Obama to placate Israel's right-wing leaders

The right winger among Jews create insecurity for Jews and the people of Israel, they pretend to work for the security of Jews and Israel, in reality they do the opposite. When are the moderate Jews going to wake up and take charge of their nation?

Unless there is justice for every one, peace become a forlorn hope.
When we keep threatening others, we are becoming less safer.
It is a shame the right wingers do not understand this and
get out of the way peace.

Mike Ghouse
_______________________

MJ Rosenberg shows just how far Obama has gone to placate Israel's right-wing leaders. Plus Ha'aretz says Talk to Hamas! Amira Hass analyzes Israel's move to expel residents of Jerusalem affiliated with Hamas.

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Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said it best at his joint press conference with President Barack Obama yesterday. Speaking of the urgency of beginning talks with the Palestinians, he said "we need to begin negotiations in order to end them."

One has to wonder if it will even get that far. After yesterday's meeting of the Obama-Netanyahu Mutual Admiration Society, it does not appear that the Israeli leader is under any pressure to begin serious negotiations anytime soon. Or freeze settlements. Or do much of anything except express dedication to the concept of peace.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank summed it up:

A blue-and-white Israeli flag hung from Blair House. Across Pennsylvania Avenue, the Stars and Stripes was in its usual place atop the White House. But to capture the real significance of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's visit with President Obama, White House officials might have instead flown the white flag of surrender. [Emphasis mine]

In fact, Netanyahu may have gotten more from Obama than he had even hoped for.

In the joint statement issued by the two governments after the meeting, the United States agreed that anything Israel does in the name of its own security (as it sees it) is fine with us:

The President told the Prime Minister he recognizes that Israel must always have the ability to defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats, and that only Israel can determine its security needs. [Emphasis mine]

The point here is that the United States has no right to tell Israel what to do on security issues which, for Netanyahu, of course, include maintaining the occupation, blockading Gaza, and "preempting" any adversary by attacking whenever and whomever. Most troubling, the United States agreed that Israel will continue to be exempted from the requirements of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Here's Obama:

Finally, we discussed issues that arose out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Conference. And I reiterated to the Prime Minister that there is no change in U.S. policy when it comes to these issues. We strongly believe that, given its size, its history, the region that it's in, and the threats that are leveled against us -- against it, that Israel has unique security requirements. It's got to be able to respond to threats or any combination of threats in the region. And that's why we remain unwavering in our commitment to Israel's security. And the United States will never ask Israel to take any steps that would undermine their security interests. [Emphasis mine]

In other words, Israel is exempt from the nonproliferation requirements we impose on every other country because of its "unique security requirements." Of course, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and a host of other countries have (as they see it) "unique security requirements." This exemption, pretty much unspoken until now, blows a hole in our nonproliferation policy.

It is clear that the President has no intention of putting any pressure on the Prime Minister. Despite the fact that Israel continues to expand settlements, continues to evict Palestinians from their homes, and has announced that after September any semblance of a settlement freeze will be replaced with more settlers everywhere, Obama still praised Netanyahu to the skies. So why would Netanyahu engage in serious negotiations?

Netanyahu must be ecstatic. He told his political allies and adversaries back home that in an election year, no President of the United States would dare pressure him. And so Netanyahu won big time yesterday.

But Israel lost. So did the United States (which looks less like a superpower and more like a paper tiger). And obviously, so did the Palestinians.

The amazing thing is that while the president gave Netanyahu everything he wanted (which was primarily a lovey-dovey photo op and threatening statements on Iran), Netanyahu got away with offering nothing. He simply said "we want to explore the possibility of peace." The possibility?

One could go on and on. But why bother? The Netanyahu-Obama summit was not a serious event but a purely political one. Each leader accomplished what he needed: Netanyahu goes home looking far stronger than when he departed and without making any compromises that would offend his right flank. Obama can inform the chairs of the House and Senate campaign committees that they can tell disgruntled donors that his relations with Netanyahu are good as gold.

And "pro-Israel" Democrats can proclaim Obama to be "the most pro-Israel President ever." (The last President to hold that title was George W. Bush.)

It just makes you proud.






Ha'aretz Editorial: July 7th

The writer David Grossman called on the government of Israel in these pages yesterday to cease its preoccupation with the number and identity of Palestinian prisoners who would potentially be swapped for captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Grossman believes Israel should make Hamas a broader offer that would involve "a total cease-fire, an end to all terror activities from Gaza and a lifting of the siege." The start of such negotiations would see Shalit and the prisoners exchanged.

The proposal deserves serious consideration as the basis for a new policy. It is unfortunate that four years have been wasted and something along these lines was not adopted soon after Shalit's abduction in 2006. There is no certainty, however, that Hamas would have agreed to the proposal then, or that it will do so now. It is also worth examining the impact such a deal would have on the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and Jordan. But the point of departure is that there is no sense in allowing the existing situation to continue.

