable for the consequences.

The Brotherhood’s Bait and Switch

Egypt’s newly elected president, Mohammed Morsi, says he will be a “leader for all Egyptians.”  That sounds a lot like the sorts of lies his fellow Muslim Brothers have been telling for months, only to renege on them when they can.  We ignore the true character and ambitions of the Brotherhood – in Egypt, elsewhere in the Mideast, in the wider world and here – at our extreme peril.

In fact, the Brothers’ bait-and-switch gambits are standard operating procedure for their secretive organization.  After all, from the Muslim Brotherhood’s inception in Egypt in 1928, it has been a revolutionary organization committed to the imposition worldwide of a totalitarian, supremacist Islamic doctrine they call shariah. 

The unattractiveness of that brutally repressive agenda to non-Muslims and even many Muslims, has forced the group to operate largely in the shadows.  It wages a stealthy, pre-violent “civilization jihad” to advance its goals until circumstances are ripe for conquest via violent jihadism.

In the hope of attenuating the military’s opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood  rise, the latter has utilized myriad subterfuges.  In previous rounds of elections, the Brotherhood promised that it would not seek a parliamentary majority.  Then, it did.  It promised not to run a candidate for president.  Then, it actually ran two of them.

As its power grew, the Brotherhood cynically abandoned others in the opposition in the hope of cutting deals with the junta that ruled Egypt following the overthrow of long-time U.S. ally, Hosni Mubarak: the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).  When the SCAF cracked down on the eve of the second round of the presidential election, however, the Brothers were back in Tahrir Square making nice with those unlikely to fare well under shariah – Christians, secular liberals and women to whom   Morsi’s soothing words are obviously intended to appeal. 

Another Brotherhood bait-and-switch was laid bare in a Wall Street Journal interview with the Brotherhood’s formidable deputy supreme guide, Khairat Al Shater.  As Matthew Kaminski put it “If the Muslim Brotherhood came to power, Mr. Al Shater would be in charge.”  In other words, Morsi is a puppet for the leader of an outfit described by Kaminski as “a closed, rigidly hierarchical and disciplined quasi-Trotskyite organization.” 

Khairat Al Shater revealed one more gambit in his interview with the Journal.  Mr. Kaminski quoted him as saying that “the priority is ‘a close partnership’ with the U.S. which the [Brotherhood] expects to help it unlock credit markets and gain international legitimacy.” 

The Muslim Brotherhood appears to have a most willing partner for such purposes in President Obama and his administration.  On the occasion of Mr. Obama’s first “outreach to the Muslim world” speech at Cairo’s al-Azhar University in June 2009, he insisted that Brotherhood operatives be in the audience.  He threw Mubarak under the bus within a few days of demonstrations erupting in Tahrir Square and elsewhere in Egypt (instark contrast to his indifference to far larger and longer-running ones inIran). 

What is more, since the first “Arab Spring” uprisings in February 2011, Team Obama has engaged with the Brotherhood extensively – both here and in the region – and signaled its willingness to do so in government.  Notably, in April 2012, after the Brotherhood dominated parliamentary elections, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered the transfer of $1.5 billion in a lump-sum, no-strings-attached grant to Egypt.

 The best hope for those who legitimately fear the Muslim Brotherhood and its unwavering – if only intermittently acknowledged – determination to impose shariah in Egypt may be for the military there to continue to resist pressure to yield power to theMuslim Brotherhood.

Unfortunately, that pressure will be immense.  It will emanate from, among others, the Obama administration.  Team Obama’s support for the Brotherhood has become more and more aggressive, and reckless.  In the process, it is empowering not only the most serious enemy of any hope for freedom in the Middle East, but avowed enemies of this country, as well.

The next shoe to drop in that regard may be a decision by President Obama to agree to a demand from Egyptian Islamists to free one oftheir most dangerous leaders, Omar Abdul Rahman, the notorious “Blind Sheikh” who ordered the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.  That unrepentant terrorist subsequently tried to use his attorney, Lynne Stewart, to communicate from federal prison an order to his followers to conduct still further, murderous jihadist acts. 

Abdul Rahman’s return to Cairo – a jihadist triumph that would likely make the Islamists’ rapture at the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran in 1979 pale by comparison – has been urged most recently during high-level meetings in Washington by Hani Nour Eldin.  Eldin is a member of the Blind Sheikh’s designated terrorist organization, Gama’a al-Islamiyya.  An incredulous House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-NY) has written HomelandSecurity Secretary Janet Napolitano asking why such a dangerous individual was granted a visa by the Obama administration and for her position on the release Abdul Rahman.

Subterfuge, subversion and sedition in the name of shariah are the tradecraft of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Team Obama’s enabling of the Brothers’ ascendancy in Egypt and its embrace of their operatives and those of other Islamist organizations in this country (see www.MuslimBrotherhoodinAmerica.com) is, if not actually illegal, certainly dangerous in the extreme.

Dreamy foreign policies

With her unbridled hostility towards Israel, the EU’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton provides us with an abject lesson in what happens when a government places its emotional aspirations above its national interests.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, many of Israel’s elite have aspired to be embraced by Europe. In recent years, nearly every government has voiced the hope of one day seeing Israel join the EU.

