Obama Can Call Abbas Bluff by Ending Aid

From JPost:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is willing to give up hundreds of millions of dollars of US aid if that is what is necessary to forge a reconciliation deal with Hamas, the Associated Press quoted his adviser as saying on Monday.

Azzam Ahmed stated that "the Palestinians need American money, but if they use it as a way of pressuring us, we are ready to relinquish that aid."

What Ahmed is saying is that the Palestinian Authority would not be pretending to be moderate if it wasn't for American money - they would happily go publicly closer towards Hamas' extremism in the interests of "unity."

Abbas' condemnations of terror - as Arafat's before him - have never been sincere. They are part of the deal, the facade they must maintain in order to continue to get US and EU aid. If they were left to their own devices, the PA would cheer today's terrorist attacks in exactly the same way they cheer yesterday's attacks, naming institutions in honor of bloodthirsty murderers. Is there any moral difference between Samir Kuntar's bashing in the skull of a four year old girl and the vicious stabbing of the Fogel children? Yet Kuntar is a hero, a person that Abbas specifically went out of his way to meet in Lebanon.

If the PLO and PA need to be bribed to act like peaceful human beings, then what more do you need to realize that any peace agreement with them would be a sham? Perhaps one can argue that an artificial peace meant to pacify the West is better than none, but it is not a peace that Israel should be forced to give tangible concessions for.

In other words, a sham peace by the PLO must be reciprocated with a similar peace from Israel: a detente where there is no shooting but where Israel does not give anything permanent upin exchange for mere words.

So President Obama should call Abbas' bluff. Cut off the funds and see how peaceful he acts. If he immediately goes to Iran via Hamas to make up his budget shortfall, then the US will know exactly how pro-West the PA really is. And the true obstacle to peace will be revealed to the world.

(h/t David G)

Do Cameron's Views on Israel Match Obama's

The Economist suggests that David Cameron's views on Israel - which have turned sharply against Israel since he took office - are being coordinated with US President Barack Hussein Obama.

If Mr Cameron offers Israel mixed messages, he does so with the blessing of America’s president, normally reliable diplomatic sources claim. Faced with what they see as the intransigence of the Israeli government led by Binyamin Netanyahu, Europe’s big beasts and America are moving closer in outlook, according to those sources. Before the UN vote of February 18th, Barack Obama reportedly encouraged Mr Cameron and others to take a tough line on Israel. In phone calls to his European allies, Mr Obama is said to have expressed frustration at Mr Netanyahu’s approach to settlements, but to have explained he had “too many domestic fires to extinguish” to risk a bust-up over Israel.

The White House strenuously denies this account. Number 10 would only confirm that Mr Cameron and Mr Obama had been in “regular touch” over the peace process. Since these are private conversations, it is tough for The Economist to know exactly what was said. But, in private, European officials have told Israel that their pressure is choreographed with America.

This, rather than hypocrisy, might be the real story of Israel’s current relations with Britain and others. Impatience with Mr Netanyahu seems to be blurring the boundaries between Israel’s friends and critics. And Mr Cameron’s seeming disagreement with Mr Obama might actually be a form of diplomatic co-operation.

I cannot think of a bigger disaster for Israel short of - God forbid - a serious military defeat than Obama winning re-election in 2012.

What could go wrong?

Labels: Barack Obama, David Cameron

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:39 PM

POTUS Rejects World Jihad Favors Sharia

Although said by the regime to be affiliated to al-Qaeda, most LIFG members have focused only on promoting sharia law in Libya, rejecting a worldwide "jihad".

"Only promoting sharia law." So they are OK with honor killing, killing of apostates, clitorectomies, women as property, amputations for stealing, stoning for "adultery," hangings for gays, Jewish genocide, ethnic cleansing ........

POTUS Backs Al Qaeda in Libya

Libya: the West and al-Qaeda on the same side The Telegraph (hat tip Armaros)
Statements of support for Libya's revolution by al-Qaeda and leading Islamists have led to fears that military action by the West might be playing into the hands of its ideological enemies.

WikiLeaks cables, independent analysts and reporters have all identified supporters of Islamist causes among the opposition to Col Gaddafi's regime, particularly in the towns of Benghazi and Dernah.

An al-Qaeda leader of Libyan origin, Abu Yahya al-Libi, released a statement backing the insurrection a week ago, while Yusuf Qaradawi, the Qatar-based, Muslim Brotherhood-linked theologian issued a fatwa authorising Col Gaddafi's military entourage to assassinate him.

