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AS WE GO TO PRESS: ROCKETS TARGET TEL AVIV IN WAKE OF TRUCE BREAKDOWN (Tel Aviv) —Hours after rockets shattered the cease-fire and hit Gaza frontier communities, three loud explosions were heard over Tel Aviv, shortly before 11 p.m., for the first time in over a week. Hamas claimed responsibility for the rocket attacks. Rocket alert sirens were heard all over southern communities, Beersheba, central Israel and as far as Beit Shemesh – which borders the nation's capital…Israel called back its delegation to Cairo in light of the violation of the cease-fire, and has already begun responding.” (Jerusalem Post, Aug. 19, 2014)
Contents:
The Deafening Silence of American Jewish Leaders: Isi Leibler, Candidly Speaking, Aug. 16, 2014 — Over the past few months, Israel has been increasingly castigated and blamed by President Obama and his spokesmen concerning their botched initiative to bring about a settlement with the PA.
On Obama’s Foreign Policy, Clinton Got it Right: Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, Aug. 14, 2014 — “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”
The (Latest) Obama Doctrine: ‘No Victor/No Vanquished’: Marc Thiessen, AEI Ideas, Aug. 14, 2014 — It’s been hard to keep up with all the Obama Doctrines that have emerged over the past five years.
Frozen in the Cold War: Matthew Continetti, Weekly Standard, Aug. 4, 2014 — In 1983, Barack Obama was a senior at Columbia University. He was not well known.
With Few Foreign-Policy Triumphs, Obama Running Out of Time: Paul Koring, Globe & Mail, Aug. 19, 2014
Hillary Didn’t ‘Hug it Out’ With Obama, Plots More Attacks: Edward Klein, New York Post, Aug. 16, 2014
The Next Act of the Neocons: Jacob Heilbrunn, New York Times, July 5, 2014
Why Obama is Driving Jews From the Democratic Party: Michael Goodwin, New York Post, Aug. 17, 2014
No Sword, No Justice: William Kristol, Weekly Standard, Aug. 4, 2014
THE DEAFENING SILENCE OF AMERICAN JEWISH LEADERS
Isi Leibler Candidly Speaking, Aug. 16, 2014
Over the past few months, Israel has been increasingly castigated and blamed by President Obama and his spokesmen concerning their botched initiative to bring about a settlement with the PA. The downward spiral in relations escalated in recent weeks with the President’s ritual endorsements of Israel’s right to self-defense being linked with criticisms of its behavior. The U.S. is unquestionably Israel’s principal ally. The American public and a bipartisan Congress remain overwhelmingly pro-Israel and, until this week, the US has maintained the military partnership and exercised its veto powers to defend Israel from biased resolutions at the UN Security Council. Israel is therefore reluctant to confront the offensive statements emanating from the White House and repeatedly undergoes motions of minimizing differences. Nevertheless, one would have expected a robust American Jewish leadership to publicly express its concern. Yet, other than the hawkish Zionist Organization of America, the Jewish establishment appears to have burrowed behind a curtain of deafening silence.
Ironically, committed American Jews are today more united in support of Israel than at any time since the Yom Kippur War. Even groups like Peace Now publicly expressed their support and partook in solidarity meetings. This, despite the fact that the left-wing media continued providing excessive exposure to anti-Israeli Jewish individuals and groups comprising a marginal fraction of the engaged Jewish community. American Jews today relate with shame to the events in 1944, when in order to appease then President Franklin Roosevelt, their leaders, headed by Rabbi Stephen Wise, failed to protest the failure to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. But over the past four decades Jewish leaders have earned a proud reputation of speaking up without fear or favor in relation to Jewish rights, aggressively combatting the demonization and delegitimization of Israel. Yet, in retrospect, American Jewish activism in our era has been uncontroversial – somewhat like motherhood and apple pie. The successful protest movements to alleviate the plight of Soviet Jewry or campaigns against anti-Semitism did not ruffle any feathers. There were occasional tensions relating to Israel but, aside from the Carter era and until the Reagan administration, Democrat presidents proved more favorable towards Israel than the Republicans. That was a source of gratification for most Jews for whom support of the Democrat Party had virtually become part of their DNA.
