Outgoing President Barack Hussein Obama has devoted a chunk of his remaining time and attention in office to indulge in a spiteful, personal demonstration of his hatred for Israel. It's the final attack of the most anti-Israel administration in U.S. history. And it isn't finished yet.
A reluctant Egypt had been prepared to present an incredibly biased anti-Israel UN Security Council resolution, a bigoted text that had been in the works for some time. But Egyptian President Asissi, after a conversations with president-elect Donald Trump and Israeli prime Minister Netanyahu pulled the resolution indefinitely. As various diplomatic sources reported, Al Sissi decided that antagonizing the incoming president and straining his security arrangements with Israel weren't worth a UN resolution he didn't want to present anyway.
President Obama had been colluding on this all along with the Palestinians, even advising on wording. He contacted the anti-Israel countries of New Zealand, Venezuela, and the Muslim nations of Senegal and Malaysia to quickly co-sponsor the resolution and get in on the floor quickly for a vote. It passed 14-0, with the U.S. abstaining as planned.
In spite of the outright lies being told by the administrations lackeys, Resolution 2334 represents a major change in U.S. policy.
It demonizes Israel, yet again, as the 'occupying power' in disregard of all historical and legal norms. It refers to Judea, Samaria (AKA the West Bank) as well as east Jerusalem as 'occupied Palestinian territory,' a neat trick since there never was a Palestine and the 1994 peace treaty between Jordan and Israel didn't even mention a Palestinian state.
It calls for Jerusalem, with the Old City, which contains all the Jewish holy sites including the Western Wall to be ceded to 'Palestine.' That means those sites will be desecrated as they were during the nineteen year Jordanian occupation, and will be closed to Jews forever. Yes, 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, inhabited by Jews for thousands of years except for a 19-year hiatus between 1948-1967 when the Jews were ethnically cleansed from the area is now 'occupied Palestinian territory'. This delegitimizes Israel and the Jewish people and concurs with the anti-semitic UNESCO resolution of October,2016 that nullified all Jewish and Christian ties and connections to Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and referred to all of the Holy sites there by their Muslim names. Obama saw to it that United States voted against that UNESCO resolution, but there was an election going on then. That's obviously why the Obama administration vetoed a similar resolution to 2334 in 2011 before his re-election run, but didn't veto 2334. There's no election going on now, and Barack Hussein Obama's situation has obviously changed. Now he can take off the mask without any cost or consequences.
This new diktat creates the boundaries for 'Palestine' giving them all of Judea and Samaria as well as East Jerusalem. In other words, it legitimizes the creation of 580,000 Jewish refugees as well as totally unsafe borders for Israel. It also violates the Oslo Accords and the Road Map, agreements the U.S. was a signatory to that stated unequivocally that any settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority could only be achieved through direct negations between the two parties. And for the first time, it legitimizes Obama's call for imposing a Palestinian state on the 1948 ceasefire lines, another total departure from previous U.S. policy.
It calls for member nations, “to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967” which legitimizes boycotts. And it calls for an immediate end to all Israeli construction In Judea, Samaria. According to this resolution, Israel isn't even allowed to build a kindergarten or repair a road.
This again is an Obama policy, not something historic. Obama's UN ambassador Samantha Power is noted for calling for the U.S. to unilaterally invade the region, force Israel into indefensible borders, engage in ethnic cleansing by throwing every Jew out of Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem, turn those areas over to 'Palestine' and establish a U.S. peacekeeping force there to keep Israel from retaliating against the inevitable terrorist attacks on its civilians that would result from the new borders.
What this UN resolution calls for is pretty close to that, but Ambassador Power had the unmitigated gall to lie about it anyway. She defended the U.S. abstention as an act to save the so-called “two-state” solution, something she said Israeli 'settlements activities' are supposedly jeopardizing. She even had the nerve to quote President Ronald Reagan and deliberately take him out of context to justify the vote she just cast. In a 1982 statement, President Ronald Reagan did call for an end to "the use of any additional land for the purpose of settlements.” In that statement, quoted by Ambassador Power, President Reagan said that "the immediate adoption of a settlement freeze by Israel, more than any other action, could create the confidence needed for wider participation in these talks."
