Donald Trump, Israel and the Jews: Eytan Gilboa, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 28, 2015 — The Donald Trump phenomenon is challenging both Israel and American Jewry.
How Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio Are Battling for the Future of GOP Foreign Policy: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, Dec. 27, 2015 — A few weeks ago, Ted Cruz committed a shocking act of heresy against the Republican Party Establishment.
Hillary Clinton’s Troubling Relationship With Israel-Hating Advisor: Shmuley Boteach, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 11, 2015— Who is Max Blumenthal, why is he a Hillary Clinton Israel Svengali and does he pose as big a headache for Hillary as Jeremiah Wright did for President Barack Obama?
Time to Investigate the Clintons for Violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act: Jan Sokolovsky, American Thinker, Jan. 4, 2016 — Now that Hillary Clinton has openly declared that Bill Clinton will be part of her campaign, it is time for the FBI to investigate the Clinton Foundation, of which Bill is the founder, for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Taking the U.S.-Israel Relationship to the Next Level: Hillary Clinton, Jewish Journal, Jan. 6, 2016
Hillary's Watergate Looms: Roger L. Simon, PJ Media, Jan. 6, 2016
Obama Reveals His Foreign Policy Fatalism: Fred Hiatt, Washington Post, Jan. 13, 2015
The Last Temptation of Barack Obama and John Kerry: Aaron David Miller, Foreign Policy, Jan. 11, 2015
DONALD TRUMP, ISRAEL AND THE JEWS
Eytan Gilboa
Jerusalem Post, Dec. 28, 2015
The Donald Trump phenomenon is challenging both Israel and American Jewry. Trump, who continues to lead the Republican list of presidential hopefuls and can no longer be dismissed as a bizarre candidate, has consistently and strongly supported Israeli positions on many critical issues, including the Iran nuclear deal and Israeli- Palestinian relations. He has also criticized US President Barack Obama for his attitudes toward Israel and warmly praised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On the other hand, he has proposed policies and made statements that no Jew can in good conscience accept or identify with.
Trump has often used pro-Israel rhetoric. He called Israel America’s best and most reliable friend, and argued that it should be viewed as the cornerstone of US policy in the Middle East. He has accused Obama and US Secretary of State John Kerry of “selling Israel out,” and said that the US should do everything possible to protect and defend it. “They’ve always been there for us and we should be there for them,” he declared. “They are the only stable democracy in a region that is not run by dictators. They are pioneers in medicine and communication and a close fair trading partner.” And, like his father, he said, he had always been loyal to Israel and “would do more for Israel than anybody else.”
Trump highlights the facts that he served as grand marshal for the Israel parade in New York in 2004 and that he has received many awards from American Jewish organizations for his support of Israel. Last February, on receiving such an award from the Algemeiner, a Jewish news organization, he said, “We love Israel. We will fight for Israel 100 percent, 1,000 percent. It will be there forever.” On June 16, when he declared his candidacy, Trump vehemently attacked the Iran nuclear deal calling it “a disaster” that could threaten Israel’s survival.
In the background, there was also a close personal connection between Trump and Netanyahu. Before the 2013 Israeli election, Trump recorded a 30-second video message endorsing the Likud leader. “You truly have a great prime minister in Benjamin Netanyahu. He’s a winner, he’s highly respected, he’s highly thought of by all. Vote for Benjamin – terrific guy, terrific leader, great for Israel,” he enthused.
On the other hand, Trump’s statements on prisoners of war, Jewish campaign contributions, immigration and entry to the US have touched on a very raw Jewish nerve. On John McCain, who spent six years as a POW in Vietnam and refused early release when his captors discovered that his father was an admiral, Trump flippantly said he was “a war hero only because he got captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” In Israel the nation as a whole cares about its POWs and the government invests huge resources in attempts to release them. The protracted and ultimately successful effort to free Gilad Schalit, a soldier who was captured and held hostage for five years by Hamas in Gaza, well illustrates this ethos.
