Saturday, March 31, 2012

Palestine and Jerusalem, and the myth it belongs to the arabs

IRAN AWARE
MARCH 21, 2012


The TRUTH hurts.., from Snyder Talk: several factual statements that contradict conventional wisdom that is based on ignorance or hatred of Israel:
  1. People we call “Palestinians” today are in large measure descendants of a hodgepodge of unruly Arabs that none of the Arab nations wanted to absorb following Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, and for good reason.  For instance, Palestinians who migrated to Jordan following Israel’s War of Independence created havoc for King Hussein, so he booted them out killing thousands of them in the process during Black September.  Click here and here for details.  “Palestinians” then fled to Lebanon and helped to foment theLebanese Civil War which lasted for more than 15 years and cost untold more lives.
  2. The Romans changed the name of Israel to Palestine following the Bar Kochba rebellion in 135 B.C.  Click here for details.  They chose that name to insult Jewish people because the Philistines were Israel’s mortal enemies.
  3. Until 1948, anyone who lived in the country we call Israel today was regarded as a “Palestinian”, including Jewish people.  Click here for details.
  4. The number of Jews forced out of Arab countries in 1948 was greater than the number of Arabs who chose to leave “Palestine” for what they thought would be a short time while the Arab nations “drove the Jews into the sea”.  Since tiny Israel defeated the combined Arab armies, they found themselves homeless.
  5. Rather than absorb the “Palestinians” who were displaced by the War of Independence, the Arab nations opted instead to set up refugee camps for them.  They did this to create squalid living conditions for “Palestinians” in hopes of garnering global support for an anti-Israel PR campaign.  Click here for details.  It’s worth noting that Israel absorbed more than 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries following the War of Independence.  Click here for details.
  6. Yasser Arafat (an Egyptian, click here for details) commandeered the name “Palestinian” in 1964 when he created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).  Click here for details.  The primary purpose of the PLO was and is to destroy Israel.  Click here for details.

Jerusalem will no longer be built on hate. Jerusalem’s future will not be written on its destroyed past.

By Marc Israel Sellem Evil spirits surround Jerusalem. from (JPost)
Small-minded people are trying to undermine the foundations of the eternal castle; denying its past, erasing its identity. They are trying to take possession of King David’s holy city.
No, I will not testify about the Jewishness of Jerusalem. Testimony will be given by the ancient coins found among the remains, etched with names of Kings of Judea. Testimony will be given by the burned stamps carrying biblical names. Testimony will be given by the walls of hope, built by Nehemiah, the rebuilder of Jewish settlement in Jerusalem over 2,300 years ago. Testimony will be given by the tremendous stone walls which surround Temple Mount, the site of the Second Temple, about which the Romans said nothing so magnificent had been seen anywhere in the world. Testimony will be given by the ritual baths carved in Jerusalem stone on the pilgrims’ route.
No, I will not testify about the Jewish nation’s devotion to Jerusalem.
Testimony will be given by the desperate etchings left by pilgrims on the stone walls of Jerusalem. Testimony will be given by the Holy Ark curtains, the wine goblets and other ritual objects which carry the image of the Western Wall stones in every place which Jews reached around the world. Testimony will be given by the prayers, the hymns and the liturgy recited in Morocco and Spain, in the mountains of Ethiopia and in the steppes of the Ukraine, etching the memory of Jerusalem in every heart.
No, I will not testify about the freedom of Jerusalem. Testimony will be given by the millions of pilgrims; Jews, Christians and Muslims who – for the first time in 2,000 years – have complete freedom of religion and worship in Jerusalem, who enjoy the status quo of mutual respect and of the safeguarding of the sacred places to the three religions, protected by the government of the sovereign State of Israel. Testimony will be given by the state archeological sites and museums in Jerusalem which preserve and tell the story of Jerusalem throughout the generations.
For 2,000 years, since my forefathers were expelled from it under the Roman sword, Jerusalem was destroyed and rebuilt time and after time. And when we merited to return to Jerusalem, we chose to stop the cycle of destruction, to return our beloved city to its eternal mission:…that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it”; A city in which all believers can raise their eyes upward.
We must condemn those who wish to return Jerusalem to the cycle of denial and bloodshed, and who wish to erase its Jewish past in the name of political struggle.
One of Jerusalem’s greatest rabbis once said, “If we were destroyed, and the world with us, due to baseless hatred, then we shall rebuild ourselves, and the world with us, with baseless love.” Jerusalem will no longer be built on hate. Jerusalem’s future will not be written on its destroyed past. Shame on those who wish to erase Jerusalem’s eternal story.

The pro-Obama media must be countered in 2012.


