The Hamas Split and the Palestinian Political Mess

hAMAS LEADERSHIP ... kHALED mASH'AL

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2012

THE RUBIN REPORT

By Barry Rubin

There’s a serious split in Hamas reflecting the growing civil war among Islamists along Sunni-Shia lines. Each side is radical but the fact that they’re fighting among themselves weakens both of them.  

The issues involved are tactical, not strategic.  Indeed, what is ironic is that Khaled Mashal, who historically has been described as the radical, is following the approach that will seem moderate to the naïve while Ismail Haniya, described by the naive as the moderate is leading the ostensibly more radical faction.

Mashal signed a deal with Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas for a coalition between Hamas and the PA. Of course, neither partner trusts the other in the least. Mashal wants to take over the PA; Abbas wants to tame Hamas and recapture the Gaza Strip or—at least—present the Palestinians as united to the world in order to demand a state now without any need to make peace with Israel.

In contrast, Haniya claims that this deal is a sell-out to the PA cowardly compromisers. Haniya was just in Tehran where his hosts repeatedly warned him against the “compromising’ traitors in Hamas’s ranks.  Of course, the deal with the PA is nothing of the sort.

What lies behind this split is the broader conflict between the Sunni and Shia Islamist camps. Haniya is siding with the Iranians, who have a lot of money but are Shia; Mashal is linking up with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which borders on the Gaza Strip, is Sunni, is now gaining power in Egypt, and belong to the same organization as Hamas.

I’m putting my money on Mashal. The Iranians can provide money but only the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood can ultimately be a real patron on the ground, forwarding money, men, weapons, and material goods to the Gaza Strip. If Hamas goes to war with Israel again it will be Egypt, not Iran (even if it has nuclear weapons) that will matter in the battle.  

But there’s another irony here that makes sense. Mashal has spent most of his time outside of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Thus, he has had more contact with Iran. Haniya has been actually running the Gaza Strip to a large extent and thus has more contact with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. I guess familiarity breeds contempt. Each man is trying to escape the orbit of the powerful big brother he has been dealing with all these years.  

  

The PA will not dominate Hamas and take over the Gaza Strip. Nor will Hamas be able to seize power in the West Bank, in part because Israel won’t allow that to happen.  And here’s still another irony. Since Haniya is against the deal, he and his allies will make sure that Fatah cannot campaign freely in the Gaza Strip.  

The projected PA elections will never come off and the Hamas-PA deal will break down, probably within the next six months. Yet the battle between the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (aided by the Jordanian branch) and Iran over influencing Hamas will continue.

In short, all of Hamas remains hardline and the only difference is over how best to wipe out Israel and commit genocide against the Jews. The Palestinians also remain badly divided. None of the leadership can deliver peace with Israel and none of these leaders want peace (and a Palestinian state based on a two-state solution) enough to make the compromises necessary to achieve it.

There is still another important element in Palestinian politics receiving almost no attention: the future leadership of the PA and Fatah.  Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is a relatively honest, relatively moderate technocrat. All of Hamas and most of Fatah loathe him. He only holds his office because the Western donors want him there. Can he last out this year or the next?

The problem is that a PA-Hamas deal requires either that Abbas or a Hamas leader becomes prime minister. Remember that the post of prime minister was originally created due to Western insistence that someone be in a position to stop Yasir Arafat, Abbas’ predecessor, from stealing the money being donated.

Then there’s Abbas himself. He has been ailing and while his periodic resignation threats have been phony ways of preserving his leverage and getting things he wants, his retirement is only a matter of time. It is hard to believe he will still be leading Fatah and the PA by, say, December 2013.

Who will replace him? You can throw around various names but don’t bother. No one has the slightest idea. There is not a single serious candidate. Presumably, the Fatah barons will make the choice. Abbas originally got the job precisely because he was so weak. None of the Fatah warlords or bosses felt threatened by a man with no popular or organizational base of support.

It was also advantageous that Abbas was the most relatively moderate of the Fatah leaders and would have the best image with the Western governments and media.

Of course, when I say relatively moderate that should be considered within the spectrum of Fatah leadership. Abbas is more aware of the benefits of a compromise peace with Israel and more realistic about Fatah’s inability to wipe out that country. Still, he is dead set on the idea that unless Israel agrees to take back any Palestinian who can trace his ancestry to pre-1948 residence there can be no peace.

