Tag Archives: Benjamin Netanyahu

Bibi at the UN

At the UN yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu exposed the lies of the latest Iranian “charm offensive.” He warned of the grave danger that the nuclear weapons program it is designed to advance will pose to the Jewish State – and the world.

To the audience’s many Iran sympathizers and useful idiots, Mr. Netanyahu quipped that the former Iranian president, “was a wolf in wolf’s clothing” while the new one “is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a wolf who thinks he can pull the wool over the eyes of the international community.”

He observed,  “It’s not that it’s hard to find evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program; it’s hard to find evidence that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program.” I’d add it’s national security fraud to pretend otherwise.

 

 

Abandoning Israel, Embracing Iran

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets today with President Obama who, last week, decided to negotiate with an Iranian regime committed to the destruction of the State of Israel.  What is more, the negotiations are predicated on a lie, namely that the mullahs in Tehran have no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons.

The Israeli leader will reportedly share detailed intelligence to the contrary.

But President Obama has as much as said “Don’t bother me with the facts.”  He actively dislikes Benjamin Netanyahu and his administration has had the most strained relations with the Jewish State of any since its founding in 1948.

The upshot is likely to be the further isolation of Israel at an exceedingly dangerous moment – one being made more so by our buying Iran’s nuclear lies.

Frank Gaffney of the Center For Security Policy On Why To Stay Out Of Syria

 

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

HH: Joined now by Frank Gaffney, president of the Center For Security Policy, www.securefreedom.org. Frank Gaffney, my first question to you is did the announcement that AIPAC is going to storm the Hill next week in support of intervention, and the New York Times story on the Israel government’s surprise you, that the Israeli government also supporting intervention? Did those stories surprise you?

FG: No, Hugh, I’m afraid that AIPAC, and sort of the organized Jewish lobby more generally, has been Obama’s poodle, basically, since he came to office. I think that they have long since lost the bubble on what’s in the interest of American Jewry, let alone Israel. And I think this is in keeping with that. You know, they didn’t fight Chuck Hagel’s nomination, they didn’t fight Samantha Power’s nomination, they haven’t said beans about the peace process, even when John Kerry threatened Israel with de-legitimation if they don’t make sweeping concessions to the Palestinians in the nature of a second state. All of this is evidence, I think, of a kind of rot that I fear is going to do two things. One, I believe this will put Israel in greater jeopardy, not less, and two, that it’s going to create an image in a lot of other Americans’ minds which you can be will be exploited by enemies of Israel, and I’m certainly not one, that the Jews are making us go to war in Syria. And that ain’t good for any of us. I really don’t think this is advisable.

HH: All right, now the Israeli government is also, according to the New York Times, urging that the President strike Syria. Does that surprise you? Or do you not believe that report?

FG: Again, no, I think it is consistent with the posture that the Netanyahu government has taken, basically, since President Obama came to office, and that is do whatever is necessary to stay on good terms with Obama. I’d like to think that at least they recognize that Obama is very hostile to Israel, but I am afraid that it is at least in part borne of this notion that if they just stay on his good side, then he won’t be too beastly to them. I don’t think it’s going to work out that way. I think he’s going to be beastly to them as he will before he’s done.

HH: Now I have been canvassing all of the center-right’s people this week, and trying to keep my eye on the news at the same time. And I just was, Brian Todd was just on CNN talking about possible retaliatory actions if we strike Syria. I am afraid, Frank Gaffney, that if we don’t, Khamenei will say I wonder what the real red line is, let’s see what…you know, as you know better than anyone, you and Ledeen, the Iranians use to go and assassinate people when no one stood up to them. They would send their killers everywhere. What signal would Khamenei take, Frank, because I have been persuaded we have to do this because of Khamenei.

FG: Look, can I say, first of all, how appreciative I am that you’re taking national security really seriously? I mean, you do more than just about anybody in talk radio, but the fact that you’re devoting this kind of time, your time, as well as your audience’s time, to a real debate about this is extremely laudatory, even if you’ve got this absolutely wrong.

HH: (laughing)

FG: You’re making the effort to inform us, and frankly, that’s not happening much in Washington these days.

HH: No, by the way, that’s exactly the way people should respond on this debate. They should just, okay, we’ve got to listen to each other, so tell me more.

FG: To your point, you are hanging your hat on being able to influence the Khamenei regime and its strategy for becoming even more of a threat in the future. I see absolutely no evidence that their behavior has been modulated in the least. Have they stopped assassinating people? Well, not since I’ve noticed. I mean, they did try to blow up the Saudi ambassador here a year or two ago in Washington.

HH: Yes, they did.

FG: And it’s, the problem, fundamentally, Hugh, the problem is this. They’ve already understood this president has no stomach for enforcing a red line against them. They already know. They’re good to go. I frankly think they probably already have got nuclear weapons, but if they don’t, there’s no, nothing standing in the way of them doing it. And our getting embroiled in a civil war in Syria, which would divert not only our attention, but also our military’s diminished resources, you’re absolutely right, we need to make a spot around the President acknowledging he’s been hollowing out our military. Indeed he has. We go waste it in a strike, and believe me, it’s not going to be the Goldilocks strike. It will turn into an escalating problem, because not least, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, if their resolution makes it through, it’s, I gather what you want, you’re going to have us committing to changing the momentum on the battlefield.

HH: We’ll come back and talk about that. Frank’s going nowhere. He’s coming back, and we’ll take our calls.

— – – – –

HH: Frank, Fox News, the reason we were off the mark there, we were watching a report on Fox News just now that the Pentagon has been asked to revise the Syrian retaliation plan more than 50 times. Now that is a talking point in your favor, I know. But it also suggests they’re getting very serious about deposing Assad, and as we went to break, you’re worried about that. Tell people why.

FG: Well, Hugh, you and others, many of whom are good friends of mine, and with whom I agree on a lot of things, have created what I believe is a delusional outcome, namely that when we go to war on behalf of the so-called opposition, and help them overthrow Bashar Assad and his regime, and run whatever retaliatory response we get in the course of that, which probably means more war, probably, I would argue, more regional war, not just confined to Syria, but that when we do all that, the guys that are going to come out of this on top are the so-called Free Syrian Army. And actually, if you know enough about it to be following the unfolding saga about these guys, it turns out it’s a subset of the Free Syrian Army that might be pro-secular, might be pro-democratic, might be pro-Western, but are absolutely unlikely to succeed as the dominant force in the country, at least probably for the rest of our lives for the simple reason that far more numerous, far better armed, far more disciplined and ruthless and combat hardened, are the Islamists. Best case as a result, Hugh, you get out of this the Muslim Brotherhood. Worst case, you get al Qaeda. And…

HH: All right, let me get some calls…

FG: …not in favor of turning over Syria to al Qaeda. We’ve already switched sides in this war, for God’s sake. I don’t think that’s an advisable thing to do, and the American people don’t want to do it, either.

