The Council Has Spoken!! This Week's Watcher's Council Results

Alea iacta est...the Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and we have the results  for this week's Watcher's Council match up.

"Israel exists; it has a right to exist in peace behind secure and defensible borders; and it has a right to demand of its neighbors that they recognize those facts. I have personally followed and supported Israel's heroic struggle for survival, ever since the founding of the State of Israel 34 years ago. In the pre-1967 borders Israel was barely 10 miles wide at its narrowest point. The bulk of Israel's population lived within artillery range of hostile Arab armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again." -Ronald Reagan, 1982


"The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts....I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us.Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us." - Eric Hoffer, 1968

"We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps." - Barack Obama, 2011





This week's winner, Joshuapundit's  'Nice Little Jewish State Ya Got There..Shame If Anything Were to Happen To It' is a reaction and analysis of a widely publicized interview President Obama gave when Israeli leader Benyamin Netanyahu was en route to meet with him, and how it related to some subsequent events. Here's a slice:

While Israeli PM Benyamin Netanyahu was already en route to the United States to discuss the Middle East peace process,  President Obama gave an interview at the beginning of last week to a friendly journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg.The shock waves from what the president had to say are still reverberating.

President Obama started by talking about the Israeli-Arab peace process.

The president, to summarize briefly, embraces the tired idea of 'linkage' wholeheartedly. In his view, Israel catering to the demands of the Palestinian Authority, giving up strategic territory in exchange for vague promises from Mahmoud Abbas and accepting the establishment of a hostile state on Israel's borders will magically lead to peace in the Middle East. Israel's Arab neighbors will all immediately become allies and friends, the Iranians will stop their quest for nuclear weapons and stop threatening to destroy Israel every two weeks or so and Hamas and Hezbollah will close up shop, disarm and go out of business.

When Goldberg prompted him, he made a few pro forma remarks about Netanyahu and about the  American 'commitment to Israel being rock solid'. But as he made plain, he wants Israel to comply with all of the Palestinian demands, and quickly. Or else. Because, you see, there are going to be a lot more Palestinians and Israeli Arabs who will overwhelm Israel demographically, the EU and others are going to isolate Israel internationally and the U.S. is going to not be able to defend Israel diplomatically any longer. Unmentioned is that much of any diplomatic isolation Israel faces is a direct result of the animosity exhibited towards the Jewish State by President Obama and his administration.

Even Goldberg, a long time Obama supporter,  evidenced some shock in a subsequent interview with PBS's Charlie Rose and characterized this as a threat.

The president,of course, focused exclusively on Arab rights rather than Jewish ones, and on Israeli security...which of course, he expects Israel to depend totally on the United States to oversee and handle, something that can be changed at the president's whim. He characterizes the Palestinians as ready for peace, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, because to the president, it’s those stubborn Jews who are holding things up.

Just for the record, that demographic threat the president and Secretary Kerry keep focusing on that is supposed to doom Israel as a democratic state unless those Jews do what he wants and fast is pure fantasy. The real truth as I write this is that the trends shows a Jewish majority in Judea and Samaria of well over 60%, because the Jewish fertility rate has increased while Palestinian rates have collapsed. In fact, Jewish fertility rates in Judea and Samaria have already overtaken Arab rates at 3.04 vs. 2.91 children per woman. Israel continues to attract a high rate of immigration, with many more to come, especially from Europe, while Palestinian emigration rates have risen sharply. Time is on the side of Israel, not the Palestinians...which is the real reason for the haste to push through a deal by the White House.

President Obama's fantasy world also includes a portrait of Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority as committed to peace.At one point, the president referred to Abbas as 'the most moderate Palestinian leader the Israelis are ever going to get.'

This could have been the cue for Goldberg to remind the president that this is the same Mahmoud Abbas who has repeatedly said that he will not make any concessions to Israel, who insists on a Jew free reichlet and who recently signed a unity agreement with the genocidal Hamas. This is the same 'moderate' who wrote his thesis at Moscow University on how the Holocaust was a myth and made it a required part of the Palestinian educational curriculum, regardless of what he told a group of hand-picked Leftist Israeli students in Ramallah last week. This is the same leader supposedly  committed to peace and co-existence who sees to it that convicted murderers of Israeli civilians are honored as 'holy martyrs', heroes and role models and rewards them financially.

Instead, Goldberg  merely pointed out that Abbas was "also the leader of a weak, corrupt and divided Palestinian entity that is already structurally semi-powerless. Do you think he could deliver anything more than a framework agreement? Is this the guy who can lead the Palestinian people to say, "OK, no more claims against Israel, permanent peace, permanent recognition?"

And President Obama's reply? "I think it has to be tested. The question is: What is lost by testing it?" The answer, of course is the same thing that was lost because of Oslo and the Road Map - hundreds of Jewish lives and hundreds of others maimed for life. President Obama, to be frank, didn't seem all that put out by the idea of Jewish bloodshed, as long as a Palestinian state the way he envisions it is the result.

Israeli PM Netanyahu probably came to the U.S. prepared to accept the non-binding Kerry framework and to try once more to convince President Obama that the Iranians are committed to obtaining nuclear weapons, that they must be stopped and time is running out. Instead, he was hit with this while in mid air.

