Recently in Israel/Palestine Category

I guess he really has decided to go the Jimmy Carter route - with an Iranian twist:

Mrs. Clinton said the [Israeli-Palestinian] talks are due to begin on September 2 and will be hosted by President Barack Obama. She said she hoped a comprehensive peace agreement can be reached within one year.

"There have been difficulties in the past, there will be difficulties ahead. .. I ask the parties to persevere, to keep moving forward even through difficult times and to continue working to achieve a just and lasting peace in the region," Mrs. Clinton said.

The leaders of Egypt and Jordan also have been invited to attend the first session.

In a statement, the Quartet - the EU, the UN, the US and Russia - said its members reaffirmed direct negotiations between the parties, "which can be completed within one year."

The historical parallel with the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, "hosted" by Mr. Peanut, couldn't be more obvious.  Given that his foreign policy has been as inept and disastrous as its domestic counterpart, Red Barry is clearly looking for some actual accomplishment that will be generally acknowledged as such to give him something to hang his 2012 re-election hat on, especially since otherwise all he'll be seen as doing is obstructing the dismantling of all the unpopular garbage the GOP congressional majorities were elected to repeal, cut, and replace.  A Rose Garden photo-op with Netanyahu and Abbas grinningly sharing a three-way handshake with His Majesty wouldn't necessarily be any magic electoral elixir, but it'd be a big step in the direction he wants to go.

But then there's the aforementioned "Iranian twist":

Coincidentally, according to today’s front-page administration-fed NYT story, one year is also the timeframe U.S. officials are now claiming Iran has before it achieves nuclear breakout capacity. The idea of this two-step media offensive, presumably, is to put pressure on Israel not to do anything “rash” before the new round of peace talks plays out, especially with news set to break tomorrow that the Bushehr reactor is ready to go. That’s consistent with the White House’s thinking all along: They’ve always believed that settling the Palestinian issue first will make it easier to deal with Iranian nukes by denying the mullahs an opportunity to exploit the great Muslim grievance. If a peace deal is struck, then theoretically the goodwill it’ll generate towards Israel and America among Sunni nations will neutralize the Muslim solidarity that Iran wants to exploit when the confrontation over its nuke program finally comes.

In plain, blunt terms, B.O. will be holding the Israelis hostage on the mullahs' behalf against the IDF doing what has to be done to at least buy time towards the Jewish State's very survival, which is only necessitated by our refusal to "disarm" Tehran ourselves.

Eeyore accurately previews the inevitable endgame:

Hamas will play no role in the peace negotiations and has no interest in ceding Gaza to its enemies in the Palestinian Authority in the event that a peace deal is hashed out. On the contrary, with Iran’s full support, they’ll inevitably accuse Abbas of having sold out the Palestinian nation in order to inflame the same sense of Muslim grievance and solidarity that the peace talks are meant to mute. In fact, if O shocks the world and the talks start making serious progress, I assume Iran and Hamas (and Hezbollah, of course) will simply precipitate some sort of crisis in order to derail them. Which is to say, how can you expect any deal to hold as long as Tehran and its proxies still have fangs?

And once they have nuclear fangs (again, as always, assuming they don't have them already) what Muslim entity will even heed, much less cooperate with any U.S. initiative once incineration from Tehran becomes the likely outcome?

Yes, triumphal photo-ops and re-election definitely are driving this umpteenth doomed-from-inception "peace process" wank.  But the regime's strategic objective remains: Dismantle Israel as the implacable enemy of "Middle East peace," not Iranian Islamist theocratic apocalyptic fanaticism, which can be "won over" to "peace and friendship" with an "extended open hand.

You know, just like Imam Rauf and Park51 (and Barack Obama and the Pelosi Politburo) have been SO open to compromise on the site of the Islamic Victory Monument.

What could go wrong?

Two edifying and uplifting vids on my way out the door this fine AM....

First, behold the squalor, poverty, and misery in which those gosh darn Jews keep Hamastanis imprisoned:

Makes your heart bleed for those poor sufferers of brutal Zionist oppression, doesn't it?

And now enjoy a heartfelt maternal tribute by a man, not unlike former astronaut Steve Austin, who is lucky to be alive:

Feminazis think Nick Cannon should be dead.  Cassy Fiano takes great exception, with deliciously extreme prejudice.

This is analagous to putting a tack on your communication prof's chair right before your worst enemy's final speech project, or putting a pornographic slide in his accompanying slideshow presentation.  Call it the gift of encouragement:

In an article published Sunday, Ahmet Davutoglu told the Turkish daily Hurriyet: "Israelis have three options: They will either apologize or acknowledge an international-impartial inquiry and its conclusion. Otherwise, our diplomatic ties will be cut off."