HH: John in Minneapolis, your comment or question for Frank Gaffney.

John: Hi, Hugh. Yeah, I agree completely with Frank. What I was going to say is we’ve got perfect examples recently. Going back to Gaza, they were allowed to elect Hamas. Going to Egypt, they elected Muslim Brotherhood. Libya is chaotic right now we got rid of Qaddafi. I mean, there’s example after example. Even Iraq’s not stable, and look at the investment there.

HH: All right, thank you, John. Let me also go to Steve in Los Angeles. He has a question for Frank. Steve, go ahead.

Steve: Hey, hi again, Hugh. And Frank, it’s a pleasure to talk to you. Hugh had Jack Keane on, and boy, you know, I was going back and forth until I heard him, and he really thinks there’s a viable group that we can support. What do you think of Jack Keane’s observation?

FG: Well, I’m a great admirer of Jack Keane, and I’m afraid in this case, as we talked about, I think it was last night, Hugh, he is relying upon this young graduate student by the name of Elizabeth O’Bagy, who it turns out works for the Syrian opposition…

Steve: Wow.

FG: …who gets a cut of contracts anytime she brings more business to the so-called Syrian Emergency Task Force. And you know, if there’s another source of information about the relative strength of these competing factions, I’d be all ears. But when the Secretary of State and John McCain and Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, and just this morning, National Public Radio all cite this young woman as the savant of what we’re dealing with here, I don’t feel too comfortable with it, I must say, especially since she’s not acknowledging the conflict of interest.

HH: And Frank, I want to follow up on that. I saw your Tweet on that. Steve, thank you for reminding me about this. I saw your Tweet on it this morning. And that’s a serious charge about a conflict of interest. How do you know that?

FG: It is a matter of public record, Hugh, that she is associated with, as the political director, of this group called the Syrian Emergency Task Force, which is run by a fellow by the name of Mouaz Mustafa, who until, I don’t know, five or six years ago, was an intern in Blanche Lincoln’s office. This is kind of like the Children’s Crusade, if I can just say…

HH: Oh, my gosh.

FG: But the point is that she’s been called it. Neil Cavuto did it the other day. The Wall Street Journal today had to issue a sort of a backhanded clarification that they failed to acknowledge that she works for the opposition. And all I’m saying is she’s entitled to work for the opposition. We’re entitled to know she’s working for the people that she’s trying to get us to help. And I don’t think that’s a basis for going to war.

HH: Yeah, the reason I bring it up is because…once I saw, because I follow your Tweet feed, obviously. Everyone should, @frankgaffney. And when you pointed it out, I went to the Center For the Study of War’s website, and I read their conflict of interest policy. Kim Kagan is very high in my esteem, very high, as is Fred. And their adamant statement on their conflicts is you can’t do that and work at the Center for the Study of War.

FG: Yeah, it’s a little curious. She seems to be running government contracts through ISW, and you know, she’s got this relationship. And she claims that it isn’t affecting her judgment. I don’t know. I just want to know that she is working for the Syrian opposition. And again, Hugh, the point is I’m willing to accept that there are some people in this Syrian opposition that might not be so bad. It’s just the problem that they A) swear fealty to the al-Nusra Front, which is al Qaeda, and two, there’s going to be a problem, because I believe they won’t win.

HH: Okay, I’ve got to get one more question is, Frank, before we run out of time. Is there anything the President can say on Tuesday night to change your mind?

FG: Hugh, if his lips are moving, he’s lying.

HH: (laughing) I guess the answer is no, then.

FG: The only thing that would make me give him the benefit of maybe a little doubt is if he says, as Jimmy Carter did in December of 1979, I’ve got this all wrong, the Soviets then invaded Afghanistan, and he turned around his hollowing out of the military, if this president said now, I’ve got this all wrong, we are going into a full-scale rebuilding of our military capabilities, and then we’re going to take on the Iranians as well as the Syrians, then we can talk. But he’s not going to do that, and if he did, he’d be lying.

HH: But at least he knows what he’s got to do to get Frank Gaffney’s vote in Congress.

FG: Yeah.

HH: Frank Gaffney, president of the Center For Security Policy, great to speak with you as always.

End of interview.

Bibi and the true believers

Standing next to US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday morning, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni gushed that through his indefatigable efforts to bring Israeli and Palestinian officials to Washington, Kerry proved that “nothing can stop true believers.”

As usual, the cognitively challenged Livni told us something she hadn’t intended to say. The term “true believer” was coined by Eric Hoffer in his classic work The True Believer from 1951, which Livni has obviously not read. Hoffer’s epic study of the psychological roots of fanaticism described a true believer as a person so fanatically committed to a cause that no amount of reality can make him abandon it.

And that just about sums up Kerry, and the man he works for, US President Barack Obama.

Kerry visited Israel six times in the four months leading up to the meetings in Washington this week, during which Americans, Palestinians and Israelis discussed the size of the table they will be sitting around in the coming discussions.

During the same four months, the Syrian regime used chemical weapons against its opponents on multiple occasions. Most recently, they gassed Palestinians in Yarmuk refugee camp outside Damascus, killing 22 people.

During those four months, al-Qaida strengthened its control over the Syrian opposition groups fighting the regime.

During those four months, the Syrian civil war became a focal point of a wider Sunni-Shi’ite religious war that has already spread to Lebanon and Iraq. In its post-US-withdrawal role of Iranian satrapy, Iraq has allowed Iran to use its territory and airspace to transfer war materiel to the Syrian regime.

During those four months, the Obama administration decided to begin arming the al-Qaidadominated rebel forces. It has also deliberately raised the risk of a Syrian-Israeli war by informing the media every time that Israel attacks missile sites in Syria.

Also during the four months that Kerry obsessed over convincing PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas to send his representative to Washington, Egypt experienced its second revolution in which, buffeted by millions of demonstrators who filled the squares of Egypt’s cities, the Egyptian military overthrew the US-supported Muslim Brotherhood regime.

The Obama administration was quick to jump onto the bandwagon of the first Egyptian revolution in January 2011. That revolution led to the military’s ouster of then-president Hosni Mubarak, a staunch US ally, and so paved the way for the totalitarian and deeply popular Muslim Brotherhood to rise to power.

When the Brotherhood became subject to its own revolution due to its incompetent handling of Egypt’s failed economy and its single-minded focus on transforming Egypt into an Islamist state as quickly as possible, the Obama administration was confounded. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal this week, a senior administration official expressed complete befuddlement at events in Egypt. “None of us can quite figure this out,” the official said. “It seems so self-defeating.”

