Kerry and the Israeli-Palestinian "Peace" Talks - Doomed to Failure

Americans Stand with Israel

by Bee Sting
Tuesday, October 22, 2013

According to Kerry, the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are moving at 'increased intensity'.  What an interesting observation, considering Harretz's report today that the two key players haven't met since the "talks" resumed in July, 2013:

"While the pace of the meetings between the Israelis and the Palestinians may have picked up, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have not met since the negotiations resumed."

and, 

 "The two parties have been engaged now in 13 meetings - serious meetings. They had three meetings in the last four days," Kerry said. "All the core issues are on the table. And they have been meeting with increased intensity."

Now, the "core" issues just happen to include splitting Jerusalem in half; not allowing one Jew to step foot inside a "Palestinian" state, and the 67' borders.   And we haven't even discussed the Arab/PLO/Palestinian/Hamas "Charter" that refuses the right of Jews to exist.  Nor, have we mentioned the "Palestinians" map that displays the whole of Israel erased and replaced with a land called "Palestine".

But, my favorite example of recognizing of these "peace" talks having nothing to do with peace and everything to do with money and politics, to-date, the highest bidder (bribe) goes to the USA to the tune of FOUR BILLION DOLLARS.  

If you should doubt the amount, Google it, and you will find an amazing amount of news and links commenting on the U.S. offering Abbas FOUR BILLION, if Abbas would merely appear cooperative and agree to resume talks that never took place before these talks began in July.  However, one of the best commentary's on the FOUR BILLION (remember, America, our economy is in a downward spiral, with predictions that the bottom is about to fall our anytime soon), but the US never lacks for CASH to hand over to any and all Islamic countries, "rebels", and if that isn't enough, to a group of Arabs calling themselves "Palestinians" to build yet another Islamic country within the borders of Israel.  

Here's an organization of Arabs, split in two since Arafat's death; both terrorists, but one group, Hamas, proud of being terrorists against the Land of Israel and the Jews, while the other group, Fatah, is allowed to hide its hatred towards Israel, under the wings and with "protection money" from the Western world. 

The United States will readily admit that our Founding Fathers paid a heavy price for our freedoms.  Israel has been paying that price since 1948 and it hasn't allowed her one moment's peace to-date.  These "peace" talks are not about peace; its all about appeasement to the Arab world, while robbing Israel of another piece of her land. 

Just before "talks" began, Jonathan S. Tobin wrote a commentary well worth a moment of your time:

Palestinians Want U.S. Cash, Not PeaceJonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary05.28.2013 - 5:55 PMSecretary of State John Kerry and some Israelis, notably President Shimon Peres, had high hopes for the latest initiative to improve the Palestinian economy. Kerry arrived at the World Economic Summit in Jordan with his usual unrealistic high hopes for the value of his diplomacy but he did not go there without offering serious incentives to the Palestinian Authority to quit its boycott of peace negotiations that has been going on since before Barack Obama became president of the United States. The United States offered a $4 billion plan that was supposed to both boost the Palestinian economy as well as give PA leader Mahmoud Abbas a tangible benefit for cooperating with Washington’s new plan to restart talks with Israel. But the Palestinian answer wasn’t long in coming. Anyone who has paid attention to Palestinian responses to the various ways that President Obama has tried to tilt the diplomatic playing field in their direction or the way they answered various Israeli peace offers in the last 20 years knows that it was the usual one word reply: no.As the Times of Israel reports:Slapping down the notion that the PA might be appeased by Kerry’s focus on economic improvements, President Mahmoud Abbas’s economic adviser, Mohammad Mustafa, said ”The Palestinian leadership will not offer political concessions in exchange for economic benefits.” He added, in a statement reported by the Palestinian Ma’an news agency: “We will not accept that the economy is the primary and sole component.”
Mustafa, who also heads the Palestine Investment Fund, said the PA’s priorities are not economic but rather a political framework for the creation of Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines, with East Jerusalem as its capital, that also ensures the rights of refugees and a political compromise, the Palestinian news agency added.
Investors are nonetheless more than welcome to “come to Palestine,” the statement added.
In other words, the Palestinians say thanks for the cash but no talks except those that guarantee they get everything they’re asking for while giving nothing in return and even then there’s no guarantee they won’t continue the conflict as their insistence on the “right of return” — which is tantamount to calling for Israel’s destruction — indicates.
While this is another humiliating setback for Kerry, it’s actually far more significant than that. It exposes the fallacy at the heart of most efforts to create peace between Jews and Arabs for the last century.  ... read more here

To-date, this FOUR BILLION DOLLAR PLAN hasn't prevented the Palestinians from ceasing to attack and murder IDF soldiers and Israeli citizens.  Nor, have these people referred to as "Palestinians" demonstrated to the world that they are serious about building up their own society "in peace" among themselves; they are blood suckers leaching off the "goodness" of aid from the USA, the EU, UN, and other smaller donations from its own Arab countries.  They can't bake bread, but they sure know how to build bombs!  Here's an example from today's news published in Harretz: 

"Lauding 'seriousness' of meetings, Kerry announces Qatar's pledge to provide $150 million in aid to cash-strapped Palestinian Authority."