The Turkish foreign minister said that during his secret meeting last week in Brussels with Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, "We showed them an exit road. If they apologize as a result of their own investigation's conclusion, that would be fine for us. But of course we first have to see it."

This "generous offer" hit the global media right as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was winging his way to New Chicago (formerly known as Washington, D.C.) for a pilgrimmage with His Majesty.  Betcha can't guess The One's reaction:

Tensions between Turkey and Israel escalated Monday as Turkey’s foreign minister said his country would sever diplomatic relations with Israel unless it either apologizes for its deadly raid on a Turkish aid ship or accepts an international inquiry into the incident.

The threat came as Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu prepares to meet Tuesday in Washington with President Obama. A Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity before the foreign minister made his comments, said Obama plans to press the Israeli leader to apologize to defuse tensions.

“The president is very concerned about the breakdown in Turkish-Israeli relations,” the diplomat said. Asked if he thought Obama could persuade Netanyahu to apologize, the diplomat added: “I’m sure he’ll give it the college try.”

Senior Obama administration officials would neither confirm nor deny the president’s intentions for the meeting with Netanyahu.

"He'll give it the college try" means he knows Bebe will tell him to do something even Michelle would find anatomically impossible, but he'll do it anyway out of hateful spite.

And now you know why the Turks tossed this latest flaming bag of dog mess on Barry's front stoop.  Yes, that's right, Barry's.  They're already at cold war with Israel.  They know Netanyahu is no Ehud Olmert (Yiddish for "Elmer Fudd," BTW) and would sooner raze Ankara to the ground than globally humiliate his country by according legitimacy to the outrageous global assertion that Israel has no MORAL right do defend itself and its citizens from relentless, bloodthirsty Islamist attack.  But they also know that the further they can split the Jewish State from its heretofore chief ally, the weaker Jerusalem becomes over time as they become less and less able to maintain their predominantly U.S.-supplied military assets.  They also know how reflexively anti-Israel, pacifistic, and hopelessly addicted to the sound of his own Chamerlainesque voice Barack Obama is.  And they know that Israel's time for "disarming" the mullahgarchy is rapidly running out.

My best guess?  The Turks are laying the groundwork to maneuver Obama into having to declare a military ultimatum against any Israeli attack against Iran's nuclear weapons facilities.  In the interests of "peace," of course.

Let's revise that opening analogy.  It's more like a kid getting a remote-controlled toy car for Christmas and amusing himself with it by ramming it into every obstacle in the house, until he finally impacts it against the support holding up the shelf on which dear old dad stores his bowling ball.

This is why kids should get socks, underwear, and pen & pencil sets instead.

Go here for a refresher on this topic.  I'm on record as considering the Hussein administration as marching shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel's enemies over the Gaza blockade runners.  But how can wily, empirically-chronicled, day-glo obvious informed opinion hold a candle to wild third-hand speculation?  Over to you, Eeyore:

I got a tip last night from a source on the Israeli side that this story at Foreign Policy accurately describes how the White House is trying to manage the flotilla investigation. The plan was to pressure Israel into starting its own probe ASAP, complete with international members, before momentum built at the Security Council for an international UN-led probe that would inevitably railroad the IDF. In fact, according to Foreign Policy, that may have been the point of the leak heard ’round the blogosphere to Bill Kristol last week — to scare the Israelis into thinking the U.S. would join in supporting an international probe if they didn’t get it in gear.

Nahhh.  First off, Bibi Netanyahu doesn't scare.  Second of all, there's little practical difference between an "international" kangaroo court in which the Israelis get to sit at the table and be railroaded in person and an "international" kangaroo court in which they're railroaded in abstentia.  I will acknowledge that bullying an enemy into braiding and looping his own noose under the misapprehension that you're doing him a favor is Obama SOP - just ask BP - but I don't see that it gains The One much politically at home.  It's not as though his Jeremiah Wright-indoctrinated ant-Semitism is some big cat still in the proverbial bag, after all.  Occam's Razor, guys.

