Obama’s Jerusalem secret
Washington Times:
Mr. Obama needs a better map. The 1967 line cuts directly through Jerusalem, and the city’s status cannot be detached from the border issue. Before 1967, the Western Wall – where Mr. Obama mentioned he visited and prayed – was barred to Jews despite a provision in the 1949 armistice agreement that all be given access. Israel captured the eastern half of Jerusalem in the 1967 war and annexed it, but Palestinians still claim it as their capital. Although candidate Barack Obama strongly supported a united Jerusalem in 2008, President Obama’s administration denounced new construction in eastern Jerusalem as illegal settlement activity in 2009.
To say that a divided city is the starting point for negotiations concedes ground that no Israeli government will accept. There is no possible parcel to “swap” that either party will agree is as important as the Temple Mount. Muslims claim it is the third holiest site in Islam, but it is at the center of Jewish identity. Mr. Obama might as well suggest making Mecca an interfaith timeshare.
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Bolton: Netanyahu said more about Iran in one speech than Obama in two years
by The Right Scoop:
Bolton says there’s a reason that Netanyahu put Iran in his speech first before dealing with the Palestinian peace process and it underscores how much of a threat Nuclear Iran is against not only Israel but the world. And he notes that Netanyahu put more focus on Iran in one speech than Obama has since he became President. This is striking considering that the IAEA just released a new report saying that Iran is continuing to stockpile uranium to increase it’s nuclear capabilities.
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Why Israel can’t go back to 1967 lines
by The Right Scoop:
This is a great video explaining why Israel says that going back to the 1967 military lines that existed before the six day war is completely out of the question.
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An Anti-Israel President
By BRET STEPHENS:
Say what you will about President Obama’s approach to Israel—or of his relationship with American Jews—he sure has mastered the concept of chutzpah.
On Thursday at the State Department, the president gave his big speech on the Middle East, in which he invoked the claims of friendship to tell Israelis “the truth,” which to his mind was that “the status quo is unsustainable, and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace.” On Friday in the Oval Office, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered his version of the truth, which was that the 1967 border proposed by Mr. Obama as a basis for negotiating the outlines of a Palestinian state was a nonstarter.
Administration reaction to this reciprocal act of friendly truth-telling? “That was Bibi over the top,” the New York Times quoted one senior U.S. official, using the prime minister’s nickname. “That’s not how you address the president of the United States.”
Maybe so. Then again, it isn’t often that this or any other U.S. president welcomes a foreign leader by sandbagging him with an adversarial policy speech a day before the visit.
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The future under Big Gov.
“All the English people here are shaking their heads in disbelief and say that it is insane. I agree but it is the law. It’s becoming impossible to run a business in this country. We are not allowed to do anything anymore. It is the way Denmark is going.”
Eagle Nabs Poodle, Delivers it to Retirement Home
NewsCore:
Her name is May, and she may well be the feel-good story of the month. May is an 18lb (8kg) toy poodle found in the grounds of a nursing home in Sechelt, British Columbia (BC).
While no one saw her arrive, deep talon marks in her back and sides strongly suggest she was the unwilling passenger of a hungry eagle for some time until being dropped from the sky, the Vancouver Sun reported Monday.
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Must have been May’s Day.
Obama Falls Short
by Adam Daifallah:
Unfortunately Obama’s approach to the peace process in Middle East at the State Department last week will only lead to a repeat of past mistakes, as well as making it harder for Israel to negotiate — especially if its partner is run by Hamas, a terrorist group committed by its charter to Israel’s destruction.
Obama’s speech, by focusing on attention on the minutiae of where future borders will be drawn, rather than more pressing issues – the development of Palestinian civil society, its economy and internal political reform, for example – fails to take into account what sort of failed state he is asking a democracy to negotiate with.. Until these bigger issues are dealt with first, squabbling over borders is futile, all the more as the central argument Israel has with other countries in the region has nothing to do with borders at all, but about their inability to tolerate Israel’s existence as a Jewish state at all – within any borders. Agreeing to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state within any borders is concept to which the Palestinians and the Arabs cannot possibly agree without being regarded as heretics and traitors by their own people.
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Obama’s diversionary tactics
By CAROLINE B. GLICK:
As the Washington Post pointed out on Friday, US President Barack Obama purposely provoked the current fight with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. He knew full well that Netanyahu does not back the Palestinian formulation that negotiations with Israel must be based on the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, or what are wrongly referred to as the 1967 lines. In the days leading up to Obama’s speech last Thursday, Israel registered explicit, repeated requests that he not adopt the Palestinian position that negotiations should be based on those lines.