March 29, 2012 - 12:02 am
by Tom Blumer

Last Thursday, Rush Limbaugh, addressing one of the Associated Press’s latest offenses against journalism,suggested that we “regard every AP story, particularly this year, as nothing more than a propaganda piece for the reelection of Barack Obama.”
Good idea — and of course, that goes for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, Bloomberg News, and virtually the entire establishment and entertainment press. Many if not most of their reports betray an ever more obvious preference for four more years of Obama.
There’s a new and largely overlooked problem in this election cycle: Story headlines have become more powerful than ever. That’s because far more people than in 2008 are getting their “news” from headline feeds sent to computers, smart phones (46% of all wireless phones), and tablets (34 million users). Even avid news consumers with busy lives won’t go to what’s behind most of the headlines they see on these devices — and when they do, especially given the limited real estate on their screens, they will rarely read past the opening paragraph or two.
This is a serious concern because the aforementioned propagandists, with special assistance from certain leftist outlets, have a virtual lock on these feeds. As I see it, their privileged access has given them extraordinary power this time around to influence the political and cultural narrative — and they have learned how to abuse it.
I will support my take on things first by discussing several headlines I observed in two hours of reviewing a Google-driven news feed on March 20. I will then cite examples from last Thursday and Friday where the headlines and opening teases worked with stunning effectiveness to portray Obama favorably or to denigrate his potential electoral opponents.
The Google News feed review was a truly discouraging experience, especially when imagining how a politically disengaged user might process what I saw. Here is some of it:
  • Via the Washington Post — “Ryan introduces GOP budget plan, slashing social programs and tax rates.” You could hardly make up a more obvious “heartless conservatives steal from the poor to give to the rich” headline. Those who click through will see the following opening sentence: “House Republicans renewed their commitment Tuesday to the politically risky strategy of targeting Medicare and other popular social programs to tame the national debt, unveiling a $3.5 trillion spending plan that would also slash the top tax rate paid by corporations and the wealthy.” Apparently anything that isn’t based on letting out-of-control programs stay on autopilot indefinitely constitutes “slashing,” because the actual Ryan Plan shows Medicare, the one program specifically mentioned, going up by no less than 4.7% in any year between 2013 and 2021, and by 70% during the nine-year time period.
  • “Killings Could Stall Election’s Nationalist Turn” — Since it’s from the New York Times, a story like this will get carried in a news feed, even though the “don’t bother reading this” headline tells readers nothing about where the killings occurred or who was involved. Tellingly, the story’s browser window title is “Killings Could Taint French Presidential Campaign,” indicating that the Times deliberately watered down its transmitted title. The story is about what PJ Media’s David Gerstman calls the “No Islamists Here” murders of seven, including three soldiers, a teacher, and three Jewish children in France — by (surprise … not) a Muslim. We don’t want to let anybody know that in the age of the alleged “Arab spring” there are still jihadists in Western countries killing innocents, do we? Don’t you know that Barack Obama solved all of this?
  • At the Wall Street Journal — “2012 GOP Wives More Popular Than Husbands.” Really, people? This is feedworthy news (or even true?), when the vast majority of even engaged GOP voters barely know who these women are? The goal, of course, is to get the disengaged to start thinking: “Boy, these guys must really be schmucks.”
  • At AFP – “Obama disowns De Niro white First Lady joke.” Readers who don’t get past the headline will think that the president himself responded (what a guy!) in reaction to De Niro’s “joke,” wherein the actor asked an audience: “Callista Gingrich. Karen Santorum. Ann Romney. Now do you really think our country is ready for a white First Lady? Too soon, right?” No, the reaction came from Obama’s campaign; and instead of “disowning” it, a spokesperson would only say: “We believe the joke was inappropriate.”
Certain organizations deemed eligible for newsfeed treatment were more than a little questionable, unless you think you can get a reliable diet of straight facts from the likes of the Huffington Post.
Last Thursday’s hands-down champ for misleading headline of the day was at the AP, also known to yours truly as the Administration’s Press. In covering Obama’s visit to Cushing, Oklahoma, to glom onto the opening of a section of the Keystone pipeline which had been the works for some time and was completed without the need to obtain his permission, the AP’s headline read: “Obama defends handling of Keystone as he puts another key oil pipeline on the fast track.”
“Another”? When has Obama ever “fast-tracked” anything not involving “green energy”? And even if he did so sometime in the past three years, why is it relevant? Until Keystone is the international pipeline its sponsors envision, it may be more appropriate, as Mark Steyn suggested on Limbaugh’s show on Friday, to call what Obama visited the Pipeline to Nowhere. Maybe an even better name for AP would be the Administration’s Pravda.
My final example, linked at Matt Drudge’s place early last Friday morning, shows that even people on the center-right who should (and maybe do) know better are allowing misleading headlines to dictate the discussion. Drudge’s headline (“SANTORUM SNAPS: OBAMA PREFERABLE TO ROMNEY!”) screamed a flat-out falsehood which made an already deceptive AP report (“Santorum: Might As Well Have Obama Over Romney”) even worse. Rick Santorum’s conditional statement — “If they’re going to be a little different (Mitt Romney compared to Obama), we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk of what may be the Etch A Sketch candidate for the future” — became a manufactured controversy when the AP’s Will Weissert eliminated its conditionality and piled on in his first sentence with something Santorum absolutely did not say: “Presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Thursday said Republicans should give President Barack Obama another term if Santorum isn’t the GOP nominee….” Drudge’s compounding of what was already a set of serious errors was irresponsible.
In terms of this election cycle, center-right activists seem far too confident that New Media’s vetting of Obama’s past and exposure of the myriad flaws in his performance as president will reach vast hordes of attention-limited and largely disengaged voters. Barring a pretty prompt sea change, most of them won’t ever see it.
Major center-right outlets and their architects need to develop and aggressively promote their own apps and feeds, consider consolidating their efforts in that regard, and above all get creative. Michelle Malkin’s Twitter-monitoring Twitchy.com enterprise looks to be a significant step in the “right” direction.
The time to react to the proliferation of election-influencing device-driven deception, dreck, and drivel from the propagandist press is growing short.

ONE WINNING MEGA-MILLIONS TICKET IN MARYLAND, UNKOWN IF MORE

Mega Millions Sales
CHICAGO (AP) — An official with the Maryland lottery says a record $640 million winning lottery ticket has been sold in Maryland, and there could be others nationwide.
Carole Everett, director of communications for the Maryland Lottery, says the winning Mega Millions ticket was purchased at a retailer in Baltimore County. She said it’s too early to know any other information about the lucky ticket-holder or whether others were sold elsewhere in the nation.
Everett says the last time a ticket from the state won a major national jackpot was 2008 when a ticket sold for $24 million.
She says, “We’re thrilled. We’re due and exciting.”
The estimated jackpot dwarfs the previous $390 million record, which was split in 2007 by two winners who bought tickets in Georgia and New Jersey.
Note:
Oh well, there go my dreams of becoming a Millionaire!  I believe the reports say this was the largest lottery drawing in history!  If there had not been a winner, the next drawing would have been up to ONE BILLION DOLLARS!  Six hundred and forty million people. young, old, middle-aged folks all joined in the excitement of possibly becoming a "winner"!  My granddaughter purchased her first lottery ticket yesterday afternoon and she said to me, "I will be able to take care of you Grammy for the rest of your life".  She's a true winner in my book!  
My mind could not comprehend having that kind of money, so I'll just accept the fact that the good Lord saved me from the stress of setting up Trust Funds, hiring tax attorneys, etc. I would have been content to fix up this old house, share with the family and grandkids, and help the cancer hospital in my area purchase equipment, for starters.  I would have been able to finally take a trip to Israel and walk the streets of Jerusalem; something my heart has yearned to do for many years.  
Good luck to the Winner and may he/she be given wisdom to know how to enjoy their new-found wealth.  
Bee