But let's say, just for the sake of rightospheric comity, that Allahpundit's anonymous Israeli source is correct.  It would seem that all the Obamunists' hostility to the Jewish State has accomplished is to pour napalm on the Islamic jihadi blowtorch - and emasculate whatever supposed American global influence Godbama's bowing & curtseying to "world opinion" was purportedly going to restore:

A spokesman for United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday that the secretary general remains “hopeful” that the world body will approve an international inquiry into the Gaza flotilla incident — on top of Israel’s own domestic investigation — after it received overwhelming support in a closed Security Council meeting Tuesday…

A diplomat with one Security Council member country said that fourteen of fifteen nations had expressed support for some form of panel established by the secretary general — rather than by a Security Council vote, which the United States could block — to investigate the deaths on a Turkish ship bound for Gaza. The U.S. was the sole nation not to support the measure in the closed session, the source said…

The U.S. position on the panel — amid intense support for it among U.N. members — has been to wait and see what Ban proposes.

“As we always do [?!?], we will work hard to make sure that Israel is not treated unfairly at the U.N.,” a U.S. official said.

And there it is.  Red Barry being "one of them," and "the biggest celebrity in the world" was supposed to make him the Prince of Turtle Bay and, by reflection, restore the United States to full good noodle star membership in the Marvelous Multilateral Commission of Gnarly Third World Awesomeness.  Instead, the bloodthirsty Islamic genocidists have only gotten more rabid and have stopped paying attention to the Chicago Cherubim altogether.  Which tends to happen when your enemies figure out that all they have to fear from you is being talked to death.

Wheeeeooo, that "smart power" is a RUSH, ain't it?

Exit quote from Jennifer Rubin:

To sum it up, we have a White House unwilling to stand four-square with Israel, refusing to rebuff the efforts to delegitimize Israel’s right to manage and review its own defensive measures, and uninterested in exploring the terrorist elements and their ties to Turkey, which were responsible for the violence. And there is no effective strategy in Congress or among Jewish groups to challenge these inclinations. Can you imagine what there is in store when Israel feels compelled to use military force against Iran? 

Yes, I can.

While we wait for the bombs to start falling, here's yet another reminder that the truth is still out there....

Grievously, Barack Obama doesn't rule his own country (philosophically), but America.  Whether he proves to be a prophet remains to be seen, and probably always will be.  But one thing is for certain: He's finding out what a siege is really like, in the only way that he could ever understand it:

So.  Speaker-in-waiting Boehner says The One has functioned as a treacherous, bullying, backstabbing traitor in the Mari Marmara incident.  But he's supposed to say such things, although a Republican actually doing so is still a remarkable sight I never get tired of for its lamentable novelty.  It's Steny Hoyer's "Yeah, you're right, Mr. Sp....I mean, John" riposte that is the real attention-grabber.  When the next House Minority Leader starts his side of the debate with, "This is not a partisan issue," that's as clear a signal as it gets of how alone on the island Barry O has become on Israel.

Let me amend that metaphor from "alone on the island" to "alone on that planetoid":

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is opposed to lifting the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip because this would bolster Hamas, according to what he told United States President Barack Obama during their meeting at the White House Wednesday. Egypt also supports this position. …

One of the points that Abbas raised is that the naval blockade imposed by Israel on the Strip should not be lifted at this stage. The European diplomats said Egypt has made it clear to Israel, the U.S and the European Union that it is also opposes the lifting of the naval blockade because of the difficulty in inspecting the ships that would enter and leave the Gaza port.

Abbas told Obama that actions easing the blockage should be done with care and undertaken gradually so it will not be construed as a victory for Hamas. The Palestinian leader also stressed that the population in the Gaza Strip must be supported, and that pressure should be brought to bear on Israel to allow more goods, humanitarian assistance and building materials for reconstruction. Abbas, however, said this added aid can be done by opening land crossings and other steps that do not include the lifting of the naval blockade.

Y'see, Israel isn't Hamas' only enemy.  The Fatah-run Palestinian Authority got run out of Gaza by the Iranian proxy gang three years ago, and there's still no love lost between the Pals' good cops and bad cops.  The munitions Hamas isn't getting would also be used on them, and consequently Abbas has a healthy interest in keeping it that way, and so backs the IDF blockade.  Ditto Egypt, which isn't eager to be the next Arab autocracy to get theocratized the hard way.  You might even say that in their eyes, the Jews are doing Allah's work for them.  Or, to westernize the metaphor, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Evidently that's a level of geopolitical nuance that is above the L'il President's pay grade, and for which there's no room in his Marxist-Alinskyist, anti-Semitic ideological rubber room. 

Mental isolation to go with political isolation - where's that "voting present" instinct when False Messiah really needs it?