If he is a tiny bit more willing to compromise on borders or anything else a combination of his weakness, intransigence, and knowledge of public opinion and his colleagues’ views prevents him from ever doing anything.

Abbas’s successor is almost certainly going to be more militant. There are two main factions in Fatah, and hence in the PA. The Arafat cronies, who are more corrupt and satisfied with the status quo, and the Fatah radicals, who’d like to see another round of fighting because they still believe in the group’s revolutionary ideology. The latter group includes both older and younger—notably Marwan Barghouti (he’s 53 years old but considered leader of the "young guard" which tells you something, doesn’t it?)—people who don’t work together.    

In short, Palestinian politics are a mess. There are fewer real moderates proportionately than you’ll find in any Arab state, where they are also small minorities. Nobody can deliver peace; no one will actually struggle to achieve a compromise peace agreement with Israel.

The international “peace process” delusion is built on never actually examining the real Palestinian political scene.  Yearning for peace is completely understandable; supporting a two-state solution is just fine. But pretending to oneself that there’s any basis for these things actually happening is quite unrealistic.  

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center. His book, Israel: An Introduction, has just been published by Yale University Press. He is also editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and Middle East editor and featured columnist at PJMediahttp://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East(Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). GLORIA Center site is http://www.gloria-center.org. His articles published originally outside of PajamasMedia are at <http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com>

Note: This article will be published in a different form in the Jerusalem Post. I own the rights and ask you to read and link to this verion..

OBAMA DISARMS FBI COUNTER TERROR TRAINING PROGRAMS, PURGES TRUTH ABOUT JIHAD

ATLAS SHRUGS

BY PAMELA GELLER

Perhaps Obama can order the exhumation of hundreds of millions of victims of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilations and enslavements in an effort to purge the truth, the reality, from history.

Over 18,000 Islamic attacks since 911, and Obama has caved to Islamic supremacists and their apologists. He ordered the purge of jihadic threat documentation. Spencer Ackerman is proud of his hand in this. History will not be kind to this tool. And his grandchildren will spit when his name is 

This is a good day for jihad in America.

FBI Purges Hundreds of Terrorism Documents in Islamophobia Probe Spencer Ackerman, Wired 

An internal FBI investigation into its counterterrorism training has purged hundreds of bureau documents of instructional material about Muslims, some of which characterized them as prone to violence or terrorism.

The bureau disclosed initial findings from its months-long review during a meeting at FBI headquarters on Wednesday with several Arab and Muslim advocacy groups, attended by Director Robert Mueller. So far, the inquiry has uncovered and purged over 700 pages of documentation from approximately 300 presentations given to agents since 9/11 — some of which were similar to briefings published by Danger Room last year describing “mainstream” Muslims as “violent.” And more disclosures may be forthcoming, as the FBI continues its inquiry and responds to Freedom of Information Act requests for the documents themselves.

FBI spokesman Christopher Allen confirms to Danger Room that the bureau found some of the documents to be objectionable because they were inaccurate or over-broad, others because they were offensive. Allen explains that the documents represent “less than 1 percent” of over 160,000 documents reviewed by the inquiry, which was prompted by a Danger Room investigation in September. The FBI purged documents according to four criteria: “factual errors”; “poor taste”; employment of “stereotypes” about Arabs or Muslims; or presenting information that “lacked precision.”

Danger Room uncovered several such documents in the fall, including some instructing FBI counterterrorism agents that“mainstream” Muslims sympathized with terrorists; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult” leader; and that the more “devout” a Muslim was, the more likely he would be to commit a violent act. Some documents even purported to graph the correlation. The FBI initially said the instruction occurred “one time only.” But when Danger Room uncovered additional anti-Islam materials — in briefings that compared Islam to the Death Star; in books on the shelves of the FBI training library at Quantico; and in pages hosted on internal FBI websites — the bureau began an extensive internal review.

Salam al-Marayati, the executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, attended the FBI meeting. He came away worried that the volume of anti-Muslim training documents hands al-Qaida an unnecessary win.

Read the rest. More on MPAC's lies here.

