John Bolton: Crunch Time for Israel on Iran
America's former United Nations envoy--a voice of sanity and reason in these terrifying times--writes in The Wall Street Journal:
Legions of senior American officials have descended on Jerusalem recently, but the most important of them has been Defense Secretary Robert Gates. His central objective was to dissuade Israel from carrying out military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities. Under the guise of counseling “patience,” Mr. Gates again conveyed President Barack Obama’s emphatic thumbs down on military force.
The public outcome of Mr. Gates’s visit appeared polite but inconclusive. Yet Iran’s progress with nuclear weapons and air defenses means Israel’s military option is declining over time. It will have to make a decision soon, and it will be no surprise if Israel strikes by year’s end. Israel’s choice could determine whether Iran obtains nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future.
Mr. Obama’s approach to Tehran has been his “open hand,” yet his gesture has not only been ignored by Iran but deemed irrelevant as the country looks inward to resolve the aftermath of its fraudulent election. The hardliner “winner” of that election, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was recently forced to fire a deputy who once said something vaguely soothing about Israel. Clearly, negotiations with the White House are not exactly topping the Iranian agenda.
Beyond that, Mr. Obama’s negotiation strategy faces insuperable time pressure. French President Nicolas Sarkozy proclaimed that Iran must re-start negotiations with the West by September’s G-20 summit. But this means little when, with each passing day, Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile laboratories, production facilities and military bases are all churning. Israel is focused on these facts, not the illusion of “tough” diplomacy.
Continue reading Bolton's brilliant essay here.
Liberal Lunacy: Lebanese Prof Charged in French Synagogue Bombing Gets Canadian Teaching Job
Fierce Fighting in Nigeria
More than 250 dead as security forces move to crush an Islamist insurrection. Click here for the report.
For Urban Elites, Global Warming is a Religion
The Vancouver Sun reports:
Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him.
Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia's best-known and most notorious academic.
Plimer, you see, is an unremitting critic of "anthropogenic global warming" -- man-made climate change to you and me -- and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed.
Continue here.
Islamist Terrorists Plotted US Attacks
Obama Only Tough on Israel
And that is no exaggeration--the term anti-Israel. Regardless of his motives, President Obama is effectively an adversary of Israel and the Jewish people. His policies are designed to increase Muslim influence, diminish the importance of the American Jewish community, shrink Israel in order to create a second Arab state in Palestine (i.e. a Hamas-ruled state in addition to the Hashemite-ruled Kingdom of Jordan), and accommodate (appease) radical Islam in general and Islamist Iran in particular.
Except for Al Qaeda and its affiliated and associated groups, every Islamist group on earth is a potential partner for engagement with the United States in Obama's eyes.
POSTSCRIPT: It's only a matter of time, in this reporter's opinion, before administration stooges start floating the concept of "reconcilable" Al Qaeda--supposed dupes of the "real" Al Qaeda who will be described as merely being swept along, and so on and so forth....