Administration Iran Leakfest Means Obama’s Tough Stance is Just Talk


COMMENTARY/CONTENTIONS



Nothing annoys foreign policy establishment types more than the need for presidents to pander to the opinions of the voters. That’s even more true this year than most as President Obama’s desire to pose as Israel’s best friend ever to sit in the White House has caused him to take stands that not only bother veteran Foggy Bottom “realists” but also his core supporters and staffers who apparently take a dim view of the desire of the overwhelming majority of the American people to support Israel and to vigorously oppose Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But though Obama’s Jewish charm offensive may still be in full swing, government insiders are apparently working overtime to send Israel and the rest of the world the signal that the president’s political commitments ought not to be taken all that seriously.
That’s the upshot of a week of heavy duty leaking on the part of administration officials who are less than thrilled about the fact that the president has publicly enlisted them in an effort to stop Iran. Yesterday, there was the attempt by Washington to expose Israel’s secret alliance with Azerbaijan and thereby ensure that it would be broken off so as to render an attack on Iran more difficult. Today, the New York Times has another leaked story in which anonymous government figures state their concern the president’s public rhetoric on Iran has boxed them into a spot that neither he nor they want to be in.
The leaking demonstrates just how unhappy the Washington foreign and defense policy establishment is about the way the president’s re-election campaign has led him to commit himself to action on Iran. Lest there be any doubt about the purpose of these disclosures, the officials tell the Times their hope is these stories as well as the recent leak about a Pentagon war simulation that was specifically crafted to feed speculation about possible U.S. casualties in the event of a conflict with Iran are designed to “provide the president with some political cover.”
The “cover” will presumably be necessary because the administration has no intention of ever actually going to the mat with Iran in spite of all the tough talk that comes out of the president’s mouth when addressing pro-Israel audiences. Some of the anonymous sources for the Times story are worried about the tough talk taking on a life of its own and overwhelming their proposed diplomatic plans on Iran. But the underlying assumption of these leaks is that the real truth about the president’s plans was revealed in his “hot mic” moment with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev when he spoke of having more “flexibility” after his “last election,” not his speech to AIPAC.
But for all the duplicity involved in the formulation of current U.S. policy toward Iran, the leakers have brought attention to a genuine dilemma. The president has condemned “loose talk” about war with Iran and has stuck to his belief that diplomacy can find a way to beguile the Iranians to abandon their nuclear plans. But the talkative administration officials understand all too well that the president’s “window of diplomacy” never really existed. No matter how much they boast of their success in creating an international coalition to back sanctions against Iran, they know this is mere talk. The Iranians don’t believe the Europeans will, when push comes to shove, enforce crippling sanctions against them. And they have no intention of backing down.
That means sooner or later, President Obama will have to choose between actually taking action on Iran and breaking his promise to ensure that Iran never goes nuclear. His staffers just hope that moment comes after November when, they presume, he can safely break his word. After all these leaks, if the Iranians didn’t already know this to be true, they know it now.
Note:
Listen to this video ... 

GLICK: The State Department's Jerusalem syndrome

US CONSULATE, JERUSALEM
Caroline Glick
March 30, 2012


I went to the US Consulate this week to take care of certain family business. It was a thoroughly unpleasant experience. I think it is ironic that two days after my extremely unpleasant experience at the consulate, State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland refused to say what the capital of Israel is. It was ironic because anyone who visits the consulate knows that the US's position on Jerusalem is in perfect alignment with that of Israel's worst enemies.

Last time I went to the consulate was in 2007. At that time the building was located in the middle of an Arab neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem. It was unpleasant. In fact it was fairly frightening. Once inside the building I couldn't shake the feeling that the Americans had gone out of their way to make Israeli-American Jews feel uncomfortable and vaguely threatened.

But then, I was able to console myself with the thought that the US has been upfront about its rejection of Israel's right to assert its sovereignty over eastern Jerusalem. By treating Jews as foreigners in their capital city and behaving as though it belongs to the Arabs by among other things hiring only Arabs as local employees, the US officials on site were simply implementing a known US policy. True, I deeply oppose the policy, but no one was asking me, and no one was hiding anything from me. 

The new consulate is much different, and much worse. The State Department opened its new consulate in Jerusalem in October 2010. It is located in the Jewish neighborhood of Arnona. It was built on the plot that Israel allocated for the US Embassy after Congress passed Jerusalem Embassy Act in 1995 requiring the US government to move its embassy to Jerusalem. I read that construction began in 2004. I haven't been able to find out whether when construction began it was to build the embassy or a new consulate so I don't know yet whether the Bush administration thought it was building an embassy that the Obama administration turned into a consulate or if the Bush administration thought it was building a consulate that the Obama administration completed. 

Whatever the case, the fact that the building that was supposed to be an expression of US recognition of Israel's capital in Jerusalem is being used as the consulate is an unvarnished act of aggression against Israel and Congress. 
 