Today the situation has changed dramatically. Whilst, overall, Americans have become considerably more pro-Israel, there has been an erosion of support amongst far left elements in the Democratic Party strongly committed to Obama. The debates over resolutions relating to Israel at the last Democratic Convention highlighted the emergence of intensifying hostility. Over the past few months, the attitude of the president and his administration towards Israel has dramatically deteriorated. Not only was Israel unfairly blamed for the breakdown in the US peace negotiations with the PA. More recently, Secretary of State John Kerry shocked Israelis by attempting to displace Egypt with pro-Hamas Qatar and Turkey as mediators – a step which if not thwarted, could have been disastrous for Israel. President Obama has not treated Israel as befits an ally. The State Department condemned Israel for civilian casualties describing its actions as “disgraceful” and “appalling”. In contrast, the president referred to thousands of rockets from Hamas as “extraordinarily irresponsible” and even called on Israel to lift the blockade – without regard to security requirements. In effect he related to Israel and Hamas in terms of moral equivalency. Regrettably, Obama’s condemnations set the tone for the rest the world to demonize Israel and encouraged Hamas to believe that continuing the war and sacrificing civilians would ultimately result in global intervention to force Israel to concede to its demands. This week the administration upped the ante to an all-time high by imposing cumbersome new bureaucratic restrictions on the provision of arms supplies. To do so now whilst Israel is engaged in a war that it sought desperately to avoid, reflects the depths to which U.S.-Israel relations have sunk.
Yet no criticism of White House policy was publicly expressed by AIPAC, the Presidents Conference, the American Jewish Committee or the Anti-Defamation League. American Jewish leaders are certainly not indifferent to events in Israel. Presidents Conference leader Malcolm Hoenlein has a proven record of devoted and passionate commitment to the Zionist cause and during the war orchestrated many effective solidarity demonstrations on behalf of Israel. There is also no doubt that dedicated supporters of Israel like AIPAC, have been striving quietly to promote the case for Israel to the White House. What is difficult to accept is the reluctance to publicly repudiate the offensive statements concerning Israel emanating from President Obama and White House spokesmen. In the past some Jewish leaders have argued that by speaking up, they would be denied access to the White House. Today that argument is inapplicable because meaningful access to Jewish leaders is probably more limited than it has been in the past half-century. Indeed left-wing anti-Israeli groups appear to have a better entree to the Administration than mainstream leaders. It seems that the Jewish leadership has decided that confronting President Obama would only further polarize the situation, encouraging him to be even more critical towards Israel. There were also fears that criticizing the White House could result in some Democratic legislators abandoning Israel in favor of their president…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
ON OBAMA’S FOREIGN POLICY, CLINTON GOT IT RIGHT
Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post, Aug. 14, 2014
“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” — Hillary Clinton, The Atlantic, Aug. 10
Leave it to Barack Obama’s own former secretary of state to acknowledge the fatal flaw of his foreign policy: a total absence of strategic thinking. Yes, of course everything Hillary Clinton says is positioning. The last time she sought the nomination (2008), as she admitted before Defense Secretary Bob Gates, she opposed the Iraq surge for political reasons because she was facing antiwar Sen. Barack Obama in Iowa. Now, as she prepares for her next run (2016), she’s positioning herself to the right because, with no prospect of being denied the Democratic nomination, she has the luxury of running toward the center two years before Election Day. All true, but sincere or not — with the Clintons how can you ever tell? — it doesn’t matter. She’s right. Mind you, Obama does deploy grand words proclaiming grand ideas: the “new beginning” with Islam declared in Cairo, the reset with Russia announced in Geneva, global nuclear disarmament proclaimed in Prague (and playacted in a Washington summit). But, untethered from reality, they all disappeared without a trace. When carrying out policies in the real world, however, it’s nothing but tactics and reactive improvisation. The only consistency is the president’s inability (unwillingness?) to see the big picture. Consider:
1. Russia: Vladimir Putin has 45,000 troops on the Ukraine border. A convoy of 262 unwanted, unrequested, uninspected Russian trucks allegedly with humanitarian aid is headed to Ukraine to relieve the pro-Russian separatists now reduced to the encircled cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukraine threatens to stop it. Obama’s concern? He blithely tells the New York Times that Putin “could invade” Ukraine at any time. And if he does, says Obama, “trying to find our way back to a cooperative functioning relationship with Russia during the remainder of my term will be much more difficult.” Is this what Obama worries about? A Russian invasion would be a singular violation of the post-Cold War order, a humiliating demonstration of American helplessness and a shock to the Baltic republics, Poland and other vulnerable U.S. allies. And Obama is concerned about his post-invasion relations with Putin?