When the talks began in July, I said that they would end in failure, due to the fact that the Palestinians came to the table with blood on their hands.  I referred to the imposed release of hundreds of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli prisons, BEFORE they would talk "peace".  

I also agree with a former Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meri: 

“I am convinced that peace will come to Israel and its neighbors because the tens of millions of Arabs need peace just as much as we do. An Arab mother who loses a son in battle weeps as bitterly as any Israeli mother.”

Israel is surrounded with the wars and fires of all her neighbors, from Egypt to Libya, and back to Syria.  She is attacked weekly, sometimes daily, by the Palestinian Hamas terrorists and some within the Fatah Palestinian group: both groups have NOT given up their attempts to murder Jews and like Iran, wipe Israel OFF the map.

I would add one comment to the thousands already recorded for history and that is this:  If the world were serious about forcing the Palestinians to make peace with Israel, it would stop ALL aid until the Palestinians in Fatah/Hamas put down their weapons and begin making peace among themselves first, and then, with Israel.

Common sense would tell you, dear World, that we do not reward our children for bad behavior, nor should we do that for the Palestinians.  The "FOUR BILLION DOLLAR PLAN" is doomed to fail until ALL the Palestinians truly seek peace without bribes and aid from foreign governments.

Remember the whole nation of Israel is smaller than the size of the US state of New Jersey.

This is the Land the "Peace talks" are proposing to divide up for the Arabs!

Bee Sting

Americans Stand with Israel

ISRAEL: Our World: A miracle and an outrage in Washington

Bee's Note:  Caroline Glick has written a background history of the Iraqi Jews and the miracle of saving and confiscating thousand-year old documents and books stolen by Saddam Hussein.  The State Department brought the documents to Washington, spent three million dollars restoring and are now held in Washington, D.C.  However, next year this administration intends to return the documents to the Iraqi government, rather than its rightful owners, unless by some miracle, WE THE PEOPLE and Jewish Israel can convince President Obama and his administration to return Iraqi Jewish archives, books and documents to its Israeli owners.

I had printed this story months ago, but time is running out, as Caroline further explains in her article:

