Don’t use anything more lethal than paintball guns

Fresno Zionist

Washington Post:

The Obama administration said Wednesday that it hadwarned Israel’s government repeatedly to use “caution and restraint” with half a dozen aid boats bound for the Gaza Strip before Israeli commandos raided the flotilla this week in an operation that killed nine people.
“We communicated with Israel through multiple channels many times regarding the flotilla,” P.J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement issued in response to a question from The Washington Post. “We emphasized caution and restraint given the anticipated presence of civilians, including American citizens.”

“Don’t use anything more lethal than paintball guns,” the Israelis were warned. “Think how bad it would look if you accidentally shot some Nobel laureates or members of the European Parliament among the humanitarian peace activists on board.”

OK, I made the last part up. But doesn’t it seem that the US is micro-managing Israeli policy more than ever lately?  And not for the better, if you believe, for example, that pressure from the incoming Obama Administration aborted Operation Cast Lead before the final push that would have overthrown Hamas. Or if you think that forbidding Jewish building in Jerusalem is bad for Israel’s sovereignty in its capital. Or if you worry about a radar installation on Israeli soil that is supposed to protect Israel, but which Israelis are forbidden to enter.

Obama Administration officials and advisors are starting to say that close relations with Israel are a liability to US policy.

Well, guess what? It appears that the reverse is true.


Remember when the Bush I Administration told Israel to hold still while Saddam Hussein dropped his Scuds on Tel Aviv? Today we have the ‘red light’ against an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities (possibly such an attack would be impractical, but a red light nevertheless).

Here is my idea for how the US could promote peace in the Mideast: simply get out of the way and let Israel defend itself. Israel is not expansionist. There’s no downside except that the Arabs and Iran will dislike the US. But they do that already.

My note:

It is evident from the past year's comments pouring out of the White House that Obama is no friend to Israel.  This is obvious to even the most casual observer.  Therefore, with all the wisdom in Israel, among its leaders, I would ask why they allow themselves to follow Obama's lead when it comes to protecting the Land of Israel and its civilians.  WHY?  Unlike the Arab countries surrounding Israel, Israel has the capabilities and the young lions to defend every inch of its land and people - so, following the lead of one who wishes you harm (Obama and Abbas, Hamas, Hizbollah, Iran, etc.) ... why, dear Israel, do you arm your soldiers with paint ball guns?  


Time to take the lead and do what is necessary, for Israel, not what you think will appease others - there is no allowance for appeasement and concessions if you truly value the lives of all Israelis, and this, I know you do - time to take out the more lethal weapons and ignore advice from those who defend the haters of Israel.


Bee Sting

US lifts sanctions on Russian firms

TUNDRA TABLOIDS


Groups previously accused of giving illicit assistance to Iran, Syria.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday removed sanctions against three Russian organizations the US had previously accused of assisting Iran's effort to develop nuclear weapons.

Penalties against a fourth Russian entity previously accused of illicit arms sales to Syria were also lifted.

The timing of the decisions, published in Friday's Federal Register but not otherwise announced by the State Department, suggested the possibility of a link to US efforts to win Russian support for a new UN Security Council resolution expanding sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.

The State Department on Friday did not immediately respond to questions about lifting the sanctions.

Two of the entities — Dmitri Mendeleyev University of Chemical Technology and the Moscow Aviation Institute — had been sanctioned in January 1999 under a 1994 executive order authorizing such action. The order was aimed at organizations determined to have contributed to a foreign country's development or production of weapons of mass destruction or missiles capable of launching such weapons.

When the administration of former US president Bill Clinton announced those sanctions, then-Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said the two institutions "directly support Iranian efforts to develop nuclear weapons."

At the time, the Russian government denied such support for Iran.

More here.

Posted by KGS at 10:42 AM 

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Obama?

 Guest blog from Uzi Amit-Kohn

Posted By Richard Landes On 8th April 2010 @ 20:09 

Augean Stables

 

I just received the following piece from a friend in Israel. I post it here at his request not because I endorse it, but because I think it’s important to think out of the box, and that’s precisely what he does. Comments and criticism welcome as always. - Augean Stables

Unlike our brethren in the diaspora, most Israeli Jews – myself included – had no illusions about then presidential candidate Barack Obama being a friend of Israel. But even I did not foresee that Obama would team up with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to subject Israel to a “good cop- bad cop” routine, and with Iran in the role of the “good cop”, no less.

By now, even many well known figures in US Jewry have come to recognize President Obama’s undisguised hostility toward the Jewish State. Ed Koch, Alan, Dershowitz, and Martin Peretz are just three of the more prominent American Jews who have publicly broken with Obama over his treatment of Israel. Here in Israel, distrust of Obama has reached such staggering heights that this Passover, at Seder tables throughout the country – or so my extrapolation from the experiences of my friends and acquaintances leads me to believe - Barack Obama’s name came up when the Haggadah (ritual reading) came to the text of “Vehi she’amda”, which –in English translation – reads:

“This is what has stood by our fore- fathers and by us! For not just one [oppressor] alone has risen against us to destroy us, but in every generation they rise against us to destroy us; and the Almighty rescues us from their hand!”

Barack Obama seems to me a person full of self-regard but totally lacking in self-awareness, so at the White House “Seder” that he hosted, he probably had no sense that those words – written in reference to such villains of Jewish history as Pharaoh, Amalek, Nebuchadnezzar, Titus and Hadrian and more recently associated by one and all with Adolph Hitler – were now being recited with a picture of Barack Obama in people’s minds. It took real skill for an American president, elected with 78% of the Jewish vote, to be recognized by millions of Jews as a potential destroyer of the Jewish People.

It has been reported that the Obama administration’s intention in creating an artificial crisis in US – Israel relations was politically to weaken Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, and to force him either to form a new coalition with the Kadima party and its leader Tzippi Livny, or to engineer a situation in which Livny will form a new government. The most recent manifestation of Obama’s hostility seems to be a recent report in the Washington Post, that Obama, encouraged by his own National Security Advisor, Jim Jones, and such past – unfriendly to Israel - National Security Advisors as Zbigniew Brezinski and Brent Scowcroft – plans to try to impose a settlement on both Israel and the Palestinians, and will “link” Israel’s cooperation on that violation of our sovereignty to action on the Iranian nuclear issue.

To help forestall this possibility I recommend that Israel-supporters in the United States start being very vocal, and preemptively equate any attempt to impose a settlement on Israel with 1930’s era appeasement. Ed Koch [1] has already applied the “M-word”, writing of Obama’s foreign policy “There is a foul whiff of Munich and appeasement in the air.” We may as well start using the “NC-word” (i.e. – “Neville Chamberlain”) in this context as well.

Obama is already tanking in the polls and is suffering the most rapid decline in his presidential approval rating of any first term president since polling began. He might decide that whatever benefit he had hoped to gain, by imposing a “peace settlement” on Israel, would not be worth the additional damage to his image and political standing.

The most mystifying aspect of this report is that Obama wants to make American action against the Iranian nuclear program contingent on Israel accepting the imposed settlement. The underlying premise would seem to be that Iran is only Israel’s problem, and that America’s friends and allies in Europe and the Middle East – let alone the United States itself – are in no way threatened by a nuclear armed Islamic Republic of Iran.