Demoncraps No Longer Support Israel

The Democratic Party Divorce From Israel

Read More About: The Democratic Party was once the anchor of the pro-Israel community. Not any more.

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Redacted from an excellent, in-depth 5 page article that must be read in its entirety.

By JONATHAN S. TOBIN

COMMENTARY Magazine

December 2015 (No, nothing has changed since December – worse if anything with Bernie or Hillary in the leadership)
President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran survived a congressional challenge in September 2015, despite its extreme unpopularity with the American people. With very few exceptions, Democrats in the House and Senate rallied to the president’s side and (in the case of the Senate) refused to allow even a token vote to be cast in opposition. This was a turning point, for the deal formally recognizes the eventual right of Iran to become a nuclear power—a right that places Israel in profound existential jeopardy.

Supporters of Israel will continue to claim that the Jewish state is a bipartisan cause in the United States, but as the Iran vote has made painfully clear, this assertion has become more hope than reality. When it came to the most important vote for Israel in a generation, Republicans in both the House and the Senate unanimously opposed the agreement, while an overwhelming majority of Democrats backed it.
Though many Democratic activists and voters remain ardent backers of Israel, those making up the liberal base of the party are not. On issues such as Iran and the conflict with the Palestinians, Democrats are, at best, split, with their left wing increasingly speaking in open opposition to the Zionist cause. More to the point, much of the Democratic Party has followed President Obama’s lead in seeking to redefine what it means to be pro-Israel. They claim they are acting out of “tough love” rather than disdain, and that they are acting in Israel’s best interests in contravention of the views of Israel’s own lively and disputatious electorate.

Those claims ring increasingly hollow, but until now they have proved sufficient for a strong majority of Jewish voters and a great many financial backers of Jewish origin in the Democratic Party. It seems that while Republicans actually compete with one another to demonstrate their pro-Israel bona fides, Democrats no longer have to bother.John F. Kennedy was the first American president to meet with an Israeli prime minister and became the first to sell arms to the Jewish state. But a U.S.-Israel relationship did not really take off until Lyndon Johnson succeeded him. Johnson’s “green light” to Israel to defend itself against Arab aggression just prior to the outbreak of the 1967 war was a critical moment in the development of the alliance between the two countries.

It was only after Israel had triumphed in that war and gained the strategic depth it needed to be less vulnerable to annihilation that American leaders began to think of Israel as an asset to the West in the Cold War, not a mere irritant to relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Jimmy Carter’s thinly disguised disenchantment with Israel led to a record-low Jewish vote for a Democratic presidential candidate when he ran for re-election in 1980—and Carter’s unyielding bitterness about that was a key motivation for his emergence as an unmistakably anti-Israel voice in the decades following his humiliating defeat.

Carter’s four years in office featured near-constant strife with Israel and the Likud government led by Menachem Begin, who took office in 1977. It was the first rightist government Israelis had elected in the state’s 29-year history. Though Begin’s supposed intransigence was blamed for the trouble—an intransigence belied by the accords that were Carter’s only foreign-policy success—the real issue was Carter’s sub-rosa hostility toward Israel, a factor that would not be fully understood until he left office.

In 1979, UN ambassador Andrew Young took it upon himself to meet secretly with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization, then correctly designated as a terrorist group. The strength of pro-Israel sentiment among Democrats was such that Carter faced enormous pressure to fire Young, who later resigned at Carter’s request. But the incident became a flashpoint, as black leaders hotly protested Young’s departure in an intra-party split that foreshadowed future problems for Israel with left-wing Democrats.

Carter’s thinly disguised disenchantment with Israel led to a record-low Jewish vote for a Democratic presidential candidate when he ran for re-election in 1980—and Carter’s unyielding bitterness about that was a key motivation for his emergence as an unmistakably anti-Israel voice in the decades following his humiliating defeat.

Many Americans had fallen in love with a pioneer Israel governed by the socialist Labour Party and represented by the romance of the agricultural and social collective known as the kibbutz. For liberal Democrats, the full-throated nationalism of Begin’s Likud Party proved disquieting, as Likud’s voting base was made up not of Jews of European origin like them but of Sephardic Jews to whom they felt little connection. Though his policies were little different from those of his Labour predecessors when it came to security issues, Begin was demonized in the press and disdained by Jewish liberals following the lead of disgusted Ashkenazi Israelis astonished to find themselves out of power for the first time.