On December 3, Trump told members of the Republican Jewish Coalition that he suspects many members won’t back him because he is rich and doesn’t want their contributions. Trump may have thought he was making a joke, but the Israeli media saw his comments as reinforcing anti-Semitic stereotyping of Jews as rich people who “control the world” and can “buy” elections with their money.
Trump has also made highly provocative and controversial statements on immigration and entry to the US. On June 16, he said that Mexico is sending in people bringing drugs, crime and rape. Later he extended this observation to include immigration from other Latin American countries. And after the recent San Bernardino massacre, he called for a temporary ban on the entry of Muslims to the US, until the government figures out “what the hell is going on.”
Jews, who have suffered from closed immigration gates and been saved by open ones, find these statements appalling. Mass Jewish immigration from Russia and Eastern Europe to the US, Palestine and other countries, especially from the beginning of the 20th century, saved Jews from pogroms, persecution and oppression. Mass Jewish immigration from the Arab countries to Israel after the 1948 War of Independence saved them from a similar fate. On the other hand, before, during and immediately after the Second World War, Jews trying to flee Nazi Germany or occupied Europe were refused entry to many countries, including the US.
Millions perished. Therefore, Jews cannot but protest a wholesale, religion-based ban on entry to the US. Indeed, many Jewish organizations in the US, as well as political and religious groups in Israel, overwhelmingly rejected Trump’s call for a ban on the entry of Muslims to the US. Trump had intended to visit Israel and meet Netanyahu on December 28. The parties had agreed on the itinerary two weeks before Trump’s Muslim ban statement. Thirty- seven Knesset members, all but two from the opposition, strongly criticized Trump’s proposed blanket ban on Muslim entry and urged Netanyahu to cancel their meeting in protest. Netanyahu rejected this demand but issued a critical statement of his own: “The State of Israel respects all religions and strictly guarantees the rights of all its citizens. At the same time, Israel is fighting against militant Islam that targets Muslims, Christians and Jews alike and threatens the entire world.”…
Trump had hoped his visit to Israel on the eve of the Republican primaries would bolster his lead in the race. He wanted to project interest and knowledge in national security and foreign affairs, especially in the Middle East, the No. 1 source of violence, terrorism and instability in the world. He also wanted to garner legitimacy for his controversial positions on the region, and to contrast his support for Israel with what he called the Obama administration’s abandonment of the Jewish state. The strategy made sense, but the injudicious Muslim ban statement undermined any chance of successfully implementing it. Had Trump stuck to his plan, the protests and demonstrations in its wake would almost certainly have rendered it counterproductive.
Trump has certainly been exploiting the weaknesses and confusion in Obama’s handling of Israel, Islamic extremism and terrorism. The president’s blaming only Israel for the impasse in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations has only strengthened Palestinian recalcitrance. The delay in defining the San Bernardino massacre as terrorism, Obama’s refusal to use the term “Islamic terrorism” and his pathetic attempts to characterize the Islamic State organization as non-Muslim reveal an acute denial of both American and Middle Eastern realities.
Indeed, American Jews have been disappointed by Obama. In the 2008 elections, they voted for him by a ratio of 78 percent to 22 percent; in 2012, this had dropped to 69 percent to 30 percent. Gallup’s surveys show that in 2008, 71 percent of American Jews identified themselves as Democrats or leaning to the Democratic Party, while 22 percent identified themselves as Republicans or leaning to the Republican party. In 2014, this ratio dropped to 61 percent to 29 percent…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
HOW TED CRUZ AND MARCO RUBIO ARE BATTLING
FOR THE FUTURE OF GOP FOREIGN POLICY
Jonathan Chait
New York Magazine, Dec. 27, 2015
A few weeks ago, Ted Cruz committed a shocking act of heresy against the Republican Party Establishment. “If you look at President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and, for that matter, some of the more aggressive Washington neocons,” he told Bloomberg News, “they have consistently misperceived the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and have advocated military adventurism that has had the effect of benefiting radical Islamic terrorists.” Cruz was cleverly making a point about the Obama administration’s intervention in Libya, which resulted in a failed state that has nurtured ISIS, but his attack cut much deeper than it might have first appeared. One of the supporters of that venture was Marco Rubio, Cruz’s primary rival for the affection of regular (non-Trump-loving) Republicans. Rather than frame his contrast with Rubio as a matter of personal judgment or partisan loyalty, though, Cruz defined his opponents in ideological terms (“the more aggressive Washington neocons”). Indirectly, he was reminding his audience of another country in the Middle East where neocon military adventurism has wound up benefiting Islamic extremism — and harking back to an older conservative approach.