If I am not mistaken, the US Consulate General in Jerusalem is the only US consulate in the world that is not subordinate to the embassy in the country where it is located. When it was located in a hostile Arab neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem, the fact that it was not subordinate to the US Embassy in Tel Aviv was upsetting. But it was also easily justified in light of US policy of not recognizing Israeli sovereignty in eastern, southern and northern Jerusalem. 

But Arnona is in western Jerusalem. It is a Jewish neighborhood that even the most radical Israeli leftists don't envision transferring to the Palestinians in any peace deal. Putting the consulate in Arnona - and on the site reserved for the embassy no less - is the clearest expression of American rejection of all Israeli sovereign rights to Jerusalem imaginable.
And the fact that it is located in the heart of a Jewish neighborhood is far from the only problem with the building. 

Israelis who live in Jerusalem and need US consular services are required to go to the consulate in Jerusalem. You can't just go to Tel Aviv to avoid the unpleasantness. This again is due to the fact that the US does not recognize ANY Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem. From the State Department's perspective, people who live in Jerusalem -- even in Arnona and Rehavia and Ein Kerem etc. -- live in a DIFFERENT COUNTRY from people who live in Tel Aviv and Netanya. We can no more receive services from the embassy in Tel Aviv than we can receive services from the embassy in Amman.

I will be writing more about the US's adversarial treatment of Israel as embodied in its treatment of Jerusalem in next week's Jerusalem Post column. But suffice it to say here that Victoria Nuland's statement to AP reporter Matt Lee, (posted below in case you missed it), is a true depiction of America's policy on Jerusalem - and though it, on Israel. 


It would be useful for someone to get Mitt Romney on record discussing his position on Jerusalem. Assuming that he says - like every other Republican presidential candidate - that he supports transferring the US embassy to Jerusalem, he should further be asked to explain how, if he is elected president, he will force the State Department to change its policies towards Israel and respect US law by treating Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

UPDATE from Yisrael Medad:
The following is an email I received from Yisrael Medad from the Begin Center. He writes an excellent blog www.myrightword.blogspot.com

Yisrael follows the US Consulate in Jerusalem far more closely than I and here is what he was to say:

I am old enough to recall pre-1967 when the Consulate in "West Jerusalem" was where it always was for some 150 years - at Agron Street.  The library was great.  And by the way, the building you mention is the offices of the consular section. Political, economic and other matters are still at Agron, where the Consul-General lives.

But to the politics:  A rather disturbing pattern of behavior has emerged from the US Consulate-General in Jerusalem over the past years that would point to a need for Congressional review and oversight.
 
Except for matters of passports, visas and birth registration, all other activities whether social, educational, scientific, sports, etc. are blatantly discriminatory in that no Jewish American citizen, who lives in the area supervised by the Consulate, can benefit from or take part in.  They are intended for Arabs solely.  
 
Jews resident in the area of Judea and Samaria face a policy of exclusion and that, we maintain, would seem to be unconstitutional and illegal.  In the same geographical area under the jurisdiction of the Consulate there exist two separate and not equal populations: Jewish and Arab, whether Muslim or Christian.

Is what they are doing legal by American law?  Is it in the spirit of the democratic foundations of American democracy?  Can the Consulate adopt exclusionist policies that separate between peoples based on race in the same geographic area?  Can it create the "state of the West Bank"?
 
There are almost 350,000 Jewish residents in the communities located in the territory for which the C-G is responsible (the almost 300,000 Jews in the newer Jerusalem neighborhoods and within the Old City is another matter).  Almost 15,000 are American citizens.  They do not benefit from any of these cultural, social or funding outreach activities and other programs and monies.  Jews don't count, other than deserving consular needs like birth registration, visas, etc. 

I think it would be a helpful for the House Foreign Relations Committee to hold hearings on the manner in which the US Consulate in Jerusalem is run. Jewish US citizen residents of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria should be brought in to give testimony.

“Marxism in America” by Lt. Gen. (Ret.) W.G. Boykin

MARCH 13, 2012
Dear readers,
13 March 2012:  We began this website to report on Islamic threats to our nation shortly after 9/11. Over the last several years, we’ve witnessed the growing threat from our own government leaders, while they use the cult of Islam to advance their globalist agenda. They have co-opted the security of our country by allowing the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, for providing support to the terrorist group Hamas, and other related organizations, to infiltrate nearly all government sectors and numerous police departments. Islam is being positioned to replaced our Judeo-Christian values and to act as a pit stop to national secularism as our defining national “religion.”
To facilitate this, a Marxist sits in the Oval Office. Please do not send us e-mail that makes this a racial issue, as it is clearly not about race, nor is it about political party.  The issue transcends the now false Republican-Democrat paradigm as illustrated by the actions of many so-called conservatives in Congress. It is now obvious that the enemies of our great nation are well entrenched, and are inside the gates.
Please take a few minutes to watch this video of Lt. Gen. (Ret.) W.G. Boykin talk about Marxism in America:
AND ..

Obama Marxist Quotes





Friday, March 30, 2012

The time for pretense is over. Obama is no friend of America.

AMERICAN THINKER
March 28, 2012

What Happened to Preserve, Protect, and Defend?

By John Griffing
How does a president of the United States whose allegiance is to his country knowingly and in plain sight sabotage his nation's defenses?  Until recently, the discussions of severe military cuts remained in the appropriate realm of working groups, and few seriously considered Obama's radical campaign promises to eliminate nuclear weapons from the U.S. arsenal to be of any real validity.  After all, many Democrat presidential contenders before Obama had pandered to pacifists and the armies of the naïve swelling the Democratic base in order to get elected.  But none of these individuals actually took proactive steps to completely remove America's nuclear triad from the list of strategic options.  Our ability to instill fear in the hearts of our enemies, both current and future, was left unquestioned by all previous presidents, minor reductions in stockpiles notwithstanding.