Begin had retired by the time the first Palestinian intifada broke out in 1987. By this point, media depictions of Israel as an imperial force dominating a captive populace could no longer be blamed exclusively on Likud. The country was then led by a coalition government, and the task of putting it down fell to none other than the former Labour prime minister and future peace-process martyr Yitzhak Rabin, who oversaw a response he himself called “might, power, and beatings.” The Palestinian attempt to pose as the underdog in the conflict with Israel was assisted by a liberal mainstream media that viewed the Palestinians as the new David to Israel’s Goliath.

Arafat responded to Camp David by launching the terror war known as the Second Intifada. Nonetheless, many Democrats clung to the idea that the Jewish state had not taken enough risks for peace. The peace process itself had ironically bolstered the fallacious notion that Israel was the possessor of stolen goods rather than the administrator of disputed territories to which it also had rights.

But as the intifada continued, any concerns that liberals might be abandoning their support for Israel were entirely overshadowed by concerns about the first President George Bush. Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker was as openly hostile to Israel as Carter had been. At one point, Bush refused to give Israel loan guarantees to build housing for Russian Jews because of a dispute over West Bank settlements. Democrats railed against Bush’s treatment of Israel and reaped the benefits in 1992 when Jewish support for Bush in his failed reelection bid reached a modern low of 11 percent.
Bush’s replacement by Bill Clinton seemed to further solidify the Democratic Party’s standing as the preeminent pro-Israel party. Clinton’s affection for the Jewish state was genuine, and his hosting of the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasir Arafat on the White House Lawn earned him applause from most of the pro-Israel community.

Soon enough, the “peace process” created new problems for Israel among Democrats. With the Oslo process already failing in 1996, Israelis again turned to the right and elected Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister. Netanyahu proved willing to continue negotiating with the Palestinians in spite of their violations of the accords. But the liberal disaffection with him was unmistakable, and it fed off the idea that the dark face of Israel had been unmasked at the moment that Yigal Amir assassinated Yitzhak Rabin during a pro-Oslo rally in 1995.

Arafat responded to the Camp David Accords  by launching the terror war known as the Second Intifada, which should at least have demonstrated to all honest observers that the Palestinians were more interested in pursuing their quixotic goal of eliminating Israel than in a two-state solution. Nonetheless, many Democrats clung to the idea that the Jewish state had not taken enough risks for peace. The peace process itself had ironically bolstered the fallacious notion that Israel was the possessor of stolen goods rather than the administrator of disputed territories to which it also had rights. In the view of a growing number of liberals, the rationale for Israel’s existence depended on giving up this land no matter the consequences for its security.

Israelis across the political spectrum lost faith in the peace process owing to both the Second Intifada and the conversion of Gaza into a terror state after Ariel Sharon withdrew every settler, soldier, and settlement in 2005. But their concerns had no impact on many Democrats who still claimed to be friends of Israel.

By the time of Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008, the leader of the Democrats was a man who made no bones about representing himself as someone who was hostile to Israel’s Likud Party even as he claimed unconvincingly to be sympathetic to the country itself. And unlike his recent predecessors, Obama believed that creating more “daylight” between Israel and the United States was the key to the peace process.

But unlike presidents who had picked fights with Israel before, Obama seemed able to do so without getting significant pushback from his own party. He could consistently rely on the backing of most Jewish Democrats in his constant quarrels with the Netanyahu government.

Obama then maneuvered worldwide the Iranians recognition for their nuclear program and the end of sanctions, Obama began getting tough with both Israeli critics of his policy and Democrats who were stepping out of line.

This struggle proved to be the culmination of the Democratic Party’s long march away from Israel. In early 2015, opponents of a nuclear Iran thought they could still count on overwhelming support from both Republicans and Democrats for an effort to head off a bad deal. Bipartisan majorities had backed toughened sanctions on Iran over the president’s objection before, and there was hope that a new sanctions bill could pass as well. But at this point, Obama started to treat improved relations with Iran, and a consequent cooling of ties with Israel, as his foreign-policy priority.

The Iran-deal vote must be understood in the context of a Democratic Party whose base is now comfortable explicitly articulating its opposition to the Jewish state. At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, pro-Israel motions were omitted from the party platform. Democratic leaders sought to correct the mistake during the proceedings and were visibly shocked when a large majority of those responding to a voice vote on pro-Israel measures expressed their opposition.