While Trump has distracted the party with bombastic grossness, Cruz has undertaken a concerted attack on an unexpected weak point: the belief structure, inherited by Rubio, that undergirds the party’s foreign-policy orthodoxy, opening up a full-blown doctrinal schism on the right. The Iraq War remains the Republican Party’s least favorite subject, but the principles that drove the Bush administration into Baghdad (without a plan for the occupation) have remained largely intact. Most Republican leaders still espouse the neoconservative belief in confronting autocratic governments everywhere, that demonstrations of American military power will inevitably succeed, and that the championing of democratic values should inform all major foreign-policy strategy.
When he first came to Washington, Rubio distanced himself from these beliefs. “I don’t want to come across as some sort of saber-rattling person,” he said in 2012, the next year insisting that higher military spending be paid for with offsetting cuts elsewhere. The next year, he started rattling sabers. Rubio came to support higher defense spending even if it increased the deficit, and turned sharply against the Iran nuclear deal. Now a full-scale hawk poised to restore the banished Bush doctrine, Rubio has surrounded himself with neoconservative advisers, using buzzwords like “moral clarity,” and promised to stand up to Russia, China, Cuba, and North Korea, unworried by the possibility that standing up to some of the bad guys might require the cooperation of other bad guys. “I’m ready for Marco,” enthused William Kristol.
The Bush years trained liberals to think of neoconservatism as the paramount expression of right-wing foreign-policy extremism. But neoconservatism runs against the grain of an older and deeper conservative tradition of isolationism. Cruz has flitted about the edges of the libertarian right, sometimes forming alliances in the Senate with Rand Paul, an isolationist who — after briefly being in vogue — has largely been marginalized within his party. At the last Republican foreign-policy debate, Cruz identified himself with that creed more openly than he ever had. Just as Rubio’s buzzwords signal his neoconservative affiliation, Cruz conveyed his isolationism by calling for an “American-first foreign policy” and dismissing Rubio as a “Woodrow Wilson democracy promoter.” The face-off between Rubio and Cruz at that debate represented something far more profound than the usual exchange of canned sound bites.
The isolationist tradition has long been misunderstood to mean a policy that perished overnight on December 7, 1941, and that promoted complete withdrawal from world affairs. In fact, isolationist thought grew out of — and, in some ways, represented the apogee of — American exceptionalism.
It regarded other, lesser countries with disgust, a sentiment that bred the competing impulses to both be distant from the rest of the world and to strike out at it.