To a significant degree, Israel’s decision to recognize the PLO in 1993 and negotiate with Yasser Arafat and his deputies was an attempt by Israel’s political class to win acceptance from the likes of Ashton and her continental comrades. For years the EU had criticized Israel for refusing to recognize the PLO.

Until 1993, Israel’s leaders defied Europe because they could tell the difference between a national interest and an emotional aspiration and preferred the former over the latter. And now, Israel’s reward for preferring European love to our national interest and embracing our sworn enemy is Catherine Ashton.

To put it mildly, Ashton is not a friend of Israel. Indeed, she is so ill-disposed against Israel that she seems unable to focus for long on anything other than bashing it. Her obsession was prominently displayed in March when she was unable to give an unqualified condemnation of the massacre of French Jewish children by a French Muslim. Ashton simply had to use her condemnation as yet another opportunity to bash Israel.

Her preoccupation with Israel was again on display on Tuesday. During a boilerplate, vacuous speech about President Bashar Assad’s slaughter of his fellow Syrians, apropos of nothing the baroness launched into an unhinged, impassioned, and deeply dishonest frontal assault against Israel.

The woman US President Barack Obama has empowered to lead the West’s negotiations with Iran regarding its illicit nuclear weapons program stood at the podium in the European Parliament and threw an anti-Israel temper tantrum.

The same woman who couldn’t be bothered to finish her speech about Assad’s massacre of children, the same woman who is so excited about her Iranian negotiating partners’ body language that she doesn’t think it is necessary to give them an ultimatum about ending their quest for a nuclear bomb, seemed to lack a sufficiently harsh vocabulary to express her revulsion with Jewish “settlers.”

As she put it, “We are also seriously concerned by recent and increasing incidents of settler violence which we all condemn.”

It’s not clear what “recent and increasing incidents of settler violence” she was referring to. But in all likelihood, she didn’t have a specific incident in mind. She probably just figured that those sneaky Jews are always up to no good.

ASIDE FROM condemning imaginary Israeli crimes more emphatically than real Syrian crimes, Ashton’s speech involved a presentation of the EU’s policy on Israel and the Palestinians.

That policy is based on three premises: The EU falsely claims that all Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines are illegal.

It rejects Israel’s legal right to assert its authority over Area C – the area of Judea and Samaria that is empty of Palestinian population centers.

And it will only soften its anti-Israel positions if the Palestinians do so first.

Aside from its jaw-dropping animosity towards Israel, what is notable about the EU’s position is that it is actually far more hostile to Israel than the Palestinians’ position towards Israel as that position was revealed in the agreements that the Palestinians signed with Israel in the past. In those agreements, the Palestinians accepted continued sole Israeli control over Area C. They did not require Israel to end the construction of Jewish communities outside the 1949 armistice lines. The peace process ended when the Palestinians moved closer to the EU’s position.

The EU’s antipathy towards Israel as personified in Ashton’s behavior teaches us two important lessons. First, it is often hard to tell our friends from our foes. Israelis – particularly those born to families that emigrated from Europe – have traditionally viewed Europe as the last word in enlightened democracy and sophistication and style. We wanted to be like them. We wanted to be accepted by them.

Indeed we were so swept away by the thought that they might one day love us back that we adopted policies that were inimical to our national interest and so weakened us tremendously.

It never occurred to us that the fact that Europe insisted that we adopt policies that undercut our national survival meant that the Europeans wished us ill.

They seemed so nice.

The second thing we learn from Ashton’s anti-Israel mania is that when we engage in foreign policy, we need to base our judgments about our ability to influence the behavior of our foreign counterparts on a sober-minded assessment of two separate things: our interlocutor’s ideology and his interests. In Ashton’s case, both parameters make clear that there is no way to win her over to Israel’s side. She is ideologically opposed to Israel. And the citizens of Europe are becoming more and more hostile to Israel and to Jews.

These twin parameters for judging foreign leaders and representatives came to mind on Wednesday with the publication of State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss’s critical report on the government’s handling of the Turkish-government supported, pro-Hamas flotilla in May 2010. Perhaps the most remarkable revelation in the report is that up until a week before the flotilla set sail, led by the infamous Mavi Marmara, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was under the impression that he had reached a deal with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Netanyahu believed that through third parties, including the US government and then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, he had convinced Erdogan to cancel the flotilla. He had a deal.

The fact that Netanyahu thought he had a deal with Erdogan is startling and unnerving. It means that Netanyahu was willing to ignore the basic facts of Erdogan’s nature and the way that Erdogan perceives his interests, in favor of a fiction.

By May 2010 it was abundantly clear that Erdogan was not a friend of Israel. He had been in power for eight years. He had already ended Turkey’s strategic alliance with Israel. In 2006, Erdogan was the first major international leader and NATO member to host Hamas terror chief Ismail Haniyeh. His embrace of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood made clear that he was Israel’s enemy. It is a simple fact that you cannot be allied with Israel and with the Muslim Brotherhood at the same time. The same year he allowed Iran to use Turkish territory to transfer weaponry to Hezbollah during the Second Lebanon War.

