Nikki Haley: America’s Shield Maiden

The General Assembly is set to hold an emergency session on Thursday regarding President Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. The body is expected to vote on a resolution calling on the United States to reverse the move.

The anticipated General Assembly vote comes days after U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley vetoed a Security Council resolution that would seek to nullify any move to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. That resolution did not specifically mention Trump or the U.S., but was a clear effort to rebuke the president.

Haley defended the veto on Monday, saying that the Security Council resolution was an affront to U.S. sovereignty. "Today, for the simple act of deciding where to put our embassy, the United States was forced to defend its sovereignty. The record will reflect that we did so proudly."

“At the United Nations we are always asked to do more and give more. So, when we make a decision at the will of the American people about where to locate our embassy, we don't expect those we've helped to target us. On Thursday there will be a vote criticizing our choice. The US will be taking names. What we witnessed here in the Security Council is an insult," she said. "It won’t be forgotten."

The Palestinians immediately announced they will seek a resolution with similar demands in the 193-member General Assembly, where there are no vetoes. Unlike the Security Council the General Assembly’s resolutions are not legally binding and are largely symbolic.

The UN operates at the beck and call of Islamic States who hate Israel, something which makes the body’s toxicity self-perpetuating.

During the Viking era, women were on an equal footing with men.  They knew how to wield a sword and when a warrior fell on the battlefield they would pick up the shield and fill in the shield wall.  They did not fear a clash of arms.

Nikki Haley is such a warrior.  She tenaciously defends her president and the nation of Israel with equal zeal and bravery.  

UN Jackals And Their Atrocious Betrayal of Israel

The World’s Most Dangerous Community Organizer has made two trips to Israel.  The first was July 24, 2008 as a presidential candidate to Jerusalem’s Western Wall, Judaism’s most holy site, and again as president in March 2013.

Jerusalem is the ancient capital of Israel and site of the original temple.  The Western Wall is where the Ten Commandments were stored in the Ark of the Covenant.  The Western Wall is also known as the Wailing Wall by Jews who make pilgrimages there to grieve the persecution of the Jewish people.

It was at the Western Wall that Obama left a note that read, “Lord—Protect my family and me.  Forgive me my sins, and help me guard against pride and despair.  Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just.  And make me an instrument of your will.”  He vowed to forge an “unshakable bond” with Israel if he became the next president.

When he traveled to Israel again in 2013, his itinerary included a trip to Yad Vashem a living memorial to the Holocaust and to those who were “righteous among the nations”.  The “righteous” were those who summoned extraordinary courage to save the Jews from extermination by the Nazis.

“This is my second visit to this living memorial.  Since then, I’ve walked among the barbed wire and guard towers of Buchenwald.  Rabbi Lau told me of his time there, and we reminisced about our good friend, Elie Wiesel, and the memories that he shared with me.  I have stood in the old Warsaw ghetto, with survivors who would not go quietly. But nothing equals the wrenching power of this sacred place, where the totality of the Shoah is told.  We could come here a thousand times, and each time our hearts would break.”

“For here we see the depravity to which man can sink; the barbarism that unfolds when we begin to see our fellow human beings as somehow less than us, less worthy of dignity and of life.  We see how evil can, for a moment in time, triumph when good people do nothing, and how silence abetted a crime unique in human history.”

“Here we see their faces and we hear their voices.  We look upon the objects of their lives—the art that they created, the prayer books that they carried.  We see that even as they had hate etched into their arms, they were not numbers.  They were men and women and children—so many children—sent to their deaths because of who they were, how they prayed, or who they loved.”

“And yet, here, alongside man’s capacity for evil, we also are reminded of man’s capacity for good—the rescuers, the Righteous Among the Nations who refused to be bystanders.  And in their noble acts of courage, we see how this place, this accounting of horror, is, in the end, a source of hope.”

His soaring rhetoric and honeyed words betray his deep Palestinian ties.  To this day, The Los Angeles Times refuses to release the Rashid Khalidi tape they acquired surreptitiously which lays bare Mr. Obama’s disdain of Israel and his effusive support of Middle East radicals.  He is a political chameleon.

