Earlier this week, my husband mentioned that he had read that Israel was holding mock dogfights using both F16s and MIGs, which they got from who knows where. We discussed the implications of this off and on for the rest of the evening, wondering if this exercise heralded anything in particular, or was just a show of strength.
Robert Avrech at Seraphic Secret connects more dots. Lots more. Based on what the Israeli military has been doing recently, he wonders how much longer Iran will have a nuclear facility. Being a screenwriter, Mr. Avrech calls this “foreshadowing.” Not being a screenwriter, I call it “bad news for Iran”, but “forshadowing” works for me too.
2. Earlier this month, Israeli jets flew to Gibraltar and back refueling in mid air. The 2,361 miles distance from Israel mimics the distance required to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities from Israel.
4. Over the past year the IAF has flown several combat missions into Sudan to destroy convoys carrying weapons from Iran to be smuggled into Gazastan. The IAF flew these missions without interference from a single Arab state. Again, the round trip distance is striking.
Heh. “Striking.”
Mr. Avrech goes on to point out that President Obama likely believes that his own personal charm, plus the diplomatic skills of his State Department, will be enough to prevent Iran from going nuclear, while the mullahs can barely conceal their amusement at such a conceit.
A nuclear Iran is a situation that the entire world should be taking far more seriously, especially with conditions in the Middle East as they are today. Make no mistake: if Iran attains its goal of becoming nuclear, it will use that power. And I believe Israel will only be the beginning. I agree with Mr. Avrech when he says:
I have this weird tendency to take it quite seriously when a holocaust denying Muslim Jew-hater threatens another Holocaust.
But that’s just me.
Sir, you are not alone in this tendency.
I sincerely hope that when Israel makes its move, President Obama will immediately throw the weight of the United States in the balance with Israel. A nuclear Iran threatens not just the Jewish state; it threatens the entire free world.
UPDATE: Well, well. According to Ben Smith at Politico.com, it looks like the U.S. is pulling out of Durban II. The report leaves it unclear if we really are pulling out, or if we’re just going to sit on the sidelines for a while, but it looks like it might be a step in the right direction, anyway.
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The Short Form:
Dear Israel,
You’re screwed.
Love,
America
It is becoming clearer all the time that President Obama has no great affection for Israel. Which is sad, really as Israel is one of our staunchest allies, and the only real democracy (and the only developed nation) in the Middle East.
Some of us have been aware of the President’s leanings since he first started to campaign for the job he now holds. The evidence was there: 20+ years in a church that spews not only anti-American but also anti-Semitic bile, the endorsement by Nation of Islam leader “Calypso Louie” Farrakhan, the longstanding friendship with former PLO press agent Rashid Khalidi.
The book was open, it remained for us to read the words. Sadly, many of us didn’t.
And now we are seeing the continuation of that mindset, presented as policy-makers and shaped as executive decisions.
President Obama’s first official call to a foreign leader, to Mahmoud Abbas, “Palestinian” President.
His decision to participate in at least the planning stages of Durban II, the UN “anti-racism” conference which thinly disguises the UN’s own virulent anti-Semitic leanings.
The almost-one-trillion dollars the President has pledged to Gaza, which will never actually do the citizens of Gaza any good but will instead doubltess get many of them and also many Israelis killed.
The appointment of Chas Freeman to head Obama’s National Intelligence Council: anti-Semite, in the pocket of Saudi Arabia, pro-Chinese Communist. This is the man who will decide what intelligence information reaches the President.
Each of these things taken alone might not mean much of anything. Add them, and the other instances that doubtless exist, and the bottom line becomes ominously clear. President Obama has no regard for Israel.
So, friend, ally, democracy, chosen people, this American is sorry to say that you’re probably on your own when it comes to support from the American President. But for whatever it’s worth, this American citizens (as well as most, I’d say) still stands proudly in support of Israel. These days, that’s the best we can do.
An astonishingly frank and heart-wrenching open letter to the “Palestinians” from Youssef M. Ibrahim, a former New York Times Middle East Correspondent.
Dear Palestinian Arab brethren: The war with Israel is over. You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children. We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the “eternal struggle” with Israel. Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years…
Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins. Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the United Nations. Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West , while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win…
Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways. Those of us who share borders with Israel , such as Egypt and Jordan , have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon. Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq , frankly could not care less about what happens to you.
Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed. The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab. Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours, Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods – more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives – while your children played in the sewers of Gaza.
The war is over. Why not let a new future begin?
Please read the whole thing. If the rest of the Arab world can bring to bear this same kind of persuasion, we may just see peace and prosperity in Israel and Gaza one of these days. I pray daily that it comes to pass.
GM Roper at GM’s Place gives us a brief history of Israel and its 60-year fight for survival, surrounded as it is by enemies who wish for nothing more than the complete obliteration of the tiny democracy and death to all its citizens.
“In 1945 the world looked on in horror as the gas chambers and crematoriums of Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich were exposed for the hell holes they really were. Equally shocking to the world were photographs of the living skeletons from P.O.W. Camps in the Philippines, Japan and the concentration camps in Germany, Poland, and other places and the United Nations, the United States, and Jews everywhere said ‘Never Again…’
Now, you would think that the Arabs would have learned their lesson, and they did, now they attempt to accomplish by dint of terrorism what they could not, and cannot accomplish via force of arms and the world once again says “Never Again.”
