Submitted by: Donald Hank
Two articles I received recently. The first and the last both were written by Israelis and both call Kerry an idiot. If you don't already know he is one, you need to read at least those.
The first provides good details on how Kerry is being led around by the nose by Palestine.
It is clear to me that the Israelis are well aware of the scandals swirling around Zero and are no longer impressed. It is sad that so many believed his lies at first and that he was able to somehow garner the bulk of the Jewish vote.
Don Hank
#1 ISRAELIS SEE OBAMA FOR WHAT HE IS - A WORLD IGNORAMOUS
US Secretary of State John Kerry looks like a bit of an idiot these days. On Monday he announced that he will be returning to Israel and the Palestinian Authority and Jordan for the fifth time since he was sworn into office on February 1. That is an average of more than one visit a month.
And aside from frequent flier miles, the only thing he has to show for it is a big black eye from PLO chief and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
When Kerry was here last month he unveiled a stunning plan to bring $4 billion in investment funds to the PA. If his plan actually pans out, its champions claim it will increase the PA's GDP by a mind-numbing 50 percent in three years and drop Palestinian unemployment from 21 to 8 percent.
Standing before world and regional leaders on May 26, Kerry said plaintively, "This will help build the future. Is this a fantasy? I don't think so."
Abbas and his underlings wasted no time, however, in demonstrating that indeed, Kerry's plan is fantasy. Abbas appointed Rami Hamdallah, a Fatah apparatchik with perfect English, to replace America's favorite moderate Palestinian, Salam Fayyad, as PA prime minister.
As The Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh has pointedly explained, Hamdallah was appointed for two reasons. First, to facilitate Fatah's absconding with hundreds of millions of dollars in donor aid to the PA and to Palestinian development projects precisely of the type that Kerry hopes to finance with his $4b. grant. The second reason Abbas appointed Hamdallah the English professor from Nablus was because his language skills will enable him to make American and European donors feel comfortable as his colleagues in Fatah pick their taxpayer- funded pockets.
Aside from mooning Kerry in the middle of his speech in Jordan, Abbas couldn't have thought of a more graphic way to show his contempt for Kerry and the Obama administration.
But that wasn't the only thing the Palestinians did. Again, as Abu Toameh has reported, the popular Palestinian response to last week's World Economic Forum in Jordan, where Abbas and Kerry rubbed elbows with President Shimon Peres and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, was to attack the businessmen who accompanied Abbas to the conference. Their crime was meeting with Israeli businessmen who came to the conference in Peres's entourage. Led by Fatah activists, Palestinian writers, unions and others also went after Palestinian businessmen from Jenin who went to Haifa to meet with Israeli businesspeople at the invitation of Haifa's Chamber of Commerce. The "anti-normalization" crowd is calling for Palestinians to boycott Palestinian businesses that do business with Israelis.
And again, that isn't all. At the PLO's birthday celebrations this week, Abbas said that the group's 1964 charter reflects the will of the Palestinian people. That charter calls for the destruction of Israel. It was written three years before Israel took control of Judea, Samaria and northern, southern and eastern Jerusalem.
But wait, there's more. The Palestinian leadership attacked Kerry personally and his plan as an attempt to bribe them. They promised that while they will happily take the money, $4b. measly dollars won't convince them to moderate one iota. They still demand that Israel release all Palestinian terrorists from its jails, agree to its demographic destruction through the so-called "right of return," or unfettered immigration of millions of foreign Arabs to Israel, and the surrender of all of Judea, Samaria and northern, southern and eastern Jerusalem to the PLO as a precondition to beginning negotiations.
And for all that, Kerry responded by applauding Hamdallah's appointment and announcing he will return here next week and is planning to roll out his own comprehensive peace plan very soon.
Israeli leaders for the most part have reacted to Kerry's constant harping by rolling their eyes. He seems like a complete lunatic. Obviously he will fail and the best thing we can do is smile and nod, like you do when you are dealing with a crazy person.
Even when Kerry claimed that the reason Israelis aren't interested in peace is that we have too much money to care, we didn't take offense. Because really, why take anything he says seriously? And aside from that, they ask, what can the Obama administration do to us, at this point? Every single day it becomes more mired in scandal.