THE JERUSALEM POST

By CAROLINE B. GLICK21/10/2013 TORAH SCROLLS from the Iraqi Jewish community on display at the Babylonian Jewish Heritage Center Photo: REUTERS Restoring the Iraqi Jewish archive to its Israeli owners would be tantamount to recognizing that the cause of the Arab world’s conflict with Israel is Arab anti-Semitism. If you happen to be in Washington, DC, between now and January, you can see a piece of Jewish history that was never supposed to see the light of day. The National Archives is now exhibiting restored holy books and communal documents that belonged to the Jewish community of Iraq. In 1940, the Iraqi Jewish community numbered 137,000 people. Jews made up more than a quarter of the population of Baghdad. A 2,500-year-old community, Iraq had for centuries been a major center of Jewish learning. The Babylonian Talmud was written there. The yeshivot in Karbala and Baghdad were considered among the greatest in the world. According to Dhiaa Kasim Kashi, a Shi’ite Muslim interviewed in the 2008 book Iraq’s Last Jews, by the 1930s, the Jews of Iraq had become leaders in every field. “All of Iraq’s famous musicians and composers were Jewish,” he said. “Jews,” he continued, “were so central to commercial life in Iraq that business across the country used to shut down on Saturdays because it was the Jewish Shabbat. They were the most prominent members of every elite profession – bankers, doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, etc.” All of this began to end with the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. Due to rampant Islamic Jew hatred, Arab leaders were drawn to the Nazis. For their part, the Nazis were quick to capitalize on their popularity. The German ambassador to Iraq, Fritz Grobba, cultivated Nazi sympathizers in the Iraqi military and organized a pro-Nazi military coup in April 1941. On June 1, 1941, as Jews celebrated the festival of Shavuot, the pro-Nazi government carried out a massive pogrom. Estimates place the number of Jews murdered at anywhere between 180 and 900. Nine hundred Jewish homes were destroyed. Hundreds of Jewish shops and businesses were looted and burned. The pogrom, which came to be known as the Farhud, or “violent dispossession,” marked the beginning of the end of the Iraqi Jewish community. Iraq was one of the five Arab states that invaded Israel on May 15, 1948. The immediate victims of Iraq’s unyielding rejection of Jewish national liberation were the Jews of Iraq. In 1950, the exodus began. By the end of 1952, when the government shut the remaining Jews in, 124,000 Jews had fled Iraq, mainly to Israel. Forced to abandon their private and communal property, their possessions became hostage to the regime. The few thousand Jews left in Iraq lived in utter terror. But even in their reduced state, they tried to protect the property of their phantom community. In Baghdad, only one synagogue remained in operation. The Jews brought all the communal documents and holy books there for storage. But as Harold Rhode, a recently retired US Defense Department cultural expert, reported in August at PJM Media, in 1985 Saddam Hussein sent his henchmen to the synagogue with several trucks. They stole the documentary history of the community in broad daylight. Rhode explained that Saddam ordered the theft of the Jewish community’s property both to humiliate the Jews and Israel and to impress his fellow Arabs. As he put it, from a local cultural perspective, “Humiliation – i.e., shaming another’s personal reputation – is more important and more powerful than physical cruelty. “By capturing the Jewish archives, Saddam was humiliating the Jewish people. He was showing how powerless the Jews were to stop him.” From a pan-Arab perspective, Saddam demonstrated that he “was in the vanguard of protecting and regaining Arab honor, and was therefore more worthy of Arab/Muslim leadership than were the others.” Rhode was deployed to Iraq shortly after the US-led overthrow of Saddam’s regime. By the time he arrived in May 2003, there were only a dozen Jews still living in Iraq. Rhode was the first American official informed of the existence of the archive. It was stored in the cellar of the headquarters of Saddam’s mukhabarat, or secret police. When Rhode arrived at the building with a small detail of soldiers and New York Times reporter Judith Miller, the building had just been flooded by an unexploded shell that had punctured the water main. When he realized the dimensions of the archive, now largely underwater, Rhode moved heaven and earth to save it. Due to Rhode’s action, and the support he received from Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi, vice president Dick Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the archive – which included everything from school records to 500- year-old copies of the Bible – was saved on Shavuot 2003 and sent to the US. Once the archive was safely in the US, the State Department spent $3 million restoring the 2,700 books and tens of thousands of documents. In the meantime, back in Iraq, there are still hundreds of Torah scrolls languishing in a government cellar, inaccessible to the public, and in a horrible state of disrepair. The fact that the archive was rescued from Saddam’s vault and is now being shown to the public is a miracle. But if nothing changes, on Shavuot 2014, the miracle will come to a tragic and scandalous end. In an act of cultural aggression, the US government has promised to return the Jewish communal archive – stolen from the Iraqi Jewish community by the Iraqi government – to the Iraqi government by June 2014. The State Department insists that the archive is Iraqi government property, since it was found in an Iraqi government building. But if that is true, then all the Jewish property stored in the Gestapo’s dungeons should have remained German government property after World War II. And even the comparison to the Nazis is too facile. Jews could safely enter Germany, and even live there after the Nazis were defeated. Jews cannot safely enter, let alone live in, Iraq. The difference between Jewish property stolen by the Nazis and Jewish property stolen by Arab regimes is political. It is politically acceptable to acknowledge that the Nazis were criminals. But the Arabs have never had to pay a price for their persecution and eventual destruction of their Jewish communities. No one wishes to recognize the fact that it is anti-Semitism that drives the Islamic quest to destroy the Jewish state. The only lawful owners of the Iraqi Jewish archive that is being shown in Washington are the Iraqi Jews and their descendants, who are now overwhelmingly Israelis. The only place the archive should be sent is the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center in Or Yehuda, the only museum in the world dedicated to preserving the cultural heritage of the 2,500-year-old Jewish community of Iraq. Yet for the American foreign policy establishment, besotted by a quasi-religious belief that the establishment of a Jew-free Palestinian state on Israeli land will cure everything from Islamic jihad to the common cold, recognizing this simple truth is a bridge too far. Restoring the Iraqi Jewish archive to its Israeli owners would be tantamount to recognizing that the cause of the Arab world’s conflict with Israel is Arab anti-Semitism. A petition is now circulating demanding that the US government return the archive to its rightful owners in Israel. At this point, it would be a great miracle if they would just agree to keep it safe in Washington until an American government comes along that decides to base its Middle East policies on the truth. caroline@carolineglick.com  http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Our-World-A-miracle-and-an-outrage-in-Washington-329351 NOTE: PLEASE SHARE THIS STORY; SIGN THE PETITION, AND CONTACT YOUR WASHINGTON REPRESENTATIVES - BE A PART OF "A GREAT MIRACLE"!