Obama has done what no guardian of America would do: systematically tear down the most vital of America's defenses, all while America's enemies wait with bated breath for the nation that owes trillions in debt to be left standing defenseless.  What happens when America lays down its arms?  It seems Obama would like to find out.  Americans may be the unintended (intended?) victims of a perverse social experiment.
Leaks from high-level defense sources reveal that in addition to commitments under the New START agreement, which brings the total number of deliverable U.S. warheads to 1,000 -- an unacceptably low number that prevents the U.S. from being able to destroy the 3,000 priority strategic targets identified by the DoD -- Obama now plans to implement an 80-percent force reduction that will leave America with only 300 deliverable warheads.  Such a move is suicidal.  Such a low number is wholly insufficient to protect America from the growing list of dangerous and erratic nuclear regimes with global ambitions.  Even more crucial to understanding the risk inherent in such a decision is the role of U.S. nuclear weapons stockpiles as a deterrent. 
Americans have only been able to live the cushy, carefree existence of the last half-century -- now taken for granted by new generations of youngsters who have known only prosperity and for whom Cold War politics are moot -- because the U.S. possessed a credible nuclear arsenal capable of devastating any adversary.  It is because of, not in spite of, America's nuclear assets that America has survived multiple existential threats.
The danger of nuclear confrontation has increased, not decreased, since the end of the Cold War.  The likelihood of nuclear exchange has increased rapidly, mirroring the acquisition of nuclear weapons by small and medium-sized states, with multiple hostile nuclear powers now vying for global influence.  Obama is at best gravely naïve if he is pursuing drastic and suicidal cuts to our arsenal at the present time. 
 Obama has been busy gutting American conventional forces as well.
The Army and the Marines are to be significantly downsized, even as their global commitments expand.  Consequently, America can no longer simultaneously fight two major wars in two theaters of deployment, a capability deemed vital by defense insiders to ensuring America's defense against coalitions of aggressor states, and now a plausible scenario owing to the Russian military buildup in the Middle East and the increasinglybelligerent actions of China on every front.  Both nations are in a Warsaw-Pact prototype alliance called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that openly challenges U.S. leadership and engages in maneuvers in which the United States is the target.  Iran is also a member of this organization.  Eliminating the two-war capability would seem ill-advised.  But then, Obama probably knows this.
The Navy thinly escaped Obama's hacksaw.  Recent studies commissioned by DoD indicate that the present number of aircraft carrier battle groups is not sufficient to maintain an adequate defensive posture in the Pacific, where U.S.-Taiwanese forces are under constant threat of nuclear exchange with China.  Even though the number of carrier groups is already below normal, Obama had wanted to cut another carrier battle group from the fleet.  The Navy torpedoed the move, but not without cost.  Modernization efforts have been canned, and shipbuilding will be greatly slowed, which will cause the fleet to shrink by approximately 70 ships in the 2020s.
Enter and exit the U.S. Air Force.  The Air Force has been forced to lose several hundred planes, even though its present number is already below the threshold admittedly needed to carry out tactical bombing campaigns.  In Bosnia, when the Air Force was a few times larger than today, it took 40 percent of active aircraft to execute the campaign.  Can anyone seriously argue that the U.S. Air Force, which needed nearly half of its resources to prosecute Bosnia, can actually manage a conflict involving multiple major powers at one time, especially if cuts of the magnitude enacted go unchallenged? 
America's president has done more to harm American security than our greatest foes could ever dream of doing, and he has done it with both eyes wide open, willingly, with full knowledge of the implications, which raises the obvious question: what word describes a president who will do this to his own country?  The recent Medvedev revelations are a good indicator of Obama's interest in satisfying Russian demands  in ways that would be unpopular with the American people.
Obama admittedly seeks the eradication of American superpower status.  Even if a case can be made for a reduced U.S. footprint worldwide or for a less interventionist foreign policy, would a loyal American knowingly seek to undermine his or her nation's greatness merely to satisfy some philosophical pretense to equality with "everybody else"? 
The time for pretense is over.  Obama is no friend of America.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/03/what_happened_to_preserve_protect_and_defend.html#ixzz1qcRycdaN

Grief: All of Palestine belongs to the Jews

ISRAPUNDIT
MARCH 29, 2012
POSTED BY TED BELAM

Howard Grief is the author of The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law and is the leading expert on the subject. He co-copied me with three powerful letters in defence of our rights, which follow.

To Mr. Leonello Gabrici
The Head of the Division,
Middle East II: Israel, Occupied Palestinian Territory,
Middle East Peace Process,
European External Action Service
Brussels, Belgium
Dear Mr. Gabrici,
I am appalled and dumbstruck by the fact that you are the Head of a Division of the European External Action Service whose jurisdiction explicitly deals with “Middle East II: Israel, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Middle East Peace Process”. This title is an insult to the Jewish People, to Zionism and the valiant struggle that the Jews waged to reclaim their ancient homeland, a struggle that began in earnest with the convocation of the first Zionist Congress at Basel, Switzerland in 1897. The country of Palestine was created in April 1920 at the San Remo Peace Conference for one purpose only – to be the Jewish National Home, and the term “Occupied Palestinian Territory” is thus an oxymoron since Palestine was never intended to be an Arab land under international law now supposedly “occupied” by Israel, as the title of your office implies, but rather was always intended to be a Jewish land that was to reconstitute the ancient Jewish State of Judea destroyed by Rome in the first century C.E. It takes staggering ignorance or ingrained hostility to the Jewish People and Zionism to believe that the land known to the Jews as Eretz-Israel since the time of Joshua Bin-Nun, long before it was called Palestine, belongs to the local Arab inhabitants who have falsely re-branded themselves as “Palestinians”.