On December 23, 2016, Obama broke with the longstanding practice of both Democratic and Republican administrations to protect Israel from one-sided UN resolutions. He let the United Nations Security Council pass a resolution declaring the establishment of settlements by Israel “a flagrant violation under international law."

The resolution demands that "Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem." The Obama administration abstained rather than veto this resolution as it had done with regard to a similar resolution back in 2011.

It declares that any Jew who lives in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem which has been inhabited for a thousand years is illegal and in violation of international law. It is now the official position of the United States of America that the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem belongs to the Palestinians.

The Council passed the resolution, 14-0.  The countries voting for the resolution were Great Britain, France, Russia, China, Japan, Ukraine, Angola, Egypt, Uruguay, Spain, Senegal, New Zealand, Malaysia and, of course, the US by abstention.

Israel has accused Obama of colluding with the Palestinians against the Jewish state. The remaining question is whether Jewish leaders and Democratic politicians who vouched for Obama and defended him for eight years will now tell the truth.

The American taxpayer foots 22% of the total United Nations budget.  What we get for our three billion dollars a year is a corrupt organization whose dysfunctional and hostile agencies are united in opposing America around the world.

I wholeheartedly agree with Daniel Greenfield’s take on the UN:

“These days, the United Nations is a forum for Islamist powers and the rotting remains of the Communist front to continue its war against the free world while seducing weak-minded nations into going along.” 

“We are not making the world a better place by being members of this anti-American organization which vacillates between being evil and useless.”

Point Of View For Sunday July 20, 2014

Calling Up The Devil

Rockets being fired from the Gaza strip into Israel 

Israeli police remove part of a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip towards the city of Tel Aviv 

A Palestinian child shouts at al-Shifa hospital after Israeli forces shelled her house 

I must commend Richard Fernandez for his elucidation of the conflict between Israel and the militant Islamist Hamas terror group and Palestinian militants.

He brings into crystal clarity evidence that Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda affiliated jihadist militias and Fatah have zero interest in a peaceful coexistence with Israel.  They are committed to the extermination of Israel and its Jews.

There are estimates that Hamas’ military is still only using less than 20% of its military weapons capacity, according to an expert in Hamas affairs.  This suggests that there may be more months of rocket firepower.  Those closely watching events on the ground contend that the number of rockets being launched from Gaza into Israel is neither increasing nor decreasing.

After 12 days of fighting, Israel’s military said that Palestinian terrorists have fired at least 1,705 rockets out of an estimated stockpile of 10,000.

Their arsenal includes Qassam rockets with a range of 17km (10miles) that can reach into Ashkelon and Sderot, Grad rockets with a range of 20km (12 miles) that can hit Beersheba and Grad WS-Es 40km (24 miles) than can attack Tel Aviv, Dimona and Jerusalem.  The destructive power of their long-range Farj-5/M-75 missiles 75km (46 miles) can reach Haifa, Zikron Yaacov and Hadera and their Khaibar-1 missiles 160km (99 miles) are capable of reaching into the neighboring country of Jordan.

Mr. Fernandez explains:

“Nihilism isn’t the absence of a belief. It is something subtly different: it is the belief in nothing. The most powerful weapon of terrorism is therefore the unyielding No. “No, I will not give up. No, I will not tell the truth. No, I will not play fair. No, I will not spare children. No, I will not stop even if you surrender to me; I will not cease even if you give me everything you have, up to and including your children’s lives. Nothing short of destroying me absolutely can make me stop. And therefore I will defeat you even if you kill me. Because I will make you pay the price in guilt for annihilating me.” 

“It’s an extremely powerful weapon.  The Absolute No is a devastating attack on the self-image and esteem of civilization.  Hamas will demonstrate the No, the Nothing. It will show that deep down inside Israelis—and Americans—are animals like them.  This can be called the Seven Gambit, from a 1995 film which explores this exact theme. It depicts two detectives versus the devil in the shape of nameless man, who kills people not by attacking them directly, but by creating situations where they kill themselves by yielding to one of the seven deadly sins: sloth, gluttony, vanity—and finally vengeance and wrath.”

Sara Roy, in a warped diatribe at The Boston Globe, penned the following:

“Gaza’s present anguish did not emerge in a vacuum nor in response to a single terrible event as the Israeli government would have us believe. Instead, it emanates from a context of ongoing occupation and repression that has transformed Gaza—the center of Palestinian nationalism and resistance to Israeli occupation—into one of the most impoverished, imprisoned areas of the world.”