Meanwhile, on Al Jazeera America …

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2013  MIDDLE EAST AND TERRORISM

by Tom Thurlow 

 

It has been almost two months since Al Jazeera America (AJA), the American outlet of Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera, debuted in the U.S. Viewers of the network note its impressive graphics and lack of commercials, a welcomed change of pace compared to most cable news in the States. The network also employs a host of familiar faces that help bolster AJA’s image as just another news network. It remains to be seen just how radical AJA will let its coverage becomes once it grows more assured of its acceptance into the mainstream. Already AJA’s Sunni sponsors have let the mask slip.

Despite a petition drive to exclude AJA from cable distribution, AJA’s coverage is definitely on the rise.  Last spring and summer, AJA went on a hiring spree, hiring producers, writers, technicians, and hundreds of other staffers.  AJA also snapped up big news names like Joie Chen, David Shuster and Soledad O’Brien, and then opened 12 American bureau offices.  Broadcasting began August 20.

Of course, AJA is not just another news network.  AJA’s parent company, Al Jazeera, is owned by the government of Qatar, the tiny, oil-rich, Sunni Muslim state in the Persian Gulf, bordering Saudi Arabia.  Qatar is ruled by Shiekh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who, despite his personal business dealings with Israel, is pro-Hamas, pro-Muslim Brotherhood and anti-Israel.  Al Jazeera’s news coverage has reflected those views.

In fact, Al Jazeera is so pro-Muslim Brotherhood it recently got kicked out of Egypt for instigating Muslim Brotherhood protests there.  In 2008, Al Jazeera’s Beirut bureau chief threw an on-air birthday party for Samir Kuntar, convicted killer of an Israeli family.

Americans learned to hate Al Jazeera in the days after 9-11, when Al Jazeera first repeated the charge that American Jews were warned beforehand of the attacks in New York, then repeatedly broadcast interviews of Osama bin Laden.  Al Jazeera has even described the War on Terror as “so-called,” and suicide bombings as “paradise operations.”

Through the years Al Jazeera has had on-air personalities who were blatantly anti-Semitic.  One popular Al Jazeera show, “Shari’a and Life,” features a host who regularly criticizes Shiites, Americans and Jews.

During the height of the Iraqi war years, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld described Al Jazeera as “the mouthpiece of Al Qaeda,” while President George W. Bush referred to Al Jazeera as “a terrorist organization.” Upon the initial invasion of Afghanistan and later in Iraq, US military forces bombed local Al Jazeera offices because of the support they had given terrorists.

Now that AJA is on the air in the US, Americans will get to judge for themselves if AJA will be an independent news network covering news items important to Americans, or if AJA possesses the dispositions of its parent company.

While the network’s foreign news coverage is acceptable, the viewer gets the feeling that AJA is “up to something” whenever the news involves Israel, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Mideast in general.

Take for example the network’s coverage of the civil war in Syria.  A Pew study revealed that most of the Syrian coverage by AJA was similar to most other American networks, but AJA spent much more time covering the humanitarian aspects of the story and the hardships of the rebels.  And no wonder – Qatar has funded the rebels.

In its domestic news coverage, AJA is clearly left-leaning.  Typical of a pattern, in a recent day’s news broadcast, President Obama is shown speaking and blaming Republicans for the government shut-down, then the GOP response was only paraphrased in passing by the show’s anchor.

Strictly as a marketing issue, this liberal domestic news slant puts AJA in the same crowded category as most other American news channels, like ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, NPR and MSNBC, leaving Fox News alone in the right-of-center TV news coverage.  Granted, AJA is only weeks old, but so far it is positioning its domestic news coverage in a pretty crowded field.

One recent episode of an in-depth news talk show on AJA, “The Stream,” revealed a definite anti-Israeli bias.  The episode addressed the issue of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and how to get Israel to discuss peace.  Special guests included members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which is a scandal in and of itself. The ISM is an organization, not of peace activists, but of para-militants who actively work with Palestinian terrorists and who call for armed force against Israel. ISM activists protect weapons-smuggling tunnels and have been photographed with assault weapons. Another group on the show calling itself Combatants For Peace (CFP) equates Israeli soldiers with Palestinian “combatants” (i.e. terrorists).  Neither the CFP nor ISM’s websites acknowledges Israel’s right to exist, even with defensible borders.  The Stream even included a former Israeli soldier, who complained of Israeli aggression against Palestinians.  He was probably trying to be Israel’s version of John Kerry, circa 1971.

The show featured furrowed brows and hand-wringing about how to get “both sides to stop talking past each other,” and how to “open a dialogue.”  A stream of viewer tweets across the bottom of the screen confirmed that the viewers were of the same mindset.  There was also some talk of “Israel’s occupation” and the need to boycott Israel’s products in order to foster peace talks.

AJA also maintains a website to supplement its on-air overage.  Recently, the website reported on a study that calculated the number of deaths from the Iraqi war to be over 500,000, dramatically higher than estimates from most other studies.  The website also included a letter from an inmate and hunger-striker at Guantanamo, complaining of the force-feeding he has to endure to keep him alive.  Poor guy!