Changes in American Jewish life are having an additional impact on the decline of pro-Israel Democrats. The 2013 Pew Survey also points to marked decline in a sense of Jewish peoplehood and pro-Israel sentiment among a group that comprises disproportionately loyal Democratic voters and donors. . As that segment of voters became less connected to Jewish identity, so, too, the influence of the pro-Israel community declined among Democrats. Jewish liberals were never single-issue voters obsessed with Israel. But as Israel’s image was battered by wars and the disdain of Obama, it slipped even lower on their list of priorities.
In Barack Obama’s Democratic Party, pro-Israel voices have been marginalized. That marginalization might not be permanent. The next generation of Democrats might come to understand that Obama’s foreign policy—a set of actions that have led to the rise of ISIS, the growing strength of Iran, and “daylight” between the United States and Israel—has made this country and the world more unstable and more dangerous. In American politics, the centrifugal pull of the center ultimately shifts both parties back to moderation on key issues.

That dynamic is the last best hope we have for a pathway back to support for Israel on the part of a Democratic Party that has lost its way.

(And, it sure won’t find the way back via either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. That fact is a given) jsk

Jerome S. Kaufman

- See more at: http://israel-commentary.org/#sthash.mU5R7Fl2.dpuf

Former Prez Carter, The Model For Disingenuous Anti Semite. He Only Brokered Peace To Enhance His Own Chance At Nobel Prize And Not To End Hostilities.

Jimmy Carter: From Nobel Prize to 'Terrorist' Ties

Monday, 29 Dec 2014 01:53 PM

By Todd Beamon

• 
  

The image is iconic.

On March 26, 1979, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat clasped hands at the White House in Washington after signing an agreement that would end 31 years of war between the countries.

Standing between the leaders was President Jimmy Carter, who brokered the deal after a tense 13-day summit at Camp David in Maryland in which both parties threatened to walk out daily.

The Camp David accords — reached in principle on Sept. 17, 1978 — led Begin and Sadat to receive the Nobel Peace Prize that year and solidified the Democratic president as a strong supporter of Israel and a champion of world peace.

After losing the White House to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980, Carter established the Carter Center two years later with his wife, Rosalynn, to continue his global humanitarian work.

He won his own Nobel prize in 2002 for his human-rights work. Carter turned 90 on Oct. 1.

But those years have also seen Carter voicing strong anti-Israel views and support for terrorist groups. His 2006 book — "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" — came under widespread attack for asserting that Israel's settlement on Palestinian land was the main impediment to peace in the Middle East.

He also has met with leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and has accused Israeli PrimeMinister Benjamin Netanyahu of being too eager to go to war with Iran over its nuclear ambitions.

Last August, Carter spoke at an event in Detroit sponsored by the Islamic Society of North America, identified by the Justice Department as a terrorist group — and he has long backed Hamas in its conflict with Israel.

"Hamas cannot be wished away, nor will it cooperate in its own demise," Carter and former Ireland President Mary Robinson wrote in an op-ed piece in Foreign Policy magazine that same month. "Only by recognizing its legitimacy as a political actor — one that represents a substantial portion of the Palestinian people — can the West begin to provide the right incentives for Hamas to lay down its weapons."

Carter's support for Hamas has brought harsh attacks from Jewish leaders, who charge that they reflect a long-simmering anti-Semitism on the part of the 39th president.

"He had a latent hostility toward Israel when he was president, which has now come to the surface and is frequently expressed in ill-informed criticism of Israel and support for the organizations like Hamas that seek Israel's destruction," Mitchell Bard, executive director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, told Newsmax.

"Mr. Carter has never met an Islamic terrorist that he didn’t like," Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the American Center for Democracy, told "America's Forum's" host J.D. Hayworth on Newsmax TV. "The older he's gotten, the more supportive he has become of … others who are really not supporting anything that is written in the American Constitution."

Perhaps one of Carter's strongest critics is former Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who has slammed the former president as "an all-out cheerleader for Hamas" — and has suggested that he could be violating U.S. law in calling for backing the terrorist group.

"Jimmy Carter wants the United States and the European community to recognize Hamas, to legitimate it," said Dershowitz, who also is a Newsmax columnist. "It's against the law in the United States, even if you're a former president, it's against the law to provide material support to a listed terrorist organization — and Jimmy Carter's coming awfully close to that line."