And that is the thing of it. In its support for the Brotherhood, the administration was implementing its wholly unfounded, dead-wrong ideological belief that the Muslim Brotherhood is a progressive, “largely secular” organization that is dedicated to good works. And now that the Egyptian military, supported by about half of the Egyptian people, has rejected the Brotherhood, its actions are incomprehensible to the Obama administration.

In the face of massive documentary evidence, and facts on the ground, (Egypt has run out of food, and rather than get them some, overthrown president Mohamed Morsi rammed through a totalitarian Islamist constitution), the Obama administration still clings to its ideological belief that the Muslim Brotherhood is a positive, progressive, “largely secular” organization that is devoted to good works for the poor.

So, too, in Syria. The administration thinks it is okay to fund the Free Syria Army, because its leadership is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Owing to the administration’s blind faith in its belief that the reason that the US is hated in the Muslim world is because it has opposed populist Islamist forces, Obama and his advisers think it makes sense to arm those forces in Syria now – so long as the Muslim Brotherhood is able to hide the fact that it is dominated by al-Qaida for a sufficient number of news cycles to sell this fiction to the media.

The administration’s faith in Islamist reasonableness holds for the Shi’ite Islamists just as strongly as it does for the Sunni Islamists. This is why it maintains its commitment to negotiating with Iran’s fanatical regime about its nuclear weapons program, despite overwhelming evidence that the Iranians are using the negotiations as a means to develop their bomb in peace.

This week David Albright and Christina Walrond at the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington published a deeply disturbing report. They explained that based on what we know, Iran will reached “critical capacity” in its nuclear program by mid-2014. Albright and Walrond defined critical capacity as “the technical capability to produce sufficient weapongrade uranium from its safeguarded stocks of low enriched uranium for a nuclear explosive, without being detected.”

Albright and Walrond then explained the many ways Iran can speed up the process, and hide its achievement from the international community for long enough to make it too late to conduct military strikes on their nuclear facilities to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

In other words, they told us politely, and diplomatically, if urgently, that we have arrived at the moment of decision. Will the US or Israel strike Iran’s nuclear installations to prevent it from becoming a nuclear power, or will Iran become a nuclear power? If we wait much longer, we won’t have sufficient time to act.

But for Kerry and his fellow true believers the most urgent priority was to convince the Palestinians to sit in the same room as Israelis. And this week they scored a great victory for US foreign policy by achieving their goal.

In her brief remarks, not only did Livni inadvertently tell us that Kerry is a fanatic. She also told us that she is a fanatic.

Livni said, “[I]t took more than just a plane ticket to be here today. A courageous act of leadership by Prime Minister Netanyahu that was approved by the Israeli government made this visit here and the beginning of the negotiation possible.”

The “courageous act” she referred to was the government’s decision to release 104 “Palestinian prisoners” from Israel’s prisons. The demand for their freedom was the obstacle Abbas placed in the way of Livni acquiring her long-sought-after plane ticket to peace talks and five star receptions at Kerry’s Washington mansion.

The 104 “prisoners” are made up of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. They are not car thieves or pickpockets. They are monsters with human faces. All 104 are serving life sentences for murder or attempted murder. Their crimes were gruesome acts of barbarism marked by demonic cruelty.

Yusef Said al-Al and Ayman Taleb Abu Sitteh stabbed David Bubil and Haim Weitzman to death and mutilated their bodies, cutting off their ears as souvenirs.

Three other “Palestinian prisoners” hacked four teenagers to pieces, killing them with pitchforks, hatchets and knives.

Thirteen-year-old Oren Baharmi was raped and murdered by Amad Mahmad Jamil Shehada.

And the list goes on and on, and on.

There was nothing even vaguely courageous about Netanyahu’s decision to release these monsters.

There was nothing even vaguely courageous about his cabinet members’ decision to vote for their release. Theirs was an act of utter cravenness. They dishonored the victims, the victims’ families and the nation as a whole.

And they endangered the country. According to the Almagor Victims of Terror organization, from 2000 to 2008, 180 Israelis were murdered by Palestinian terrorists released by Israel in previous “deals.” And those terrorists had been imprisoned for non-lethal actions, (i.e., without blood on their hands).

The fact that Netanyahu and his ministers passed this decision simply to provide a sufficient payoff to Abbas for him to send Saeb Erekat to Washington to talk about nothing with Livni, makes their actions, not only craven, but insane.

Livni’s obscene characterization of this cowardly, life-threatening injustice as a “courageous act,” exposes her as well as a true believing fanatic.

Only a fanatic could say such a thing.

In his remarks, Kerry said that the talks about the size of the table are going to bring about a situation where Israel will achieve, “not just the absence of conflict, but a full and lasting peace with the Arab and Muslim nations.”

Like Kerry’s demand that Israel free the terrorists, this statement bespeaks an underlying fanatical dementia. Regarding the “Arab and Muslim nations,” in Syria, neither the al-Qaida forces nor the regime have mentioned anything about putting down their weapons if Israel coughs up Jerusalem and Elon Moreh. The same goes for Hezbollah, Iran and their friends and enemies warring for power throughout the region.

As for the Palestinians, if they were interested in “lasting peace” with Israel, they wouldn’t demand freedom for terrorist murderers. Moreover, while Kerry was exulting in his brilliant success, Abbas announced that in his version of “lasting peace,” Jews will be wiped off of the map of Palestine.

As Abbas put it, “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli – civilian or soldiers – on our lands.”

So again, while Kerry and Livni see rainbows and unicorns, Abbas sees a Jew-free Palestine, with the 600,000 Jews of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria rendered homeless refugees to make room for his anti-Semitic fiefdom.

It is not surprising that Kerry, Obama and Livni are going along with this obscenity. It is not surprising that fanatics who pray to the god of the two-state solution think it is courageous to free Jewish-baby killers. It is not surprising they think the most important thing on the international agenda is to secure Israel’s surrender of land, our legal rights, and our ability to defend ourselves to a terrorist group that hates Jews so much it requires all of us to be gone before it will do us the favor of accepting sovereignty.

What is surprising – and frightening – is that Netanyahu, who is not a true believer, and knows that they are true believers, is going along with this.

Netanyahu knows that Israel cannot survive without Judea and Samaria. He knows what the Muslim Brotherhood is. He knows the nature of the Iranian regime. He knows that the PLO is no different from Hamas. Their goal is the same – they want to destroy Israel.

Netanyahu knows that Obama is hostile to Israel and that he will not lift a finger to block Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

So why is he going along with their insanity? In bowing to US pressure and approving the release of 104 terrorist murderers from prison, Netanyahu behaved like a coward. In bowing to US pressure not to bomb Iran’s nuclear installations, Netanyahu is being a coward.

The most important question for Israel today then is whether our leader is capable of being anything else.