To disabuse yourself of the notion that there is such a thing in international law as “Israel-Occupied Palestinian Territory”, I would highly recommend that you read the pronouncements made by two eminent British statesmen who were instrumental in creating Palestine as the Jewish National Home and future independent Jewish State, namely, Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour, as well as those of Balfour’s successor, Lord Curzon, who did not favour the concept of Zionism but nevertheless admitted that Palestine was to become a Jewish country. I would also recommend that you read the statements made at the San Remo Peace Conference at the two sessions of April 24 and April 25, 1920 dealing with Palestine by the French Prime Minister Alexandre Millerand and the Director of the French Foreign Ministry, Philippe Berthelot, who, though vehemently opposed to establishing Palestine as a Jewish State, nevertheless conceded that was the actual purpose of the Balfour Declaration that was adopted in a new format by means of the San Remo Resolution that henceforth became part of international law and the foundation document of the State of Israel.
You condescendingly state that I am “fully entitled to express [my] particular historic and legal interpretations regarding Israel’s territorial rights”, as if I am formulating a non-legal, individualistic argument that is not in accord with the facts or the truth. I have in my correspondence with Mr. Ilkka Uusitalo enumerated all those acts, principles and norms of international law which evidence the fact that an undivided Palestine was to be established as a Jewish State, without the creation of an Arab state in any part of the country. I will thus not repeat these arguments here. What I wrote is not “particular” to myself but is based solidly on the texts of various acts of international law that were approved by all the victorious Allied powers that dismantled the Ottoman Empire, including three prominent states of the European Union today, namely: Britain, France and Italy.
Upon the re-birth of the Jewish State on May 15, 1948, Jewish legal rights to Palestine were devolved upon the State of Israel. Whatever you may think, those rights never lapsed, were never annulled or voided and never validly or legally transferred to an Arab people known as “Palestinians”, as you so wrongly assume. Moreover, subsequent events – such as the 1947 Partition Resolution, Security Council Resolution 242, the Israel-PLO Agreements or the Road Map Peace Plan – have not superseded or curtailed the rights of the Jewish People to former Mandated Palestine, since none of those documents constitute acts of binding international law, despite the impression given to the contrary by advocates of the Arab “Palestinian” cause, including leading officials of the European Union and its bureaucratic apparatus, that includes your own office.
Mr. Gabrici, the acts and provisions of international law as well as the legal principles and norms I cited earlier to Mr. Uusitalo are not my “interpretations” of international law; they were what the law clearly states or connotes, without the necessity for “interpretation”, as you so glibly tell me. An interpretation of a specific law or that of an international agreement or treaty is only required when their plain meaning is unclear or ambiguous. That is certainly not the case for the relevant documents of international law pertaining to the legal status of former Mandated Palestine and Jewish legal rights thereto. It is you, not I, who prefers to “interpret” international law to favour the artificial and fabricated Arab “Palestinian” claim to Palestine. You ought to open your mind to the legal truth that you have never learnt or assimilated and the accompanying legal facts which underpin and confirm the ironclad Jewish case to the Land of Israel. If you do so, you will no longer be associated with a European office that falsely asserts that “Palestine” is “Israel-occupied Palestinian territory”.
I shall follow your advice and desist from any further exchanges with the European External Action Service, in particular with the Division you head. Perhaps you will be so kind as to place this letter in the hands of Lady Catherine Ashton to dispel her ignorance in addition to your own.
Howard Grief
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Dear Mr. Sherman,
I congratulate you on your excellent column published in The Jerusalem Post on Friday, February 24, 2012 on the misjudgments and detrimental concessions made by Israeli decision-makers dating from the Six-Day War that were also urged on by various prominent Israelis in our relations with Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, the “Palestine Liberation” Organization and its offshoot created by Israel itself, the “Palestinian Authority”.
You rightly stated that the Israeli leadership displayed “moronic myopia” and blindness in proposing a total withdrawal from the Golan Heights and South Lebanon and even earlier from Sinai, and you backed up your appraisal by quoting the exact words of those who fit into this embarrassing category. No doubt you stand on solid ground in reminding ordinary Israeli and their government leaders of the folly of the “land for peace” formula – or as you also aptly call it, the “Nirvana-Now” formula – an unattainable goal with the Arab haters of Israel infused with the tenets of Islam, particularly those found in Islam’s oral tradition known as the Hadith. This tradition defines the whole of the Land of Israel as Muslim or Waqf territory which, as one Islamic scholar, a Moslem himself, Professor Khaleel Mohammad of the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego State University, has said is “is to be wrested from the accursed Jews in a brutal and bloody eschatological battle”.
While I salute you for naming those public figures who have made “appallingly inaccurate assessment[s] of Israel’s adversaries”, particularly in regard to negotiating a peace agreement with Syria’s Hafez Assad and, after his death, with his son, Bashar Assad, to wit: former IDF Chief-of-Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, former Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, former Director-General of the Foreign Ministry Dr. Alon Liel and the celebrated but anti-nationalist, extreme left-wing author Amos Oz, what I found lacking in your otherwise astute column was that you failed to mention at all the worst culprits, who recklessly and I may add illegally proposed giving up either all or most of the Golan Heights to Syria as part of a “land-for-peace” agreement, that as we know now would have put Israel in the most precarious position possible requiring no less than a new Six-Day War to recapture it. In this regard, the first Prime Minister to propose withdrawing from the Golan was Yitzhak Rabin in the early to mid-nineties, who told U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher that Israel would be willing to cede the Golan in return for ending the war with Syria, as confirmed by Rabin’s military aide, Danny Yatom, who sat in on the meeting between the two where this subject was discussed.