Dershowitz has even charged that Carter's statements in recent months calling for the bombing of the Islamic State (ISIS) and attacking President Barack Obama for not doing so sooner smacked of hypocrisy.

"The very idea that former President Carter, who presided over a foreign policy that enabled Iran to overthrow the Shah and substitute the first radical Islamic terrorist regime, would say that President Obama did not do enough to prevent the growth of ISIS would be laughable if it were not so pathetic," he wrote in a Newsmax column.
Carter did not respond to a Newsmax request to be interviewed for this report.

But Lawrence Wright, author of the new book — "Thirteen Days in September" — which details the inside drama of the Camp David negotiations, said that Jewish leaders were long wary of Carter — and that distrust intensified after the accords were signed.

"Carter was always the subject of suspicion for Jewish leaders," Wright told Newsmax in an interview. "He was a deep-water Baptist from rural South Georgia, and he was not the kind of political figure that was readily recognized or trusted by American Jewish leaders.

"After Camp David, there was a bad feeling on the part of many Jews that he forced Israel to sign this peace agreement — and he became the first Democratic nominee not to receive a majority of the Jewish vote. So the turn against him was immediate among Jewish leaders in the U.S.

"In Israel, there's still a bad feeling about Carter and it was amplified by his book, 'Peace Not Apartheid' — but the truth is that discourse is used in Israel all the time," Wright added. "It's just not the kind of thing they want to hear from an outsider, especially an American."

Carter overwhelmingly won the Jewish vote when he first ran for office in 1976, 64 percent to Republican President Gerald Ford's 34 percent. That was helped by his support during the presidential debates for a bill that would bar U.S. corporations from complying with an Arab boycott of Israel.

But two years later, Carter's administration agreed to sell advance weapons to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The deal was seen as a slap to Israel by Jewish leaders.

It "created a lot of tension with the pro-Israel community, which did not believe the Saudis either needed or had earned the weapons that they were being sold — and a significant portion of the Congress believed that as well," said Bard, who also is executive director of the Jewish Virtual Library.

"They thought that he was trying to take advantage of the support that the pro-Israel community was giving to the arms sale to Egypt and also to Israel and that by making it a package, he was trying to force the pro-Israel community to support something that they believed was not in Israel's or America's best interest."

He added: "They were already angry, and this was just one more thing that was creating a fear that a second term could be even worse."

Bard also cited Carter's 1980 speech in which he talked of Israel's right to live within "secure and recognized borders" — "and just in general speaking in ways that were not sympathetic to Israel's position."

Despite its significance, the Camp David agreement did not endear Carter with Jewish voters, either, Bard said. Begin agreed to give up the oil fields in the Sinai Peninsula, withdrawing Israeli defense forces over three years in return for Egypt ending its state of war and establishing peace.

Egypt captured the region in the Six-Day War in 1967.

"He believes that Menachem Begin lied to him about a settlement freeze, which in fact he didn't," Bard said.

He acknowledged the American president's role as broker, adding, however: "It would have never happened if it weren't for how bad Carter's policies were.

"The whole reason that Sadat went to Jerusalem [in 1977] was because he thought Carter's policies were so bad that if he didn't do something on his own to try to advance Egypt's interest, then he would never achieve his goals," he said.

Carter's objective at the time was an international conference to discuss Mideast peace, Bard explained, "and Sadat understood better than anyone else that would make it impossible to reach any agreement, because it would essentially give a veto to the most radical or most anti-Israel members of the conference, notably the Syrians."

Wright retorted that Jewish criticism of the president stepped up "right after Camp David."

"Many Jews felt that he had bullied Israel into the Camp David agreement — and Carter told me that he was accosted by Benjamin Netanyahu, who blamed him for forcing Israel to return Sinai.

"The Camp David accords are not loved either in Israel or in Egypt," Wright added. "That's why it's called a 'cold' peace — and this indicates how difficult it was to make the sacrifices that they did at Camp David."

The anger among Jewish Democrats played out strongly at the polls in 1980, when Carter sought re-election against Republican Ronald Reagan.

The incumbent received the lowest percentage of Jewish votes since the New Deal, 45 percent, to Reagan's 39 percent — but the independent candidate, John Anderson, drew 15 percent.

Reagan had strongly backed Israel since 1948, and much of the ethnic Jewish press was more against Carter rather than it was for either Reagan or Anderson.

