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Roger Simon wonders if American Jews are giving thought to the way Obama is treating Israel.
…The Obama administration has taken the admonition to “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer” to a new level. They want to make love with their enemies while taking their friends to the woodshed and beating the living daylights out of them. And take them they did, time after time. First Biden, then Hillary, then some semi anonymous character at the State Department dressing down Ambassador Oren (talk about disrespecting your betters!), then on to the talk show circuit with the droning Gibbs and Obama’s “best Jew” David Axlerod. His other “best Jew” Rahm Emanuel was nowhere in evidence, as far as I know. (Interesting, that).
But back to my lede. Is the Jewish love affair with the Democratic Party about to end? I know many will be skeptical. And they should be. But I suspect something is brewing. This kind of excessive and weirdly paternalistic attitude to the state of Israel, directed so clearly from the top, seems to come out of a kind of unexamined personal animus. The long record that Obama has of friendship with virulent enemies of Israel has not gone unnoticed. …
In Jewish World Review, Anne Bayefsky believes the recent vitriol directed at Israel is to intimidate the Israelis from protecting themselves against a nuclear Iran.
…Reading between the lines, the true explanation of the hyperbole of describing the announcement of housing plans as “insulting” – to use Clinton’s word – is something else entirely: Iran. Ironically, when Vice-President Biden went before the Israeli public on March 11 and told them “The United States is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, period,” only politeness prevented Israelis from laughing out loud. Nobody believed him. Everyone knows that the UN is not going to deliver a Security Council resolution imposing serious sanctions on Iran in time to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon. Every time Obama officials claim they are working on sanctions, it just reinforces the conclusion that they have absolutely no intention of doing what is necessary to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.
That leaves Israel holding the bag. And Obama – along with European countries and Australia – do not want Israel to use force against Iran’s nuclear facilities regardless of the mortal threat that they pose to Israel’s population. The President’s only way to prevent Israel from acting – without using more overt intimidation that would reveal his having put Israel’s security way down on his list of priorities and risk a backlash in Congress – is to scare Israel fast with threatened isolation on a trumped-up affront like a bunch of new houses in the desert. …
…And we also know that for the Vice President of the United States to stand before Israelis, address the greatest immediate threat to their peace and security and misrepresent the President’s willingness to do what it takes to prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb – is what is really insulting.
In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin blogs that the Obami are getting in the way of their own peace process by criticizing Israel and stirring up Palestinian unrest.
What prompted this morning’s violence in Jerusalem’s Old City? Though the stone-throwing and disruptions resulted in only eight Israeli security personnel being wounded and a similar number of Palestinian casualties, the context of the American diplomatic offensive against the Jewish state must be seen as an incentive for the Palestinians to do their own part to ratchet up the pressure. While the Obama administration is using its hurt feelings about the announcement of building homes in a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem to put the screws to the Netanyahu government, the Palestinians have their own game to play here. And since Washington has decided to go all out to falsely portray the Israelis as the primary obstacle to peace, it should be expected that the supposed victims of the new housing — Palestinians who are in no way harmed by the building of new apartments — will seek to keep events churning. …
Also in Contentions, Noah Pollak blogs that the Obami are mastering the art of alienating friends.
Jeffrey Goldberg spoke with White House officials today and posted this report.
“So what is the goal? The goal is force a rupture in the governing coalition that will make it necessary for Netanyahu to take into his government Livni’s centrist Kadima Party (he has already tried to do this, but too much on his terms) and form a broad, 68-seat majority in Knesset…
Obama knows that this sort of stable, centrist coalition is the key to success. He would rather, I understand, not have to deal with Netanyahu at all — people near the President say that, for one thing, Obama doesn’t think that Netanyahu is very bright, and there is no chemistry at all between the two men — but he’d rather have a Netanyahu who is being pressured from his left than a Netanyahu who is being pressured from the right.”
So here we have on record the Obama administration saying 1) that it is trying to topple the government of a democratic ally (if only we could try this in Tehran!) 2) that it believes it has such mastery of Israeli politics that publicly bludgeoning Bibi will result in such a shakeup, and that 3) even if the hoped-for new government is formed, the White House thinks it’s a good idea to go on record stating that the Prime Minister they will have to deal with is stupid. …
In Power Line, Paul Mirengoff blogs about the Obami lack of diplomacy and WaPo commentary on the subject.
…But the Post’s perspective is an important one because it purports to reject what Obama is doing even on its own terms (the Post assumes that Obama is trying to advance the cause of peace, not simply letting off steam after a tough year by venting against a country he can’t stand; I’m not so sure). If Obama’s actions fail to garner support even from those who would like Israel to do at least some of what Obama is demanding — and from an institution like the Post that is more than willing to criticize Israel — then the administration has little hope of winning over mainstream Israelis and Americans for its crusade against the Netanyahu government. And without such support, that crusade is likely to be as unsuccessful this year as it was early last year when Obama and Hillary Clinton attempted to browbeat Israel into making concessions. …
David Harsanyi has some criticism for the disproportionate ways in which the Obami are addressing foreign policy issues. In reading about Dalal Mughrabi square, one wonders why the Israelis would consider entering into a peace process with the Palestinians, who celebrate a terrorist who murdered Israelis.
