grinning Goliath staggering about sporting a ‘kick me’ sign on his back with Russia, Iran and Pakistan duly obliging in quick succession. In the past four weeks, every single one of Obama’s foreign policy initiatives has appeased and strengthened the enemies of both Israel and the west, whose fates are umbilically linked. The driving motif of Obama’s foreign policy has been ‘engagement’ with the Muslim world. Ostensibly offering the hand of friendship if that world unclenches its own fist, he is actually offering up not just the west’s hand but its entire body to be kicked into submission. And I use that last word advisedly. Now Khaled abu Toameh reports that one result of this approach has been to boost Hamas. As the Independent reported yesterday, European politicians -- including two British MPs – are now openly talking to Hamas despite the fact that it is a banned organisation by the EU (the EU has in fact been talking covertly to Hamas for years). Abu Toameh reports that Egypt’s President Mubarak and Palestinian President Abbas are also now talking to Hamas, having previously refused to do so on the grounds that this would only strengthen it and weaken them. But now they are doing so principally because, according to Egyptian and Palestinian political analysts, Mubarak and Abbas feel comfortable to talk to Hamas because they realize that President Barack Obama's new administration is contemplating a new, conciliatory approach toward Iran and its proxies in the Middle East, namely the Syrians, Hizbullah and Hamas... Sure enough, only yesterday the US Middle East envoy George Mitchellsupported the Egyptian call for a Palestinian unity government comprising the PA and Hamas. He dutifully parroted the formula that Hamas would still need to halt violence, recognise Israel and accept previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements. But Hamas has not done so and shows no sign that it will ever do so. What Egypt is proposing, and America has now endorsed, is a Palestinian government comprising people still bent upon a genocidal agenda. According to the American Jewish leaders to whom Mitchell put in a conference call, he said that until now divisions among the Palestinians have been a major obstacle to bringing peace to the region... What an extraordinary thing to say. Until now, the major obstacle to peace in the region has been the Palestinians’ implacable goal of bringing about the end of the Jewish state. The divisions amongst them are merely about the best means of achieving this end. But this idiot went on to repeat the core delusion of those who have neither understood not learned the right lessons from recent history: And he said that he had learned one lesson from his experience in Ireland that he believed was applicable now: the importance of having representation from all the different factions in the conflict. His remarks about the positive impact Egypt's efforts at bringing Palestinians together were made in this context. For the umpteenth time: there is no analogy with Northern Ireland because a) the Irish Republicans did not want to conquer Britain for the Irish, subjugate the British under threat of death and turn the UK into a Catholic state, and b) the only reason the IRA abandoned terror and asked to become part of the democratic process was because the British Army had beaten it into at the very least a permanent stalemate. Peace became possible solely because terror had been defeated. But Hamas has not been defeated: far from it. And now, far from helping to defeat this genocidal terror organisation, Obama is strengthening it by granting it legitimacy. By strengthening Hamas, Obama also strengthens its puppet-master Iran. So the enemies of America and the west are now stronger, while America and the west are now weaker. The belief that this represents merely naivety on the part of Obama rather than malice towards Israel has taken moreover an enormous knock as a result of his decision to participate in ‘Durban 2’. This is the reprise of the 2001 Durban hate-fest against Israel, which is being held in Geneva in April under the auspices of the grotesquely misnamed UN Human Rights Council, chaired by Libya and with the vice-chairs occupied by Iran and Cuba. As Gregg Rickman, the US former special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism, has noted: ...the council, like its predecessor, has become irrevocably tarred with anti-Semitism and bias against Israel. As the State Department’s March 2008 Report on Contemporary Global Antisemitism explained about these two organizations, ‘For many years before its abolition, the Commission on Human Rights had a separate agenda item focusing solely on alleged violations of Israel -- namely, Item 8, “Question of the violation of human rights in the occupied Arab territories, including Palestine.” This allowed multiple resolutions against Israel, while no other country could have more than one resolution run against it each year. No other country beside Israel had an agenda item exclusively scrutinizing it. This tradition has been continued by the new U.N. Human Rights Council.’ No free society should have anything to do with the sick farce of an ‘anti-racism’ conference held by such a body. This week America sent a delegation to Geneva, ostensibly ‘to try to change the direction in which the Review Conference is heading.’ I commented here and here on the damage this decision has already done. But as Anne Bayefsky reports, when America got to Geneva this week it chosenot to draw the poison from this process. On the contrary, it just sat on its hands. When Iran and Syria blocked an attempt to include a reference to the Holocaust, the Americans remained silent. Worse, they also remained silent when the Palestinian delegation proposed that the declaration should call for implementation of the advisory opinion of the ICJ [International Court of Justice] on the wall, [i.e., Israel's security fence], and the international protection of Palestinian people throughout the occupied Palestinian territory. But as Caroline Glick observes: ...the ICJ's advisory opinion on Israel's security fence claimed that Israel has no right to self-defense against Palestinian terrorism. At the time, both the US and Israel rejected the ICJ's authority to issue an opinion on the subject. On Thursday, by not objecting to this Palestinian draft, not only did the US effectively accept the ICJ's authority, for practical purposes it granted the anti-Israel claim that Jews may be murdered with impunity. At what point will the Americans acknowledge that they cannot ‘change the direction in which the Review Conference is heading’? Almost certainly, at nopoint. At every stage there will be doubtless overwhelming arguments for staying on in the pious hope of changing that direction – ignoring the fact that the direction of the Review conference has been set in stone, to ‘reaffirm’ and ‘foster the implementation’ of the Durban Declaration, which singled out Israel uniquely for censure and libelled it as a racist state. Durban 2 is therefore central to the attempt by the Arab and Muslim world to legitimise the destruction of Israel. It also seeks to criminalise all criticism of Islam and suppress free speech under the guise of combating ‘Islamophobia’ as part of its jihadi strategy of progressively crippling all the west’s defences. This is the process Obama is now validating. If anything shows beyond a doubt that America is now set on a path of both doing the Jewish people maximum harm and surrendering to the intimidation by the Muslim world, its participation in the obscenity of Durban 2 is surely it. As Gregg Rickman writes in aghast disbelief: In encouraging this conference to reconvene and worse, leaving it in the hands of the likes of Iran, Libya and other terrorist states, the United Nations again dishonors itself by allowing these tyrants a platform to impose their racial and religious bigotry on the world. How can the United States possibly be a part of this insanity? The answer lies in the man whom it has elected as its 44th President. One might think alarm bells might now be ringing in the American Jewish community. On the contrary. These are the people who voted overwhelmingly for Obama (because he was a Democrat, because he was black and because he would liberalise abortion; the psychopathology of the majority of American Jews and their actual attitude towards Israel is an issue for another time). And they are the people he has now suborned. For on his delegation at Geneva, taking part in this process of delegitimising the Jewish state while pretending to put a brake on the process, is one Felice Gaer, a senior official of the American Jewish Committee. Yes, that American Jewish Committee – you know, the so-called ‘Jewish lobby’ which (according to Mearsheimer/ Walt and every Jew-hater from the neo-Nazi and white supremacist websites to the pages of the Guardian and Independent) manipulates America to do the bidding of Israel. Uh-huh. So let’s get this straight. Having voted this man into power, the AJC now has its head up Obama’s backside while he lends legitimacy and strength to those who wish to destroy the Jewish state and the free world -- all the time pretending to themselves that they are helping to mitigate the damage. Some lobby.
The Fifth Columnist In The White House
After merely one calendar month, Obama’s foreign policy has already been disastrous for the defenders of the free world. See Charles Krauthammer’s description of how he has turned America into a
Saturday, 21 February 2009
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