So what is a news-watcher to do?  When it comes to foreign news coverage, most of the important news involves Middle East matters, a subject where AJA is pretty biased. For domestic news, so far AJA’s coverage is similar to the coverage of several other networks.

But beyond these questions, what is the point of Al Jazeera even coming to America?  Why would the Emir of Qatar go through the hassle and expense?  One theory could be that AJA is some sort of pan-Arab pride project.  And it is true that most significant regions of the world have at least one major news network.  Some have also speculated that AJA is just a vanity project on the part of the Emir of Qatar, which is possible.

One other theory, and it is speculative but worth pondering, is that AJA may be getting into the American mainstream, slowly getting accepted, so that if there is another 9-11, a war involving Israel, or some other mass terrorist event, AJA will be there to share its pro-Al Qaeda or anti-Israel side to American viewers.  Kind of an “embedded news network,” ready to propagandize at a moment’s notice. Given Al Jazeera’s past loyalties to Al Qaeda and positions against the US and Israel, it is certainly possible.

When Al Gore sold Current TV to Al Jazeera, he is reported to have said that Al Jazeera “gives a voice to those who are not typically heard,” and “speaks truth to power.” Actually, in the event of a war involving Israel or another large-scale terrorist attack against Americans, AJA will be a vehicle for arguing against speaking truth to terrorist powers. It may in fact be terrorized Americans who will be forced to speak truth to AJA.

Tom Thurlow 

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-thurlow/meanwhile-on-al-jazeera-america/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Americans performing Hajj attacked in Saudi Arabia

Bee's note: Another example of Muslims vs. Muslims.  If anyone remembers the videos of the Dearborn Muslims attacking non-Muslim Americans, this story is an example of that old saying, "What goes around, comes around".  I have a strong feeling these "American" Muslims in Saudi will be anxious to leave and come back to America, where they can once again go about their business of complaining of their "freedoms" in the United States.

Photo: Pilgrims on Hajj (AP)

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

WASHINGTON, October 18, 2013 —  A group of Americans visiting Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj were threatened and attacked earlier this week on Oct. 16 by a radicalized group of extremists. On one of the nights where Hajj pilgrims are required to stay overnight in the city of Mina, a group of young men began asking different sets of pilgrims if they were from the United States.

When they encountered a group that identified themselves as not only Americans, but also as Shiite Muslims, they were threatened and attacked by the group of men, who were apparently armed with knives and other blades.

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SEE RELATED: More than 14,000 American Muslims leave for pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia

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During the attack, the men reportedly shouted “Our [holy pilgrimage] will be complete once we have killed you, ripped out your hearts and eaten them, and [then] raped your women.”

In continuing the assault, the men also shouted “We’re going to do Karbala all over again,” referring to an important historical event to Shi’ite Muslims, wherein the grandson of the Prophet, named Imam Husain, was brutally attacked and killed, after he was forced to witness the killing of many of his family members. The survivors of the incident, mostly women and children, were immediately imprisoned in circumstances that resulted in the deaths of some of the prisoners.

The Americans fled the tent area, which the Saudi government had specifically designated for American and European pilgrims. During the escape, many of the group, almost entirely U.S. citizens and mostly hailing from Dearborn, Michigan suffered bruises (in one case, due to an attempted strangulation), concussions, broken bones, and black eyes.

Victims of the attack reported that nearby police refused to take action, and in some cases were openly laughing at the attack. The Americans approached other officers, including one described as a “lieutenant with stars on his shoulder pads.” They reported the attack and showed police video footage of the attack taken on cell phones.  

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SEE RELATED: NYC lawyer argues that NYPD can spy on peaceful Muslim conversations

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The “lieutenant” confiscated the phones and immediately deleted the videos in front of onlookers. Without comment, he returned the phones to their owners and left.

Members of the group also turned to the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia for assistance, but were told help could only be provided if members of the group had died in the attacks.

Some victims even tweeted about the attack after reaching safety:

@seyedmg wrote “10 members of our group where attacked by 200 barbarian salafis for making salawat in Mina ….  They need your [prayers].”

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SEE RELATED: Turkey’s Chief Justice: If that is Islam, I’m no Muslim

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Later he tweeted, also referring to the incident of Karbala, “They attacked screaming kill them like Hussien [sic] and take there women as captives like Zaynab… We have people bleeding and women terrified”

This twitter account apparently belongs to Seyed Mothafar Al-Qazwini, a young Shiite schoalr. Al-Qazwini posts on his twitter account a video of the man he believes instigated the attack. The video, posted below, is an Australian newscast of 31-year-old Omar Ammouch, who was arrested in Australia for physically attacking Australian Muslims who refused to support the Syrian rebels.