"Originally, they expected him to be very supportive president," Bard said. However, "Jews turned on him in droves in the election," he added, "which really was indicative of how severe his policies were viewed, not just toward Israel but also toward the country as a whole."

Many Jewish leaders believe that these issues now fuel Carter's public support for Hamas and other anti-Israel groups that have been endorsed by the Obama administration.

President Barack Obama is reportedly considering whether to impose sanctions on Israel in an effort to stop housing construction projects in eastern Jerusalem. The possibility arises as the administration is lobbying strongly against new prohibitions on Iran over its illegal nuclear weapons program.

"All you have to do is read the Hamas charter, and you know what their motivations and goals are — and they repeat them constantly in public," Bard told Newsmax. "They don't hide what their objectives are, and Carter's always thought that if people would just sit down with him in a room, he would be able to convince them of the err of their ways and things would be all right.

"But he just doesn't understand — doesn’t want to understand, apparently — what these groups really believe, and he'd rather simply believe in what he wishes things were rather than what they really are."

Related Stories:

• Dershowitz: Israel Has to Attack a Nuclear Iran
• Top Scholar: US Universities 'Painting Israel as the New Nazi'

© 2014 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

The Land Of Israel Belongs To The Jews, The Rest Of The World Should Stay Out Of Their Business.

ISRAEL: STICK TO GOD AND YOUR GUNS

Exclusive: Joseph Farah defends Jews' right to build homes 'anywhere, anytime'

 JOSEPH FARAH

Editor’s note: Joseph Farah is in Israel this week leading a tour of the Jewish state with best-selling author Jonathan Cahn.

“Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem.”

– Zechariah 12:2

JERUSALEM – Israel’s military response to thousands of rocket attacks from Gaza and infiltrations by terrorists through a maze of Hamas-built tunnels has, somewhat predictably, prompted its enemies and many others around the world to demand the Jewish state stop building what they call “settlements” in areas on the West Bank of the Jordan River, or, more accurately, Judea and Samaria.

Among those making demands that Israel stop building – and even repairing homes – even in and around its capital city, Jerusalem, is the United States of America.

As a former Middle East correspondent and an Arab-American, let me explain why Israel must never allow pressure from its enemies or foreigners to deter the building of “settlements” or consider ceding any more land to Palestinian Arab control.

Never. Not ever.

Israel dismantled similar “settlements” in Gaza in exchange for promises of peace. But “settlements” is a loaded word. What the world calls “settlements” are Jewish communities built on historically Jewish land – territory desperately needed by Israel to protect itself from the kind of attacks being perpetrated by Palestinian Arabs in Gaza. In fact, some 9,000 Jews were forcibly removed from Gaza by the Israeli military in 2005.

How did that work out for Israel?

Not so well.

Now the focus of the world’s attention is on so-called “settlements” in and around Jerusalem and throughout Judea and Samaria. Even the U.S. has, at various times, called for Israel to stop construction of houses – and sometimes even repairs on existing structures – in those areas.

Why do I put quotes around the word “settlements”? Because it’s an ugly word. These “settlements” are nothing but Jewish communities. If Jews don’t have the right to live in historically Jewish lands, where do they have a right to live?

It may be too late for Gaza, but with anti-Semitism rising around the world, Jews need a homeland more than ever. Israel’s population is growing, from immigration, rising birth rates and increased longevity.

In addition, Israel has experimented with land giveaways, and they have only resulted in more attacks on its population centers. In other words, the land-for-peace gambit has failed miserably.

What’s the solution? Israel needs to do what is right for the Jewish people.

But these communities are a thorn in the side of Arab Palestinians. Why? Simply because they don’t accept the idea that Jews have a right to live there. In fact, polls show most Arab Palestinians don’t believe Jews have a right to live anywhere in Israel – not even Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

That’s not just the overwhelming opinion of the Arab people in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority; it’s the opinion of the leadership. The official position of the Palestinian Authority, including those supposedly negotiating “peace” terms with Israel, is that no Jews should be permitted to live in a future Palestinian state.

In other words, the Palestinian Arabs believe in religious and ethnic cleansing of their land.

Back in 1977, when Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was negotiating a peace deal with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, then-President Jimmy Carter was already pressuring Israel to halt Jewish “settlements” in Judea and Samaria.

In a meeting with Carter, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Carter raised the issue with Begin.