The Guardian's revelation Wednesday that the US government has been confiscating the phone records of tens of millions of Americans who use the Verizon business network since April is just the latest serious, normal-presidency destroying scandal to be exposed in the past month. And every single scandal - the IRS's unlawful harassment and discrimination of conservative organizations and individuals, the Justice Department's spying on AP journalists and attempt to criminalize the normal practice of journalism through its investigation of Fox News correspondent James Rosen - makes it more difficult for President Barack Obama to advance his agenda.
As for foreign policy, the whistle-blower testimony that exposed Obama's cover-up of the September 11, 2012, al-Qaida attack on the US Consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi has caused massive damage to Obama's credibility in foreign affairs and to the basic logic of his foreign policy.
Ambassador Chris Stevens was tortured and murdered by al-Qaida terrorists who owed their freedom of operation to the Obama administration. If it hadn't been for Obama's decision to bring down the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, who had been largely harmless to the US since he gave up his illicit nuclear weapons program in 2004, those al-Qaida forces probably wouldn't have be capable of waging an eight-hour assault on US installations and personnel in Benghazi.
With the Benghazi scandal hounding him, the Syrian civil war and, for the past week, the anti-government protests in Turkey all exposing his incompetence on a daily basis, these Israeli leaders take heart, no doubt in the belief that Obama's freedom to attack us has vastly diminished.
Although this interpretation of events is attractive, and on its face seems reasonable, it is wrong.
And it would be a devastating mistake for Israeli leaders to believe it.
Since he entered office, Obama has responded to every defeat by doubling down and radicalizing.
When in 2009 public sentiment against his plan to nationalize the US healthcare industry was so high that Republican Scott Brown was elected senator from Massachusetts for the sole purpose of blocking Obamacare's passage in the US Senate, Obama did not accept the public's verdict.
Instead he used a technicality to ram the hated legislation through without giving Brown and the Senate the chance to vote it down.
And now, as his Middle East strategy of appeasing Islamists lies in the ruins of the US Consulate in Benghazi and in the cemeteries interning the Syrians murdered in sarin gas attacks as Obama shrugged his shoulders, Obama is again doubling down. On Wednesday he announced that he is elevating the two architects of his policy to senior leadership roles in his administration.
Obama's appointments of UN Ambassador Susan Rice to serve as his national security adviser, and of former National Security Council member Samantha Power to serve as ambassador to the UN, are a finger in the eye to his critics. These women rose to national prominence through their breathless insistence that the US use force to overthrow Gaddafi in spite of clear evidence that al-Qaida was a major force in his opposition.
Power is reportedly the author of Obama's policy of apologizing to foreign countries for the actions of past administrations. Certainly she shares Obama's hostility toward Israel. And she has been outspoken in expressing her negative opinions.
In a nutshell, Power's vision for US foreign policy is a noxious brew of equal parts self-righteousness, ignorance and prejudice. And now she will be responsible for defending Israel (or not) at the most hostile international arena in the world, where Israel's very right to exist is subject to assault on a daily basis.
Obama's decision to appoint Rice and Power in the face of the mounting scandals surrounding his presidency generally and his foreign policy particularly is not the only reason Israeli leaders should not expect for his weakened political position to diminish Obama's plan to put the screws on Israel in the coming years. There is also the disturbing pattern of the abuse of power that the scandals expose.
To date, all administration officials questioned have denied that Obama was in any way involved in directing the IRS to use the tax code to intimidate with the aim of discrediting and destroying conservative organizations and donors. Likewise, they say he played no role in the Justice Department's espionage operations against American journalists, or in the intentional cover-up of the al-Qaida assault on US installations and personnel in Benghazi. But mounting circumstantial evidence indicates that this is not true.
White House visitor records show that IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman visited Obama's White House 157 times. His predecessor Mark Everson who served under president George W. Bush only visited the White House once.
So, too, as Andrew McCarthy reported last month in National Review, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney admitted that Obama spoke with then secretary of state Hillary Clinton at 10 p.m. on September 11, 2012, during the al- Qaida assault in Benghazi.
It was after that phone conversation that the administration changed its talking points about the nature of the assault, purging details on the identity of the perpetrators and blaming an unrelated Internet movie trailer for inciting the attack.
The one thing all the scandals share is a single-minded willingness to pursue radical goals to the bitter end. The IRS's targeting of conservatives was an appalling abuse of executive power, unlike anything we have seen in recent history. The passage of Obamacare in the face massive public opposition was another means to the end of destroying his opponents.