…These days, as Christian farmers are being slaughtered by Muslim machetes in Nigeria, outrage from the White House is difficult to find. But it made sure to instruct our Libyan ambassador to apologize to “Colonel” Moammar Khadafy after he offered some mildly critical comments about the dictator’s call for jihad against Switzerland.
Khadafy can be forgiven, but there are transgressions that can’t. One such sin was perpetrated by Israel after the nation’s decision to allow a new housing project to be built in Jerusalem.
…As the administration was manufacturing this anger, the Palestinian Authority was preparing the newly minted Dalal Mughrabi square. You know, just a place for folks to gather and commemorate the 32nd anniversary of 1978′s Coastal Road Massacre, in which 37 Israelis — 13 of them children — were murdered in a bus hijacking. …
Claudia Rosett reviews Mosab Hassan Yousef’s book, Son of Hamas.
Meet Mosab Hassan Yousef, a genuine Palestinian freedom fighter. He was raised to become a leader of the terrorist group Hamas–strict Muslims dedicated to the destruction of Israel. But the horrors he saw them inflicting on their own people led him to become an informant within Hamas for the Israeli security service Shin Bet. Risking death had he been found out, he worked for years to save innocent lives, as he puts it–both Israeli and Palestinian.
Now living in the U.S., Yousef is further risking his neck to tell his tale. He has just published a memoir, Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue and Unthinkable Choices. In a phone interview, speaking fluent English, he says it “reads like a novel” but “this is a true story.”
Written with the help of journalist Ron Brackin, Yousef’s 265-page book reads with the page-turning ease of a great thriller. Its bombshell news about his work for the Israelis broke just last week, a few days prior to publication. That comes on top of his disclosure in 2008 that while working with Hamas he had quietly converted from Islam to Christianity. In his multi-faceted telling of what he calls his “unlikely journey,” Yousef challenges layers of conventional wisdom (and the entire weave of State Department and White House thinking), to offer his insider insights into Islam, terrorism, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and hopes for peace in the Middle East. Whether you are inclined to agree with him or not, he deserves a wide hearing. …
Jonathan Laing, in Barron’s, takes an in-depth look at the looming fiscal crises to state and local governments due to bloated public pensions.
…Says Todd Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University: “In many ways, some of our states are like General Motors before its bankruptcy, suffering from falling revenue, borrowing money to cover operating expenses and operating under crushing legacy health and pension liabilities. It’s entirely possible, given the gigantic size of the pension liabilities, that some states might do what was once the unthinkable at GM and default.”
Such assessments might be alarmist. A rebound in the U.S. economy and a continued rally in stocks would do a world of good for ailing public pension funds. And only one state — Arkansas in 1934 — has defaulted on its GO bonds in the past century with their holders suffering losses. Arkansas, however, was a special case. In addition to the Great Depression, it was ailing from large local debts it had assumed as a result of catastrophic floods in the 1920s.
But what if the stock-market rally falters, the economy doesn’t return to full health, jobs remain scarce and tax revenues remain depressed?
…some major bond investors are altering their strategies in light of the impending pension crisis. …
…Vallejo, Calif., had no choice but to file a Chapter 9 bankruptcy in 2008 …
…the fallout has been brutal. Employee health-care benefits have been decimated. Holders of the city’s municipal bonds are unlikely to get all their money back. And violent crime rates have shot up dramatically as a result of reductions in its police force from 158 to 104 officers.
The only thing that will be left untouched? The very thing that tipped the California city into Chapter 9 — its $84 billion in future pension obligations.
The Economist has more on the new abundance of natural gas first posted here February 7th.
… These techniques have unlocked vast tracts of gas-bearing shale in America (see map). Geologists had always known of it, and Mitchell had been working on exploiting it since the early 1990s. But only as prices surged in recent years did such drilling become commercially viable. Since then, economies of scale and improvements in techniques have halved the production costs of shale gas, making it cheaper even than some conventional sources.
The Barnett Shale alone accounts for 7% of American gas supplies. Shale and other reservoirs once considered unexploitable (coal-bed methane and “tight gas”) now meet half the country’s demand. New shale prospects are sprinkled across North America, from Texas to British Columbia. One authority says supplies will last 100 years; many think that is conservative. In 2008 Russia was the world’s biggest gas producer (see chart 1); last year, with output of more than 600 billion cubic metres, America probably overhauled it. North American gas prices have slumped from more than $13 per million British thermal units in mid-2008 to less than $5. The “unconventional”—tricky and expensive, in the language of the oil industry—has become conventional. …