Col Gaddafi has pinpointed the rebels in Dernah as being led by an al-Qaeda cell that has declared the town an Islamic emirate. The regime also casts blame on hundreds of members of the Libyan Islamist Fighting Group released since the group renounced violence two years ago.

Although said by the regime to be affiliated to al-Qaeda, most LIFG members have focused only on promoting sharia law in Libya, rejecting a worldwide "jihad".

"Only promoting sharia law." So they are OK with honor killing, killing of apostates, clitorectomies, women as property, amputations for stealing, stoning for "adultery," hangings for gays, Jewish genocide, ethnic cleasning ........
Atlas Shrugs

Is America Behind Turmoil in Egypt?

Wikileaks is claiming America is behind the revolution in Egypt. To what end? If the Muslim Brotherhood takes over, and/or an Iranian proxy, one would have to seriously question who and what is in the White House.

Obama took no such action with Iran -- a jihadist terrorist state agitating in countries all over the world. That was an historic missed opportunity.

Obama has finally spoke with Mubarak -- just moments ago. He had spoken to him up until now.

The Telegraph via Drudge: (hat tip Van)

Egypt protests: America's secret backing for rebel leaders behind uprising

The American government secretly backed leading figures behind the Egyptian uprising who have been planning “regime change” for the past three years, The Daily Telegraph has learned.

The American Embassy in Cairo helped a young dissident attend a US-sponsored summit for activists in New York, while working to keep his identity secret from Egyptian state police.

On his return to Cairo in December 2008, the activist told US diplomats that an alliance of opposition groups had drawn up a plan to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak and install a democratic government in 2011.

He has already been arrested by Egyptian security in connection with the demonstrations and his identity is being protected by The Daily Telegraph.

The crisis in Egypt follows the toppling of Tunisian president Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali, who fled the country after widespread protests forced him from office.

The disclosures, contained in previously secret US diplomatic dispatches released by the WikiLeaks website, show American officials pressed the Egyptian government to release other dissidents who had been detained by the police.

UPDATE: Obama is addressing the nation on Egypt. He is lecturing on human rights and free speech. The people of Iran must be vomiting. How stern he is being with Mubarak. Why was he not stern with Ahmadinejad?

Race and the Tea Party's Ire

By Eugene Robinson, Truthdig

The first African-American president takes office, and almost immediately we see the birth of a big, passionate national movement—overwhelmingly white and lavishly funded—that tries its best to delegitimize that president, seeks to thwart his every initiative, and manages to bring the discredited and moribund opposition party roaring back to life. Coincidence?

Not a chance. But also not that simple.

First, I’ll state the obvious: It’s not racist to criticize President Obama, it’s not racist to have conservative views, and it’s not racist to join the tea party. But there’s something about the nature and tone of the most vitriolic attacks on the president that I believe is distinctive—and difficult to explain without asking whether race is playing a role.

One thing that struck me from the beginning about the tea party rhetoric was the idea of reclaiming something that has been taken away.

At a recent campaign rally in Paducah, Ky., Senate candidate Rand Paul, a darling of the tea party movement, drew thunderous applause when he said that if Republicans win, “we get to go to Washington and take back our government.”

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Take it back from whom? Maybe he thinks it goes without saying, because he didn’t say.

On Sunday, in a last-minute fundraising appeal, Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee implored his supporters to help “return American government to the American people.”

Again, who’s in possession of the government right now, if not the American people? The non-American people? The un-American people?

There’s an obvious answer, but it’s one that generally comes from the progressive end of the political spectrum: Americans must fight to take back their government from the lobbyists and big-money special interests that shape our laws to suit their own interests, not for the good of the nation.

That may be what some tea partyers have in mind, but the movement hasn’t seen fit to make campaign finance reform one of its major issues. And the Establishment Republicans who are surfing the tea party wave—while at the same time scheming to co-opt the movement—would view the idea of taking money out of politics with horror, if they thought it might actually happen.

So who stole the government? What makes some people feel more disenfranchised now than they were, say, during the presidency of George W. Bush?

After all, it was Bush who inherited a budget surplus and left behind a suffocating deficit—I’m not being tendentious, just stating the facts. It was Bush who launched two wars without making any provision in the budget to pay for them, who proposed and won an expensive new prescription-drug entitlement without paying for it, who bailed out irresponsible Wall Street firms with the $700 billion TARP program.