In 2008, Erdogan openly sided with Hamas against Israel in Operation Cast Lead. In 2009, he called President Shimon Peres a murderer to his face.

By the time the flotilla was organized, Erdogan had used Turkey’s position as a NATO member to effectively end the US-led alliance’s cooperative relationship with Israel, by refusing to participate in military exercises with Israel.

THE NATURE OF the flotilla organizers was also known in the months ahead of its departure for Gaza. The IHH’s ties to al-Qaida had been documented. Netanyahu’s staff knew that the IHH was so extreme that the previous Turkish government had barred its operatives from participating in humanitarian relief efforts after the devastating 1999 earthquake. They feared the group would use its relief efforts to radicalize the local population.

In and of itself, the fact that Erdogan was openly supporting IHH’s leading role in the flotilla told Israel everything it needed to know about the Turkish leader’s intentions. And yet, up until a week before the flotilla set sail, Netanyahu was operating under the impression that he had struck a deal with Erdogan.

It is likely that Netanyahu was led to believe that a deal had been crafted by the Americans.

Obama is not the only American leader that has been seduced into believing that Erdogan and his Islamist AKP Party are trustworthy strategic partners for the US. Many key members of Congress share this delusional view.

According to a senior congressional source, Turkey’s success in winning over the US Congress is the result of a massive Turkish lobbying effort. Through two or three front groups, the Turkish government has become one of the most active lobbying bodies in Washington. It brings US lawmakers and their aides on luxury trips to Turkey and hosts glittering, glamorous receptions and parties in Washington on a regular basis. And these efforts have paid off.

Turkey’s bellicosity towards Israel as well as Greece and Cyprus has caused it no harm in Washington. Its request to purchase a hundred F-35 Joint Strike Fighters faced little serious opposition. The US continues to bow to its demands to disinvite Israel from international forum after international forum – most recently the upcoming US-hosted counter-terrorism summit in Istanbul.

Certainly Turkey’s strategic transformation under Erdogan’s leadership from a pro-Western democracy into an anti-Western Islamist police state has dire implications for American national interests. And the Americans would be well-served to look beyond the silken invitations to Turkish formal events at five-star hotels and see what is actually happening in the sole Muslim NATO member-state. But whether the US comes to its senses or not is its business.

Israel had no business buying into the fiction in 2010 that Erdogan could be reasoned with.

True, today no one in Israel operates under that delusion anymore. But the basic phenomenon of our leaders failing to distinguish between what they want to happen and what can happen continues to exist.

Ours is a dangerous world and an even more dangerous neighborhood. Everywhere we look we see cauldrons of radicalism and sophisticated weaponry waiting to explode. The threat environment Israel faces today is unprecedented.

At this time we cannot afford to be seduced by our dreams that things were different than they are. They are what they are.

We do have options in this contest. To maximize those options we need to ground our actions and assessments in clear-headed analyses and judgments of the people we are faced with. Their actions will be determined by their beliefs and their perception of their interests – not by our pretty face.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Congressional Leaders Call for Investigations of Muslim Brotherhood Penetration of the Obama Administration

Washington, DC, June 14, 2012: Five influential Members of Congress called yesterday for the inspectors general (IGs) of government departments with national security responsibilities to investigate whether their agencies are being subjected to influence operations mounted as part of what the Muslim Brotherhood calls its “civilization jihad.”  This initiative holds out hope that a grave, and largely unremarked, threat may thus be recognized and thwarted in time.
The authors of letters sent to the IGs for the Departments of State, Justice, Defense and Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are:
  • Rep. Michele Bachman, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and Chairwoman of the House Tea Party Caucus
  • Rep. Trent Franks, Chairman of the House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on the Constitution a member of the House Armed Services Committee
  • Rep. Louie Gohmert, Vice Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security
  • Rep. Tom Rooney, Deputy Majority Whip and member of the House Armed Services Committee
  • Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee’s   Oversight Subcommittee; and
In a joint press statement, each of these congressional leaders expressed profound concern about the dangers posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and the need to understand that threat here in the United States.  What is more, they cited in their letters evidence of the penetration of Brotherhood operatives and allies inside the Obama administration, and examples of policies that appear to have been influenced as a result.
The legislators explicitly draw upon documentation of that evidence contained in Parts 8 and 9 the Center for Security Policy’s new, ten-part online video curriculum: The Muslim Brotherhood in America: The Enemy Within (www.MuslimBrotherhoodinAmerica.com).
Center President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. said:
“These five key legislators are to be commended for their exemplary leadership on a matter of utmost peril to this country – namely, the stealthy effort being made by avowed enemies of this country, the Muslim Brotherhood, to destroy us ‘from within.’  Their request for the five inspectors general to conduct investigations of the Brotherhood’s progress toward that end – and report back within ninety days – will hopefully be seconded by others in both parties and be swiftly addressed by the IGs, given their responsibility for conducting such independent inquiries within executive branch agencies.  The Center for Security Policy’s extensive research, and the online course that presents it, shows those inquiries are fully warranted and urgently needed – as are, for that matter, corresponding investigations by the Congress, as well.”