A few days after the abduction and the failure of operation "Southern Shalit" to locate and rescue the soldier, astute voices from the top ranks of the Israel Defense Forces reached the conclusion that if Shalit was to be brought back, a new policy was necessary. These voices, which apparently reflected the position of GOC Southern Command Yoav Galant and then chief of staff Dan Halutz, sought to recognize the reality that had been created in Gaza following the Hamas victory in the PA elections four months earlier, and the establishment of the Ismail Haniyeh government (Hamas' violent takeover of the Strip only took place in June 2007 ).

The IDF wanted to pose the following option to Hamas: Preserve your rule of power or continue your violent struggle against Israel. A proposal to seek a broad agreement on Israel-Hamas relations was drafted - which was to include a cease-fire, an end to terrorist attacks and the launching of Qassam rockets, an end to efforts to acquire more weapons for use against Israel and the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Shalit. A report on this attitude held by the IDF, published by Haaretz, angered then-prime minister Ehud Olmert, who opposed a prisoner exchange deal. He shelved the idea and subsequently rejected similar ones raised during Operation Cast Lead.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not bound by Olmert's objections. He should revive the idea and challenge Hamas. Israel needs to embark on an initiative that would fundamentally alter the situation along the southern border, without fearing dialogue with Hamas. It must not regard the current situation as simply fate.



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Published 01:42 07.07.10
Latest update 01:42 07.07.10
Disloyalty on the part of the occupied
Were it not for Mohammed Abu Tir's red beard, this would perhaps be only a marginal news item: Israel is working to expel four Palestinian residents of Jerusalem affiliated with Hamas from the city of their birth.
By Amira Hass
Were it not for Mohammed Abu Tir's red beard, this would perhaps be only a marginal news item: Israel is working to expel four Palestinian residents of Jerusalem affiliated with Hamas from the city of their birth.

There are those who see this expulsion as demonstrating a proud national stance, but it is already turning out to be a political boomerang. Abu Tir is under arrest, because he did not leave Jerusalem on June 19. His colleagues - Khaled Abu Arafa, formerly the Jerusalem affairs minister in Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh's government, and Ahmed Atun and Mohammed Totah, both members of the Palestinian Legislative Council on behalf of an Islamic list identified with Hamas - have moved into the Red Cross office in East Jerusalem.

Four years ago, then-interior minister Roni Bar-On (Kadima ) revoked their status as Jerusalem residents on the grounds that they had violated their minimal obligation of loyalty to the state of Israel, its citizens and its residents. After that, they were arrested, released and defined as illegals obligated to depart from "Israel's borders."

Since the end of 1995, the Interior Ministry - headed first by Haim Ramon (Labor ) and subsequently by Eliyahu Suissa (Shas ) - has pursued a policy of mass revocation of residency (with a brief hiatus under Natan Sharansky of Yisrael B'Aliyah, and even that only after an intense public struggle ). The record was set in 2008, when 4,577 men and women were stripped of their right to reside in their own city by the Interior Ministry, then headed by Meir Sheetrit (Kadima ).

Nevertheless, by revoking the residency of these three parliamentarians and one former cabinet minister, Israel has set a record of a new sort: Until now, Jerusalem residency had been revoked exclusively on the basis of administrative pretexts, such as prolonged stays outside the city.

These wicked pretexts derive from the liberty Israel has taken of applying the Entry to Israel Law - used primarily to grant residency permits to non-Jewish immigrants - to residents of occupied and annexed East Jerusalem. But the inhabitants of East Jerusalem did not decide to "come" to Israel; it is Israel that "came" to them.

The current case, however, is the first time Israel has denied Jerusalem residency on political grounds.

The United States and Europe urged Israel to let the Palestinians hold elections in 2006. The participation of an Islamic list affiliated with Hamas was a well-known condition for enabling these elections to take place, including in Jerusalem.

Yet the moment that list won a sweeping victory, Israel embarked on a campaign of punishment against its members, and especially the Jerusalemites among them, for "serving" in the Palestinian Authority.

This, in and of itself, represented a new peak of political cynicism (and another slap in the face to PA President Mahmoud Abbas ). It has been exceeded in its cynicism only by Israel's demand that the occupied evince loyalty to the occupier, lest he be banished.

With this expulsion order, Israel has managed to unite the entire Palestinian arena. The protest tent the three men set up in the courtyard of the Red Cross office has become a pilgrimage site. And Abbas has met twice with those slated for banishment.

Time will tell whether his promise to have the decree rescinded can be kept. In the meantime, however, the political movement that is his main rival is again becoming the symbol of the national struggle and of steadfastness in waging it.