That proposed cession was in my legal opinion a clear violation of Sections 97 and 100 of the Penal Code dealing with treason. Rabin’s offer to Syria was made without the consent of the Cabinet and at a time when there was no law or procedure that allowed the cession of Israeli territory to another state for any reason whatsoever. Rabin’s alleged act of treason was then pursued by Shimon Peres when he succeeded Rabin as Prime Minister. Even Prime Minister Netanyahu in his first term of office (1996-1999) was reported in the press to have made a similar offer that would have entailed a treasonous withdrawal from most of the Golan. What good then are the laws of treason in our law books if they are not enforced or prosecuted by the Attorney-General against those in positions of power or influence who make offers or devise plans to cede sovereign Israeli territory to another state or entity – that is expressly prohibited by the Penal Code? The Attorney-Generals who did nothing when these offers were made – Michael Ben-Yair and Meni Mazuz – should themselves have been prosecuted for dereliction of duty and failure to uphold the laws of the State they swore under oath to uphold.
As regards Dr. Liel, I take the liberty to mention that several years ago I tried to convince MK Professor Arieh Eldad to file treason charges under the aforementioned Sections 97 and 100 of the Penal Code against Liel for cooking up, without lawful authority to do so, a private or unofficial peace agreement with a Syrian representative who was an American citizen, Ibrahim (Abe) Suleiman, under which Israel would crazily surrender the entire Golan to the young and brutal tyrant, Bashar Assad, as evidenced by a document to that effect, termed a “non-paper”, dated August 29, 2005, thus committing an act to impair Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan according to our law, punishable by the death penalty or life imprisonment. However, I never heard back from MK Eldad though I know he later made use of the legal information I gave him on the treason provisions of the Penal Code to accuse Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of committing treason for his ludicrous offer to the PLO to re-divide Jerusalem and surrender practically all of Yosh, separate and apart from conceding all of the Golan to Syria in a failed bid to satisfy all alleged or imagined Arab grievances against Israel., grievances that can never be satisfied except by the disappearance of the Jewish State.
The Golan Heights, of course, was not the only case where land was relinquished to “buy peace” with our adversaries. We have to go back as you rightly pointed out to Prime Minister Menahem Begin, who, upon winning power after 29 years in the Opposition, decided to surrender Sinai to Egypt even though Sinai had never in the modern period been a recognized sovereign part of Egypt under international law. It is clear today that this cession has caused enormous harm to Israel since Sinai, thanks to Begin’s foolish and illegal “land for peace” treaty with Egypt, is now a terrorist and smuggler’s paradise that threatens Israel’s security and has also become an open door for tens of thousands of African migrants to enter Israel with all the social problems this will cause us in the future.
It should interest you to know that Begin was explicitly forewarned by two of his brightest advisers at the time of the Camp David negotiations not to proceed with his ill-conceived plan to cede Sinai to Egypt, a territory which was really a part of the historical Land of Israel mentioned in our Torah, that was also formerly included in the Independent Sanjak of Jerusalem under Turkish rule before Britain, in a famous incident of gunboat diplomacy against the Ottoman Sultan in 1906 forced him to relinquish direct Turkish rule over this territory and hand it over to British administration, who then appended it to Egypt. That is how Sinai, a non-Egyptian land, became “Egyptian”, contrary to the historical and geographical truth. Those aforesaid prescient advisers were Hebrew University Professor Moshe Sharon and, of course, the late Shmuel Katz. However, Begin, in his desire to be remembered as a great “peacemaker”, listened not to the sage advice proferred by Sharon and Katz, but rather to the injurious advice tendered by Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, Defense Minister Ezer Weizmann, Agriculture Minister and Chairman of the Ministerial Committee for Settlement, Ariel Sharon, as well as that of Law Professor Aharon Barak, the future President of the Supreme Court and Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S., Meir Rosenne.
Unfortunately, the “moronic myopia” and shallow thinking exhibited by Begin, Rabin and Peres was afterwards manifested to the same degree by their successors: Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and, surprisingly enough, Binyamin Netanyahu, all of whom made tentative offers to Syria to cede all or most of the Golan. Netanyahu who, not content with his concessions under the Wye Plantation Agreement, during his first term of office, has formally adopted the anti-Likud and suicidal Two-State Solution as a cornerstone of his policy. I am aware that Netanyahu’s advisers and supporters pretend it is only a Machiavellian tactical move to fend off relentless pressure on Israel applied by U.S. President Obama and the European Union. What will happen, though, if the next non-Likud Prime Minister of Israel adopts Netanyahu’s course as a firm and unchangeable policy? Netanyahu’s deception will then become reality, though that may truly never have been intended by Netanyahu himself.
I hope your great column will bang some common sense into the minds of those directing Israel’s Government now or in the future as to why we should never cede, under any circumstances, any more of our precious territory to Syria nor, for that matter, to the “Palestinian Authority” for the sake of a mirage “peace”. However, I admit that that is a forlorn hope.
Howard Grief
Copies: Rich Frostig
Prof. Moshe Sharon
Arieh Stav
Dr. Netta Dor-Shav
M,K. Prof. Arieh Eldad
Dr. Alex King
_______________________________________________________
Mr. David Lee
Kingston-upon-Thames
London, England
Thanks for sending me the article that appeared December 13, 2011 in Front Page Magazine on “An Invented People, the so-called ‘Palestinians’”, by David Meir-Levi, an American-born Israeli, currently living in Palo Alto, California, who serves as the Director of Peace and Education at Israel Peace Initiative.
Meir-Levi uses several sources to substantiate Gingrich’s truthful statement, particularly that of Daniel Pipes, who incidentally has a copy of my book, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, where I expatiate at length on this subject in Section Four entitled “The Switch of National Identities and Names”, and an additional segment in Appendix II entitled “The Historical Origin of the Name ‘Palestine’ and Related Regional Terms”.