Hold Obama Accountable

Suddenly, congressional leaders of both parties are demanding investigations into serial disclosures of national security secrets on President Obama’s watch.  The truth of the matter is that we already know what we need to about these leaks.  The question is:  Will anybody do anything about it?

Of course, the leaks themselves are already out there – prominently featured, for example, on the front pages of the New York Times.  We know of the compromise of techniques used to defend our country through cyberwarfare, drone attacks, covert operations and what turned out to be other nations’ successful penetration of terrorist cells. 

We also know that, in every case, the leakers’ handiwork portrayed Barack Obama as a highly effective, decisive, muscular and hands-on Commander-in-Chief.  Sadly, the President’s overall record shows him to have been anything but, hence the need to pump up his street creds as part of the reelection campaign.

If the damage done for what are, on their face, nakedly political purposes were not so serious, the President’s remark last week that he finds "offensive" suggestions that "his White House" could have been responsible would be hilarious.  Yet, it seems certain that his Justice Department’s investigation will shed no helpful light on the degree of involvement by the Executive Office of the President or, in case he was parsing his words deliberately, the culpability of those who work for him elsewhere in the government.  At a minimum, that will certainly be true between now and the November election.

As former federal prosecutor-turned-bestselling author Andrew McCarthy has observed (http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/06/09/latest-in-leak-farce-the-special-counsel-folly/), Attorney General Eric Holder has jujitsued legislators’ demands for a special prosecutor into a review by two U.S. Attorneys that will not only take, in all likelihood, a year or more to complete.  Worse yet, their investigation will also be used as a pretext to thwart congressional inquiries into the leaks for the duration of that probe.

This is all the more ridiculous in light of what we already know:  People working for Barack Obama have been talking to the media.  Some, like longtime Democratic political operative and current National Security Advisor to the President Tom Donilon, have actually allowed themselves to be named as sources.

In other cases, the leakers are part of a very small universe, making a swift and rigorous investigation manageable.  For instance, some of the leaks were attributed to officials among the presumably quite restricted number of subordinates who participate in highly classified meetings with Mr. Obama to target terrorists for assassination.  One of these turns out to be none other than presidential campaign strategist David Axelrod.  It really should not take long to ferret out who among this small group said what on an off-the-record basis.   

More importantly, the bottom line is also clear:  President Obama is the beneficiary of the spin associated with these leaks, not the American people.  And that truly is offensive.

Unfortunately, the same can be said of a number of other actions for which the President can – and must – be held directly accountable.  These include, for example:

  • President Obama’s deliberate and far-reaching unilateral disarmament of both U.S. conventional and nuclear forces through budgetary actions and malign neglect.
  • President Obama’s embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood – bringing them to power in the Mideast and encouraging their efforts to insinuate shariah here.  In fact, Mr. Donilon’s deputy, Dennis McDonough, was in Qatar last week meeting with senior operatives of America’s two most prominent Brotherhood front groups, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), toward that end.  We also just learned that his administration has had "hundreds of meetings" with CAIR.
  • President Obama’s buying time for Iran to complete its decades-long drive to acquire nuclear weapons and eviscerating the U.S. missile defenses needed to protect against that growing threat.
  • President Obama’s alienating of Israel, Poland, the Czech Republic, Honduras and other allies in the vain hope of currying favor with their foes, and ours.
  • President Obama’s encouraging other adversaries, from Russia to China to North Korea to Chavismo in our hemisphere, thanks to the weakness and irresolution that have characterized his policies to date and that his team now feels the need to obscure with heavy spinning of the leaked secrets.  And,
  • President Obama’s diminishing of our sovereignty, notably by trying to ram through the Senate the Law of the Sea Treaty – the subject of two more hearings this week in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, including the first in which opponents have been allowed to testify, led by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Despite the likelihood that the American people will not learn who has been responsible for the damage done to our security through the serial leaks of highly classified information until well after November 6th – if then, they are on notice about his priorities:  Emboldening our enemies, undermining our friends and diminishing our country.  We simply cannot afford four more years of unaccountable and dangerous malpractice on the part of a Commander-in-Chief.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Defeating the Jewish Alinskyites

Saul Alinsky, the godfather of subversive radical political action, had a very clear strategy for undermining and destroying his enemies: Infiltrate, divide and destroy.

Since his disciple Barack Obama was elected US president in 2008, Alinsky’s impact on Obama has received a fair amount of attention.

Less noticed has been the adoption of Alinsky’s methods by radical leftist Jews in the US and Israel for the purpose of undermining the American Jewish community on the one hand, and Israel’s nationalist camp on the other. This week we saw the impact of both campaigns.

The striking weakness of the American Jewish community was exposed on Tuesday with the Democratic primary defeat of Rep. Steve Rothman in New Jersey. In Israel we saw the impact of the campaign to undermine and destroy the nationalist camp with the defeat of the proposed legislation aimed at saving the doomed Givat Haulpana neighborhood in Bet El.

Ahead of the 2008 US presidential elections, the anti-Israel pressure group J Street made a sudden appearance. Claiming to be pro-Israel, the anti-Israel lobby set about neutralizing the power of the American Jewish community by undermining community solidarity. And it has succeeded brilliantly.

Rothman is Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel. His defeat at the polls in New Jersey by Rep. Bill Pascrell owed in large part to openly anti-Semitic activism by Pascrell’s Muslim supporters.