2. Syria: To this day, Obama seems not to understand the damage he did to American credibility everywhere by slinking away from his own self-proclaimed red line on Syrian use of chemical weapons. He seems equally unaware of the message sent by his refusal to arm the secular opposition (over the objections of Secretary of State Clinton, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and CIA Director David Petraeus) when it was still doable. He ridicules the idea as “fantasy” because we’d be arming amateurs up against a well-armed government “backed by Russia, backed by Iran [and] a battle-hardened Hezbollah.” He thus admits that Russian and other outside support was crucial to tilting the outcome of this civil war to Bashar al-Assad. Yet he dismisses countervailing U.S. support as useless. He thus tells the world of his disdain for the traditional U.S. role of protecting friends by deterring and counterbalancing adversarial outside powers.
3. Gaza: Every moderate U.S. ally in the Middle East welcomed the original (week 1) Egyptian cease-fire offer. They were stunned when Obama’s secretary of state then met with Qatar and Turkey — Hamas’ lawyers — promoting its demands. Did Obama not understand he was stymieing a tacit and remarkable pan-Arab-Israeli alliance to bring down Hamas (a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood) — itself an important U.S. strategic objective? The definitive evidence of Obama’s lack of vision is his own current policy reversals — a clear admission of failure. He backed the next Egyptian cease-fire. He’s finally arming the Syrian rebels. And he’s returning American military power to Iraq. (On Russia, however, he appears unmovably unmoved.) Tragically, his proposed $500 million package for secular Syrian rebels is too late. Assad has Aleppo, their last major redoubt, nearly surrounded. If and when it falls, the revolution may be over. The result? The worst possible outcome: A land divided between the Islamic State (IS) and Assad, now wholly owned by Iran and Russia.
Iraq is also very little, very late. Why did Obama wait seven months after the IS takeover of Fallujah and nine weeks after the capture of Mosul before beginning supplying the Kurds with desperately needed weapons? And why just small arms supplied supposedly clandestinely through the CIA? The Kurds are totally outgunned. Their bullets are bouncing off the captured armored Humvees the IS has deployed against them. The Pentagon should be conducting a massive airlift to provide the pesh merga with armored vehicles, anti-tank missiles and other heavier weaponry. And why the pinprick airstrikes? The IS-Kurdish front is 600 miles long, more than the distance between Boston and Washington. The Pentagon admits that the current tactics — hitting an artillery piece here, a truck there — will not affect the momentum of the IS or the course of the war. But then again, altering the course of a war would be a strategic objective. That seems not to be in Obama’s portfolio.
THE (LATEST) OBAMA DOCTRINE: ‘NO VICTOR/NO VANQUISHED’
Marc Thiessen
AEI Ideas, Aug. 14, 2014
It’s been hard to keep up with all the Obama Doctrines that have emerged over the past five years. First, the Libyan war gave us the doctrine of “leading from behind.” Then, in Syria, we saw the birth of a new Obama Doctrine: military action “just muscular enough not to get mocked” (though, Obama backed off of even those miniscule strikes, taking that one out of contention). Then earlier this year, Obama claimed the guiding principle of his foreign policy was “Don’t do stupid shi*t.” Now, in an interview with The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, Obama unveiled yet another Doctrine – one, he says, that guides both his domestic and foreign policies: “No victor/no vanquished.” Said Obama: We have so many things going for us right now as a country — from new energy resources to innovation to a growing economy — but we will never realize our full potential unless our two parties adopt the same outlook that we’re asking of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds or Israelis and Palestinians: No victor, no vanquished and work together. It’s hard to fathom just how inane – and hypocritical – this is. Domestically, Obama didn’t exactly follow the “no victor/no vanquished” approach when he controlled both houses of Congress and rammed the stimulus and Obamacare through on party-line votes. House Republican Whip Eric Cantor gave President Obama a list of modest proposals for the stimulus at a White House meeting, but Obama told the assembled Republicans that “elections have consequences” and “I won.” In other words, he was the “victor” and they were the “vanquished.” Deal with it.
Internationally, does he really believe that we should follow a doctrine of “no victor/no vanquished” when it comes to the fight with the Islamic State – a movement so radical it has been crucifying its opponents? Apparently so. For a year, he rejected repeated calls by the Iraqi government for drone strikes to prevent the advance of the Islamic State. Now that the Islamic State has taken control of large swaths of Iraq, Obama has launched limited strikes – only to protect US diplomatic facilities in northern Iraq (for fear of another Benghazi) and prevent the massacre of Yazidi minorities, but not to defeat the Islamic State or drive it from its strongholds. So it seems our policy when it comes to the Islamic State is a hybrid of the Obama Doctrines: “no victor/no vanquished” and strikes “just muscular enough not to get mocked.” That explains a lot.