Spittle-laced voices here and abroad share Ms. Roy’s perverted view.  One such example was CNN’s Diane Magnay who called a group of Israelis “scum” and today in London and Paris tens of thousands of protesters holding placards and banners chanted pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel slogans.

"Saturday’s demonstration in London came on the heels of numerous protests Thursday and Friday worldwide, including Cairo, Istanbul, Cape Town, Berlin, New York and Washington. Many of the protests have turned violent."

"In Istanbul, police warded off hundreds of rioters who attempted on Thursday to storm the Israeli embassy building. Demonstrators in Ankara and Istanbul also hurled stones at several compounds where Israeli officials reside. Calls for the destruction of the Jewish state were heard in both Turkish cities. Police responded by firing tear gas canisters and water cannons at the crowds. Israel decided Friday to pull some of its diplomatic staff out of Turkey in the wake of the protests."

Less than ten years ago, Israel uprooted 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip withdrawing its entire military and thereby relinquishing it to the Palestinians.  The Israelis gave the Palestinians 3,000 greenhouses worth $14 million that had produced fruits and flowers for export in an effort to promote the economy in Gaza. Palestinians looted them walking off with irrigation hoses, water pumps and plastic sheeting in a blow to fledgling efforts to reconstruct the Gaza Strip.

It has been 47 years since the 1967 Six Day War and throughout Israel’s existence efforts to bring peace to the region have largely failed.  In 1967, UN Security Council Resolution 242 called for the exchange of land for peace.  Jimmy Carter brought together Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David for the Camp David Accords in 1978 that resulted in two agreements.  Then followed the Madrid Conference in 1991 and the Oslo Agreement two years later that tried to build on UN Resolution 242 and 338.

The purpose of the 2000 Camp David peace talks was to offer the Gaza Strip and part of the Negev desert to the Palestinians and the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees.

The 2001 Taba talks were held amid an election campaign for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.  Barak said that "nothing is agreed upon until everything is agreed upon". He said that he could not commit a subsequent government to what he called the "ideas" coming out of the talks. With the election of Ariel Sharon in February 2001, time ran out.

In 2002, the Arab Peace Initiative introduced a two-state solution.  Efforts to have the parties agree have failed at every turn.  The Roadmap talks in 2003 attempted to hammer out how a settlement could be reached.  This eventually led to the 2003 Geneva Accord in which the Palestinians would give up their “right of return” in exchange for almost the whole of the West Bank.

Hamas, in 2007, had just won parliamentary elections and taken control of the Gaza Strip.  The Annapolis Peace Talks that year failed because Hamas was not represented and declared it would not be bound by anything declared at the talks.

In Washington in 2010, Mahmoud Abbas wanted a guarantee of a Palestinian state based on 1967 lines.

It is impossible to understand the uncontrollable hatred of Jews.  So demented is Hamas’ insanity that they wantonly use women and children as human shields. (Please go to this link and this link to view Hamas’ confessions about the use of human shields.)

Benjamin Netanyahu said, “It must be understood that our enemy hides in mosques, puts weapons stores under hospitals and situates command posts next to kindergartens. The enemy uses the residents of Gaza as a human shield and inflicts disaster on them. The responsibility for harm to the citizens of Gaza lies on the shoulders of Hamas and Israel regrets any harm to them. The difference between Israel and Hamas is that we use missiles to defend the citizens of Israel while they use the civilian population to defend the stores of their missiles.”

Charles Krauthammer, the American Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist, shares his thoughts on the moral depravity of the terrorist group known as Hamas:

"To deliberately wage war so that your own people can be telegenically killed is indeed moral and tactical insanity. But it rests on a very rational premise: Given the Orwellian state of the world’s treatment of Israel, fuelled by a mix of classic anti-Semitism, near-total historical ignorance and reflexive sympathy for the ostensible Third World underdog, these eruptions featuring Palestinian casualties ultimately undermine support for Israel’s legitimacy and right to self-defense." 