According to an investigative report of the primary campaign by the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo, in February Pascrell’s Muslim supporters began castigating Rothman and his supporters as disloyal Americans beholden only to Israel.

Aref Assaf, president of the New Jersey-based American Arab Forum, published a column in the Newark Star Ledger titled, "Rothman is Israel’s Man in District 9." He wrote, "As total and blind support becomes the only reason for choosing Rothman, voters who do not view the elections in this prism will need to take notice. Loyalty to a foreign flag is not loyalty to America’s [flag]."

These deeply bigoted allegations against Rothman and his supporters were not challenged by Pascrell. Pascrell also did not challenge Arabic-language campaign posters produced by his supporters enjoining the "Arab diaspora community" to elect Pascrell, "the friend of the Arabs." The poster touted the race as "the most important election in the history of the [Arab American] community."

Rather than challenge these anti-Semitic attacks, Pascrell enthusiastically courted the Muslim vote in his district.

Pascrell was a signatory to what became known as the "Gaza-54 letter." Spearheaded by J Street, the 2010 letter, signed by 54 Democratic congressmen, called on Obama to put pressure on Israel to end its "collective punishment" of residents of Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Pascrell’s race was far from the only recent instance of anti-Semitism being employed by Democratic candidates to win their elections. In Connecticut’s 2006 Democratic Senate primary, anti-Semitic slurs and innuendos were prominent features of Ned Lamont’s successful race against Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Defeated in his party’s primary, Lieberman was forced to run as an Independent. He owed his reelection to Republican support.

LIEBERMAN’S GENERAL election victory over Lamont did not force all of his fellow Democrats to rethink their use of anti-Semitism as a campaign strategy. At a candidate’s debate in this year’s Connecticut Democratic Senate primary race, candidate Lee Whitnum attacked her opponent Rep. Chris Murphy as a "whore who sells his soul to AIPAC."

Given the fact that the overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans are supporters of the Democratic Party, it should have been assumed that they would have responded to Whitnum’s anti- Semitic slurs by seeking to get her expelled from their party. They also could have been expected to pour resources into defeating candidates like Pascrell who actively court the votes of open Jew-haters. But this didn’t happen.

Instead, due to J Street’s agitation, and the penetration of the Jewish organizational world by J Street fellow travelers, for the past three years, the American Jewish community has been fighting among itself about what it means to be pro-Israel. At a time when the US Jewish community’s party of choice is increasingly falling under the influence of radical leftists and Muslims who reject Israel’s right to exist, rather than standing tall, Jewish communities around the US are being neutralized by the solipsism of self-defeating, J-Street-invented issues like whether AIPAC is legitimate and whether Jewish anti-Zionists can be considered pro-Israel.

Equally horrible, if not worse, at a time when Israel is being threatened with annihilation by Iran, and Jewish communities in Europe and Latin America are under physical assault, the voice of the self-obsessed American Jewish community is coming through more and more weakly, with powerful voices questioning the very legitimacy of its collective voice.

In Israel, the success of local Alinskyites was on display this week as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu found himself squaring off against his party’s most committed constituency.

The 350,000 Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria and their massive support base inside the Likud, and indeed throughout Israeli society, suffered a tremendous defeat this week.

Netanyahu’s decision to torpedo a proposed law that would have prevented the implementation of the Supreme Court-ordered destruction of the Givat Haulpana neighborhood in Beit El has made these Likud members perceive themselves as isolated and in danger.

Just as the American Jewish community needs to recognize the J Street effect to contend with its current condition, so in Israel both sides of the divide in the nationalist camp need to understand how they came to find themselves on opposite sides of the fence.

Misreading what has happened, many are drawing false analogies between Givat Haulpana and the destruction of the Jewish communities in Gaza in 2005 and the destruction of homes in Amona in 2006. In both those previous cases, the destruction of the homes was the consequence of government policy. Then-premier Ariel Sharon wanted to destroy the Jewish communities of Gaza and northern Samaria. Their destruction was the centerpiece of his governing agenda. So, too, his successor Ehud Olmert wanted to destroy Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. He ran on a policy of destroying them in the 2006 elections.

This is not the case with Netanyahu.

Netanyahu can be faulted for not providing sufficient protection to Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria. He has not permitted Jews to build on state land to make up for the fact that they face market discrimination from the Palestinian Authority which has made it a capital crime to sell private land to Jews. And of course, he bowed to US pressure and instituted the deeply prejudicial temporary construction ban on Jews in 2009 and 2010.

But unlike Sharon and Olmert, Netanyahu has not made the destruction of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria a goal of his government.

To the contrary, he has enacted initiatives to strengthen the Jewish communities there and to raise the general public’s awareness of the centrality of Judea and Samaria to Jewish history and heritage.

Netanyahu is not the best friend of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. But he is more a friend than an enemy.

SO IF Netanyahu doesn’t oppose the communities of Judea and Samaria, why is he supporting the destruction of Givat Haulpana? The answer is that he and his angry constituents were set up by the radicals who run the state prosecution.

True, the leftist-dominated Supreme Court ordered the government to destroy the neighborhood. But the state prosecution gave the court’s justices no other choice.