Kerry’s folly, Israel’s peril

In one of Team Obama’s trademark Friday afternoon specials, Secretary of State John Kerry announced last week that his six rounds of shuttle diplomacy had resulted in an agreement to reconvene Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.  As usual, the timing was appropriate for an initiative designed to garner favorable headlines, but that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

It appears that Kerry has bought this “breakthrough” by bullying Israel into making further concessions to its Palestinian enemies, even before the talks begin.  In exchange for nothing more than the Palestinians’ agreement-in-principle to resume them, the Israelis will release some number of additional convicted terrorists.  Never mind that the ones left in Israeli jails after numerous previous releases are, by and large, those who have most successfully and murderously attacked innocent civilians in the Jewish State.

If the Israelis once again pay this price, they must expect the same results as before: More hardened criminals unleashed to wage jihad against Israel – and against any Palestinians that might actually wish to make peace with her.

The rapturous public welcome routinely accorded these terrorists makes clear that it is such war-mongers, not the peace-makers, who are blessed in the radicalized West Bank.  That is even more true in Gaza, where few defy the despotic and virulently anti-Israel dictates of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian franchise: the designated terrorist organization, Hamas.

For that reason, among many others, notwithstanding Kerry’s ego-driven pursuit of negotiations, his purported “breakthrough” cannot produce real progress towards a genuine peace.  And inevitably, pressure will begin to mount all over again for further Israeli concessions.

This pattern was evident in the immediate aftermath of the latest Friday afternoon special.  Unidentified Palestinian officials promptly put out the word that Secretary Kerry had, as The Blaze reported, given “Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas a letter guaranteeing that new peace negotiations with Israel will be based on pre-1967 borders.”

Israeli officials, including prominent politicians in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, have responded sharply.  They deny any agreement to use as the basis for these talks a return to the indefensible territorial boundaries that have aptly been called “Auschwitz borders.”  So, the new negotiations may founder before they begin.

But let’s engage in a thought-experiment.  Just for the purpose of discussion, consider what would happen if Israel did agree to surrender territory on the West Bank and Golan Heights that provides a modicum of strategic depth to the otherwise incredibly vulnerable Jewish State?

One need look no further than the emerging correlation of forces arrayed against Israel.  The unmistakable reality is that it is facing the prospect for the first time in a generation of actual or prospective enemies on every side, including potentially devastating attacks from the sea.

O The most populous Arab state, Egypt, is convulsed by domestic unrest and a volatile confrontation between Islamists sworn to destroy Israel and a military that, in the past, has repeatedly tried to do so.  The two nations’ cold peace, enforced for decades by a demilitarized Sinai, is jeopardized as that desert peninsula is increasingly populated by al Qaeda and other jihadists itching to attack Israelis.

O Syria is wracked by civil war in which the ultimate victory of either Iranian/Hezbollah-backed Bashir Assad or the Muslim Brotherhood-al Qaeda alliance is likely to pose new threats to the long quiet, but now restive, Golan Heights.  U.S. arming of the so-called “rebels” may or may not assure their triumph.  But it will surely increase the danger that faction poses to Israel.

O Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq are in various stages of destabilization at the hands of Islamists of assorted stripes.  Turkey is in the hands of a particularly dangerous one, Recep Tayyep Erdogan, who makes no secret of his hostility towards Israel and solidarity with its enemies.  And the Islamic Republic of Iran is continuing to build the capacity to deliver an existential nuclear threat to Israel.

O As the brilliant strategic analyst and author Mark Helprin pointed out in the Wall Street Journal last weekend (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323848804578607724088622856.html), Israel can no longer take comfort in the “qualitative edge” in conventional armaments that previously enabled it to contend with numerically superior enemies:  “Saudi Arabia’s air force (soon 380 combat aircraft, primarily F-15s) is rapidly gaining on Israel (441 combat aircraft) in quantity and quality. Were the Saudis to take a Muslim-solidarity time-out with Iran and join Egypt, Syria and perhaps even Turkey to defeat Israel in an air war, it would mean Israel’s death.”

In short, this is no time for the U.S. government to be demanding that its most important, self-reliant and reliable ally in the Middle East make territorial concessions that will render it more vulnerable to attack from one, or more, of the aforementioned quarters.  That is especially so given that such concessions have no prospect of translating into an enduring peace with all, or even most, of the Palestinians.

It is neither in the Israelis’ interest nor our own that they weaken themselves further in the face of the region’s burgeoning shariah-driven religio-politico-cultural dynamic, one that is feeding their enemies’ unrequited ambition to “drive the Jews into the sea.”

John Kerry’s vainglorious diplomacy has thus far done nothing to mitigate that dynamic.  If anything, his sympathies and those of President Obama towards the Muslim Brotherhood are feeding it.  We must not permit such folly to continue to intensify Israel’s peril, and our own.

Chuck Hagel: It’s the anti-Americanism, stupid

Chuck Hagel hates Jews. Or should I say, he hates Jews who think that Jews have rights and that their rights should be defended, in Israel by the government and the IDF, in America by Israel’s supporters.

As I mentioned before, it is not at all surprising that Obama appointed Hagel, and I see little  chance that the Senate will reject his appointment. Israel and its American friends however can take heart that Israel will not be Hagel’s chief concern.

Hagel — and Obama — have bigger fish to fry than Israel. They are looking to take on the US military. They will slash military budgets, they will slash pensions and medical benefits for veterans in order to save a couple dollars and demoralize the military. They will unilaterally disarm the US to the point where America’s antiquated nuclear arsenal will become a complete joke. And I don’t see the military capable of stopping it. Anyone remember the F-22?

I find the whole Israel angle on Hagel irritating because of this. Yes, Hagel will be bad to Israel. But we can minimize the damage by diversifying our own arsenal and weaning ourselves off of US military handouts that only serve as work subsidies for US military contractors at the expense of Israeli ones.Moreover, for years that military aid has been a corrupting force on Israel’s general staff. I’ve been advocating ending US military aid to Israel for more than a decade, but better late than wait until we find ourselves at war and out of spare parts because Hagel and Obama won’t sign the requisition orders to Boeing and Lockheed.

Unlike Israel, the US military cannot minimize the damage that Hagel and Obama will cause. America’s capabilities will suffer at the hands of the duly reelected Commander in Chief and his duly appointed Defense Secretary. The only chance to dodge that bullet was on Election Day and the American people blew it.

By making this a story about Hagel the anti-Semite, nice senators like Lindsey Graham and John McCain are obfuscating the main problem. The main reason Hagel shouldn’t be appointed is not because he hates Israel. It is because he hates a strong America.