Militant Islam Monitor:  Muslim Public Affairs Council tries to reroute HLF terrorist funding back to militant Islamic 'Palestine Children's Relief Fund'

Posted by Pamela Geller on Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 07:14 PM 


NOTE:
SEE: The Fox is in the Henhouse by SHEIKYERMAMI on FEBRUARY 18, 2012

Guns, Butter, Jobs and Birth Control - by Sultan Knish

Saturday, February 18, 2012

The old totalitarian paradigm was guns or butter. The Soviet Union could provide its people with the basic food groups or it could run a military race to conquer as much of the world as possible. As a totalitarian ideology, it naturally chose the latter.

The modern incarnation of the hammer and sickle, the liberals who took it slow, working from within the system instead of seizing the reins and executing anyone who got in the way, isn't big on guns. The Clinton and Obama administrations both inflicted massive cuts on the military because it was extraneous to their domestic goals. They didn't want guns, but they didn't want butter either. They wanted a third thing.

The Obama Administration is about as interested in creating jobs as the denizens of the Kremlin were in making sure that every Russian family had plenty of milk and butter on the table. Totalitarian ideologies don't care about individual welfare and they certainly are not interested in individual empowerment. An improved economy would weaken the left, it would undermine its central program of promoting fear and dependence on a social safety net and a rights infrastructure administered by them.

The left is not very good at discussing the economy. Ask its leaders to apportion blame for economic problems and they are right there with denunciations of the banks, corporations and a thousand other factors. But ask it how to repair an economy and after some mumbling the answer is usually to fund a bunch of its pet projects that have nothing to do with the economy and everything to do with its social agenda.

The left's goal is to transform society, not to empower individuals to make their own choices. That is why an arena like birth control is its natural territory. A society with state subsidized birth control has a low birth rate, low marriage rate, high demand for social subsidies and a high demand for immigrants to compensate for the low birth rate and pay for the social subsidies. Now whether or not you think such a society is a good thing, it is the kind of society that the left wants.

Given a choice between universal birth control and universal free market jobs, the former is a priority and the latter a threat. It's not just birth control, there are any number of elements, which may be benign in and of themselves, but which fit into a larger picture of the kind of society it wants.

The Communist era left thought big. If there was hunger, they would grow more wheat. If there weren't enough jobs, they would create more factories. It was a grandiose insanity that eventually brought down Communism, but it was healthier than the post-human left which is declinist. If there is hunger, then their solution is to raise the price of food with a tax that will subsidize meals for the poor. If there aren't enough jobs, the solution is for more people to go on the dole and for everyone to make do with less.

From a distance this looks like wealth redistribution, but it's actually a program for teaching everyone to make do with less. That is why Obama has done everything possible to hike energy prices, by making it harder to get to oil, coal and natural gas, while promoting expensive "clean energy" and "energy efficiency". 

Faced with a challenge, the new left's solution is always make do with less. Less heat, less food and less children. The old left still had some faith in human aspirations. The new left only sees humanity as foolish children who have to be regimented and taught self-discipline. To sacrifice not for a better world, but for a more sustainable existence. There is less of Marx to it and more of Gandhi in that.

There is a mystical strain to this incarnation of the left. It does not see economic problems as arising from natural causes, but spiritual causes. It assigns blame primarily to "greed", a venial sin and a spiritual problem. Its solutions all involve remaking society in ways that have little to do with creating jobs or even regulating the banks, but address their secular notion of spiritual ills that are responsible for the malaise.

Teaching everyone to make do with less of everything is just step one. Step two is to break down the structures of attachment. Break down the family, religion and the nation. Teach people to stop being possessive of the old structures. Wipe out the tribal and national bonds so that there is no longer any war or jealousy. Eliminate marriage and stable parenthood to end possessiveness. Leave people as isolates, individual units, citizens of the state.

It's an old program. The Nazis made some slight progress on it. Various leftist movements and regimes have flirted with communal arrangements, but no one has made an entire society work that way. Yet.

To people who think that way subsidized birth control is very important. So is tolerance, international travel, centralized schooling, learning to appreciate nature, disruptive immigration, extended adolescence, higher education, state subsidies, free love, multilingual training, world citizenship, social safety nets and a thousand other things. None of which involve creating jobs.