Isolationism dominated conservative thought from the end of World War I — as a reaction against Wilson’s costly democratization crusade, as Cruz implied — through Pearl Harbor. After the war, without losing its hold on large segments of the GOP, the worldview mutated in the face of communism. The Soviet threat intensified the contradiction between the desire to quarantine America from the communist contagion and to eradicate it. The old isolationists resolved the tension by developing a fixation on airpower as a substitute for diplomacy and land forces. American planes would allow it to dominate the world while remaining literally above it. (Airpower, wrote the historian Frances FitzGerald, “would allow America both to pursue its God-given mission abroad and to remain the virgin land, uncorrupted by the selfish interests of others or foreign doctrines.”)…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
HILLARY CLINTON’S TROUBLING RELATIONSHIP
Shmuley Boteach
Jerusalem Post, Jan. 11, 2016
Who is Max Blumenthal, why is he a Hillary Clinton Israel Svengali and does he pose as big a headache for Hillary as Jeremiah Wright did for President Barack Obama? The well-known proverb declares you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep. Last summer, in the wake of the impending Iran deal, which she herself helped to create and vocally supported, Hillary reached out to calm the jitters of her wealthiest Democratic Jewish supporters in an attempt to convince them that she would always support Israel. She also emphasized that she utterly condemns the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement that Israel is currently facing. But she has been a harsh critic of the Jewish state, often relishing her role.
During a speech in 2012 she spoke of Israel’s “lack of generosity” and “lack of empathy” toward the Palestinians. She admitted that during her time as secretary of state she oftentimes was the “designated yeller” at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. She once yelled at him for 45 minutes when Israel granted permits to build houses in the eastern neighborhoods of its capital Jerusalem during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel.
But with the recent dumps of emails from Hillary’s private Internet server the public has received an in-depth look at the very important role that Sidney Blumenthal played for Hillary during her time in the Obama administration. Blumenthal is one of Hillary’s closest advisers and a longtime family friend. He was a senior adviser during Bill Clinton’s presidency and served again as senior adviser for Hillary’s failed 2008 run for the White House. Blumenthal was clearly a man whose advice Hillary trusted and she was willing to pay him $10,000 a month for his services. However the information coming to light paints a troubled picture. What they show is a slew of anti-Israel writings and opinions, many of which originated from articles written by Blumenthal’s own son, Max Blumenthal.
Max is a writer and self-declared “anti-Zionist,” known for his active support of the BDS movement and his calls for the dismantling of the State of Israel. He trolls pro-Israel writers, as I can personally attest. Max’s widely panned 2013 book Goliath, Life and Loathing in Greater Israel is full of anti-Israel rants, omissions and outright lies. In it, he repeatedly compares the Jewish state to Nazi Germany, and advocates that the majority of Jews currently living in Israel must be removed from the land to make way for a Palestinian state. Mimicking the Islamic State’s acronym ISIL, Max created the hashtag #JSIL – Jewish State in the Levant. To Max, the democratic State of Israel and Islamic State are morally equivalent entities.
His opinions are seen as radical leftist claptrap even by Left-leaning detractors of the Jewish state. The Nation columnist Eric Alterman – himself a critic of Israel’s presence in the West bank – described how the book “could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club.” J. J. Goldberg of The Forward described Goliath as an “unpleasant book.” By contrast, David Duke, the racist former Klu Klux Klan leader, praised Blumenthal’s book.
What is truly concerning is that Sidney Blumenthal has not only failed to ever condemn his son’s anti-Israel writings, but has actively advocated for and defended the warped, outrageous ideas conveyed therein. In fact, after learning of Alterman’s critique of Max’s book, Blumenthal began sending out emails attacking Alterman and supporting his son’s shoddy and repugnant anti-Israel scholarship. One such email included an article from the radical anti-Zionist website Mondoweiss (which loved the book and for which Max has written for in the past) attacking Alterman’s review.
But even more concerning than all of this is that Hillary Clinton, the nation’s chief diplomat, valued Max Blumenthal’s disturbed anti-Israel rants so much that she forked out $120,000 a year to his dad to keep the flow of information coming.
Among the emails Sidney Blumenthal sent to Hillary is a link to a November 2010 blog post written by his son. In it, Max attempts to equate the views and policies of far Right Dutch politician Geert Wilders with those of Israel. Max goes so far as to claim that Wilders learned from, and formulated his views as a result of his living in Israel. Max writes: “Israel’s mainstream leadership echoes Wilders’ crudest talking points on a regular basis.” Max describes how “the extreme right [in Europe] is also attracted to Israel because the country represents its highest ideals. While some critics see Israel as a racist apartheid state, people like Wilders see Israel as a racist apartheid state – and they like it.”