But then, that is why Obama appointed him. The American people in their wisdom, reelected Obama despite the fact that he wants to cut America down to size, strangle the economy in regulations and unaffordable welfare handouts and then gut its military. By making Hagel’s appointment about Israel all his opponents are doing is giving Hagel and his supporters new excuses for sticking it to Israel.

It was Obama and his supporters that started the myth that Netanyahu was interfering in the elections, even though he did no such thing. All Netanyahu did was welcome Romney to Israel during the campaign, just as Olmert welcomed then senator Obama to Israel before the 2008 elections.

Obama, Hagel and their army of media outlets and operatives are setting Israel up to take the blame for everything they do and in the process seeking to demonize Israel’s prime minister before the American people. The campaign against Hagel the anti-Semite just plays into that while hiding the real problem which is that he is anti-American.

NOTABLY, AT the same time that the US electorate decided they’d had it with being the indispensable nation and so reelected a man who said the US is as exceptional as Greece, Israelis have decided we’ve had enough with trying to pretend we’re nothing special.

Next week we’re going to vote and it is already clear that Israel is in the midst of the Second Zionist Revolution. The first Zionist revolution was a socialist revolution. The second Zionist revolution is Jewish. Israel is coming into its own. Judaism is flourishing, changing, living and breathing here like it never has anywhere since the destruction of the Second Commonwealth. The secular Left has been eclipsed by the Jewish Right. I don’t call it the religious Right because that is too limiting. What’s happening isn’t just about religion, it’s about everything and that is why non-observant hipsters in Tel Aviv are voting for the Jewish Home party. Non-observant and observant Jews are joining forces and the anti-religious are being left behind.

As my content editor at Latma Avishai Ivri explained to me a couple weeks ago, all the polling data we’re seeing is largely worthless because it is based on calls to landlines and most young Israelis don’t have landlines. Two thirds of the Jewish Home party’s voters are under 40 and the party is polling at 14-18 seats in polls that under-represent their supporters. I don’t pretend to know how the election results are going to look but it is clear that a massive change has occurred in the last few years and it will only become more pronounced in the coming years. Next week’s election will be the first formal expression of this change.

Some fear that Netanyahu will take his electoral victory, throw it in the garbage and replay Sharon’s perfidy, by spitting on his voters and his party and forming a narrow coalition with the far Left in order to appease the anti-Semites in Washington. But I don’t see that happening. First, Netanyahu isn’t as shameless as Sharon and he doesn’t seem to have the dictatorial impulses Sharon suffered from.

Second, I don’t think he has the people in Likud that would let him go that route. Sharon had Olmert and Livni who were happy to toss their values out the window for job promotions. Netanyahu is the head of the most right wing Likud list ever. The lefties he pushed into the cabinet despite his party members’ objections last time around – Dan Meridor, Benny Begin and Michael Eitan — were obliterated in the primaries. Netanyahu can’t bring them in this time, even if he wants to. So that means he doesn’t really have the ability to abandon his base, even if he wanted to. And again, I don’t think he’d want to.

What all of this means is that beginning next month, we are in all likelihood going to see a post-American US government squaring off against the first genuinely Jewish Israeli government ever. I don’t know what will happen when they meet. But I know it will be great material for my column.

Israel Betrayed

In October 2001, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon issued a prophetic warning:  “Do not repeat the dreadful mistake of 1938, when enlightened European democracies decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia for a ‘convenient temporary solution’.” He declared: “Israel will not be Czechoslovakia.”

Tragically, President Obama today is increasingly treating Israel as Western leaders did in abandoning the Czechs seventy-four years ago.  He is signaling to a genocidal regime in Iran that the Jewish State is on its own – a signal like the one to which Hitler responded with the worst bloodletting in world history.

To be sure, Team Obama has engaged from the get-go in what Governor Mitt Romney has called “throwing allies like Israel under the bus.”  For example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been treated with utter contempt by President Obama. His demands that the Jewish State make serial and unreciprocated concessions to its Palestinian enemies – including adopting indefensible borders – have been dictated in public and high-handed ways.

Even more troubling has been the cumulative effect of Obama policies towards the Middle East that are helping transform large swaths of the region into a festering Islamist sore, prone to jihad – most immediately against Israel and, inevitably, against the United States.  In particular, Mr. Obama’s determination to legitimate, empower and enrich the government of Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi adds materially to the danger confronting the Jewish State and American interests.

The legitimation will reach new heights later this month when Morsi gets the red-carpet treatment in New York and Washington.  The empowering included not just demands conveyed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in July that the Egyptian military surrender power to Brotherhood-dominated presidency and legislature; it also apparently entails U.S. acquiescence to Morsi’s moves to remilitarize the Sinai in violation of the Camp David Accords.  And the enriching piece involved an unconditional, lump-sum payment earlier this year, over bipartisan congressional objections, and is reportedly to be followed by the incipient transfer of a further $1 billion.

Predictably, as with the sell-out of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, what such concessions will produce is an emboldening of freedom’s enemies.  And that will not be good for its friends – abroad or here.

Much the same can be said of the Obama administration’s appeasement of Iran.  Yes, it has reluctantly imposed – usually at the insistence of the Congress – sanctions on various aspects of the regime and its supporting industrial, commercial and security edifices.  But in virtually every other regard, Team Obama has bought time for the mullahs to complete their nuclear weapons program and efforts to render it essentially invulnerable to attack through relocation of enrichment operations to hardened underground factories.

President Obama and his civilian and military subordinates have done just about everything short of a preemptive strike on the Jewish State to prevent the Israelis from trying to neutralize a looming existential threat to their nation.  They are said to have employed both carrots and sticks – for example, promises of help with doing the deed after the election (trust us!) and evidently compromises of Israeli operational plans for recovering strike aircraft in Azerbaijan, which had the desired effect of foreclosing that option.

In the face of mounting evidence that Israel feels compelled to act alone and within the next two months, the Obama administration has become even more aggressive.  In London last week, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, went so far as to declare his opposition to such an attack, saying, “I don’t want to be complicit if they choose to do it.”

While the exact meaning of that statement is unclear, an indication of what the general – and his boss, the Commander-in-Chief – have in mind might have been the subject of a report in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.  It claims that U.S. diplomats have gone to third-parties to communicate to Iran that the United States will not support an Israeli strike on the Iranian nuclear program provided the mullahs “steer clear of strategic American assets in the Persian Gulf.”  One can almost hear Neville Chamberlain pledging no objection to the Chechs losing the Sudetenland to the Nazis as long as Hitler agreed to leave the French and Brits alone.  While the White House spokesman says the report is “false,” it sure sounds right.