The part she conveniently left out was that in his speech, President Reagan was referring to a freeze on new settlements during a “period of transition,” which would “begin after free elections for a self-governing Palestinian authority” and could prove that “Palestinian autonomy poses no threat to Israel’s security.” President Reagan also said that “the United States will not support the establishment of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza,” but suggested instead “self-government by the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in association with Jordan.”
Sounds like Ronaldus Maximus understood the true nature of the 'Palestinians' and why 'statehood' for them was a singularly bad idea. Even the Oslo Accords only referred to limited autonomy, not a separate Palestinian state.
You see, it's not Israel's communities in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem that have prevented a settlement. As Mahmoud Abbas himself admitted, it was President Obama's idea to make a building freeze a major issue when it wasn't before, even to the point of creating a major diplomatic incident between the US and Israel over what was essentially a local zoning issue and then harshly criticizing Israel for rejecting an offer to resume the freeze that the US never made in the first place.
What's prevented a solution is the continued refusal of the Arabs whom call themselves 'Palestinians' to negotiate anything. negotiating, of course means making concessions to thew other side, and Abbas has said repeatedly that he's unwilling to make a single concession to Israel. And why should he, especially now?
President Obama started out his presidency letting anyone who was paying attention that he had a major problem with America's alliance with Israel and wanted to create lots of 'daylight' between the two countries.
He was thoroughly schooled in his disdain for Israel by his mentors from his earliest days, Frank Marshall Davis, Edward Said, Louis Farrakhan, Jeremiah Wright, Khalid al-Mansour, Bill Ayres and others. Abbas, as a trained Soviet apparatchnik recognized Obama's training instantly and knew that all he had to do was hold out until Obama gifted him what Abbas, wanted, without any concessions whatsoever.
No one with a shred of intellectual honesty can separate this UN action from Jew hatred. This resolution not only meets Natan Sharansky's famous '3D' definition of anti-semitism, ( Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization) but actually conforms to the U.S. Department of State's official working definition of it.
So, where does this go from here?
Reaction in the U.S. itself was mixed in some interesting ways.
President-elect Donald Trump was predictably outraged. Aside from his own warmth towards Israel and the Jewish people, this an attempt by a lame duck president to impose a policy on him as an incoming president was despicable, and Trump made no bones about saying so.
Trump apparently found out what was up, and had called for Obama to veto the resolution the day before it went tothe UN, saying, "As the United States has long maintained, peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians will only come through direct negotiations between the parties, and not through the imposition of terms by the United Nations,” the president-elect said in a statement Thursday.
"This puts Israel in a very poor negotiating position and is extremely unfair to all Israelis."
And Trump warned the U.N. shortly after the vote via Twitter that “things will be different” after his inauguration.
Many members of congress also expressed outrage. As you can imagine, this was mainly the Republicans. Sen. James Lankford, (R-OK), a member of the Senate appropriations subcommittee responsible for making foreign aid funding decisions, tweeted, "U.N. funding should be up for discussion if the anti #Israel resolution is approved." Senators Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton and others also voiced disgust at this and are calling for defunding the UN, unless this is repealed.
The Israelis,of course, are livid at this deliberate betrayal. But they should have expected it. This was always going to happen with Barack Hussein Obama in the White House, and I predicted it a long time ago. Needless to say, Israel isn't going to abide by any of this.No country would, unless they were collectively suicidal.
Contrary to popular belief in some circles, Israel is not dependent on American military aid. They have their own thriving arms industry and the amount involved is a relatively small part of their defense budget, although it undoubtedly helps. Actually, as I've pointed out before, the U.S. gets far more in goods and services from Israel than we pay out, and Obama's ' generous' new aid package was actually a reduction,not an increase and came with some major strings attached.
The real reason Netanyahu accepted it was an attempt to mollify what he understood was an anti-Israel president, and to try to avoid losing the alliance's real benefit for Israel...that of a trusted friend who would fend off what amounts to institutionalized Jew hatred in the sewer the UN has become. Frankly, after eight years of this president, he should have known better.