Bush was vilified by critics while he was in office, but not with the suggestion that somehow the government had been seized or usurped—that it had fallen into hands that were not those of “the American people.” Yet this is the tea party suggestion about Obama.

Underlying all the tea party’s issues and complaints, it appears to me, is the entirely legitimate issue of the relationship between the individual and the federal government. But why would this concern about oppressive, intrusive government become so acute now? Why didn’t, say, government surveillance of domestic phone calls and e-mails get the constitutional fundamentalists all worked up?

I have to wonder what it is about Obama that provokes and sustains all this tea party ire. I wonder how he can be seen as “elitist,” when he grew up in modest circumstances—his mother was on food stamps for a time—and paid for his fancy-pants education with student loans. I wonder how people who genuinely cherish the American dream can look at a man who lived that dream and feel no connection, no empathy.

I ask myself what’s so different about Obama, and the answer is pretty obvious: He’s black. For whatever reason, I think this makes some people unsettled, anxious, even suspicious—witness the willingness of so many to believe absurd conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace, his religion, and even his absent father’s supposed Svengali-like influence from the grave.

Obama has made mistakes that rightly cost him political support. But I can’t help believing that the tea party’s rise was partly due to circumstances beyond his control—that he’s different from other presidents, and that the difference is his race.

Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.

Israel Refuses Obama's Auschwitz Borders

There's a new survey of Arab public opinion out. Among other things, it shows that Arabs are disappointed with President Obama. It also claims that 86% of Arabs would give up on going to war with Israel if only... we'd go back to those Auschwitz borders where they could have us where they want could get rid of us.

Andrew Sullivan - who claims to be pro-Israel - excoriates Prime Minister Netanyahu for refusing to do Obama's bidding.

The powerful logic of insisting on a freeze to settlement construction and a viable two-state solution - essential to turning the propaganda tide in the terror war - is based in Arab public opinion. The reason many of us supported Obama was his unique capacity to win over the Muslim middle and isolate the Jihadist fringe. Israel's government, and its most ferocious supporters in the US, have done a great deal to destroy that promise, and, in so doing, have weakened the United States in the war on Jihadist terror.

So Sullivan is suggesting that Israel should commit national suicide so that the Arab world will like President Obama? I don't think even most Americans expect us to do that. And I'd be deeply opposed to any Israeli government that took Sullivan's demand seriously.

And the whole notion of blaming Netanyahu for Obama's unpopularity is absurd.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem

Obama Pimps for Hamas: $400 millions

O is offering more money to the jihad in Gaza. The thing is, he knows. O knows the money is going to fund Islamic genocide of the Jewish people. Obama lethal for Israel

Your taxpayer dollars at work.

Obama to Offer More Aid to Gaza Despite Benefits for Hamas by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, INN

U.S. President Barack Obama is expected on Wednesday to offer visiting PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas more American aid for Hamas-controlled Gaza with conditions that the money not end up in the hands of the terrorist faction. However, a Palestinian Authority official has revealed how the money ends up in Hamas' hands.

“The president and…Abbas will discuss steps to improve life for the people of Gaza, including U.S. support for specific projects to promote economic development and greater quality of life," according to a senior Obama administration official quoted by Reuters. American aid for Gaza since Hamas took control of Gaza has been funneled through the Fatah-led PA, but Bassem Khoury, minister of national economy for the Palestinian Authority, explained to the French newspaper Le Monde last October how Hamas pockets the money.

Read it and hurl.

There is no humanitarian crisis, as evidenced here and here. More chubby starving Philistinian Muslims under siege by jihad. And economic development? So they can rip it to shreds, like they did here and here. Where Palestinians Muslims truly enjoyed looting and desecration.

Atlas Shrugs

Kindly Expel Twenty States from the Union

It is fashionable to condemn the Dems and the GOP for their abysmal performance on the war and health care issues. Progressives quickly forget we either voted for these wretched parties or we wasted our votes on third parties with no chance to win. During the primaries the general public mocked and rebuked worthwhile candidates such as Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.
Twenty states elected thirty GOP Senators willing to condemn to death 450,000 citizens who lack health insurance over the next ten years. During the same period they will part with $1 trillion to take over the heroin trade from the Afghans. Recently, the thirty Senators voted for KBR to quash Jamie Leigh Jones' suit against them in connection with her suffering a vicious gang rape by KBR employees.
The voters in twenty states cast their ballots for Senators who would murder US citizens, who would capture the heroin trade from the Afghans and who would allow 'defense' contractors to countenance gang rape.
The twenty states should be expelled from the United States of America.