But what if Israel does attack Iran and Iran does retaliate – not only against U.S. “assets” in the Persian Gulf, but elsewhere including in this country? Can the possibility be ruled out that this President – simpatico as he clearly is with the Iranian regime and hostile as he clearly is towards Israel – responds by finding ways to punish the Jewish State that go beyond a refusal to sustain its military capabilities, as Nixon did in 1973?  Could he even use the pretext of attacks by Iran or its proxies here to invoke the sweeping emergency powers he has granted himself and his subordinates in a series of executive orders to disrupt an election that might otherwise unseat him?

We cannot know the answers to such questions at the moment.  We can only imagine, though, if this is how President Obama behaves on the eve of a national election in which Jewish votes may be critical to his bid for a second term, imagine how he will treat Israel if he has “more flexibility” post-November.

Israel faces the cynical world

This week a German doctor in Bavaria filed a criminal complaint against Rabbi David Goldberg.

Rabbi Goldberg’s “crime”? He performs ritual circumcisions on Jewish male infants in accordance with Jewish law.

The doctor’s complaint came shortly after a ruling by a court in Cologne outlawing the practice of male circumcision.

The Austrians and the Swiss also took the ruling to heart and have banned infant male circumcision in several hospitals in Switzerland as well as in the Austrian state of Vorarlberg. Denmark and Scandinavian governments are also considering limiting the practice of circumcision which has constituted one of the foundational rituals of Judaism for four thousand years.

Meanwhile, in Norway Dr. Anne Lindboe has come up with the perfect way out of the artificial crisis. Lindboe serves a Norway’s ombudsman for children’s rights. And she proposes that we Jews just change our religion to satisfy anti-Jewish sensitivities. She suggests we replace circumcision with “a symbolic, nonsurgical ritual.”

It’s worth mentioning that circumcision isn’t the only Jewish ritual these enlightened Europeans find objectionable. Sweden, Norway and Switzerland have already banned kosher slaughter.

Attacking circumcision isn’t just a European fetish. The urge to curb Jewish religious freedom has reached the US as well. Last year San Francisco’s Jewish Community Relations Council had to sue the city to strike a measure from last November’s ballot that would have banned circumcision if passed. The measure’s sponsor gathered the requisite 12,000 signatures to enter the proposition on the ballot. Circumcising males under the age of 18 would have been classified as a misdemeanor punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison. Sponsors of the measure distributed anti-Semitic materials depicting rabbis performing circumcisions as villains.

The people involved in banning or attempting to ban circumcision are not on the political fringe of their societies. They are part of a leftist establishment. They are doctors and lawyers, judges and politicians. This doesn’t mean that all their fellow leftists are anti-Semites. But it does mean the political Left in the Western world feels comfortable keeping company with anti-Semites.

This state of affairs is even more striking in international affairs than in domestic politics. On the international level the Left’s readiness to rub elbows with anti-Semites has reached critical levels.

While the Europeans have long been happy to cater to the anti-Semitic whims of the Islamic world, the escalation of the West’s willingness to accept anti-Semitism as a governing axiom in international affairs is nowhere more apparent than in the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

And the American Left’s willingness – particularly the American Jewish Left’s willingness – to cover up the administration’s collusion with anti- Semitic regimes at Israel’s expense is higher today than ever before.

A clear-cut example of both the Obama administration’s willingness to adhere to anti- Semitic policies of anti-Semitic governments and the Left’s willingness to defend this bigoted behavior is the Obama administration’s decision not to invite Israel to participate in its new Global Counterterrorism Forum.

The GCTF was founded with the stated aim of fostering international cooperation in fighting terrorism. But for the Obama administration, it was more important to make Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, who supports the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups, feel comfortable, than it was to invite Israel to participate.

Not only did the US exclude Israel, at the GCTF’s meeting last month in Spain, Maria Otero, the State Department’s under secretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights, seemed to embrace the Muslim world’s obscene claim that Israelis are not victims of terrorism because terrorism against Israel isn’t terrorism.

In her speech, titled “Victims of Terrorism,” Otero spoke of terror victims in Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Uganda, Colombia, Northern Ireland, Indonesia, India and the US. But she made no mention of Israeli terror victims.

Rather than criticize the administration for its decision to appease bigots at the expense of their victim, American Jewish leftists have defended the administration. Writing in The Atlantic, Zvika Kreiger, senior vice president of the far-left S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, wrote that allowing the Jewish state entry to the GCTF parley would have “undermined the whole endeavor.”

Kreiger sympathetically quoted a State Department official who explained that actually, by ostracizing Israel the administration was helping Israel.

The source “reasoned the progress made by the organization would ultimately better serve Israel’s interests (not to mention those of the United States) than would the symbolic benefits of including it in a group that likely wouldn’t accomplish anything. [Moreover]… once the organization was up and running, and its agenda was established, they could find ways to include Israel that would not be disruptive.”

So despite the fact that Israel is a major target of terrorism, and despite the fact that many of the states the US invited to its forum condone terrorism against Israel and support terrorist groups that murder Israeli Jews, Israel is better off being excluded, because the anti-Jewish governments invited by the Obama administration will somehow totally change their perspective on anti-Jewish terrorism as long as they don’t have to suffer the irritation of sitting in the same room as real-live representatives of the Jewish state.

THE CYNICISM of the State Department official’s statement to Kreiger is only outpaced by Kreiger’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge that cynicism.

Kreiger’s behavior makes sense. If he acknowledges the bigoted nature of the Obama administration’s policies he will have to stop defending them.

To a degree, Kreiger’s willingness to defend and justify the Obama administration’s anti-Israel behavior parallels the behavior of Israelis who argue against Israel unilaterally striking Iran’s nuclear facilities in order to delay the Iranian regime’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Since 2003, when Iran’s nuclear weapons program was first revealed to the world community, Iran’s leaders have succeeded in convincing world leaders that Israel is No. 1 on their target list. And so, the international debate about what a nuclear-armed Iran will mean for the world has always followed the Iranians’ lead and centered on the dangers it would pose to Israel.

Israel’s leaders from then-prime minister Ariel Sharon down to the last governmental spokesman have maintained that Iran’s nuclear program threatens the entire Free World. Sharon – like his leftist disciples today – claimed that given the threat Iran’s nuclear program constitutes for global security, Israel has no reason to lead the global fight to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Indeed, Israeli leadership of the campaign against Iran’s nuclear program would cause some countries to do nothing because they hate Israel even more than they fear Iran.

Like his followers today, Sharon insisted that the US, as the leader of the Free World, is responsible for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And they are right. Iran’s nuclear program does threaten global security and Iran’s nuclear program does threaten the US specifically. Iranian dictator Ali Khamenei just ordered his troops to carry out terror attacks against the US in retaliation for US moves to overthrow Iran’s Syrian puppet Bashar Assad. Iran was the principle sponsor of the insurgency in Iraq and remains the principle supporter of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

It’s not that Israel’s leaders belittle the threat Iran’s nuclear weapons program constitutes for Israel. Across the spectrum on the Iran debate in Israel – from former Mossad director Meir Dagan and President Shimon Peres on the Left to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak on the Right – everyone agrees that in light of the Iranian regime’s religious fanaticism and its millenarian belief that Armageddon will hearken the coming of the Shi’ite messiah, Iran cannot be trusted not to use nuclear weapons against Israel.

