November 23, 2014

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

While attention is focused on the immigration edicts, we should not overlook problems in the Middle East. Roger Simon posts on last week’s attacks in Jerusalem.

What to say about the latest round of Islamo-carnage in Jerusalem that hasn’t been said thousands of times before? Golda Meir made it all clear in her famous 1957 speech at the National Press Club in DC: “Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.”

In other words, basically never. The hate culture of the Palestinians — and almost all Arabs — is so deeply imbued it’s hard to imagine it ever changing. After this recent incident, they danced in the street with hatchets and gave each other candy.

Lots of people have tried to make peace with them. The supposed war-monger Ariel Sharon uprooted his own people and gave the Palestinians Gaza. We all know what happened. Then prime minister Ehud Olmert offered the Palestinians the peace deal of the century. They walked away.

The reason is obvious. The Palestinians don’t want a two-state solution and never have. And not just Hamas with their infamous charter urging the death of all Jews, even Jewish trees (whatever that means) — all of them. …

  

 

Mark Steyn says ISIS are “fast track” Nazis.

… ISIS are fast-track Nazis. No messing about with a few property restrictions and intermarriage laws as a little light warm-up: They’re only in the business of “final solutions”, and they start on Day One and don’t quit until the last Christian and Yazidi is dead or fled. As I’ve often remarked about today’s exhaustively cleansed Maghreb, Levant and Araby, Islam is king on a field of corpses. But pikers like the Muslim Brotherhood, the Baathists, the House of Saud take their time. ISIS are shooting for the Guinness Book of Records.

Fortunately, progressive opinion in the west hates Jews more than it loves Christians or Yazidi or Shia or Kurds, so ISIS can get on with killing everyone they want to kill. George Packer reports in The New Yorker:

Karim couldn’t help expressing bitterness about this. “I don’t see any attention from the rest of the world,” he said. “In one day, they killed more than two thousand Yazidi in Sinjar, and the whole world says, ‘Save Gaza, save Gaza.’ ”

Indeed. But you have to pick your causes. To put pressure on Netanyahu, you fly in John Kerry to bore him to death. To put pressure on ISIS would require a commitment the west is not willing to make. So Christians will vanish from the region, and the Yazidi will vanish from the world. …

 

Jonathan Tobin reacts to NY Times suggesting moral equivalence in the Palestinian conflicts.

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s terror attack in Jerusalem in which two Palestinian terrorists slaughtered four Jews in a synagogue, the international media was forced to change, at least for a day or two, their consistent narrative about the Middle East conflict which centered on alleged Israeli misbehavior rather than the reality of Palestinian intransigence, incitement, and violence. But even under these egregious circumstances, mainstream journalists sought to establish a flimsy moral equivalence between this atrocity and what they sought to claim were comparable Israeli outrages conducted against Muslims. An example of this came in the analysis by the New York Times’s Jodi Rudoren who asserted, “Jewish vandalism against mosques is a regular occurrence.” But while such regrettable instances have occurred, they are not “regular” and pale in comparison to the toll of Arab terrorism directed at Jewish targets. …

… Palestinian society embraced the two synagogue murderers as heroes this week. Their act of barbarism was celebrated in the streets of Palestinian cities and endorsed by members of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah Party (though, forced by Secretary of State John Kerry, Abbas issued a condemnation) as well as their Hamas rivals. This is hardly surprising since Abbas had praised recent terror attacks on Jews by Palestinians and even said one who attempted to murder a Jewish activist was a “martyr” who went straight to heaven. …

 

 

George Friedman of Stratfor comments on the foreign policy of a failed presidency.

… Therefore, if we follow historical patterns, Obama will now proceed slowly and ineffectively to increase military operations in Syria and Iraq, while raising non-military pressure on Russia, or potentially initiating some low-level military activities in Ukraine. The actions will be designed to achieve a rapid negotiating process that will not happen. The presidency will shift to the other party, as it did with Truman, Johnson and George W. Bush. Thus, if patterns hold true, the Republicans will retake the presidency. This is not a pattern unknown to Congress, which means that the Democrats in the legislature will focus on running their own campaigns as far away from Obama and the next Democratic presidential candidate as possible.

The period of a failed presidency is therefore not a quiet time. The president is actively trying to save his legacy in the face of enormous domestic weakness. Other countries, particularly adversaries, see little reason to make concessions to failed presidents, preferring to deal with the next president instead. These adversaries then use military and political oppositions abroad to help shape the next U.S. presidential campaign in directions that are in their interests.

It is against this backdrop that all domestic activities take place. The president retains the veto, and if the president is careful he will be able to sustain it. Obama will engage in limited domestic politics, under heavy pressure from Congressional Democrats, confining himself to one or two things. His major activity will be coping with Syria, Iraq and Russia, both because of crises and the desire for a legacy. The last two years of a failed presidency are mostly about foreign policy and are not very pleasant to watch.