The left believes strongly in social solutions. It believes that all our ills are social in nature and that social justice can only be practiced by a healthy society. Their idea of a healthy society is totalitarian but they have that in common with most ideologues who want a perfect state, rather than a free state.

The mantra of a society where people are less concerned with things and more concerned with people repeats itself incessantly. But a society where people are constantly concerned with other people is a totalitarian state. In East Germany, there were as many informers as there were citizens. The people were not concerned with things, because they had very few of them. They were concerned with informing on everyone around them so that they would not be suspected of caring more about things than about people.

Our own society is already rather excessively concerned with people. Frighteningly so at times. The social reformers are working harder than they did a century ago when they might have actually been needed. The society they are creating is an obtrusive social surveillance state where everyone is constantly being monitored, where every action has political implications and the weight of children is a national security crisis. Nothing is off limits and no one but the enlightened elite are immune from being brought into line by state employees on a mission to create a noble and enlightened state.

Creating such a state does not depend on pandering to "selfish" clamoring about jobs. What use are jobs except to help people buy things and raise families, two things that the left believes is at the heart of our problems. And those problems can only be solved when people give up on such selfish urges and join in a communal system for the greater good that teaches them to make do with less while focusing on their ethical obligations to society at large.

Rather than addressing economic ills, the Obamas are working on transforming society. Their real response to American economic woes is telling Americans to seek enlightenment, the satori of socialism. A response that positively makes the apocryphal, "Let them eat cake" seem humane by comparison.

Not only isn't the crisis going to waste, its carcass is being skinned, butchered, deboned and ground up for the ultimate teachable moment, teachable year and teachable decade. Economic instability is being leveraged to teach everyone a lesson about the need for a stronger social safety net, which then becomes a lesson about how to sacrifice, how to give up personal freedoms and how to make do with less for the greater good.

The left's rhetoric about corporations isn't limited to companies or to the rich. There isn't really an actual dollar value beneath which your resources don't deserve to be redistributed by the enlightened hand of the state. The left is not at war with wealth, it is at war with private property. It is not at war with corporations, it is at war with the idea that there can be any organization that is not of the state. It is not at war with people who own yachts, it is at war with the idea that anyone is entitled to living without engaging in exercises of conspicuous lifestyle decline, whether it is recycling, sending money to Africa, paying carbon taxes or any other form of tribute to the need to be less selfish. 

The mandate has always been social change. According to the left it is not our economy that is broken, we are the ones who are broken. We are too greedy and too selfish, as individuals and as nations. Our possessiveness must be curbed by destroying everything that the individual owns or is attached to in the name of the greater good.

Ideologues define all problems, no matter how minute, in relation to a failure to comply with their ideal way of life. They will exploit a crisis to achieve power and implement that way of life and that way of life alone. Nothing else interests them and they will not solve any problems except through the implementation of their program.

That is what we are up against. That is their weakness, if we can exploit it, but it is also the thrust of their assault on us. On all of us. We are dealing with people who are limited to thinking in very narrow and specific ways. Who are fanatically obsessed with transforming our society, but who are unable to question their own assumptions. That makes them dangerously single-minded, but it also makes them prone to failure.

The Obama Administration has been relentlessly single-minded about its domestic program and as a result it has lost public support. What people perceive as economic failure, it views as successful social reforms. If it can reclaim power, it will proceed with an even more ruthless version of the same program. It is not interested in guns or butter. Only in social change.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2012/02/guns-butter-jobs-and-birth-control.html

Obama Regime's Secret Collaboration with pro-terrorist, anti-American organizations

Secular Egyptian on the IslamoFascist and Muslim Brotherhood lobbies and the Obama Regime’s secret collaboration with pro-terrorist, anti-American organizations

BARE NAKED ISLAM

February 19, 2012

FBI Director Mueller secretly met on February 8 at FBI headquarters with a coalition of groups including various IslamoFascist and militant Arabic groups who in the past have defended Hamas and Hizballah. At this meeting, the FBI revealed that it had removed more than 1000 presentations and curricula on Islam from FBI offices around the country that was deemed “offensive to Muslims.”

Investigative Project  The FBI did not reveal what criteria was used to determine why material was considered “offensive” but knowledgeable law enforcement sources have told the IPT that it was these radical groups who made that determination. Moreover, numerous FBI agents have confirmed that from now on, FBI headquarters has banned all FBI offices from inviting any counter-terrorist specialists who are considered “anti-Islam” by Muslim Brotherhood front groups.