“Mr. President,” Begin responded, according to a new book called “Rebbe: The Life and Teachings of Menachem M. Schneerson, the Most Influential Rabbi in Modern History” by Joseph Telushkin. “Here in the United States of America, there are 11 places named Hebron, five places named Shiloh, four places named Bethel and six places named Bethlehem.”

Carter: “Indeed there are. Within 20 miles of my home there is a Bethel and a Shiloh.”

Begin: “May I be permitted to visit them one day?”

Carter: “Of course, with pleasure! There are three good Baptist churches there.”

Begin: “In that case, I shall bring along our chief rabbi to protect me. Allow me to put to you a hypothetical question. Imagine one day that the governors of the states in which these Hebrons and Shilohs and Bethels and Bethlehems were located were to issue a decree declaring that any citizen of the United States was free to settle in any one of these places except for one category – the Jews. Jews are forbidden to build homes in the Shilohs and the Hebrons and the Bethels and the Bethlehems of America – so it should be decreed. Oh dear! Everybody is welcome to settle in any of these cities whose names derive from the Book of Books except for the people of the Book. Good women and men everywhere would cry from the rooftops – ‘Scandalous! Discrimination! Bigotry!’ Am I not right?”

Carter: “Hypothetically.”

Begin: “So how can you expect me – a Jewish prime minister of the Jewish state, who heads a cabinet of 15 Jews – to forbid fellow Jews from acquiring a piece of land and building a home in the original Shiloh, in the original Beth El, in the original Bethlehem, and in the original Hebron from where our Jewish forefathers originally came? Would that not be scandalous?”

Indeed, it would be scandalous. In fact, it is scandalous for anyone to suggest that Jews don’t have a God-given right to live wherever they choose to live – but especially in those communities.

Today, as a result of this continuing, unrelenting, unwarranted and immoral international pressure on Israel to cede more territory to its sworn enemies – people who still call for the destruction of the Jewish state – Bethlehem is already devoid of a Jewish community. And this town once dominated by Christians – the little town where Jesus was born – is nearly devoid of Christians.

Tired of religious persecution, the payment of jizya taxes imposed by the new Muslim majority and getting caught in the crossfire of Palestinian Muslim attacks on Israel and the predictable responses, the small Christian community represents less than 10 percent of the population.

This proves Begin’s instincts were right – not only for Jews, but for the Christian Palestinian minority as well.

Can we all agree on one simple premise? Ethnic and religious cleansing is morally wrong. That recognition should be enough to put to rest the heckling for Israel to stop building houses for Jews – anywhere, anytime.

Israel should not be intimidated by what the world demands of it – not even when U.S. leadership turns its back. Israel has a far more potent ally – the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Obama Admin Starts Calling Netanyahu Names Because He Will NOT Do What They Want.

The Obama Administration is quickly moving to marginalize Israel by demeaning  and publicly denouncing the Prime Minister. Usually disagreements with leaders of other countries are not expressed publicly, protocol demands that respect be given to those to whom you might disagree, however, in Israel's case, all normal relations seem to have gone out of the window.

 The following post shows how estranged the leaders of Israel and the US have become. Is this planned and part of a plan?

We think so. It is our belief (and have said it many times on this blog) that the goal of the Obama Administration is to isolate Israel from the rest of the world, cripple it with worldwide sanctions and then call for its demise as a "pariah nation."  In other words, BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions) on steroids!

There already have been two occasions that indicate to us the plan is proceeding as planned. The first was the shut down of air traffic to Ben Gurion.  This short lived effort was an initial "shot across the bow" by the Administration to show that they could and would shut down Israel's economy. Since a large portion of trade moves out of the country by air, this would definitely hurt.

The damage is quantified in the article by  Oxford Economics "Economic Benefits From Air Transport In Israel", in which we read:

 While air accounts for just 0.5% of the tonnage of global trade 

(Chart 3.8), air freight makes up 34.6% of the value of global trade.  

For more on the impact see: http://www.iata.org/policy/Documents/Benefits-of-Aviation-Israel-2012.pdf

The second occasion was the stoppage in replenishing  the Hellfire missiles and other military supplies that up until the Obama Administration had been transactions between the Israeli and US military. Israel would make  a request and and the US would approve the equipment. They are our ally and why should we not support them.