Even those who, for political and cultural reasons, are sworn opponents of the Palestinian Islamic movement know that Israel is setting a precedent.

Today, people affiliated with Hamas are being expelled from Jerusalem. Tomorrow, if the PA falls apart or dares to reject Israel's dictates, it will be known Fatah activists who will be stripped of their residency due to "disloyalty to the occupation."

Following the flotilla raid, the expulsions from Sheikh Jarrah and the royal plans for Silwan, this is yet another match that Israel is tossing into the tinderbox. And it is one that even its friends will find it hard to ignore.

Israel's defenders mobilize, threaten

The biggest threat to Israel is the Neocons, who are itching to have wars, bomb and threaten others. No nation will be secure if they keep threatening others and expect them to be silent, they will counter threat...and they will coutner it.. there is no end to the itching ideology and policies of Neocons. It is time for moderates to speak up and ask the neocons to shut up for a while, their policies have kept Israel on the edge, and not safe.

Mike Ghouse
~~~~~~~~~

Israel's defenders mobilize, threaten
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Faced with what the Wall Street Journal calls "one of Israel's worst international relations disasters in years", the right-wing leadership of the so-called "Israel Lobby" has been pulling out all the stops to defend the Jewish state against global outrage over its deadly seizure of a Gaza-bound vessel in international waters carrying humanitarian supplies early on Monday morning.

Its biggest concern for now is to prevent the administration of US President Barack Obama from distancing itself in any way - let alone joining in the almost universal condemnation - from the military operation in which at least nine civilian passengers of the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara were killed by Israeli commandos.

"As the international community is engaged in a biased rush to judgment against Israel and a diplomatic lynching, now is the time

for the United States to firmly stand with the Jewish state and its people," said Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, on Wednesday.

"The US must show the world that it not only supports Israel's right to defend its borders and citizens against terrorism, but that it supports Israel's right to protect itself from people who pretend to be 'peace activists', and parade under the guise of humanitarians while supporting Hamas and violently attacking Israeli military personnel," he added.

Indeed, even after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's spokesman publicly thanked Washington for its efforts to "water down" a statement by the president of the United Nations Security Council issued early on Tuesday morning, hard-line neo-conservatives complained bitterly that Obama had betrayed its closest ally by not vetoing it.

"So why did we agree to the presidential statement?" asked Elliott Abrams, former president George W Bush's top Middle Eastern aide, in an article entitled "Joining the Jackals".

"The White House did not wish to stand with Israel against this mob [of Security Council members who condemned the Israeli attack] because it does not have a policy of solidarity with Israel," Abrams, who is now based at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote for the neo-conservative Weeklystandard.com. "It would have been simple to stop the mob had the White House wanted to." (Emphasis in the original.)

Some neo-conservatives, whose worldview is closely aligned to that of Netanyahu's Likud Party, even suggested that Obama's failure to unconditionally defend Israel in its hour of need could well make the Jewish state take even more aggressive action in the future.

"If Obama decides it is in America's interest to make an example of Israel after the Gaza flotilla incident in order to win goodwill in Cairo, Beirut, Tehran and Ankara," warned Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, "then he must also recognize that the leadership in Jerusalem is going to conclude that it cannot trust the United States to safeguard its security, and that therefore it must take matters into its own hands on any number of issues, not the least of which is Iran's nuclear program."

In effect, if the White House decides to come down hard on Israel now," he added in National Review Online, "it is the same as giving a green light for Israel to strike Iran."

That threat was echoed in a remarkable column published by the neo-conservative Wall Street Journal on Tuesday in which the author, Ronen Bergman of Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, argued that the operation itself was "irresponsible" and evidence that a "siege mentality" - based on the belief that world opinion is irreversibly hostile to the Jewish state - had taken hold of the country and its governing elite.

Citing Iran's nuclear program, Bergman argued that such an "unhealthy mindset" was "profoundly disturbing when the fatigued and isolated country itself has the means to strike pre-emptively and punishingly at its enemies, including in ways from which, realistically, there may be no return."

While neo-conservatives were warning darkly about the geopolitical consequences for the administration of any distancing from Israel's position, the Lobby's leaders and their friends in US Congress focused more on defending Israel's version of the pre-dawn incident that took place on Monday some 100 kilometers off Gaza's coast.

They insisted, among other things, that the Israeli commandos who carried out the operation, armed only with paintball rifles and handguns, acted in self-defense after coming under attack from passengers brandishing iron bars, knives and other crude weapons.

