Israeli government ministers and Knesset members who will help make the decision about whether to attack Iran's nuclear facilities do not have to wait any longer for a preparatory briefing by the Israel Air Force.
They can read about all the possible scenarios for a strike on Iran, and about the potential risks and chances of success, in a study by Abdullah Toukan and Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Never before has such an open, detailed and thorough study of Israel's offensive options been published.
The authors of the 114-page study meticulously gathered all available data on Israel's military capabilities and its nuclear program, and on Iran's nuclear developments and aerial defenses, as well as both countries' missile inventory.
After analyzing all the possibilities for an attack on Iran, Toukan and Cordesman conclude: "A military strike by Israel against Iranian nuclear facilities is possible ... [but] would be complex and high-risk and would lack any assurances that the
overall mission will have a high success rate."
FULL ARTICLE http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1085619.html
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Monday, May 25, 2009
OBAMBI WANTS TO SPEND NEARLY ONE BILLION DOLLARS ON SUPPORTING PALESTINIAN TERRORISS
As President Oba-Hussein is getting set to welcome Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to Washington this week, and US lawmakers debate the proposed $900 million aid package to the PA, it is once again using its money to proclaim that killing Israeli woman and children is heroic.
The PA chose to name its latest computer center "after the martyr Dalal Mughrabi," who led the most deadly terror attack in the country's history. Her 1978 bus hijacking killed 37 civilians, 12 of them children, including American photographer Gail Rubin. The new center is funded by Abbas's office, which is bolstered by Western aid money. (Al-Ayyam, May 5).
US law prohibits the funding of Palestinian structures that use any portion of their budget to promote terror or honor terrorists. But $200 million of the US's proposed $900m. aid package is earmarked to go directly to the Abbas government, which regularly uses its budget to honor terrorists.
In fact, this latest veneration of Mughrabi is not an isolated case, but part of a continuing pattern of honoring terrorists that targets children in particular.
Last summer the PA sponsored "the Dalal Mughrabi football championship" for kids, and a "summer camp named for martyr Dalal Mughrabi... out of honor and admiration for the martyr."
It also held a party to honor exemplary students, also named "for the martyr Dalal Mughrabi," under the auspices of Abbas and at which Abbas's representative "reviewed the heroic life of the martyr [Mughrabi] (Al-Hayat al-Jadida, July 23, 24 and August 8, 2008).
All these PA-funded activities were to teach kids that a killer of women and children is a role model.
TWO MONTHS AGO, 31 years to the day after the Mughrabi murders, PA TV broadcast a special program celebrating the terror attack, calling the killing of 37 civilians "one of the most important and most prominent special operations... carried out by a team of heroes and led by the heroic fighter Dalal Mughrabi" (PA TV March 11).
And its not just Mughrabi who is a Palestinian hero. Despite professions in English by Abbas and other PA leaders that they reject terror, the PA has a long and odious history in Arabic of celebrating terrorists as role models and heroes, often involving US money.
USAID spent $400,000 in 2004 to build the Salakh Khalaf soccer field. After Palestinian Media Watch reported that Khalaf was the head of the Palestinian terror group that murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and two American diplomats in Sudan, USAID publicly apologized and said it would demand that the PA change the name. The name was never changed.
In 2002, US money funded renovations of the "Dalal Mughrabi school for girls." After PMW alerted the US State Department to Mughrabi's terrorist past, the funding was cancelled. Within 24 hours, the PA said the name would be changed, and the American money was reinstated.
Once the work was completed, however, the school was renamed for the terrorist. It bears Mughrabi's name to this day.
AT A RECENT hearing of the House Appropriations Committee, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged: "We will work only with a Palestinian Authority government that unambiguously and explicitly accepts the Quartet's principles, [including] a commitment to nonviolence."
And it's not just Clinton's pledge. US law interprets nonviolence to include not honoring terrorists: "None of the [US]... assistance under the West Bank and Gaza program may be made available for the purpose of recognizing or otherwise honoring individuals who commit, or have committed acts of terrorism" (2008 Foreign Operations Bill Sec. 657.B - C.1).
This latest glorification of the terrorist Mughrabi, coming as Congress considers the administration's latest request to fund Abbas, imposes a profound responsibility on Congress. But it also creates a unique opportunity.
Will the US follow its own laws, and insist that the PA stop turning killers of women and children into heroes and role models before it receives another cent of US money?
Congress and Obama can send a message to the PA that the US will not fund the PA, or any part of its budget, until it proves that it has ceased promoting terrorist murderers as heroes and role models. It can demand a statement from Abbas - in public, in Arabic and in the PA media - that murdering Israelis is terror, that terrorists are neither heroes nor holy martyrs and that they will no longer be honored.
Or they can send a different message to Abbas: that raising another generation of Palestinian children to the values of hate, murder and martyrdom is acceptable to the US - so acceptable that the US is even willing to fund it.
Alan Note: and spend nearly a $100 million bringing thousands of these trained terrorists into the USA and establish a life for them at taxpayer expense. Another Oba-Hussein, increasingly overt, dilution of loyal Americans with the import of terrorists and illegal aliens with little or no loyalty to America. When will we wake up and SEE through what he is doing to us and our country.
The PA chose to name its latest computer center "after the martyr Dalal Mughrabi," who led the most deadly terror attack in the country's history. Her 1978 bus hijacking killed 37 civilians, 12 of them children, including American photographer Gail Rubin. The new center is funded by Abbas's office, which is bolstered by Western aid money. (Al-Ayyam, May 5).
US law prohibits the funding of Palestinian structures that use any portion of their budget to promote terror or honor terrorists. But $200 million of the US's proposed $900m. aid package is earmarked to go directly to the Abbas government, which regularly uses its budget to honor terrorists.