Everyone admits that given Iran’s open sponsorship of terrorism, it is a certainty that terror groups would use the Iranian nuclear umbrella to massively expand their terrorist war against Israel.

Just as Dagan, Peres and their associates share Netanyahu’s assessment of the threat Iran’s nuclear program poses for Israel, Netanyahu agrees with their assessment that Israel’s options for contending militarily with Iran’s nuclear program are limited and imperfect. No one argues that Israel has a magic bullet to destroy Iran’s nuclear project.

Netanyahu and Barak have repeatedly warned that Israel has no perfect strike option. They have also warned that a response from Iran and its proxies in Syria and Lebanon to an Israeli strike will likely be harsh and deadly. All they say is that it is better than the alternative of Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons.

The doves agree with Netanyahu that a limited Israeli strike is better than the alternative of a nuclear-armed Iran. They differ with Netanyahu on only one issue: their assessment of the US’s willingness to use military force to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

Voicing the doves’ assessment of the Obama administration and Europe, this week former commander of Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen. (res.) Aharon Zeevi Farkash told NBC news, “I think Western leaders realize a nuclear Iran is the No. 1 challenge facing the world.”

Unfortunately, Farkash is wrong. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, made this point earlier this week in an interview from Afghanistan. There Dempsey said frankly, “Israel sees the Iranian threat more seriously than the US sees it, because a nuclear Iran poses a threat to Israel’s very existence.”

In other words, Dempsey told us that Iran’s cynical packaging of its nuclear program as an anti-Israel initiative has worked. The Americans – and the Europeans – believe that Iran’s nuclear program is Israel’s problem to deal with. The Israelis are right that as the leader of the Free World it is the US’s responsibility to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. But as Dempsey’s statement shows, the US is not interested in fulfilling its responsibility.

Like the Europeans, the Americans will only act when Iran forces them to do so. And that means they will do nothing to prevent Iran from developing the bomb. They will only move when Tehran has already crossed Israel off the top of its target list.

Israeli opponents of an Israeli strike against Iran don’t want to believe that Americans are capable of such cynicism. They would like to believe that the only government capable of behaving cynically is their own. They want to believe that the US – with its vastly superior military capabilities to destroy Iran’s nuclear program – will do the right thing and not leave it to Israel – with its limited means – to take care of the problem for a cynical world.

But just as Kreiger’s defense of the Obama administration’s courtship of anti-Semites at Israel’s expense crosses the line separating naivete from willful, bigotry-enabling blindness, so Peres, Dagan and their colleagues cross the line. And it is not mere bigotry they are enabling.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

Who ‘Lost’ Egypt?

In 1949, the Communist takeover of China rattled the US foreign policy establishment to its core. China’s fall to Communism was correctly perceived as a massive strategic defeat for the US. The triumphant Mao Zedong placed China firmly in the Soviet camp and implemented foreign policies antithetical to US interests.

For the American foreign policy establishment, China’s fall forced a reconsideration of basic axioms of US foreign policy. Until China went Red, the view resonant among foreign policy specialists was that it was possible for the US to peacefully coexist and even be strategic allies with Communists.

With Mao’s embrace of Stalin this position was discredited. The US’s subsequent recognition that it was impossible for America to reach an accommodation with Communists served as the intellectual architecture of many of the strategies the US adopted for fighting the Cold War in the years that followed.

Today the main aspect of America’s response to China’s Communist revolution that is remembered is the vindictive political hunt for scapegoats. Foreign Service officers and journalists who had advised the US government to support Mao and the Communists against Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalists were attacked as traitors.

But while the “Red Scare” is what is most remembered about that period, the most significant consequence of the rise of Communist China was the impact it had on the US’s understanding of the nature of Communist forces. Even Theodore White, perhaps the most prominent journalist who championed Mao and the Communists, later acknowledged that he had been duped by their propaganda machine into believing that Mao and his comrades were interested in an alliance with the US.

As Joyce Hoffmann exposed in her book Theodore White and Journalism as Illusion, White acknowledged that his wartime report from Mao’s headquarters in Yenan praising the Communists as willing allies of the US who sought friendship, “not as a beggar seeks charity, but seeks aid in furthering a joint cause,” was completely false.

As he wrote, the report was “winged with hope and passion that were entirely unreal.”

What he had been shown in Yenan, Hoffmann quotes White as having written, was “the showcase of democratic art pieces they (the Communists) staged for us American correspondents [and] was literally, only showcase stuff.”

Contrast the US’s acceptance of failure in China in 1949, and its willingness to learn the lessons of its loss of China, with the US’s denial of its failure and loss of Egypt today.

On Sunday, new President Mohamed Morsy completed Egypt’s transformation into an Islamist state. In the space of one week, Morsy sacked the commanders of the Egyptian military and replaced them with Muslim Brotherhood loyalists, and fired all the editors of the state-owned media and replaced them with Muslim Brotherhood loyalists.

He also implemented a policy of intimidation, censorship and closure of independently owned media organizations that dare to publish criticism of him.

Morsy revoked the military’s constitutional role in setting the foreign and military policies of Egypt. But he maintained the junta’s court-backed decision to disband the parliament. In so doing, Morsy gave himself full control over the writing of Egypt’s new constitution.

As former ambassador to Egypt Zvi Mazel wrote Tuesday in The Jerusalem Post, Morsy’s moves mean that he “now holds dictatorial powers surpassing by far those of erstwhile president Hosni Mubarak.”

In other words, Morsy’s actions have transformed Egypt from a military dictatorship into an Islamist dictatorship.

The impact on Egypt’s foreign policy of Morsy’s seizure of power is already becoming clear. On Monday, Al-Masri al-Youm quoted Mohamed Gadallah, Morsy’s legal adviser, saying that Morsy is considering revising the peace accord with Israel. Gadallah explained that Morsy intends to “ensure Egypt’s full sovereignty and control over every inch of Sinai.”

In other words, Morsy intends to remilitarize Sinai and so render the Egyptian military a clear and present threat to Israel’s security. Indeed, according to Haaretz, Egypt has already breached the peace accord and deployed forces and heavy weaponry to Sinai without Israeli permission.

The rapidity of Morsy’s moves has surprised most observers. But more surprising than his moves is the US response to his moves.

For instance, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, one administration official dismissed the significance of Morsy’s purge of the military brass, saying, “What I think this is, frankly, is Morsy looking for a generational change in military leadership.”