"Israeli soldiers had every right to defend their lives against a lynch mob attacking them with knives and clubs," said Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Based primarily on a short video distributed by the Israel Defense Forces, this version of events, including the weapons involved on both sides, has been called into question by the testimony of many of the 600 some passengers. After being towed to Israel and held incommunicado for some 24 hours, they were deported on Wednesday.

It also failed to take into account the right of self-defense of those aboard a vessel that came under attack in international waters. "This is like a carjacker complaining to the police that the driver bashed him with a crowbar that was under the seat," noted M J Rosenberg, a Middle East analyst at Media Matters.

Israel's defenders have also tried to focus media and public attention on what they have called the "terrorist-linked, radical Islamic" group that reportedly bought the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish-based Insani Yardim Vakfi, or IHH, and helped sponsor the flotilla of eight vessels that set out to breach Israel's three-year-old blockade of Gaza.

According to a release put out on Monday by the powerful American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a declassified report by the Central Intelligence Agency after 9/11 named the IHH "as part of 15 organizations that employed members or otherwise facilitate the activities of terrorist groups - INCLUDING al-Qaeda".

Another AIPAC release cited testimony by a "famed French counter-terrorism investigator" that the IHH had played "an important role" in the al-Qaeda Millenium [sic] bomb plot" that targeted Los Angeles International Airport.

But, while the IHH appears to have played a role in recruiting fighters in the Bosnia and Chechnya conflicts in the mid-1990s when the US Central Intelligence Agency report was written, it currently carries out relief operations in more than 100 countries, including Haiti and a number of African countries, as well as in Gaza, the New York Times reported Tuesday. And, aside from an assortment of sticks and kitchen knives, no weapons were found aboard any of the ships seized by Israel.

Similar talking points, however, were deployed by The Israel Project (TIP), another right-wing Zionist group that mobilized its members to write e-mails to lawmakers and media outlets in their area calling on them to stand by Israel. In the space of two hours on Tuesday afternoon, the Washington bureau of Inter Press Service received nearly 20 emails from TIP members in support of Israel's version of the incident.

Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/ .

(Inter Press Service)

Fatal Embrace by Mark Braverman

http://markbraverman.org/

Mark Braverman’s roots are in the Holy Land – his grandfather, a fifth generation Palestinian Jew, was born in Jerusalem, emigrating the U.S. as a young man. Growing up in the United States, Braverman was reared in the Jewish tradition, studying Bible, Hebrew literature, and Jewish history. Trained in clinical psychology and crisis management, Braverman devoted his professional career to working with groups and individuals undergoing traumatic stress. Returning to the Holy Land in 2006, he was transformed by witnessing the occupation of Palestine and by encounters with peace activists and civil society leaders from the Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities.

Since then, Braverman has devoted himself full-time to the Israel/Palestine conflict. He is a co-founder and Executive Director of Friends of Tent of Nations North America, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting Palestinian land rights and peaceful coexistence in historic Palestine. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions-USA, the advisory committee of Friends of Sabeel North America, and the advisory council of the Washington Interfaith Alliance for Middle East Peace. He is a charter member of American Jews for a Just Peace.

NOW AVAILABLE:
Fatal Embrace. Christians, Jews and the Search for Peace in the Holy Land

Who represents Israelis

I have been striving to say this thought for a while, am glad to see some one has said it eloquently.

Wayne Padgette, "As someone who as visited the middle east, I have found friends among both the Arab populations and the Israeli. For the most part, the people themselves are easy to get along with, and the vastest majority of them do not concern themselves with the politics of their "leaders". However, those "leaders" have picked enough fights between each other... See More that it is relatively easy to sway people's opinions toward violence. It would be so wonderful if the average people (of both sides) there could rise up, overthrow their militant leaders, and begin discussing a real peace, the kind of peace the very same peoples enjoyed for many years up until the time that Rome destroyed the previously existing nations."

thank you Wayne.

Mike Ghouse
www.MikeGhouse.net
~~~

Press Release, Holocaust and Genocides in Dallas

PRESS RELEASE
Contact: Mike Ghouse (214) 325-1916,
email: MikeGhouse@aol.com
event email: HolocaustandGenocides@gmail.com
Website: http://www.holocaustandgenocides.com/

III ANNUAL REFELCTIONS ON THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDES

DALLAS – (January 14, 2010) –The Foundation for Pluralism announces the 7/7 speakers Panel to reflect upon the Holocaust and Genocides event at 5:00 PM on Sunday, January 24, 2010 at the Center for Spiritual Center, 4801 Spring Valley Road, Dallas, TX. 75244.

Each individual in the seven member panel would acknowledge the inhumanity in each one of us and reflect upon the solutions for co-existence. It is a purposeful event to learn, acknowledge and reflect upon the terrible things, that we humans have inflicted upon each other.

What can you do as individual?

Continue: http://holocaustandgenocides.blogspot.com/2010/01/press-release-on-holocaust-and.html
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