The February 8 FBI meeting was the culmination of a series of unpublicized directives issued in the last three months by top FBI officials to all its field offices to immediately recall and withdraw any presentation or curricula on Islam throughout the entire FBI. In fact, according to informed sources and undisclosed documents, the FBI directive was instigated by radical Muslim groups in the US who had repeatedly met with top officials of the Obama Administration to complain, among other things, that the mere usage of the term of “radical Islam” in FBI curricula was “offensive” and ‘racist.” And thus, directives went out by Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Mueller to censor all such material. Included in the material destroyed or removed by the FBI and the DOJ were powerpoints and articles that defined jihad as “holy war” or presentations that portrayed the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization bent on taking over the world—a major tenant that the Muslim Brotherhood has publicly stated for decades.

Islamist Lobbies’ Washington War on Arab and Muslim Liberals

by Essam Abdallah
The Cutting Edge News

The most dramatic oppression of the region’s civil societies and the Arab Spring is not by means of weapons, or in the Middle East. It is not led by Gaddafi, Mubarak, Bin Ali, Saleh, or Assad. It is led by the powerful Islamist lobbies in Washington DC. People may find my words curious if not provocative. But my arguments are sharp and well understood by many Arab and middle eastern liberals and freedom fighters. Indeed, we in the region, who are struggling for real democracy, not for the one time election type of democracy have been asking ourselves since January 2011 as the winds of Arab spring started blowing, why isn’t the West in general and the United States Administration in particular clearly and forcefully supporting our civil societies and particularly the secular democrats of the region? Why were the bureaucracies in Washington and in Brussels partnering with Islamists in the region and not with their natural allies the democracy promoting political forces?

Months into the Arab Spring, we realized that the Western powers, and the Obama Administration have put their support behind the new authoritarians, those who are claiming they will be brought to power via the votes of the people. Well, it is not quite so.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Nahda of Tunisia, the Justice Party of Morocco and the Islamist militias in Libya’s Transitional National Council have been systematically supported by Washington at the expense of real liberal and secular forces. We saw day by day how the White House guided carefully the statements and the actions of the US and the State Department followed through to give all the chances to the Islamists and almost no chances to the secular and revolutionary youth. We will come back to detail these diplomatic and financial maneuvers which are giving victory to the fundamentalists while the seculars and progressives are going to be smashed by the forthcoming regimes.

In the US, there are interests that determine foreign policy. And there are lobbies that put pressure to get their objectives met in foreign policy. One of the most powerful lobbies in America under the Obama Administration is the Muslim Brotherhood greater lobby, which has been in action for many years. This lobby has secured many operatives inside the Administration and has been successful in directing US policy towards the Arab world. Among leading advisors sympathetic to the Ikhwan is Daliah Mogahed (Mujahid) and her associate, Georgetown Professor John Esposito. Just as shocking, there is also a pro-Iranian lobby that has been influencing US policy towards Iran and Hezbollah in the region.

One of the most important activities of the Islamist lobby in the US is the waging of political and media wars on the liberal Arabs and Middle Eastern figures and groups in America. This battlefield is among the most important in influencing Washington’s policies in the Arab world. This huge war waged by the Islamist lobbies in America started at the end of the Cold war and continued all the way till the Arab spring. The two main forces of this lobby are the Muslim Brotherhood fronts and the Iranian fronts. According to research available in the US, the Ikhwan fronts such as CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations), led by Hamas supporter Nihad Awad, as well as the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Islamic Society of North America, and others waged their political war to block the representatives of Arab liberals and Muslim moderates from making their case to the American public. The Iranian lobby, exemplified by the National Iranian American Committee (NIAC), led by Trita Parsi, has been hitting at Iranian exiles.  READ THE REST

NOTE:  PLEASE GO DIRECTLY TO BARE NAKED ISLAM TO READ/POST COMMENT.  The comments on BNI are as interesting this article is disturbing! 

undefined

Video: Friends are Like Flowers ....

This is a very special Thank You to a dear friend, Veronica Gilson.  She creates the most beautiful photos of America and for supporters of Israel.  