 Not so with the Obama group. During the Operation Protective Edge, the request for the Hellfire missiles came to the US military and they were ready to be shipped until the Administration heard about it. The re-supply was scrapped and held for a month until the White House approved. Now, any military materiel that is going to Israel must be approved by 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

How easy will it be to stop the resupply? What will it take? Simply the President telling his compliant underlings that no more military supplies go to Israel and it will  happen.

The Obama Administration has shown that it can shut down air traffic which dramatically impacted Israel's economy and prevented the re-supply of military materiel. The only issues left for a BDS full fledged attack are a world wide boycott of Israel which would come from the United Nations sanctions. Getting the UN to take this action would be child's play.  They routinely condemn Israel while letting terrible massacres (Darfur, Syria, Iran and ISIS are examples) pass without mention. For that matter Syria and Iran are on the human rights council of the UN, does that make any sense? So having Irasl condemned would be easy work for the Obama crew.  

When the White House calls Netanyahu "chickenshit", that is deplorable action and it tells us that this Administration is in full discredit mode against Israel. We will see the BDS implemented soon and Israel will be made to fight for its life against the entire Middle East (and without US help and support.)  This will happen soon, probably before the end of the Obama term in 2016.

Hopefully, we are wrong and nothing terrible happens. Nothing would make us happier.

Conservative Tom

US Official: “Bibi is a Chickenshit” Prime Minister

By Lea Speyer October 29, 2014 , 10:27 am

40 12

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“The one who conceals hatred has lying lips, and whoever utters slander is a fool.” (Proverbs 10:18)

(Photo: GPO)

Diplomatic relations between Israel and the US are in a “full-blown crisis” amid growing reports of hostility between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama, The Atlantic reported on Tuesday.

In an article written by Jeffry Goldberg, a senior Obama administration official explained that the supposed “unbreakable” bond between Israel and the US “is now the worst it’s ever been.”

The official made no qualms about how he and other Obama officials view the policies of the Israeli prime minister. “The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,” the official stated.

US officials are supposedly being frustrated by Netanyahu’s “near-pathological desire for career-preservation” and nothing more, the article claimed.

“The good thing about Netanyahu is that he’s scared to launch wars,” the senior official stated. “The bad thing about him is that he won’t do anything to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arab states.”

“The only thing he’s interested in is protecting himself from political defeat. He’s not [Yitzhak] Rabin, he’s not [Ariel] Sharon, he’s certainly no [Menachem] Begin. He’s got no guts,” the official added.

In regards to Iran, the Obama administration views Netanyahu’s threats to launch a preemptive strike against Iran as completely basis. The empty threats are too little, too late, the official explained.

“It’s too late for him to do anything. Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger,” he said. “It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.”

Over the past week, diplomatic rhetoric between the two nations has heated up as the US condemned Netanyahu’s decision to approve the construction of 1,000 new homes in Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Paski said that Israel’s decision to build across the Green Line was “incompatible with their stated desire to live in a peaceful society.”

Netanyahu rejected American and other international criticism. “We have built in Jerusalem, we are building in Jerusalem and we will continue to build in Jerusalem,” Netanyahu said on Tuesday.

“I have heard a claim that our construction in Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem makes peace more distant. It is the criticism which is make peace more distant,” he added.

The “breakdown in relations” between Obama and Netanyahu has brought a new era in Israel-US relations. According to Goldberg, Netanyahu has “written off” the Obama administration with the prime minister changing tactics by appealing to Congress and the American people.

US officials have expressed “red-hot anger” at Netanyahu for maintaining policies to build in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

Netanyahu, who on Tuesday criticized those who condemn Israeli construction beyond the Green Line as “disconnected from reality,” led Goldberg to say that “the Netanyahu government appears to be disconnected from reality.”

“Jerusalem is on the verge of exploding into a third Palestinian uprising. It is true that Jews have a moral right to live anywhere they want in Jerusalem, their holiest city,” Goldberg continued. “It is also true that a mature government understand that not all rights have to be exercised simultaneously.”

In response to The Atlantic’s report, the Prime Minister’s Office rebuffed the report. Israel Radio reported sources inside the office said that Netanyahu “will continue to stand for Israeli interests, and no pressure will change this.”

Speaking at the Knesset Wednesday afternoon, the prime minster made his first public comments about the report. “I respect our ties with the US,” he said. “I am being attacked because I am defending Israel.”

Read more at http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/23462/us-official-bibi-chickenshit/#ha6pXT7JYsSjOuL6.99