The cover-up of the Benghazi attack was a bid to hide the failure of a policy in order to double down on it - despite its failure. The only reason you would want to double down on an already failed policy is if you are ideologically committed to a larger goal that the failed policy advances.
The similarities of the pattern of behavior in all of these actions, as well as the circumstantial evidence already unearthed, indicate strongly that despite the denials, Obama was in fact involved and may have directed the actions of all of his underlings in all of the scandals now unfolding.
What this means for Israel is we cannot be lured into complacency by Kerry's buffoonery or Obama's apparent political weakness. This is a man who is most dangerous when attacked. And this is a man who is absolutely committed to his ideological agenda. We had better be ready, because if we are not, we won't know what has hit us.
Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.
#2 Sec of State KERRY 'WRONG AND REPRESENTING FAILED IDEAS
Few figures in American political life have been as consistently wrong as often as John Kerry. The former Senator bet on every Communist leader and Middle Eastern 
tyrant he could find only to watch the wheels of history roll over his mistakes. And now as Secretary of State, Kerry is at it again.
In between peddling a Syrian peace process that no one but him believes in, he took a break to peddle the even more discredited peace process between Israel and the terrorists.
In a speech to the American Jewish Committee, Kerry invoked the litany of failures, "Madrid to Oslo to Wye River and Camp David and Annapolis", but urged his audience not to pay attention to history and “give in to cynicism”.
tyrant he could find only to watch the wheels of history roll over his mistakes. And now as Secretary of State, Kerry is at it again.In between peddling a Syrian peace process that no one but him believes in, he took a break to peddle the even more discredited peace process between Israel and the terrorists.
In a speech to the American Jewish Committee, Kerry invoked the litany of failures, "Madrid to Oslo to Wye River and Camp David and Annapolis", but urged his audience not to pay attention to history and “give in to cynicism”.
"Cynicism has never solved anything," he said. But then again neither has the Peace Process. And while cynicism isn't likely to usher in an era of peace or grow money on trees, it offers you the power to extract yourself from bad situations instead of taking refuge in more of the same wishful thinking that got you into them.
If you find yourself mailing your tenth check to that Nigerian prince, cynicism won't get you a 200 percent return, but it will keep you from losing more money.
"Why should any Israeli start giving in to that cynicism now?" Kerry asked. Perhaps because it's been twenty years. Or because thousands of Israelis have been killed and wounded. Or because there isn't a single piece of supporting evidence to show that the other side is interested in any kind of final peace agreement.
The only sure things that have come out of the Peace Process in two decades are terrorist attacks and increased demands by the terrorists. There has been no final status agreement for the simple reason that the terrorists can only get the best possible deal by never coming to an agreement. The longer they hold out, the better the offers that the likes of John Forbes Kerry extract from Israel are. And the offers keep getting better so there is never any reason to actually make a deal.
Picture a desperate rug merchant dickering with a customer. The rug merchant always lowers his prices. The customer always lowers his bids. The deal can never happen until the priceof the rug reaches zero or until the rug merchant decides that the price isn't worth selling at. And that is the thing that men like Kerry will never allow Israel to do. Israel can never stop bargaining and the Palestinian Authority never has to stop bargaining until the entire rug, all of Israel, is on the table.
Since Israel can never make that offer and since its enemies will never accept less than the whole rug, the negotiations are doomed to a descending spiral in which the Jewish State's negotiators offer more and more in the hopes of settling the negotiations faster to avoid the even higher demands that they know they will face down the road, while the exact same calculation removes any incentive from the other side to settle because they know that the deals will be better down the road.
The only way out of the spiral is for Israel to walk away from the negotiations for good, accepting that the penalty for permanently abrogating the peace process will be less than the eventual penalty for perpetuating the peace process. And that is what Obama and Kerry hedge against by talking up the benefits of peace.
"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie; deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth; persistent, persuasive and unrealistic," John F. Kennedy said. The mythology of the peace process is the enemy of the truth. Its "reassuring repetition of stale phrases" prevents what Kennedy called, "the difficult, but essential confrontation with reality."
Kerry repeatedly calls for hope against cynicism, using stale phrases to perpetuate a mythology of peace with no basis in reality. Out of his mouth fall all the stale promises and threats that have been moldering for decades. "We can’t let the disappointments of the past hold the future prisoner," he says and you can hear the faint echoes of a thousand old speeches and smell the musty air of old banquet halls.