He continues, “They richly enjoy when Israel mows down Arab Muslims by the dozens and tells the world to go to hell; they admire Israel’s settler culture.” Max also writes, “Most of all, they yearn to live in a land like Israel that privileges its ethnic majority above all others to the point that it systematically humiliates and dispossesses the swarthy racial outclass.” He adds, “The endgame of the far-right is to make Europe less tolerant and more Israeli.” What was Hillary’s response to this racist, anti-Israel tirade? She writes back to Blumenthal, “A very smart piece – as usual.”…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
TIME TO INVESTIGATE THE CLINTONS FOR VIOLATIONS
OF THE FOREIGN AGENTS REGISTRATION ACT
Jan Sokolovsky
American Thinker, Jan. 4, 2016
Now that Hillary Clinton has openly declared that Bill Clinton will be part of her campaign, it is time for the FBI to investigate the Clinton Foundation, of which Bill is the founder, for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (22 USC 611 et seq).
Since 2008, according to numerous reliable reports, the Clinton Foundation has received hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions from as many as 19 foreign countries and many significant foreign corporations. These include Algeria, Australia, Brunei, Canada, the Dominican Republic, Kuwait, Morocco, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Taiwan, and the UAE. During the same period, former President Bill Clinton has personally received millions in speaking fees from a number of these same nations and corporations.
Common sense and an examination of the record indicate that there was no altruistic explanation for these contributions and fees. On the contrary, these foreign donors were involved in projects or activities that could have benefited politically or commercially from favorable policy decisions by the secretary of state, or from the Clintons’ global contacts. Therefore, the Foundation and the Clintons individually should be investigated for violating the Federal Agents Registration Act (FARA) for failing to register as agents of those foreign governments and failing to fully disclose these payments.
The issue of donations and fees from foreign governments to the Clintons received a great deal of media attention during March and April of this year, particularly after the publication of the book Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer. Since then, Hillary’s email scandal has pre-empted the attention of the press. However, we should not permit the likelihood of violations of FARA by the Clintons to fade from public scrutiny, and we should resume the demand for an investigation into what is prima facie a massive sale of influence that so far has been conducted with impunity.
In fact, there may be a direct connection between payments by foreign governments to the Foundation and the email scandal, since Mrs. Clinton may well have determined that her email correspondence involving the Foundation was “personal” and therefore would not be turned over to the State Department and would ultimately be “wiped.” Well-publicized examples that suggest a direct connection between contributions to the Clinton Foundation and United States policy decisions include the sale of 20% of U.S. uranium reserves to a Russian company (2008-2010), the decision not to criticize Algeria’s human rights record (2010), changing its position on the Keystone Pipeline after the Canadian government made a major donation (2014), and a decision not to investigate a donor for violating the Iran sanctions law…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
Taking the U.S.-Israel Relationship to the Next Level: Hillary Clinton, Jewish Journal, Jan. 6, 2016—In this time of terrorism and turmoil, the alliance between the United States and Israel is more important than ever. To meet the many challenges we face, we have to take our relationship to the next level.
Hillary's Watergate Looms: Roger L. Simon, PJ Media, Jan. 6, 2016— Of all the welter of predictions for 2016, by far the most dramatic seems to have been given short shrift or swept under the rug — the possible indictment of Hillary Rodham Clinton while running for the presidency.
Obama Reveals His Foreign Policy Fatalism: Fred Hiatt, Washington Post, Jan. 13, 2015—In his final State of the Union address, President Obama returned to the optimism that he personified in his first campaign — but applied it only to America.
The Last Temptation of Barack Obama and John Kerry: Aaron David Miller, Foreign Policy, Jan. 11, 2015—As we enter the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency, Mideast watchers might have begun 2016 convinced that the current administration was done with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