The case regarding Givat Haulpana exposes several of the pathologies of Israel’s legal system. But by far the most glaring pathology it reveals is the politicization of the state prosecution by the radical leftists who run it.

In the event, the radical activist group Yesh Din petitioned the court in the name of a Palestinian who claimed to be the rightful owner of the land on which the neighborhood was built. Yesh Din presented the court with an affidavit in which the Palestinian claimed that the land in question belonged to him. Yesh Din then asked the court to make the state explain why, given the affidavit, the IDF had not yet evacuated the neighborhood.

On its face, the job of the state prosecution couldn’t have been more obvious. All they had to do was tell the court that the issue of ownership is contested and that the court should require Yesh Din to adjudicate ownership in the lower courts.

So, too, they ought to have rejected the unsubstantiated assertion that the IDF is required to destroy homes built on private land. There is ample precedent for both positions, including a nearly identical case regarding a neighborhood in Barkan where the land in question belonged – without question – to a private Jewish landowner.

But the state prosecution decided not to take any of those obvious positions. By not questioning the veracity of the affidavit or the assertion that the IDF is required to destroy homes built on private land without the permission of the owner, the state prosecution, which is supposed to represent the elected government, left the justices no choice. All they could do was set a date for the expulsion of the 30 families living in the five apartment buildings. And so they did.

Both the Knesset and Netanyahu seem to recognize that Israel’s elected leaders were manipulated by political radicals abusing their positions in the state prosecution to undermine the elected government. And they seem to be taking appropriate action. The Knesset has ordered the state comptroller to investigate the circumstances surrounding the state prosecution’s mishandling of the Yesh Din petition. Netanyahu has ordered the construction of 300 buildings in Beit El and 851 homes in all of Judea and Samaria. He has formed a ministerial committee that will oversee the state prosecution’s handling of future cases regarding Palestinian claims to land housing Jewish communities.

None of this solves the problem of the 30 families who through no fault of their own are slated to become homeless in the next three weeks because public officials abused their office to throw these families from their homes and divide and destroy the nationalist camp. But it may make prosecutorial malpractice a less attractive option for these homegrown Alinskyites.

The Alinsky strategy is brilliant in its cunning mendacity. And his followers in the American Jewish community and Israel have already succeeded in causing great harm. The stakes are high in both countries. The time has come for the majority of American Jews and Israelis to stop being cowed and confused by their destructive manipulations.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=273110

Common Sense on L.O.S.T.

In recent days, top U.S. cabinet officers have traveled around the world on high-profile diplomatic missions.  Ironically, in the process of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to the Arctic Circle and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s travels in Asia, they both undercut the case for the United Nations’ controversial Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) – a case they had jointly made prior to departing in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Mrs. Clinton took part in a meeting of the Arctic Council whose eight members have territory in that region.  Of these, just five – Russia, Canada, Norway, Denmark’s Greenland and the United States – actually have coasts on the Arctic Ocean, and therefore are able to claim rights to the resources offshore. 

To be sure, the Secretary of State used the occasion of her joining the other Arctic nations for the purpose of forging a new region-wide search-and-rescue (S&R) agreement to express the Obama administration’s commitment to LOST.  She assured her colleagues  that the President is determined to overcome opposition in the Senate and the country in order to get the treaty ratified. 

Still, this S&R agreement suggests the obvious:  It is far easier to achieve understandings in a group of eight – or, better yet, five – nations that have similar, if not identical, interests and a shared understanding of the stakes, than among agroup of 150-plus nations, most of whom do not.  If that is true for an accord governing assistance to downed planes and ships lost at sea, it surely is the case when it comes to the disposition of potentially many billions of dollars worth of undersea oil and gas deposits.

Meanwhile, our Defense Secretary was off in Asia trying to shore up America’s alliances in the region without actually saying that China is a threat that needs to be countered there.  So he eschewed the President’s much-touted strategic “pivot” from the Middle East and South Asia to the South China Sea – supposedly involving a move in force to parry the PRC’s aspirations for hegemony.  Instead, Mr. Panetta employed less offensive terms like “rebalancing” and made commitments about a future U.S. presence in the theater that were deeply discounted in light of ongoing, and forthcoming, sharp cuts in defense spending.   

It happens that Secretary Panetta’s enthusiasm for the Law of the Sea Treaty tracks with Team Obama’s public efforts to low-ball the dangers posed by China’s increasingly aggressive behavior towards our Asian friends and allies, and its growing capacity to act coercively due to its growing military capabilities.  He and, surprisingly, even senior Navy and other military officers who should know better seem to think that if only the United States were a party to LOST, international law would tame the Chinese dragon.  

As one of the nation’s most astute China hands, Gordon Chang, noted recently in his column at World Affairs Journal (www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/gordon-g-chang/should-us-ratify-un-sea-treaty-because-china):  “Although Beijing ratified the [LOST] pact in June 1996, it continues to issue maps claiming the entire South China Sea.  That claim is, among other things, incompatible with the treaty’s rules.  It’s no wonder Beijing notified the UN in 2006 that it would not accept international arbitration of its sovereignty claims.”