"In a world of such Kafkaesque ethical inversions, Hamas’ depravity begins to make sense. This is a world in which the Munich massacre is a movie and the murder of Klinghoffer is an opera—both deeply sympathetic to the killers. This is a world in which the UN ignores humanity’s worst war criminals while incessantly condemning Israel, a state warred upon for 66 years which nonetheless goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid harming the very innocents its enemies use as shields." 

"It’s to the Israelis’ credit that amid all this madness they haven’t lost their moral scruples. Or their nerve. Those outside the region have the minimum obligation, therefore, to expose the madness and speak the truth. Rarely has it been so blindingly clear."

Kerry’s Dubious Utility As A Peace Process Facilitator Is Officially At An End

I have despised John Kerry ever since he compared American servicemen deployed in Vietnam to “the Army of Genghis Khan” in exaggerated imagery:

“They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.”

Secretary of State “Ketchup” has issued a series of remarks over the past nine months that have incensed his Israeli counterparts and left the Mideast Peace Talks in utter disarray.

Last month he suggested that a deterioration of the peace talks was due to settlement activity in east Jerusalem. This past March he suggested that Israel would face a reinvigorated boycott, divestment and sanctions movement should talks fail, and last November he seemed to threaten Israel with a third intifada if a deal was not concluded.

The current administration continues to open itself up to parody, an example of which we saw most recently in a video clip, and now we learn than he warned if Israel did not make peace soon it could become “an apartheid state.”

This slur against Israel must be music of the ears of the Palestinians, Hamas and our betters on the Left.

Attempting to walk back the loaded term “apartheid” in relation to Israel, Kerry said:

“If I could rewind the tape, I would have chosen a different word to describe my firm belief that the only way in the long term to have a Jewish state and two nations and two peoples living side by side in peace and security is through a two state solution.  In the long term, a unitary, bi-national state cannot be the democratic Jewish state that Israel deserves or the prosperous state with full rights that the Palestinian people deserve.”

Kerry’s non-apology apology means simply that armies of soldiers, terrorists and diplomats continue to gather in a flagrant scheme to carve up the Holy City of Jerusalem and eradicate half the city of Jews and turn it into a staging zone for some of the world’s most barbaric terrorists.

Kerry must resign his post as Secretary of State and Jonathan Tobin’s money quote adds credence to this thought:

“[Kerry’s] ability to influence events in a positive way is finished. By injecting the apartheid slur into the negotiations, Kerry has poisoned the waters in a manner that will only make it more rather than less difficult for Palestinian leaders to do what they must to bring about peace. Rather than pushing the parties toward an agreement, he has sabotaged the process. Just as the end of the conflict will have to wait until a new generation of Palestinians is willing to put aside their rejection of a Jewish state, so too, must a productive American intervention be put off until Kerry leaves the diplomatic stage.”

The Devastating Effects Of The World’s Most Dangerous Community Organizer’s Foreign Policy Failures

Former US Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, believes that "[The White House's foreign policy] initiatives truly reflect Obama's view of America's international role.  His is a world of rhetoric and talk, not power." 

In an Op-Ed at The Los Angeles Times, Bolton mournfully opines:

The coming crash of U.S. diplomacy is not idle speculation about a remote future. Our declining prestige is already apparent globally; when all three Middle East negotiations fail conclusively, America's influence will fall further. Friends and adversaries alike are recalibrating their policies accordingly, particularly because the underlying causes of the three impending failures will spell trouble and misfortune elsewhere. 

Obama's ongoing failures could have been avoided. A less ideological, more realistic and clear-eyed leader would comprehend American power and interests, knowing how to use the former to protect the latter, rather than making Obama's basic mistakes. 

Obama's first error: misreading your adversary. There was never any chance Iran could be negotiated out of a nuclear weapons capability it has pursued for nearly 30 years. Efforts during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations demonstrated how Iran deftly uses negotiations to gain political legitimacy, buy time to continue work on its nuclear program and evade international punishment. Hassan Rouhani followed precisely this playbook as Iran's chief nuclear negotiator 10 years ago. He is doing so again today as Iran's president. 

The second error: not knowing who your adversaries are. Obama argued for three years that Russia shared his objective of a peaceful transition from the Assad regime in Syria to something else. This was never true. Moscow's support for Assad (as well as Iran's, directly and through Hezbollah) guaranteed he would only depart feet first. The U.S. could either have aided Syria's opposition or tackled the problem's root cause: the mullahs' regime in Tehran. Obama chose to do neither. His equivocation regarding Syria's chemical weapons program has provoked giggles or dismay at White House weakness. 