Matthew Continetti
Weekly Standard, Aug. 4, 2014
In 1983, Barack Obama was a senior at Columbia University. He was not well known. He lived off-campus, had a few close friends, and spent a lot of time reading. He went to some meetings of the Black Students Association, but no one remembers seeing him there. He majored in political science, with a concentration in international relations, and classmates and professors say he was an attentive and intelligent student. But he was not an active participant in student life. He was not a student radical. He did not go on a hunger strike. He did not storm any administration buildings. One friend, in an interview with biographer David Maraniss, likened Obama to the protagonist of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer: a passive observer. As graduation approached, Obama took up his pen. Looking for work as a community organizer, he needed something to add to his thin résumé. He was interested in the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, which he was studying in a senior seminar on American diplomacy. “The class analyzed decision-making and the perils of ‘groupthink,’ the ways that disastrous policies, like the escalation of the Vietnam War, develop,” writes biographer David Remnick. The seminar had just eight students. In class, Obama had a tendency to relate U.S. foreign policy to his upbringing. “He talked about his father being from Kenya so much,” Maraniss writes, “that at least one student assumed Obama himself was from Kenya.” Obama’s final paper for the seminar was on nuclear disarmament. He got an A.
In March 1983, Obama published an article in a student magazine called the Sundial. His piece, titled “Breaking the War Mentality,” drew on the themes of the senior seminar. “Most students at Columbia do not have firsthand knowledge of war,” Obama writes. Though “the most sensitive among us struggle to extrapolate experiences of war from our everyday experience,” it is impossible to know the true costs of war from afar. “Bringing such experiences down into our hearts, and taking continual, tangible steps to prevent war, becomes a difficult task.” But the task is not impossible. There are goodhearted men and women, Obama writes, volunteers who, despite not knowing what war is really like, “foster awareness and practical action necessary to counter the growing threat of war.” Far-left student groups such as Arms Race Alternatives (ARA) and Students Against Militarism (SAM), Obama says, “are throwing their weight into shifting America off the dead-end track.” Obama’s sympathies are clear. “The article,” Remnick says, “makes plain Obama’s revulsion at what he saw as Cold War militarism and his positive feelings about the nuclear-freeze movement.” Obama quotes reggae singer and activist Peter Tosh. He recounts a visit to a meeting of Students Against Militarism. “With its solid turnout and enthusiasm,” he writes, “one might be persuaded that the manifestations of our better instincts can at least match the bad ones.” Obama’s criticism of the antinuke activists is that their focus is too narrow. They aren’t radical enough. “One is forced to wonder whether disarmament or arms control issues, severed from economic and political issues, might be another instance of focusing on the symptoms of a problem instead of the disease itself,” he writes. What “the disease” is, Obama does not say.
In the end, though, Obama says the peace activists have noble motives and worthy aims. “What the members of the ARA and SAM try to do,” he concludes, “is infuse what they have learned about the current situation, bring the words of that formidable roster on the face of Butler Library, names like Thoreau, Jefferson, and Whitman, to bear on the twisted logic of which we are today a part.” The essay not only reveals Obama’s position on nuclear disarmament. It also offers a glimpse of the milieu in which a president came of age. Most of us form our political identities in young adulthood. Our attitudes, judgments, and preferences are shaped by political circumstances when we are 18 to 25 years old. Obama is no exception. As he reached maturity, the Cold War approached its climax. The most divisive issue in American politics was Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy. The belief that Reagan was a warmonger was deeply held by many people on the left. Obama was one of them. The trendy idea at the time was support for the “nuclear freeze.” The production of intercontinental ballistic missiles would be halted. NATO wouldn’t deploy missiles in Europe. Nuclear arsenals would be reduced. It was a utopian ambition: Advocates of the freeze proposed no verification system and flirted with unilateral disarmament. The security repercussions were irrelevant to these nuclear dreamers. “The freeze is not a plan,” Charles Krauthammer wrote in the New Republic in the spring of 1982. “It is a sentiment.” And it was widely shared. Author Jonathan Schell published The Fate of the Earth, the bible of nuclear disarmament, also in 1982. The following March, Reagan delivered his famous “Evil Empire” speech, which horrified the left, just as the Sundial was publishing Obama’s article. In June, one million people marched in New York City in support of the freeze. The fear-mongering reached its peak on November 20 when The Day After, a television movie that dramatized the aftermath of a nuclear war, aired on ABC. It is still the most-watched TV movie ever. Few people remember either The Day After or the nuclear freeze campaign. But that does not mean they had no lasting effect. Indeed, when one examines President Obama’s foreign policy in light of his article in the Sundial, one is struck by how he continues, to this day, to fight “the war mentality.” How he continues to struggle against “the twisted logic” of the Cold War. How he continues to associate organization, negotiation, and moral suasion with “our better instincts.” No matter the results.