YouTube of Omar Ammouch

The attackers are believed to be of the Salafi sect, more popularly known as Wahabis, who are often associated with strong anti-Shiite viewpoints. Critics believe that many of Al-Qaeda’s members subscribe to the Salafi belief system.

This incident is the latest in a string of attacks against Westerners in Saudi Arabia. In different incidents in past years, Shi’ite Imams from the United States and Canada were either assaulted or arrested for complaining about assaults.  The previous incidents, as well as this week’s attack, all required medical treatments.

“I personally thought it was the end,” said one of the victims of this attack, a dentist from Michigan, not wishing to be identified for fear of reprisal from the Saudi police or other extremists.  Continuing sadly, “You always hear about how nice [Hajj] is supposed to be…

“Something needs to do something about [the attack]. If this wasn’t the House of God, I would say that I never want to come back.”

No witness has thus far been willing to identify themselves, each of them citing safety concerns.

Read more: http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/american-muslim/2013/oct/18/americans-performing-hajj-attacked-saudi-arabia/#ixzz2iGxxnAst
Follow us: @wtcommunities on Twitter

Israel and the new Munich - by Caroline Glick

Column One: Israel and the new Munich

By CAROLINE B. GLICK

10/17/2013 20:49

The Iranians have given no indication that they would be willing to suspend all uranium enrichment.

Catherine Ashton, Saeed Jalili during before talks Photo: REUTERS/Tolga Adanali/Pool

Speaking to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Wednesday, Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz explained Israel’s concerns about the nuclear negotiations with Iran in Geneva. “We’re worried Geneva 2013 will end up like Munich 1938.”

Well, the time for worrying has passed. The statements from the Obama administration and the EU following the closing of the first round of talks all made clear that Geneva 2013 is Munich 1938.

The White House was unable to restrain its excitement at the prospect of a deal with the genocidal, nuclear weapons-developing mullocracy.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said, “The Iranian proposal was a new proposal with a level of seriousness and substance that we had not seen before.”

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who led the six-power delegation that faced the Iranians, said that the talks were “the most detailed we have ever had, by a long way.”

Ashton also said that she is committed to making concessions to Iran as quickly as possible. In her words, “When we have been talking and in our discussions in these last days we know that we have to look for a first step, a confidencebuilding step, and we know we have to be clear about the last steps and to do that in the context of the objective overall.”

The stunning talks even included a one-on-one discussion between the chief US negotiator Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman and the Iranians.

The only problem with all these exciting developments is that all the “serious Iranian proposals” would result in the same outcome: a nuclear-armed Iran. There was nothing in the Iranian proposals that could give anyone any reason whatsoever to believe that Iran is serious about stopping its nuclear weapons development program. Indeed, the only thing we learned this week is that like the Allied powers in 1938, the Obama administration and the Europeans have no stomach for a confrontation and are willing to dress up appeasement of a dangerous foe as “peace” and “progress.”

The Iranians have given no indication that they would be willing to suspend all uranium enrichment.

In his press conference after the current round of talks ended, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif insisted that Iran has the right to continue enriching uranium. The Iranian offer appears to involve suspending its 20 percent uranium enrichment activities and sufficing with enriching uranium to 3.5%.

As everyone from US Sen. Mark Kirk to the Washington Post editorial board to US President Barack Obama’s former chief pointman on Iran’s nuclear program Gary Samore have stated over the past several days, given Iran’s current enrichment capabilities, Iran’s offer is meaningless.

Over the past year, Iran has installed a thousand sophisticated centrifuges at its nuclear installation at Natanz. These new centrifuges allow Iran to transform 3.5% enriched uranium to bomb-grade material (enriched to 90%) as quickly as its old centrifuges were capable of transforming 20% enriched uranium to weapons-grade levels. So today, 3.5% enrichment is as comfortable a jumping-off point for the Iranian weapons program as 20% enrichment was a few years ago. Iran’s “serious proposal” is a joke.

As Samore told The New York Times, “Ending production of 20% enriched uranium is not sufficient to prevent breakout, because Iran can produce nuclear weapons using low-enriched uranium and a large number of centrifuge machines.”

In a conference call with the Israel Project Wednesday, Samore explained, “What they’re offering is really no different than what we’ve heard from the previous government, from [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad’s government for the last couple of years.... They continue to reject any physical limits on their enrichment capacity – meaning the number and type of centrifuge machines, the stockpile of enriched material that they have in country. And as far as I can tell, they have continued to reject closing any of their nuclear facilities... I haven’t heard of any agreement to halt work or to modify the heavy water research reactor that they’re building, and which may be close to operational.”