Not only did President Obama convince a lot of Israelis that his view of an Israeli/Palestinian peace accord isn't rooted in reality and that they can no longer depend on the U.S. as any kind of honest broker, but the president's remarks had to let Netanyahu know in advance that any attempt to get President Obama to look at reality on Iran was a waste of time.

In the interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, President Obama also did some chest thumping about Iran, saying that the Iranians were cooperating because they were afraid of him! To hear President Obama talk, because they're so scared of what he might do, "they've halted their nuclear program, no centrifuges being installed; the 20 percent enriched uranium being drawn down to zero; Arak on hold."

Absolutely none of this is true. The Iranians say flatly that enrichment is continuing, a whole new crop of advanced centrifuges is being installed , and the Iranian heavy water reactor at Arak,which has no peaceful application is not on hold at all.

In the end, instead of publicly accepting the framework, Netanyahu merely took a copy from the president privately without commenting and left for home. Among other things, this completely sandbagged Secretary of State John Kerry, who was not briefed on the interview in advance and according to one of my sources definitely in a position to know, was left scrambling to do damage control.

The latest indication of this president's disdain for Israel occurred after Netanyahu left the White House. One of Israel's written-in-stone conditions for any peace agreement is the formal acceptance by Abbas of Israel as a Jewish State. Israel wants this because it would signal a final end to the conflict, terminate the Palestinian fiction that Jews are just 'colonists' who have no connection or rights to the land of Israel and end the idea that thousands of those hostile Arabs whom represent themselves as Palestinian 'refugees' somehow have a right to resettle in Israel.

Abbas has always refused to do this for exactly these reasons, and once this interview was released, he repeated it once again. Not only that, but those Arabs whom represent themselves as Palestinians and whom President Obama claims are ready for peaceful coexistence refuse to accept Israel as a Jewish state either. Because like Abbas, they still cling to the dream of someday driving the Jews into the sea.

 

When Abbas again repeated his refusal, what was different this time is that our own State Department backed him up on it.

Much more at the link

In our non-Council category, the winner was Victor Davis Hanson with A New Obama Doctrine? submitted by Bookworm Room , which poses the question of whether President Obama will change his foreign policy direction ala' President Carter after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

OK, here are this week’s full results. Only Rhymes With Right was unable to vote this week,but was not subject to the mandatory 2/3 vote penalty.:

Council Winners

• *First place with 5 1/3 votes!Joshuapundit –'Nice Little Jewish State Ya Got There..Shame If Anything Were to Happen To It'


• Second place with 1 2/3 votes –The Noisy Room – Internet Control — Keys To The Kingdom


• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –The Razor – Putin's Man In The White House


• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes – Bookworm Room – The anti-bossy campaign is just the latest example of the Left’s obsession with gender, sex, and sexuality as a way of remaking society


• Fourth place with 1 vote –GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – Air/Sea Battle II


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –VA Right! - I Still Love My Country, But Thanks to Obama, I Am Embarrassed for America


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –The Right Planet – The World’s Slide Towards the ‘Second October Revolution’


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –Nice Deb – Ron Fournier: POTUS May Be In The Middle Of “Full Blown Constitutional Crisis” (Video)


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –Liberty's Spirit – The Importance of the Words "Jewish State"


• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote – Simply Jews – Vladimir Vladimirovich, please liberate us!


• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote – The Independent Sentinel – Boeing Believes Flight MH370 Is In Taliban Territory in Pakistan – Updates

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 3 1/3 votes! – Victor Davis Hanson-A New Obama Doctrine? submitted by Bookworm Room


• Second place with 2 votes – Daniel Greenfield(Sultan Knish)/ FrontPage Mag –The End of International Law submitted by The Noisy Room


• Third place with 1 1/3 votes -Dr. Stuart Schwartz/American Thinker – My Wife's Last Days -- And the Coming ObamaCare Death Panel submitted by The Right Planet


• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote-Skeptoid –What I’d Say to the Latest Anti-Vaccine Celebrity submitted by The Razor


• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote-Avi Issacharoff/Times of Israel – Assad is Starving Palestinians to death in a Syrian Camp, And Nobody Cares submitted by Liberty's Spirit


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote -The Passing Parade – Leisure time on someone else's nickel, or so I'm told submitted by Simply Jews


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote -Arthur Herman/Commentary – Will Israel Be the Next Energy Superpower? submitted by Joshuapundit


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote -Lilia Shevtsova/The American Interest – Falling into Putin’s Trap submitted by The Glittering Eye


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote - Blazing Cat Fur – Uighur leader: “We have plans for many attacks in China,” plus police officer killed in Xinjiang's capital submitted by Watcher


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote -Boudica Weblog –Rabbi in Crimea urges Jews to leave Ukraine, fears neo-Nazi attacks submitted by The Independent Sentinel


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote -Alexandria – 44 Imposes Sanctions On Russia submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote -David Limbaugh -Obama, In His Sole Discretion submitted by Nice Deb


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote - Volokh Conspiracy/WAPO – Dateline: Shushan, Persian Empire, 600 BCE submitted by The Watcher

See you next week! Don't forget to tune in on Monday AM for this week's Watcher's Forum, as the Council and their invited special guests take apart one of the provocative issues of the day with short takes and weigh in...don't you dare miss it. And don't forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.....'cause we're cool like that!