The Cold War of the early 1980s is more than the backdrop to President Obama’s dealings with Vladimir Putin. It is the backdrop to his dealings with the world. Obama is determined not to repeat what he sees as mistaken Cold War policies. He wants to move beyond the weapons and walls of his young adulthood to an era of friendship and peace. “You know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” Obama told Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential debates. “Our approach as the United States is not to see this as some Cold War chessboard in which we’re in competition with Russia,” he said earlier this year. Tell that to Vladimir Putin. “There have been times where they slip back into Cold War thinking and Cold War mentality,” Obama admitted to Jay Leno in 2013. Times? For Russia’s president, the fall of the Soviet empire was “a major geopolitical disaster of the century.” Putin has occupied Georgia, supported the Iranian nuclear program, propped up Bashar al-Assad, hosted Edward Snowden, sent Bear bombers to the Pacific Coast of the United States, annexed Crimea, financed, armed, trained, and directed Ukrainian insurgents, provided them the means to shoot down a passenger airliner, and organized a global campaign of anti-American propaganda. But one has the impression that President Obama is more interested in rejecting the “Cold War mentality” than he is in standing up to the Russian dictator. Indeed, he was against the “Cold War mentality” when the Cold War was going on…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
IRWIN G. BEUTEL, Z’L
It is with great sadness that the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research notes the passing of Irwin G. Beutel. The generous and resourceful head of our Board for well over a decade, Irwin was a key force in helping to build CIJR into the world-class pro-Israel academic think-tank which it is today. An internationally-known and unfailingly generous pro-Israel philanthropist and community leader, he supported many institutions, and his achievements were recognized both here and in Israel.
Irwin had an encyclopedic knowledge of the community and an unfailingly clear and sound judgement. He was particularly interested in supporting Jewish students, at all stages of development, and off- as well as on-campus. Irwin supported CIJR's development of the unique Israel Learning Seminar, designed to help students develop the knowledge needed to confront antisemitism on campus, and we are proud that our regular public program includes the annual Irwin G. Beutel Student Activism Colloquium.
All of us here at CIJR, our National Board, Academic Council, and Student Committee, valued his friendship, his wonderful sense of humor, and his wise counsel: one of the Lamed Vavniks, the 36 kedoshim who in each generation assure the continuity of the world, Irwin was a truly good man and an unfailing friend, a real Mensch in the deepest and best sense of the term. We will miss him deeply, and extend our heartfelt sympathy to his family and friends.
(The funeral will be on Friday, Aug.22, 2014, 12:00 noon, at Paperman's.)
Frederick Krantz, Director
Baruch Cohen, Research Chairman
Jack Kincler, Board Chairman
Canadian Institute for Jewish Research
With Few Foreign-Policy Triumphs, Obama Running Out of Time: Paul Koring, Globe & Mail, Aug. 19, 2014—In the U.S. President’s own succinct, if off-colour, phrase, the Obama doctrine is: “Don’t do stupid shit.”
Hillary Didn’t ‘Hug it Out’ With Obama, Plots More Attacks: Edward Klein, New York Post, Aug. 16, 2014 —Hug it out? Not a chance.
The Next Act of the Neocons: Jacob Heilbrunn, New York Times, July 5, 2014 —After nearly a decade in the political wilderness, the neoconservative movement is back…
Why Obama is Driving Jews From the Democratic Party: Michael Goodwin, New York Post, Aug. 17, 2014
No Sword, No Justice: William Kristol, Weekly Standard, Aug. 4, 2014 —On Tuesday, President Obama visited the Dutch embassy in Washington to pay his respects to the victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, shot down over Ukraine by forces armed and backed by Vladimir Putin. Obama wrote in the embassy’s condolence book, “We will not rest until we are certain that justice is done.”
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