Oh, wait, that’s not what the world is saying? The world is saying ‘bad Israel?’”
Yes, sadly, much of the world is saying exactly that. We hear terms bandied about like “disproportionate response;” “unjust retaliation;” “excessive force;” a veritable Thesaurus of terms one might think the world saves and uses only when Israel chooses to defend itself.
“On December 5, 2003 columnist Charles Krauthammer defined Bush Derangement Syndrome as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush.” and a new psychiatric diagnosis entered the world of politics. Nowadays, as BDS is being replaced by “Hope and Change” (what ever that means) we have Israel Derangement Syndrome in which it really doesn’t matter what the provocation, it really doesn’t matter how few or how many Israeli citizens are murdered by rockets or human bombs, Israel is the bad guy.”
“Never again!” has slowly morphed into “Never defend.” And IDS is succeeding BDS as the “syndrome du jour”; I suppose there’s a certain sad symmetry in that. But what does that say about what we have become?
UPDATE: 3:29 PM EST, 1/5/2009 — FoxNews reporter Reena Ninan again reports “severe consequences” of some “incident” in Gaza, but will not/can not elaborate…
FoxNews reports (2:05 PM EST) that “something” just happened with “grave consequences” for the Israel military in Gaza. The reporter explicitly said that she couldn’t elaborate, but used the phrase “grave consequences” twice.
Israel, a tiny oasis of democracy in a vast desert of dictatorships, theocracies, and stone-aged monarchies, is finally fighting back. After braving treaty after broken treaty, pulling out of “occupied” areas, treating with terrorists as though they had honor, and enduring daily missile attacks from hostile territory, Israel is finally standing up and defending itself. And I say, good for Israel!
Can you imagine if a group of rogue Canadians in Grand Falls, New Brunswick were to fire 4,000 rockets at Caribou, Maine over the course of three years? You don’t have to imagine it, because that is exactly the situation in Sderot, an Israeli town into which Hamas fires an average of 100 rockets every month, deliberately targeting civilians.
Israel has shown an amazing amount of restraint over the years, and it’s actually good to see that the gloves are now off. And as can be counted on from a civilized country, Israel goes out of its way to ensure that their retaliatory targets are actually combatants.
What I don’t understand is why so many otherwise relatively rational people are so obtuse about this situation. We see time and time again, veiled — and not-so-veiled — comments, articles, and interviews which suggest, imply, or outright blame Israel for killing Palestinians, ignoring the fact that Israel is retailiating and defending itself.
Here is a perfect example of an aggressive and accusatory interviewer and a rational (and quite correct) interviewee, Benjamin Netanyahu.
So why is this so difficult for some to understand?
AussieDave is liveblogging the situation on the ground in Israel. He has a lot of interesting information, frequently updated. If you want the latest, check with him.
It has been reported by avarietyofsources that the Los Angeles Times is in possession of a video tape of Barack Obama addressing an audience during 2003 farewell dinner for Rashid Khalidi, a former spokesman for the PLO. In the video, it is rumored that Sen. Obama toasts Khalidi with remarks which, if made public, would be seen as incendiary to a great many people. Another guest, a Palestinian, purportedly read a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism. Yet another guest alledgedly compared Israeli West Bank settlers to Osama bin Laden.
Khalidi and Obama were at one time friends, with Khalidi and his wife dining freqently at Obama’s home. Of late, however, Sen. Obama has attempted to distance himself from Mr. Khalidi, saying at a campaign event last May, “He is not one of my advisers. He’s not one of my foreign policy people. He is a respected scholar, although he vehemently disagrees with a lot of Israel’s policy.”
“Vehemently disagrees with a lot of Israel’s policy.” Well, that’s putting it mildly. Khalidi is a founding member of the Arab-American Action Network, which, among other things, considers the establishment of Israel to be a “catastrophe.” Certainly that did not concern Obama, as in 2001 and 2002 he was able to arrange $75,000 in grants to the AAAN in his position as a board member of the controversial Woods Foundation.
The event documented on the video was attended not only by Obama and Khalidi, but a veritable Who’s Who of Chicago leftist luminaries: unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers; his wife, convicted terrorist Bernadine Dohrn; and Chicago mayor Richard Daley.
Why is the tape of this rather pretentious and relatively insignificant dinner party so important? It’s important because, in the attempt to protect a candidate’s reputation and thereby affect the outcome of the election, the LA Times is doing the entire nation a possibly calamitous disservice. If the content of that tape is as incendiary as many speculate, it is incumbent upon the Times to release it in a timely fashion so that voters may decide if the remarks by Obama are merely “youthful” exuberance, or whether they reflect his true feelings about Israel. If the content is simply mundane, why not release it and let all the furor die down?
By stonewalling as they are, the LA Times runs the risk of becoming as irrelevant as Dan Rather.
Posted by Stoutcat 
Posted by Stoutcat 
Posted by Stoutcat 