The Journal reported that Egypt’s new defense minister, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sissi, is known as a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer. But the Obama administration quickly dismissed the reports as mere rumors with no significance. Sissi, administration sources told the Journal, ate dinner with US President Barack Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser John Brennan during Brennan’s visit to Cairo last October. Aside from that, they say, people are always claiming that Morsy’s appointments have ties to Morsy’s Muslim Brotherhood.

A slightly less rose-colored assessment came from Steven Cook in Foreign Affairs. According to Cook, at worst, Morsy’s move was probably nothing more than a present-day reenactment of Gamal Abel Nasser’s decision to move Egypt away from the West and into the Soviet camp in 1954.

Most likely, Cook argued, Morsy was simply doing what Sadat did when in 1971 he fired other generals with whom he had been forced to share power when he first succeeded Nasser in 1969.

Certainly the Nasser and Sadat analogies are pertinent. But while properly citing them, Cook failed to explain what those analogies tell us about the significance of Morsy’s actions. He drew the dots but failed to see the shape they make.

Morsy’s Islamism, like Mao’s Communism, is inherently hostile to the US and its allies and interests in the Middle East. Consequently, Morsy’s strategic repositioning of Egypt as an Islamist country means that Egypt – which has served as the anchor of the US alliance system in the Arab world for 30 years – is setting aside its alliance with the US and looking toward reassuming the role of regional bully.

Egypt is on the fast track to reinstating its war against Israel and threatening international shipping in the Suez Canal. And as an Islamist state, Egypt will certainly seek to export its Islamic revolution to other countries. No doubt fear of this prospect is what prompted Saudi Arabia to begin showering Egypt with billions of dollars in aid.

It should be recalled that the Saudis so feared the rise of a Muslim Brotherhood-ruled Egypt that in February 2011, when US President Barack Obama was publicly ordering then-president Hosni Mubarak to abdicate power immediately, Saudi leaders were beseeching him to defy Obama. They promised Mubarak unlimited financial support for Egypt if he agreed to cling to power.

The US’s astounding sanguinity in the face of Morsy’s completion of the Islamization of Egypt is an illustration of everything that is wrong and dangerous about US Middle East policy today.

Take US policy toward Syria.

Syria is in possession of one of the largest arsenals of chemical and biological weapons in the world. The barbarism with which the regime is murdering its opponents is a daily reminder – indeed a flashing neon warning sign – that Syria’s nonconventional arsenal constitutes a clear and present danger to international security. And yet, the Obama administration insists on viewing Syrian President Bashar Assad’s murderous behavior as if it were a garden variety human rights crisis.

During her visit with Turkey’s Islamist Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu last Saturday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton didn’t even mention the issue of Syria’s chemical and biological weapons. Instead she continued to back Turkey’s sponsorship of the Islamist-dominated opposition and said that the US would be working with Turkey to put together new ways to help the Islamist opposition overthrow Assad’s regime.

Among other things, she did not rule out the imposition of a no-fly zone over Syria.

The party most likely to be harmed from such a move would be Israel, which would lose its ability to bomb Syrian weapons of mass destruction sites from the air.

Then of course, there is Iran and its openly genocidal nuclear weapons program. This weekThe New York Times reported a new twist in the Obama administration’s strategy for managing this threat. It is trying to convince the Persian Gulf states to accept advanced missile defense systems from the US.

This new policy makes clear that the Obama administration has no intention of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Its actions on the ground are aimed instead at accomplishing two goals: convincing Iran’s Arab neighbors to accept Iran as a nuclear power and preventing Israel from acting militarily to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. The missile shields are aspects of a policy of containment, not prevention. And the US’s attempts to sabotage Israel’s ability to strike Iran’s nuclear sites through leaks, political pressure and efforts to weaken the Netanyahu government make clear that as far as the US is concerned, Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is not the problem.

The prospect of Israel preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is the problem.

Several American commentators argue that the Obama administration’s policies are the rational consequence of the divergence of US and Israeli assessments of the threats posed by regional developments. For instance, writing in the Tablet online magazine this week, Lee Smith argued that the US does not view the developments in Egypt, Iran and Syria as threatening US interests. From Washington’s perspective, the prospect of an Israeli strike on Iran is more threatening than a nuclear-armed Iran, because an Israeli strike would immediately destabilize the region.

The problem with this assessment is that it is nonsense. It is true that Israel is first on Iran’s target list, and that Egypt is placing Israel, not the US in its crosshairs. So, too, Syria and its rogue allies will use their chemical weapons against Israel first.

But that doesn’t mean the US will be safe. The likely beneficiaries of Syrian chemical weapons – Sunni and Shi’ite terrorist organizations – have attacked the US in the past. Iran has a history of attacking US shipping without a nuclear umbrella. Surely it would be more aggressive in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz after defying Washington in illegally developing a nuclear arsenal. The US is far more vulnerable to interruptions in the shipping lanes in the Suez Canal than Israel is.

The reason Israel and the US are allies is that Israel is the US’s first line of defense in the region.

If regional events weren’t moving so quickly, the question of who lost Egypt would probably have had its moment in the spotlight in Washington.

But as is clear from the US’s denial of the significance of Morsy’s rapid completion of Egypt’s Islamic transformation; its blindness to the dangers of Syrian chemical and biological weapons; and its complacency toward Iran’s nuclear weapons program, by the time the US foreign policy establishment realizes it lost Egypt, the question it will be asking is not who lost Egypt. It will be asking who lost the Middle East.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Caroline Glick & Sen. Jon Kyl: The US, Israel and the Arab Revolution

Last month The Center for Security Policy and David Horowitz Freedom Center held the inauguralHenry M. (Scoop) Jackson and Jon Kyl Lecture on National Security on Capitol Hill.  The topic was “The U.S, Israel and the Arab Revolution.”

Center President Frank J. Gaffney Jr., moderated, and introduced Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) who offered the following opening remarks:

The lecture was presented by Caroline Glick, Director of the Israel Security Project at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Adjunct Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy:

About the Lecture Series:

The Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson and Jon Kyl Lecture on National Security will be presented twice a year as a joint program of the Center for Security Policy and the David Horowitz Freedom Center.   The lecture program is named in honor of two of the U.S. Senate’s leading defenders of America’s national security: Senator Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson (D-WA), who served in the Senate from 1953 to 1983, and Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), who has served in the Senate from 1995 to 2012.

The first lecture in the series will be presented by Caroline Glick, Senior Contributing Editor of The Jerusalem Post and Director of the Israel Security Project at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.  She also serves as adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and is the author of Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad (2008). She holds a B.A. in Political Science from Columbia University and a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University, served as Assistant Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1997-98, and regularly briefs senior administration officials and members of Congress on issues of joint Israeli-American concern. She lives in Jerusalem.