So the Iranians offered nothing this week that they didn’t offer in the past. And as a senior administration official told the Times, the Iranian program is already so advanced that for there to be time to negotiate a comprehensive agreement, Iran needs to first take steps to halt or even reverse its nuclear program.

And as Samore explained, none of the reports on the conclusion of this week’s round of talks indicated any Iranian willingness to take such actions.

The negotiations in Geneva bear an unsettling resemblance to the negotiations the West held with North Korea as it developed nuclear weapons. There, too, Western negotiators bragged about new, serious and unprecedented North Korean “concessions.”

Pyongyang used the talks to undermine Western resolve to block its nuclear progress.

Just as happened with North Korea, so with Iran, the appeasement-crazed press will bring us endless stories about new, serious negotiations documents that will “ensure the peace.”

The last of the stories will be published the day Iran tests its first atomic bomb.

Since the Iranians are making the same unserious offers they have been making for years, why are the Americans and the Europeans hailing the talks as a new beginning? Why is Ashton talking about confidence-building measures? Why are American commentators and senators talking about various steps the US could take to appease Iran? By midweek, talk was rife in Washington about the prospect of unfreezing some of the $50 billion Iranian funds that have been held in escrow in Western banks. Doing so, we were told, would reward the Iranians for being so “serious,” but it wouldn’t involve directly unraveling the sanctions regime.

All of this is happening because the American and Europeans have changed their game. The only serious development of this week is the revelation of their new game.

The Iranians remain committed to developing nuclear weapons. But the US and Europe have stopped even paying lip service to stopping them. Instead, the US and Europe aim to destroy domestic Western opposition to Iran’s nuclear program. This is the new American/European game plan. This is what stands behind all the nonsensical talk of “serious” Iranian proposals.

Before his reelection, Obama felt constrained to pretend that he was serious about preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. He opposed but then grudgingly signed comprehensive sanctions passed overwhelmingly by both houses of Congress. He told AIPAC that he had Israel’s back.

But now that he’s no longer facing reelection, the jig is up. Obama’s new goal, which is enthusiastically supported by Ashton and her comrades in Brussels, is to use the new negotiations with Iran’s phony baloney “moderate” new president to give himself political cover to open the door to Iran acquiring nuclear bombs. Obama doesn’t want to prevent Iran from getting the bomb. He wants to insulate himself from criticism when it gets the bomb.

Not only do the White House’s lies about Iran’s new “level of seriousness” give Obama the maneuver room to pretend he’s acting responsibly, they trap Israel into inaction. After all, how could Israel possibly bomb Iran’s nuclear installations when Iran is negotiating so seriously, and is “this close” to making a groundbreaking agreement?

We shouldn’t be surprised by this state of affairs. Obama has never acted in good faith with Israel.

Take the latest news on Turkey, for example.

On Thursday, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that last year NATO member Turkey gave Iranian intelligence the identities of up to 10 Iranian agents working for the Mossad after they met with their Israeli case officers in Turkey. Turkey’s action was a shocking betrayal of what was supposed to be a goal it shared with Israel and the US – preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Turkey willfully harmed Israeli efforts to achieve this goal by turning in 10 Israeli agents.

Rather than taking action against Turkey, or simply acknowledging that the actions of Prime Minister Recep Erdogan represented a fundamental shift in Turkey’s strategic outlook, Obama shrugged off Turkey’s betrayal. The US didn’t even protest Turkey’s despicable deed. Instead, as Ignatius noted, “Turkish-American relations continued warming last year to the point that Erdogan was among Obama’s key confidants.”

A few months after Turkey colluded with Iran against Israel, Obama coerced Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu into apologizing to Erdogan for Israel’s lawful maritime interdiction of the Mavi Marmara as it unlawfully sought to breach Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza coastline.

No doubt, in making this concession Netanyahu believed that he would win Obama’s goodwill. In a similar fashion, in the hope of appeasing Obama, Netanyahu has made concession after concession to the Palestinians – from drastically downgrading Jewish property rights in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to releasing Palestinian murderers from prison.

Yet in all of these cases, Obama has pocketed Israel’s concessions and demanded more concessions.

In all these cases, Obama’s allies have used the concessions to present a picture of Israel as both an ungrateful and unhelpful ally, and as a weakling. And in the meantime, Obama has facilitated EU sanctions against Israel. He has leaked top secret Israeli intelligence operations to the media. He has repeatedly threatened to abandon Israel at the UN Security Council. He has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

And now he is involved in negotiations with Iran that will necessarily lead to Iran’s emergence as a nuclear power.

From Netanyahu’s repeated declarations that Israel will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, it is unclear whether he realizes what is going on. More than anything else, those statements represent an attempt to negotiate with Obama. Netanyahu is still trying to win Obama over.