The third error: not knowing who your friends are. The Palestinians lack legitimate governing institutions capable of hard decisions, including making perilous concessions and compromises, and overcoming resistance by Hamas and other terrorists. Without such institutions, no long-term solution is possible. Negotiating with the Palestinian Authority has less substance than negotiating with a hologram. Perversely, however, Obama treats Israel as the problem.

At the center of this inept president’s foreign policy is the misguided belief that the reason America has adversaries is because it has allies.

With red lines painted here, there and everywhere backed up only by bluster and no balls whatsoever, it won’t be long before we have only adversaries and no allies anywhere in the world.  With this man sitting behind the Resolute Desk, our very existence grows ever more perilous.

Helen Thomas On The Freight Elevator To Hell

Since the announcement of Helen Thomas’ death, we’ve seen the usual worshipful coverage of her 92 years on this earth.

“Her unparalleled experience covering the presidency earned her the respect and affection of both colleagues and public officials for decades,” wrote Patricia Sullivan for The Washington Post.

Sullivan provided a few anecdotal stories of Thomas that I found amusing:

“We are the only institution in our society that can question a president on a regular basis and make him accountable,” she told author Kay Mills for a 1996 Modern Maturity magazine article. “Otherwise, he could be king.”

In the 1980s, after the official planting of a Lebanon cedar tree on the South Lawn of the White House, fellow reporters urged Ms. Thomas, a Lebanese American, to pick up the ceremonial shovel and toss some dirt into the hole to cover the roots. “And as she shoveled,” ABC News broadcaster Sam Donaldson later said, “I heard the ghosts of presidents past and present say, ‘Shove her in.’”

Although she identified herself as a political liberal, Ms. Thomas did not hesitate to criticize the Democratic administration of President Obama, even after he presented her with cupcakes on Aug. 4, 2009, their shared birthday. She once told CNSNews that not even Nixon attempted to control the news media the way Obama’s administration tried to do. “What the hell do they think we are—puppets?” Ms. Thomas asked. “They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.”

On May 27, 2010 after a visit to the White House to celebrate American Jewish Heritage Month, David Nesenoff, a rabbi and independent filmmaker, asked Thomas whether she had any comments on Israel.

“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.  Remember, these people are occupied, and it’s their land.”

Nesenoff asked where she thought they should go.

“Go home,” she responded.

Asked to elaborate, Thomas said, “Poland, Germany,” and after more prompting by the rabbi, “and America, and everywhere else.”

The video was posted five days later and almost immediately went viral, prompting calls for her firing. Thomas issued an apology, saying she deeply regretted her comments.  Her adroitly insincere apology caused her to be stripped of her front-row center seat in the White House briefing room.

One might assume that she would be finished with the limelight, but that was not the case.  One year later, in April 2012, she was presented with a medal by Hanan Ashrawi on behalf of PLO President Mahmoud Abbas “for her long career in the field of journalism during which she defended the Palestinian position.”  Washington’s PLO office said the medal was presented to her with the appreciation and blessing of the president and the Palestinian people for all of her action supporting Palestine in the West.”

Tony Snow, White House Press Secretary for George W. Bush made mincemeat of Thomas in July of 2006.  Never, in my opinion, has a press secretary looked so good bouncing off a screed disguised as a question.

Thomas was inquiring about the possibility of sending U.S. troops as part of a UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon.  Watch the video for one of Snow’s most memorable quotes:  "Thank you for the Hezbollah point of view."

Anyway, Helen The Hag can screech about the Joos from hell and spend eternity finding out why Israel is the “apple of God’s eye.”

Obama and Israel: The Undermining of a Historic Relationship

Assisted by a biased media, Barack Obama has turned his back on more than six decades of American-Israeli friendship.

This video, produced by Accuracy in Media, documents President Obama's often hostile, one-sided pressure on Israel. It also shows how the President will do anything to ensure his own chances for re-election, even if it means allowing Iran to continue developing nuclear weapons while it plays a cynical game of stalling and deception.