This was a siege:

The two-and-a-half year siege [of Leningrad] caused the greatest destruction and the largest loss of life ever known in a modern city.^[14] On Hitler's express orders, most of the palaces of the Tsars, such as the Catherine Palace, Peterhof Palace, Ropsha, Strelna, Gatchina, and other historic landmarks located outside the city's defensive perimeter were looted and then destroyed, with many art collections transported to Nazi Germany.^[44] A number of factories, schools, hospitals and other civil infrastructure were destroyed by air raids and long range artillery bombardment.

The 872 days of the siege caused unparalleled famine in the Leningrad region through disruption of utilities, water, energy and food supplies. This resulted in the deaths of up to 1,500,000^[45] soldiers and civilians and the evacuation of 1,400,000 more, mainly women and children, many of whom died during evacuation due to starvation and bombardment.^[1][2][5] Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery alone in Leningrad holds half a million civilian victims of the siege. Economic destruction and human losses in Leningrad on both sides exceeded those of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Moscow, or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The siege of Leningrad is the most lethal siege in world history, and some historians speak of the siege operations in terms of genocide, as a "racially motivated starvation policy" that became an integral part of the unprecedented German war of extermination against populations of the Soviet Union generally.^[46][47]

Civilians in the city suffered from extreme starvation, especially in winter of 1941–1942. For example, from November 1941 to February 1942 the only food available to the citizen was 125 grams of bread, which by 50–60% consisted of sawdust and other inedible admixtures, and distributed with ration cards. For about 2 weeks at the beginning of January 1942 even this food was available only for workers and military personnel. In conditions of extreme temperatures (down to −30 °С) and city transport being out of service a few kilometers to the food distributing kiosks were insurmountable obstacle for many citizens. In January-February 1942 about 700–10,000 citizens died every day, most of them from hunger. People often died on the streets, and citizens shortly became accustomed to look of death.

Reports of cannibalism appeared in the winter of 1941-1942, after all birds, rats and pets were eaten by survivors.^[48] Hungry gangs attacked and ate defenseless people.^[49] Leningrad police even formed a special unit to combat cannibalism.^[50]

This is NOT a siege:

Tom Gross, who writes for the blog Mideast Dispatch Archive (h/t my buddy Steven), obtained a copy of the email, along with photographs, both detailing the unspeakable conditions under which Palestinians in Gaza live. Among the meager scraps on which the people are forced to subsist are steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu at the local four-star restaurant. To cool off when the weather gets a little too balmy, they have little recourse beyond taking a dip in a pool that is Olympic-sized, but not a millimeter longer.

In all fairness, it should be noted that the children of Gaza have no summer camp to attend. They had one, set up by the U.N., but Hamas burned it down because it was “un-Islamic.” Hamas also threatened the lives of the U.N. staff that ran the camp, but, hey, these are struggling people. Cut them some slack!

“Many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza,” Gross writes, “live a middle class (and in some cases an upper class) lifestyle that Western journalists refuse to report on because it doesn’t fit with the simplistic story they were sent to write.”

They also don't have IDF missiles raining down on them on a daily basis, either.

But such is the risible anti-Semitic propaganda excreted to serve as the public relations platform for that steadfast and stalwart Zionist Barack "Kosher" Obama to take the next "shoulder to shoulder" step on behalf of his great and loyal Jewish ally - something to do with sliding a d'k tagh between Bibi's ribs:

The Weekly Standard has learned that senior Obama administration officials have been telling foreign governments that the administration intends to support an effort next week at the United Nations to set up an independent [!] commission, under UN auspices [cough, gag, hack], to investigate Israel’s behavior in the Gaza flotilla incident. The White House has apparently shrugged off concerns from elsewhere in the U.S. government that a) this is an extraordinary singling out of Israel, since all kinds of much worse incidents happen around the world without spurring UN investigations; b) that the investigation will be one-sided, focusing entirely on Israeli behavior and not on Turkey or on Hamas; and c) that this sets a terrible precedent for outside investigations of incidents involving U.S. troops or intelligence operatives as we conduct our own war on terror.

To which the logical White House response would be, "We know - that's the point."  A, B, and C are all key Obama ideological foreign policy objectives designed not only to weaken U.S. power and freedom of action overseas, but to lock these denuded capabilities in a policy straitjacket long after The One has re-Ascended.  In short, it's part of the permanent "transformation" of America from benevolent global hegemon and leader of the free world (whatever that term means anymore) to bloated Luxembourg.  Oh, sorry, Luxembourgistan.