If there was ever an argument to be made in favor of Netanyahu’s pleading, their time is long past. In nothing else, the obscene diplomatic theater in Geneva this week made that clear.

Israel is alone. We have no diplomatic option.

No matter what Israel says, no matter what it does, neither the US nor any other Western power is ever going to be convinced to take the only step that would set back Iran’s nuclear program – bombing its nuclear installations. No matter what, neither Obama nor any European leader will ever support an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear installations.

Israel’s back is to the wall. That is the meaning of the talks in Geneva. If we aren’t prepared to live with a nuclear-armed Iran, we have to stop talking and start acting. And we need to prepare for the diplomatic hell that will break loose thereafter

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Column-one-Israel-and-the-new-Munich-329046

Obama’s potential release of $12bn of frozen Iranian assets

 Bee's note:  

The key sentence in this article is: "The White House was reported Friday, Oct. 18 to be weighing a proposal to offer Iran access to these funds “in installments” against "steps to cut down on its nuclear program."

"Cut down" = not prevent = a "nuclear" Iran.

Dear world, is there anything you're missing about this administration's willingness to allow Iran to become a rogue nation with nuclear weapons?

"Chamberlain" Obama's decisions/agenda are as dangerous as those made by a former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: appeasements did not work then, nor will Obama's appeasements with Iran prepare this world for the war to come AFTER Iran reaches it prime objectives.

Barack Chamberlain Obama

Obama’s potential release of $12bn of frozen Iranian assets would be followed by $35 billion from Europe

DEBKAfile Special Report October 18, 2013, 6:35 PM (IDT)

Tehran stands to gain access to nearly $50 billion if the Obama administration decides to free up $12 billion of frozen Iranian assets in the US, inevitably followed by Europe’s release of another $35 billion. The White House was reported Friday, Oct. 18 to be weighing a proposal to offer Iran access to these funds “in installments” against "steps to cut down on its nuclear program."

DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources: This plan offers Barack Obama a way to ease sanctions on Iran, while avoiding political and diplomatic fallout in Congress and from Jerusalem that would result from an attempt to get the sanctions legislation repealed or amended.

US lawmakers and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu continue to call for harsher measures against Iran, after the Geneva conference last week failed to achieve any breakthrough in the controversy on Iran’s nuclear program.

Although its delegation avoided any pledge to suspend uranium enrichment and offered no plan to dismantle its enrichment facilities, US officials complimented the Iranian position as “more candid and substantive” than in previous diplomatic encounters.

Indeed, according to our sources, the Iranian delegation advised the six world powers on the opposite side of the table to simply accept Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s fatwa as an ironclad pledge of the Islamic Republic’s commitment to refrain from developing a nuclear weapon and continue to pursue a peaceful program.

As for a substantial proposal to cut back on their nuclear operations, the Iranian negotiators said firmly: Sanctions relief first; concessions only at the end of the road.

Ahead of the next round of talks on Nov. 7-8, the Obama administration hopes to warm world opinion to the proposition that Iran’s leaders, especially President Hassan Rouhani, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and his deputy Abbas Araghchi, need more incentives for concessions. They must be able to show their doctrinaire colleagues at home that diplomacy and smiles win more than intransigence.

Even before the Geneva conference, the White House was already putting in place the plan for relieving sanctions by the release of frozen funds - which is why the US delegation included for the first time the Director of the OFAC (the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control), Adam Szubin.

Asked by CNN what Szubin was doing there, senior US negotiator Undersecretary Wendy Sherman said:

“The purpose of having our sanctions team here with us is because … Iran wants to get sanctions relief. But they also have to understand what the range of our sanctions are, what they require, how they work, what it takes to implement sanctions relief, what sanctions we believe need to stay in place.”

Even this gesture failed to elicit from the Iranian delegates any concrete concessions. The obviously fed-up senior Russian delegate, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, summed up his impression of the conference by commenting sourly that it was “…better than Almaty" (where the last round of talks took place in April) but offered “no guarantee of future progress.”

Nevertheless, President Obama is determined to keep up his strategy of appeasing Tehran and showing Congress and the Israeli prime minister that they are wasting their time by trying to stop him easing sanctions on Iran, because he will bypass them with presidential decrees.

Most of all, Obama is set against allowing himself to be persuaded by Netanyahu’s arguments of the terrible danger posed by a nuclear Iran.

Foreign Minister Zarif put his oar into the conflict between Washington and Jerusalem Friday with this comment: “There is a high possibility that the talks will be disturbed by various efforts on the part of Israel,” he said. “This reflects Israel’s frustration and warmongering.” 

http://www.debka.com/article/23370/Obama%E2%80%99s-potential-release-of-12bn-of-frozen-Iranian-assets-would-be-followed-by-35-billion-from-Europe