If you noticed "Americans Stand with Israel" has a "new" look!  Veronica kindly made the logo for this blog and to me, it's like a diamond - shines brightly - for America and Israel.

Thank you, dear friend, for sharing your tremendous creativity with me.

Bee Sting

Donilon comes to Israel to threaten, cajole, plead; Dempsey warns Israel

ISRAEL MATZAV

by Carl in Jerusalem

Sunday, February 19, 2012

President Obama's National Security Adviser, Tom Donilon, arrives in Israel on Sunday in a bid to persuade the Jewish state to place its trust in Obama. Donilon joins a parade of American officials who have been here over the last few weeks.

The White House issued a statement saying Donilon will be in Israel from Saturday to Monday for consultations with senior officials about a range of issues, including “Iran, Syria and other regional security issues.” The statement said Donilon’s visit was the “latest in a series of regular, high-level consultations between the United States and Israel, consistent with our strong bilateral partnership and part of our unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security.”

Israeli government officials did not provide any more details regarding the visit by the national security adviser, which, while not rare, is also not routine.

Donilon is the latest in a parade of high-level visitors to both country’s capitals in recent weeks, including Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Mossad head Tamir Pardo in Washington, and a visit here last month by the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey.

In an interview to be broadcast in its entirety by CNN later on Sunday, Dempsey warned that an Israeli attack now 'would not accomplish its objectives.'

Let's go to the videotape.








I'll try to post at least the Iranian part of the interview later Sunday. But here's some more from YNet.

The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Martin Dempsey said Saturday that an Israeli strike on Iran "wouldn’t achieve its long-term objectives" and would be "destabilizing."

In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Dempsey said that taking military action against the Islamic Republic would not be not "prudent."

The US general claimed that the economic sanctions imposed on Iran together with international pressure are beginning to have an effect. “We are of the opinion that Iran is a rational actor. We also know, or we believe we know, that the Iranian regime has not decided to make a nuclear weapon."

In Israel, we don't view Iran as a rational actor. For the last five years, I've been explaining on this blog why Mutually Assured Destruction - a concept that was used to keep Russia at bay until Communism fell that I learned about in college - will not work with Iran. And the reaction of Iran's rulers thus far to sanctions shows that the Israeli view is right and the Obama administration's view is wrong. Obama and his minions don't understand ethnic conflict, they don't understand (or want to understand) irrational hatred of Jews, and they don't understand the difference between a competition between systems of government and the striving of an apocalyptic regime to impose its belief system on the world.

So while Israel will give sanctions as long as it possibly can to let them work, it won't give them forever. 70 years after the world and its Jews decided that one tyrant could not possibly mean that he wanted to murder World Jewry, the State of Israel will not make the same mistake.




Bee's Note:
See:

Obama sends top security aide to Israel as tension builds over nuclear Iran - US-Israel crisis: Approaching nuclear talks with Iran disable sanctions, spark anti-Israel terror - Martin Dempsey: Israeli strike on Iran would not be prudent  ... posted by Israeli Frontlines

undefined

Aspen: "Michele hits the slops!" ....

Sunday, 19 February 2012

BOKER TOV, BOULDER!

American state-run Media protects First Family from scrutiny

You won't see this in your Sunday paper, because - as is becoming all too clear - the "press" in the United States is so invested in the myth they themselves created to get Obama elected in the first place, that they cannot separate themselves now. They are "in it to win it" for Barack.

But not so, the British media.

I thought this screenshot ^ especially amusing, given the ad placement.  The Obama campaign asking that you "Help the Obamas Stand Up for Working Americans" -- right next to a story about FLOTUS on vacation again. Priceless.

.... With the economy on its knees, many American families have had to forgo their annual holiday just to make ends meet.

But barely a month after returning from a luxury Christmas break in Hawaii Michelle Obama is on holiday again - this time at the exclusive Colorado ski resort of Aspen.

The First Lady Michelle Obama is spending Presidents' Day weekend in the upmarket resort with her daughters, Sasha and Malia, and was seen hitting the slopes ... on Saturday....

 The Daily Mail report goes on to list the various staggering costs of Mrs. Obama's luxury travels. . . paid for by - you guessed it - the ever-dwindling number of Working Americans.