All these are the enemies of the truth. And the truth is a simple thing.
Kerry keeps speaking of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. But which Palestinians would those be?
Nearly half of the population of the Palestinian Authority lives under Hamas rule. Hamas is arguably the legal government of the entire Palestinian Authority having actually won elections.
Meanwhile President Abbas, the man whom Kerry would like Israel to reach a final status agreement with, was last elected in 2005. He is approaching the eight year of his four year term.
During his heavily hyped visit to Israel, Obama gave a speech in which he said, "The days when Israel could seek peace simply with a handful of autocratic leaders, those days are over. Peace will have to be made among peoples, not just governments."
But that's exactly what Kerry is peddling. A worthless deal with a bunch of autocrats.
If Obama really meant what he said, then he would have insisted that Abbas win a current election toshow that he actually speaks for the residents of the West Bank and Gaza. It would also be a matter of basic practice for the entire question of Hamas and Gaza to be settled so that there is one unified Palestinian Authority to negotiate with, rather than two Palestinian states.
And yet that's not on the table here. Anyone who proposes that a man who claims to speak for the Palestinian people should have been elected by them to higher office in this decade would be accused of cynicism and lacking in hope and faith in the mythology of peace.
Obama’s failure to insist on that means that he knows the negotiations are worthless.
The bigger Arab League peace plan that Kerry is proposing is equally worthless. Not only is it worthless in detail, but it's worthless because, as Obama said in his speech, it represents a handful of autocratic leaders.
The proposal came from the Saudi King who has never run for anything, except perhaps a dessert tray. The Arab League consists of monarchies, tyrannies and a few elected governments that took a severe beating during the Arab Spring and remain unstable even after elections. Aside from the absolutely terrible terms of the agreement, there is absolutely nothing to show that the offer represents any popular will or mandate in the Arab World.
In 2010, John Kerry met with the Emir of Qatar who told him that the best way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be for Israel to give up the Golan Heights to Syria because then Assad could convince Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to come to the negotiating table.
The full phrasing of the Wikileaks cable is worth quoting here if only because it should serve to disqualify John Kerry from ever being allowed to negotiate anything, including his next yacht buy.
"Senator Kerry told the Amir he knew Qatar could help the U.S. but asked how we deal with those who advocate violence. The Amir said the short answer is to work the Syrian track, which means pushing for Israel's return of the Golan Heights to Syria. The Amir said return of the Golan is important not just to Syria but also to Hizballah and Iran."
The last time an American leader performed this well, he was sitting across the table from Stalin at Yalta.
Kerry said that he had "great discussions" with Assad. The Emir told Kerry that Assad was committed to "big change". Kerry agreed that Assad wants change and peace with Israel. The Emir told Kerry that it's important that the United States pressure Israel into turning over the Golan Heights.
A year later, the Emir of Qatar was financing a Sunni war to overthrow Assad. Everything that he had told Kerry proved to be utterly worthless. There was no peace on the horizon. The Emir had only been using Kerry and Assad to weaken Israel, before using Hillary Clinton to weaken Assad. There was no peace here. Just the puppetry of diplomatic war.
Kerry learned no lessons from this. If there is anything that Kerry has learned a lesson from in all his years of being played by everyone from the Viet Cong to the Sandinistas to Assad, it's impossible to tell.
At the AJC, Kerry talked up the "moderate" leadership of Abbas, who had declared that he was no different than Hamas. And he doubled up on the mythology of hope. "People have spent so much time lamenting what hasn’t worked in the past that I believe we’ve actually forgotten to focus on what the future could look like if we do keep faith," he said.
But it's actually the other way around. The creaky process has only dragged on this long because of all the people who insist on taking hope on faith, instead of basing their decisions on the solid ground of history.Who trade Patrick Henry's lamp of experience for rose-colored glasses.
"Mythology distracts us everywhere," John F. Kennedy said. "In government as in business, in politics as in economics, in foreign affairs as in domestic affairs."