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Obama’s Bow to the Muslim World, Round II
by Bruce Thornton:
In September 1938 English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, explaining why he was flying to Germany a third time in order to make peace with Germany, recited the old nursery rhyme: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.” Cynical wags in the Foreign Office, who knew Chamberlain was in fact appeasing Hitler by surrendering Czechoslovakia to him, quickly began circulating another version of the saying: “If at first you don’t concede, fly, fly, fly again.”
President Obama’s new “outreach” to the Muslim world reminds me of Chamberlain’s serial efforts to appease a Germany bent on aggression and conquest. First there was the Cairo speech in June 2009, which was supposed to be a “new beginning” for U.S. relations with Muslims, but in fact simply indulged the same old bad habits of Western self-doubt and historical guilt. Thus Obama attributed the “tension” between the West and Islam to a “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold war in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.” Next came the videotaped New Year’s greetings to Iran, and the multiple letters to the Iranian “Supreme Leader” Ali Khamenei requesting “co-operation in regional and bilateral relations.” These outreaches were followed by Khameini’s announcement that “the path of Iran’s nuclear progress could not be blocked,” and by the brutal crackdown that summer on the demonstrators protesting the tyranny of the mullahcracy. Meanwhile Iran continues its support of terrorists murdering our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Obama’s Malignant Obsession with Jews and Israel
Joan Swirsky:
Jew hatred comes in many forms, all of them irrational and unsupported by empirical fact, but all of them powerful and largely effective in deflecting personal and political failures onto a tiny people which by their mere existence highlight the glaring deficiencies that exist in their adversaries. Like a deadly systemic infection, be it viral or bacterial, Jew hatred comes in many strains.
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Niall Ferguson: Eurozone headed for massive collapse
by The Right Scoop:
Niall Ferguson says there is a lack of political will in the EU to deal with the debt crises of its countries and that this complacency will likely lead to a crash later this year, similar to the one that occurred in 2008 in the US.
Note: When you hear Ferguson refer to the acronym PIGS, it stands for Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain. The acronym PIIGS includes the addition of Ireland.
The Myth of the Palestinian ‘Refugee Camps’
By Peter Wilson:
Controlling the vocabulary is a crucial part of any political debate, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically the 1948 exodus — or one should really say, the 1948 departure — of Palestinians from Israel, is no exception. A typical formulation, chock-full of code words, appeared in a recent letter to the Boston Globe: “Generations of families living in squalor in refugee camps still await their right to return under international law to their homeland Palestine.”
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Keep in mind also that the tent cities in the desert from 1948 are long gone. Over the past sixty-three years the United Nations and the United States have poured billions into the camps to upgrade living conditions. What Palestinian advocates like to call “camp shelters” or “CS’s” are typically 4-5 story concrete apartment buildings with electricity, kitchens, satellite television tuned to al-Jazeera, and municipal garbage collection. According to the UN, 99.8% of camp shelters are “connected to water networks” and 87% are “connected to sewerage networks.” In other words, Palestinian camps are modern cities. Yes, they are overcrowded, with high unemployment, and I wouldn’t want to live there. The infrastructure in these so-called refugee camps is however far superior to the shantytowns in Dhaka, Calcutta, Soweto, Kinshasa, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Jakarta, and many other cities where hundreds of millions live without running water, in shacks cobbled together from scraps of tin and cardboard, with open sewers running through the streets.
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The Samson Option: ‘Palestine’ and Israel’s Nuclear Strategy
By Louis René Beres:
Credo quia absurdum. “I believe because it is absurd.” Barack Obama is now creating conditions on the ground in which designated IDF units, in any post-Palestinian independence Middle East, would have to fight desperately against Fatah elements trained by the United States. With this incomprehensible program, therefore, we are arming and preparing the next generation of anti-Israel and anti-U.S. terrorists.
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At AIPAC, Netanyahu is clear: No return to ’67 lines
The Jerusalem Post:
In a speech short on substance but long on applause lines, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu reiterated Monday night to more than 10,000 AIPAC supporters that Israel would never return to the 1967 lines.
Saying that he would spell out in his speech to Congress Tuesday how Israel saw a peace agreement with the Palestinians, Netanyahu did say — to a loud round of applause — that any agreement “must leave Israel with security, and therefore Israel cannot return to the indefensible 1967 lines.”
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