"NOT in the Labor Force"

 And in case you don't get the {irony? hypocrisy? arrogance?} at first glance, Kevin Koffler spells  it out:

.... Michelle’s decision to ski out West again instead of hitting slopes closer to Washington would seem an inopportune choice for a first lady who is helping her husband campaign on issues of “fairness.”

The Obama campaign has set itself up as the defender of the poor and the middle class against the “One Percent,” a theme which clashes with the image a first lady who is taking frequent and exclusive vacations....

.... What’s more, as the government struggles to cut the deficit, the symbolism of a first lady jetting out to Aspen with a security entourage at taxpayers’ expense to ski would seem to send the wrong message about cutting back on spending....

.... President Obama last summer called for “an attitude of shared sacrifice” to solve the nation’s deficit woes.

  

Posted by Yael at 08:05 AM

Bee's Note:

I am just wondering if Michele packed up any of her fancy $50,000 lingerie ... just wondering!  Did she pack up "healthy" meals for the girls, or are they eating cheeseburgers and fries today?  Anyone care to know how much this little "get away" vacation is costing - does anyone care?!

Barackbar fiddles while Jerusalem burns!

ALMOST MIDNIGHT IN THE WEST
FEBRUARY 19, 2012
In Millennium Challenge 2002’s (MC02) war scenario, the enemy navylaunched a massive barrage of missiles which overwhelmed the US detection systems anddestroyed vessels – an aircraft carrier, ten cruisers, and five amphibious ships, and killed 20,000 Americans.

That's old news. New news is that Iran seems to be following the MC02 script.

Word around the Oval Office is that the usurper will avoid a conflict until after the November 2012 election. Barackbar still believes he can usurp another term! Hey, given that the newTwo-and-a Half Men is still on the air, anything is possible.

November will be too late to stop the Mad Dwarf Chimpanzoid (MDC) from realizing his wet-dream of owning, and unleashing, nuclear weapons. Barackbar knows that. So do the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Increasingly, so do even liberal Democrats. Perhaps, soon even the toadies in the enemedia will understand.

Barackbar will be shown to be the radical, un-American monster he really is. With all due respect to Maya Angelou, the man has done his job so poorly, it is surely the result of a malicious plan, masterfully executed.

Yes, that's just a way of saying he is a traitor.

Every genocide has been announced ahead of time. The idea of committing a genocide takes time to get used to. Admittedly in a Muslim country, killing Jews is religiously mandated and culturally acceptable, so the sell is not nearly so hard as it would be in a civilized country. But even Iran has had some window dressing to put up before it can proceed with actually wiping out Israel.

Increasingly, the MDC and the goat-beards, led by the Pope of Islam, Ayatollah Khameini, have preached and pontificated about the coming of the Endtimes and the ushering in of kosher times in a perfect Islamic world, if you will excuse the Mother of All Oxy-morons! 

Allah has cursed the Jews! Okay, not really Allah, he (she? it?) was conjured up by Mohamed who, psychopath that he is, hated Jews so much he wanted them wiped off the face of the Earth because they saw him for what he truly was--a lying, looting, raping, murdering paedophile! The proof is in the Koran and the Hadiths. Honestly, just think of any filthy, barbaric thing and it is kosher in Islam.

The Mad Dwarf Chimpanzoid (pronounced shim-pan-zoid) is just itching to again be bathed in heavenly light as he claimed to have been at the UN in 2005. This man is a devout Muslim. A Shiite who seethes with hatred of Sunnis as well as kafirs. A strike on Israel would elevated him to the peak of Muslim adoration.

It is Almost Midnight in the West. Barackbar cannot be allowed to sit on his skinny mulatto hiney while Iran becomes a nuclear power.

Bee's Note:

I have searched and posted news all morning on The Bee Sting Daily.  This particular article, posted by "Almost Midnight in the West" is a summary of the predominate news about Iran/Israel/Obama pulled from today's links across the Net.  The U.S. has sent more folks to Israel for a three-day talk (brow-beating to convince Israel Iran is not a threat!) ....

Israel cannot afford to listen to more of the "same" unconvincing arguments from the West; it will cost her dearly if she allows Obama to lead in matters of security.  Israel need only look to the U.S. and the alarming position Americans are in today, after almost 4 years of Obama's failed "leadership".

undefined