Just as common sense argues for using bilateral or, at most, five-party forums to establish arrangements governing the Arctic Ocean’s resources, it strongly militates against the United States allowing itself to be bound to a treaty whose core provisions (i.e., those governing limitations on territorial claims and mandatory dispute resolutions) are already being serially violated by Communist China. 

On May 9th, Secretary Panetta nonetheless asserted that “By moving off the sidelines, by sitting at the table of nations that have acceded to this treaty, we can defend our interests, we can lead the discussions, we will be able to influence those treaty bodies that develop and interpret the Law of the Sea.”  That is simply not so if, as is true of the LOST’s various institutions, we would have but one seat among many, and no certainty that we can decisively “influence bodies that develop and interpret the law of the Sea.”

In fact, thanks to the rigged-game nature of those institutions, such bodies can be relied upon to hamstring us – by, for example, applying environmental regulations over which we have no control to our Navy’s anti-submarine warfare exercises and our domestic emissions into inland air and water that migrates to the international oceans. 

Meanwhile, the Chinese will get away with choosing which rules they will abide by and which they won’t.  Mr. Chang puts it this way:  “[China] is…a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but remains a notorious nuclear proliferator, and it is a member of the World Trade Organization, yet brazenly disregards its trade obligations.  And UN sanctions?  China openly violates those too, even though it is one of the five permanent members of the Security Council.”

In short, the Obama administration wants Senators to suspend common sense and ignore real and legitimate concerns about the deleterious impact of the Law of the Sea Treaty on our sovereignty, economic interests and potentially even the national security. Will 34 Senators have enough common sense to just say “No”?