Eeyore is skeptical (partially) because...the White House "vehemently denies" this.  Which, of course, they will do right up until they do it, and they'll try to cover by claiming that "Israeli intransigence and defiance on their own investigation left them no other choice."  I don't think it matters what terrified and jeopardized congressional Donks say in support of Israel; remember, this is the same administration that hammerlocked many of these same imperiled Jackasses into voting for ObamaCare on the assurance that it would be "a winning issue" for them in November.  Whether or not Red Barry's myrmidons could be swindled yet again - and I think most of them could be - the Obamunist palace guard still thinks that The One can sweet-talk the cholesterol right out of pure butter.

Recall as well that the outrage in this is that there is an investigation at all.  Jerusalem got bullied into conceding the point but insisted it be kept out of UN "auspices," so the L'il President has already pushed them back, leaving them vulnerable to the full betrayal of throwing the IDF to Turtle Bay's wolves.  The distance between the two is not all that much, and serves another Obamunist purpose: to weaken Mr. Netanyahu and topple his Likud coalition in favor of more suicidally like-minded Labor and/or Kaditha.

Or so he thinks.  But there is another possibility, one that would never occur to a man so narcissistically convinced of his own omniscience.  Let's let Professor Hanson take it on home:

Finally, as I say, all this may have a strangely liberating effect on Israel. We know now that whatever it does, the world, or at least its prominent political and media figures, is going to damn it. Its longtime patron, the United States, now sees not much difference between Israel’s democratic achievement and the autocracies around it, which we are now either subsidizing or courting. As a result, the global censors have lost leverage with Israel, since they have proven to be such laughable adjudicators of right and wrong when Israel is involved.

Israelis should assume by now that whether they act tentatively or strongly, the negative reaction will be the same. Therefore why not project the image of a strong, unapologetic country to a world that has completely lost its moral bearings, and is more likely to respect Israel’s strength than its past concern for meeting an impossible global standard?

How odd that the more the activists, political leaders, and media figures issue moral strictures against Israel, the more they prove abjectly amoral. And the more they seek to pressure Israel, the more they are liberating it to do what it feels it must.

And if "doing what it must" includes a last-ditch air war on Iran to destroy its nuclear weapons capability because this administration (and, yes, the previous one) derelicted its duty to liberate Iran as we did Afghanistan and Iraq before it could secure nuclear weapons capability, thus guaranteeing the inevitable war on the enemy's terms and timetable instead of our own?  Well, forfeiture of any influence over Israel without gaining any influence over Iran or Syria or Turkey equals the effective elimination of ANY American influence in the Middle East.

Which, come to think of it, is also a strategic objective of Obamunist foreign policy.

Hey, maybe these people ARE smarter than they look.

Yep, Obama has pledged $400 million to the Palestinians. Isn't that wonderful? Mike Pence asks a great question, "Whose side are you on?"

Rhetorical, of course. It's becoming more and more obvious. Tell me again why Jewish people overwhelmingly vote Democrat??

JASmius adds: Because they're more more leftwingnut than Jewish.  Obviously.

Other reactions:

If a man injures his neighbor, just as he has done, so it shall be done to him: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; just as he has injured a man, so it shall be inflicted on him.

Well....why not, indeed?  Except trying to kill boarding Turkish commandoes:

Student Union chairman Boaz Torporovsky, who has been leading the reverse flotilla charge, told the Jerusalem Post on Monday, “Hundreds of people have volunteered for the flotilla, and many more are contacting us all the time for ways they can help.

“Our plan is to deliver much-needed humanitarian assistance to the Kurds of Turkey, who by the way outnumber Israelis and Palestinians combined,” he said…

Another sea-bound venture is being organized in an effort to draw attention to Turkey’s own controversial policies – this time to Cyprus, to “call for an end to the Turkish occupation” of the island’s northern half – and is being organized by Meretz activist Pinchas Har-Zahav, and his son Haim, who has also signed on for the voyage…

Har-Zahav added that the ship’s passengers were not looking for a violent confrontation and if told to turn back, they would.

“But we feel that it’s important for us to show and remind the world that Turkey is not a righteous country, but a near-rogue state, and that we, the Israeli people, are not suckers.”

Don't be too sure about that, Pinchas, old bean.  Seems to me that if Torporovsky and Har-Zahav are as long in the logistics and testicular departments as they wish to portray, it'd be Turkish Kurdistan and northern Cyprus or bust.  Wouldn't doing unto Erdogan as his flotilla did unto the IDF - again, minus the rioting - be the whole point?  'cause you know the Turks will intercept them and order them to turn around practically before they even leave their home port.  If this gesture is meant to make a statement, Jewish docility shouldn't be it, especially in an "international community" where anti-Semitic blood libels and Islamic psychological projections are as ubiquitous and dime-a-dozen as Dan Whitney's film career.