All of Meir-Levi’s sources are from internet websites, as appears from his footnotes, with only two quotations in the text of his article culled from actual books. No serious scholar or researcher would rely exclusively or almost exclusively on that source to elucidate a subject he or she wishes to write about. The internet has not yet replaced traditional sources found in books, documents and archival material. Not everything has been digitalized for use on the internet. Meir-Levi would certainly have learned more about the newly-invented Arab “Palestinian” People, one of the greatest hoaxes, if not the greatest, of the latter half of the 20th century, had he consulted my own book, which incidentally may also be accessed – I am told – on the internet. It contains a lot more background information on the evolution of the name “Palestine” and its derivative, “Palestinians”, from first connoting the Jews of Mandated Palestine until May 14, 1948, and today, the Arab inhabitants of the Land of Israel and also the so-called “refugees” who are resident in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere.
It is incorrect for Meir-Levi to state that the “Palestinian national identity was invented in 1920 and midwifed by Zionism”. No such thing! There was no Arab Palestinian national identity in 1920 despite the fact that a small number of Arabs out of the larger Arab population then living in Mandated Palestine may have also accepted this appellation for themselves especially for legal purposes as a citizen of the country. However, the great majority of Arabs rejected this name since they knew this was how the Jews of the land were identified by one and all. They definitely did not want to have the same name as that applied to the “hated Jews”.
In my opinion, the term “Palestinians” in its present usage and form was derived from or was a direct by-product of the founding of the “Palestinian Liberation Organization” in 1964 whence the term started to appear first in UN resolutions beginning in 1969, then afterwards in the media. It was the UN, aided and abetted by the Arab League states, rather than Zionism, that “midwifed” the “Palestinian national identity” in the new guise as used today. In actual fact, it was part of a successful public relations scheme to change the nature of the Arab war against Israel, the so-called “conflict” from that of pitting 21 Arab states against the lone Jewish State to a more equitable ratio of one alleged “Palestinian” nation seeking its pretended self-determination in conflict with the existing State of Israel, i.e., one against one. The linguistic problem that then resulted from the fallacious use of “Palestine” and its derivative “Palestinians” was that the name of Palestine had already officially ceased to exist as a geographical term when the State of Israel was reborn in May 1948. Furthermore, the part of former Mandated Palestine that was not included in the State of Israel was no longer called “Palestine” after the Jordanian annexation in April 1950, but was designated the “West Bank” of the Kingdom of Jordan, which also controlled the East Bank, east of the Jordan River, that had originally also been designated for inclusion in the Jewish National Home.
It is a pity that no one has yet uncovered or exposed the name of the American Madison Avenue public relations firm which first advised the Arab League state and the PLO a year or so after the Six-Day War of June 1967 to change the designation of the Arab “refugees” who had been resident in former Mandated Palestine to “Palestinians” if they wanted to shift world public opinion in their favor against Israel. That is how the Arab-Israel “Conflict” was transformed from 1969 onwards into the new formula – the “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”. Kindly note the position of the word “Israeli” before “Palestinian”, when previously the word “Arab” preceded the word “Israel”, a subtle inversion of the nature of the “conflict” and Israel’s supposedly equal responsibility for it. In the old formulation, Israel was perceived as the biblical David, but in the new formulation it was now Goliath in the eyes of the world, denying the oppressed “Palestinians” of their alleged right of self-determination in regard to Palestine. Hence, thanks to this unknown American public relations firm, an instant nation – the so-called “Palestinians” – came into being as a new tactic to destroy the Jewish State that has succeeded magnificently as a propaganda ploy.
It is well to remember the fact, as I have just noted above, that contrary to Meir-Levi’s assertion, the designation of “Palestinians” for the Arabs of former Mandated Palestine did not come into widespread use until 1969 and the early 1970s, a fact I have documented in my book. As evidence of this fact, Meir-Levi should know that as late as November 22, 1967, UN Security Council Resolution 242 still referred to those Arabs who had left Mandated Palestine or the new-born State of Israel as “refugees” and not as “Palestinians”. This change of nomenclature demonstrates how instant nations are born in the Arab world, such as the fallacious “Jordanian” nation, the “Iraqi” nation, the “Kuwaiti” nation, etc., separate and apart from the invented “Palestinian” nation.
I myself denounced the fraudulent usage of this term of “Palestinians” for Arabs when it first emerged in those early years (the 1970s) and I often mentioned this point in various articles I composed that appeared in the Hebrew-language Nativ Journal in the 1990s. It is incorrect therefore for Meir-Levi to heap undue praise on Daniel Pipes for being “the first to say so” when he certainly was not the first.
Meir-Levi would do well to read the revealing column written by ex-Prime Minister Golda Meir for the New York Times on January 14, 1976. She demolished the myth of the existence of the so-called “Palestinian People”. She said everything that needed to be said about the invention of this false moniker for Arabs. Most of what she wrote in her New York Times article is re-produced in my book (see pp. 511ff). In addition, it should be noted that as far back as June 1969, Golda Meir told the London Sunday Times”:
    It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist.
Thus, as you can see, Golda Meir preceded Gingrich’s statement by 43 years that Pipes fails to mention. Though it is true that many Israeli left-wing people and Labour Party supporters accepted the idea of the “Palestinian” People as a new nation on the world stage once that idea gained currency in the 1970s, it was definitely not Zionism that acted as a “midwife” for the forged “Palestinian national identity” as Meir-Levi asserts, but more accurately that was the work as noted above of the Arab League states and the PLO in conjunction with the U.N. where they have a dominant influence, especially in the General Assembly and the blatantly pro-Arab organ today ludicrously called the Human Rights Council. Finally, it fell to Shim’on Peres to give added credibility to this fraudulent usage of the term “Palestinians” for Arabs, when he accepted the idea in April 1986 as Chairman of the Labour Party that “Palestinians” are a distinctive people among the other Arab peoples just as Arieh “Lova” Eliav mischievously said in his 1972 book Land of the Hart.
In conclusion, while I commend Meir-Levi for making the valid and incontestable point that the “Palestinians” are, as Gingrich correctly stated, an invented people, his presentation, however, is far from comprehensive, lacks proper depth and relies much too much on internet sources instead of the primary or first-hand sources that are not posted on the websites.
Howard
Posted by Ted Belman @ 10:21 pm | 9 Comments » - israpundit