The reign of the fantasists

Defense Minister Ehud Barak has done it again. Speaking on Wednesday at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, Barak warned that if Israel can’t cut a deal with the Palestinians soon, it should consider surrendering Judea and Samaria in exchange for nothing.
Even the diehard leftists in the media had a hard time swallowing his words. After all, when Barak was premier, he oversaw Israel’s unilateral surrender of south Lebanon in 2000. Barak promised that by giving Hezbollah south Lebanon, Israel would force the Iranian proxy army to disarm and behave like a Western political party.
Whoopsie.
Then of course, there is the Gaza precedent.
Ignoring the lesson of Lebanon, Barak’s successor Ariel Sharon reenacted his unilateral surrender policy in Gaza in 2005. Like Barak, Sharon promised that once Gaza was cleared of all Jewish presence, it would magically transform itself into a Middle Eastern version of Singapore.
Whoopsie.
Both Barak and Sharon promised that their unilateral surrender policies would do more than merely transform Hezbollah and Hamas into liberal democrats. They said that by cutting and running, Israel would earn the love of the international community, and winning the love of the likes of Washington and Brussels, they said, was the most urgent item on Israel’s agenda.
Apparently Barak was referring to the same imperative when on Wednesday he said that Israel needs to act fast because, "We are on borrowed time. We will reach a wall, and we’ll pay the price."
So yes, Hezbollah has taken over not just south Lebanon, but all of Lebanon. And true, there is no one in the Palestinian Authority today who is willing to accept the continued existence of Israel in any borders. But that just means we need the West to love us even more. And the only way to get the West to love us is by imperiling our very existence by handing our heartland over to people who wish to destroy our country.
Given the high value Barak and his comrades place on winning the love of the West, it is worth considering what motivates the West – or more to the point, the US, which leads the Western world.
Unfortunately, the situation is not pretty. US President Barack Obama’s policies are just as irrational as the ones that Barak is urging Israel to implement in order to win Obama’s support. And Obama’s rationales for adopting these policies are just as divorced from reality as Barak’s are.
The place where this irrationality is displayed most prominently today is in Obama’s policy regarding Iran. As Michael Singh rightly noted on Wednesday in the New York Daily News, under Obama, US policy towards Iran is based on the view "that at the root of the Iran nuclear crisis is US-Iran conflict, and that the root cause of that conflict is mistrust."
THIS VIEW is pure fantasy. No Iranian leader has ever given the US any reason to believe that this is the case. To the contrary, every Iranian leader since the 1979 Islamic Revolution has made clear that the regime is dedicated to the destruction of the US and Israel.
The Iranians do not wish to destroy the US and Israel because they distrust them. The likes of Ayatollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Khamenei, President Ahmadinejad and all of their comrades wish to destroy Israel and the US because they hate us. They hate us because as they see it, both nations represent forces that are antithetical to their revolution’s goal of Islamic world domination.
Rather than accept this fundamental, but unpleasant truth, Obama and his advisors base their policy of engaging Iran on fairy tales about nonexistent fatwas that purportedly ruled out the development of nuclear weapons. As Vice Premier Moshe Ya’alon put it delicately this week, the Iranians are "laughing all the way to a bomb."
Ya’alon explained, "During talks with world powers, the Iranians have managed to enrich 750 kilograms of uranium to 3.5 percent, and 36 kilograms of uranium to 20 percent."
And while the Iranians were enriching all that uranium, according to satellite imagery published on Wednesday by the Institute for Science and International Affairs, they were destroying buildings at the Parchin nuclear site.
The buildings in question were suspected of being used to conduct high explosive tests pertinent to the development of nuclear weapons.
And yet, despite Iran’s obvious bad faith, and despite the fact that the much-touted sanctions against Iran have done nothing to slow the pace of its sprint to the nuclear finish line, the Obama administration insists on clinging to the fantasy that it can convince the Iranians that they can trust the US and therefore convince them to give up their nuclear weapons program.
Lacking any substantive means of defending this Tinkerbell-fairy-dust policy towards the most pressing threat to international security today, the only thing the Obama administration can tell increasingly distressed Israeli leaders is that we should trust them. They know what they are doing.
Allowing Iran to go nuclear isn’t the only price Obama has been willing to pay to fulfill his fantasy of solving Iran’s conflict with the US by building trust. He is also willing to destroy any chance of Syria becoming a responsible actor on the international stage.
Obama’s willingness to sit on his thumbs for 14 months as Syrian President Bashar Assad has killed as many as 15,000 of his countrymen owes in part to Obama’s desire to win the trust of the ayatollahs in Tehran. Since Assad is Iran’s client, any US move to overthrow him would weaken Iran. And since as far as Obama is concerned Iran doesn’t have anything against the US, but simply suffers from a chronic lack of trust in Washington, it would be wrong to harm Tehran’s interests by overthrowing the ayatollahs’ Syrian lackey.
Obama’s Syria policy is not only a product of his fantasy-based policy towards Iran. It is also a consequence of his fantasy-based policy towards Turkey. Rather than intervene early in the conflict and support pro-Western forces in Syria as an alternative to Assad’s tyranny, Obama outsourced the organization of the Syrian opposition to Turkey’s Islamic Prime Minister Recip Erdogan.
In Obama’s fantasy world, Erdogan is a great ally of the US. The fact that Erdogan has redefined Turkey away from the West and towards Tehran and the Muslim Brotherhood; rendered incoherent NATO’s strategic mission; ended Turkey’s strategic alliance with Israel; used advanced US arms to kill Kurdish civilians, and threatens war in the eastern Mediterranean over natural gas deposits that do not belong to him is irrelevant. All that matters is the fantasy that Erdogan is America’s friend. And since Obama embraces this fantasy, he subcontracted the formation of the Turkish opposition to Erdogan.
Lo and behold, the opposition Erdogan established was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. And now, according to a report by Jacques Neriah from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the Syrian opposition is dominated not only by the Muslim Brotherhood, but increasingly by al-Qaida. So whereas a year ago the US had an opportunity to build and shepherd into power a multiethnic, pro-Western Syrian opposition, in the throes of his fantasies about Iran and Turkey, Obama squandered the opportunity. As a result, today we are faced with the grim reality that the world might be safer leaving Assad alone than intervening to overthrow him.
THIS BRINGS us back to Barak, and the Israeli establishment that cannot rid itself of the notion that we need to give away the store to the Palestinians to win the support of the "international community," that is, to win Obama’s support. But towards the Palestinians as well, Obama has embraced fantasy over reality. This week the State Department had the bureaucratic equivalent of an apoplectic fit when it learned that US Sen. Mark Kirk inserted an amendment into the State Department funding bill that will require the department to provide Congress with two pieces of information: the number of Palestinians physically displaced from their homes in what became Israel in 1948, and the number of their descendants administered by the United Nations Relief Works Agency, UNRWA.
The Palestinians claim that there are some five million refugees. They demand that Israel allow all of them to immigrate to its territory as part of a peace deal. UNRWA and the Palestinians claim that not only are the Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 to be considered refugees, their descendants are also to be considered refugees.
Estimates place the number of Palestinians alive today who were physically displaced from Israel at 30,000.
All Kirk wants is the information. And for his effort to bring some facts into the discourse about the Palestinian conflict with Israel, the State Department came down on him like a wall of bricks. In a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides wrote that Kirk’s "proposed amendment would be viewed around the world as the United States acting to prejudge and determine the outcome of this sensitive issue."
As far as the State Department is concerned, until the Palestinians and Israel reach an agreement, the US must keep faith with the international community by supporting a policy regarding Palestinian refugees that is both factually absurd and deeply hostile to Israel.
This policy is in perfect alignment with the US policy on Jerusalem. In late March we learned that in the interests of not prejudging the outcome of nonexistent negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians over eastern Jerusalem, the US refuses to recognize Israeli sovereignty not only over eastern Jerusalem, but over any part of Jerusalem. The fact that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital is of no interest. The fact that US law requires the US government to recognize that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital and to locate the US Embassy in Jerusalem is irrelevant. To appease the international community, the US won’t even recognize Israeli sovereignty over western Jerusalem.
So according to Barak and his associates, to prevent Israel’s isolation by securing US support, Israel ought to ignore the lessons of the Lebanon withdrawal, the phony peace process with the PLO, and the withdrawal from Gaza and move full speed ahead with policies that will make it impossible to defend the country.
As for the US, to win the support of Europe, Iran and Turkey, Obama has adopted policies that enable Iran to become a nuclear power, make Assad the most attractive leader in Syria, empower the most anti-American forces in Turkey and pressure Israel to renounce its right and ability to defend itself.
Standing alone never looked so good.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.