The mythology of the peace process is a giant distraction. It allows for the same worthless commodity to be sold and resold, again and again. And that commodity is hope. The Israelis have been compelled to trade territory and lives for hope. Now the trade is beginning all over again, this time with a peace plan put forward by a country that is behind much of the terrorism around the world.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar insist that they are American allies even while they fund terrorists who carry out attacks against America. In 2010, they were insisting that Syria could also be America and Israel's best friend if only it had the strategic high ground of the Golan Heights. And that once it had the Heights, then it could bring Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to join the party. Now they're insisting that America has to destroy Assad and pressure Israel to give up half of Jerusalem to a terrorist organization and then there will be peace.
The substance of John Kerry's speech was that he had learned absolutely nothing from the past and that everyone else should join him in not learning anything from the past. That optimistic ignorance is not a luxury that either America or Israel can afford.
At the conclusion of his address, Kerry invoked the oath of Israeli soldiers at Masada. But the very point of the oath is the responsibility of the Israeli soldier not to allow his country to be put into a position where it is so besieged that its only choice is between the depredations of the enemy and an honorable suicide. And Masada, the final last stand in a desert fortress, is exactly where Kerry and the Qatari and Saudi devils whispering in his ear are driving the Jewish State.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century. He blogs at Sultan Knish
#3
[sorry, received no title or link. Don]
| Written by Michael Ledeen | |
| Wednesday, 15 May 2013 | |
The secretary of state was back in Washington a few days ago (5/09), begging the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to take it easy on the poor Iranians. Enough with the sanctions, he said. Secretary Kerry has joined decades of his predecessors, buying into the latest version of the 30-year old illusion that we can make a deal with the Tehran regime if only we deal properly and humbly with them. He said there was a "window of opportunity" for a couple of months. It doesn't much matter if he really believes this legend, or is following instructions from President Obama, who is still pursuing this unholy grail despite five years of swift kicks in his behind. The one he so loves to lead with. Either way, it's an embarrassment. But then, our new secretary of state has great flair for embarrassing us. In Obama's community of narcissists, Kerry is a bit different. He excels at self-humiliation, as he showed in his recent sortie to Moscow, where Czar Putin kept him waiting for many hours before sparing some time to "discuss" Syria and related topics, no doubt including Iran. As per the British Daily Mail, "Russian President Vladimir Putin kept Kerry waiting three hours before their meeting at the Kremlin on Tuesday (5/07) and continuously fiddled with his pen as the top American diplomat spoke about the ongoing crisis in Syria." I've learned that when Kerry landed in Russia, he was told that a) his hotel rooms weren't ready, and b) a military parade made it impossible for the Americans to drive to the Kremlin anyway, so he'd just have to wait. Add two hours (check-in delay at the hotel) to the Mail version. Many years ago, I traveled abroad on behalf of Henry Kissinger, by then a simple citizen, and I spoke with some important people. I was instructed never to wait more than twenty minutes, and on two occasions I informed the important person's assistant that I had waited fifteen minutes, and would have to leave in five more. Nothing personal, just a condition of my employment. Both times the important person appeared almost immediately. And I was not a cabinet member, I was a messenger boy of a famous-but former-high U.S. official. But the American secretary of state couldn't bear the thought of returning to Washington without even talking to Putin, and Kerry waited. And Kerry waited some more. When the czar was in the proper mood, he received his American visitor. Kerry was full of good cheer. And why not? We share a common vision, don't we? "The United States believes that we share some very significant common interests with respect to Syria - stability in the region, not having extremists creating problems throughout the region and elsewhere." I'm not a big believer in stability as an American strategic objective, since change and turmoil are the constant themes of world history, and America is in any event a revolutionary country. For extras, the idea that we and the Russians have common interests regarding Syria flies in the face of our proclaimed objectives: Putin wants Assad to win and rule on, while Obama wants Assad to lose and go away. So I refuse to believe that Kerry went all the way to Moscow, and sat impatiently for hours and hours just to deliver that drivel. There had to be more to it than that. No doubt Iran came up. And maybe Putin told Kerry that sanctions were a very bad idea, what with the next Iranian electoral farce scheduled in a few weeks. That might "explain" Kerry's call to Congress to take it easy. The good news is that Congress isn't buying it. New sanctions were being voted, and implemented, even as the secretary of state was lobbying for the mullahs. The bad news is that Hezbollah's supreme leader, Hassan Nasrallah, announced - on the very day of Kerry's mullah-lobbying - that his terror organization would soon receive "game-changing" (Iranian) weapons from Assad. A sure sign of stability, I suppose. |
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