But with that benefit now gone, the Israelis have learned a vital and important lesson, one Obama didn't intend. This blatant treachery united the vast majority of Israelis. It proved that Netanyahu and the Israeli Right were correct all along. They now know that there's absolutely no benefit for them in making any concessions, or negotiating anything.Israel could reduce itself to an enclave around Tel Aviv and it would still be too much. And they would still be libeled as 'the occupying power' and face more demands no matter what.
What President Obama and his creatures don't understand is that instead of preserving the fallacy of the so-called two-state solution, this has killed it. In spite of a few indeterminate words about “all acts of violence against civilians, including acts of terror, as well as all acts of provocation, incitement and destruction” Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have never taken anything like that seriously because they have never suffered any consequences at all for it from the UN,the U.S. or the 'international community.' The aid has kept coming in, and no matter what horrendous atrocities they commit against Israeli civilians or what gets taught in the Palestinian Authority's mosques, schools and official media, no matter how well they reward the perpetrators, there's no penalty for their actions. Just pro forma 'condemnations of all violence against civilians' and calls to 'reduce tension' as if Israel was equally at fault.
This resolution essentially legitimizes terrorist attacks on Israelis as 'resistance' and don't think the 'Palestinians' won't rev things up. The Israelis know that and will respond in a far more decisive way than before now that they fully understand that to the UN, nothing they do to defend themselves is legitimate. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Instead of a partner for peace or someone to negotiate with in good faith, Israel, for the first time since the Second Intifada is going to treat Hamas and the Palestinian Authority as exactly what they have always been in reality - a toxic, hostile enemy.
Israel will build in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria like never before. And they may very well annex Area C at the least. After all, if the UN calls the Western Wall inJerusalem and Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, some of which have existed since the 1920's 'occupied Palestinian territory,' why not?
As for President Obama, his plan is to double down.
Today, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry made a speech which basically defended 2334. He re-emphasized the lie that the U.S. has always opposed 'settlements' in Judea and Samaria and has always supported a two state solution on the 1948 cease fire lines or to use Kerry's terminology, 'the pre 1967 lines.' The truth, of course is that no U.S. Administration ever called the Jewish communities in Judea,Samaria and Jerusalem 'illegal' before, or called for a two state solution on the 1948 cease fire lines. This is Obama's policy and his alone.
He also trotted out the old line that "“It is the only way to ensure Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state living in peace and security with its neighbors.”
He seems to forget that Israel is already a Jewish, democratic state with 20% of its population consisting of Arabs, most of whom are fully integrated into Israeli society with the full protection of law. How many Jews live in Abbas's 'Palestine?'. Abbas has already said that no Jews will be allowed in his little reichlet. If anyone has a problem with remaining democratic, it isn't Israel.But you'd never know that to listen to John Kerry. he also repeated the call for a divided Jerusalem and the de facto creation of 580,000 Jewish refugees.
As for peace and security, why would he or any sane person believe that the Arabs whom call themselves Palestinian have any intent of living in peace with Israel, no matter what? Kerry made a mention of their incitement to violence and glorification of terrorists, saying, "The murders of innocents are still glorified on Fatah websites.”
“Despite statements by President Abbas, too often they send a different message by failing to condemn specific attacks and by naming public squares, streets and schools after terrorists.”
Is Kerry really that blind and clueless to think that's going to change, especially since there's no consequences for it, and it's being rewarded by the UN and the Obama Administration?
Kerry made a vague promise in his speech that the US would not seek further UN action. That doesn't mean they won't condone it, help plan and compose it, and do their best to help push it through.
On January 16th, there's a long planned French-sponsored conference that will focus exclusively Israel and establishing a Palestinian state. Israel is not attending, but the U.S. will be there.
On January 17th, there's yet another UN Security Council meeting scheduled. The UN normally moves quite slowly, but rest assured that both the Paris conference and the meeting have already been pretty much scripted. My guess is that another resolution arises out of it.
President Barack Hussein Obama isn't through attacking Israel yet.
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2 comments:
I'm glad you finally weighed in on this. I knew you'd have something interesting to say.
Thanks Dave.
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