In fact, this latest veneration of Mughrabi is not an isolated case, but part of a continuing pattern of honoring terrorists that targets children in particular.
Last summer the PA sponsored "the Dalal Mughrabi football championship" for kids, and a "summer camp named for martyr Dalal Mughrabi... out of honor and admiration for the martyr."
It also held a party to honor exemplary students, also named "for the martyr Dalal Mughrabi," under the auspices of Abbas and at which Abbas's representative "reviewed the heroic life of the martyr [Mughrabi] (Al-Hayat al-Jadida, July 23, 24 and August 8, 2008).
All these PA-funded activities were to teach kids that a killer of women and children is a role model.
TWO MONTHS AGO, 31 years to the day after the Mughrabi murders, PA TV broadcast a special program celebrating the terror attack, calling the killing of 37 civilians "one of the most important and most prominent special operations... carried out by a team of heroes and led by the heroic fighter Dalal Mughrabi" (PA TV March 11).
And its not just Mughrabi who is a Palestinian hero. Despite professions in English by Abbas and other PA leaders that they reject terror, the PA has a long and odious history in Arabic of celebrating terrorists as role models and heroes, often involving US money.
USAID spent $400,000 in 2004 to build the Salakh Khalaf soccer field. After Palestinian Media Watch reported that Khalaf was the head of the Palestinian terror group that murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and two American diplomats in Sudan, USAID publicly apologized and said it would demand that the PA change the name. The name was never changed.
In 2002, US money funded renovations of the "Dalal Mughrabi school for girls." After PMW alerted the US State Department to Mughrabi's terrorist past, the funding was cancelled. Within 24 hours, the PA said the name would be changed, and the American money was reinstated.
Once the work was completed, however, the school was renamed for the terrorist. It bears Mughrabi's name to this day.
AT A RECENT hearing of the House Appropriations Committee, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged: "We will work only with a Palestinian Authority government that unambiguously and explicitly accepts the Quartet's principles, [including] a commitment to nonviolence."
And it's not just Clinton's pledge. US law interprets nonviolence to include not honoring terrorists: "None of the [US]... assistance under the West Bank and Gaza program may be made available for the purpose of recognizing or otherwise honoring individuals who commit, or have committed acts of terrorism" (2008 Foreign Operations Bill Sec. 657.B - C.1).
This latest glorification of the terrorist Mughrabi, coming as Congress considers the administration's latest request to fund Abbas, imposes a profound responsibility on Congress. But it also creates a unique opportunity.
Will the US follow its own laws, and insist that the PA stop turning killers of women and children into heroes and role models before it receives another cent of US money?
Congress and Obama can send a message to the PA that the US will not fund the PA, or any part of its budget, until it proves that it has ceased promoting terrorist murderers as heroes and role models. It can demand a statement from Abbas - in public, in Arabic and in the PA media - that murdering Israelis is terror, that terrorists are neither heroes nor holy martyrs and that they will no longer be honored.
Or they can send a different message to Abbas: that raising another generation of Palestinian children to the values of hate, murder and martyrdom is acceptable to the US - so acceptable that the US is even willing to fund it.
Alan Note: and spend nearly a $100 million bringing thousands of these trained terrorists into the USA and establish a life for them at taxpayer expense. Another Oba-Hussein, increasingly overt, dilution of loyal Americans with the import of terrorists and illegal aliens with little or no loyalty to America. When will we wake up and SEE through what he is doing to us and our country.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
The True Story of the Bilderberg Group (Book)
By: Daniel Estulin
As a rhetorical question, can someone please explain to me how it is that progressive liberals such as John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, as well as do-gooder humanitarians with multiple social projects ongoing such as the Rockefellers and every Royal House in Europe, can perennially attend Bilderberg meetings apparently knowing that the final objective of this despicable group of hoodlums is a fascist One World Empire? —Daniel Estulin (P.318)—
NO DIFFERENT really, as a non-Moslem version of the Islamic Jihad to create a world caliphate obeying archaic Koranic rules and only loyal to Allah.
Daniel Estulin is a Madrid-based journalist and an investigative reporter who took on the daunting and dangerous task of researching the Bildeberg Group. Equally intriguing as his harrowing tales of being followed and nearly killed on a couple of occasions while working on the book, is the manner in which Estulin connects the dots between the Bilderberg Group, world events, notable politicians and corporate tycoons and the two other secretive monsters of the ruling elite, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission (TC).
The project lasted fifteen years and was motivated by Estulin's curiosity about how it is that the mainstream media has never covered in depth the meetings of the Bilderberg Group whose combined wealth exceeds the combined wealth of all U.S. citizens.
What Estulin's book makes clear is that the group, along with the CFR and TC, has become a shadow government whose top priority is to erase the sovereignty of all nation-states and supplant them with global corporate control of their economies under the surveillance of "an electronic global police state."
The author emphasizes that not all members of the group are "bad" people, and he implies that membership is structured somewhat like concentric circles in a target scheme within inner core and various levels of relationship between that core and the outer circles of membership.
Almost every famous player in politics and finance in the world is a member of one of the three organizations mentioned above, and their political affiliations range from liberal to conservative, for example, George W. Bush, George Soros, Gerald Ford, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter. Of this private club, Estulin says:
This parallel world remains unseen in the daily struggles of most of humanity, but, believe me, it is there:
a cesspool of duplicity and lies and double-speak and innuendo and blackmail and bribery. It is a surreal world of double and triple agents, of changing loyalties, of professional psychotic assassins, brainwashed black ops agents, soldiers of fortune and mercenaries, whose primary sources of income are the dirtiest and most despicable government-run subversive missions-the kind that can never be exposed.
In the final months of 2007 we are witnessing the stupendous success of the Big Three's strategy for planetary economic hegemony as the cacophony of their carefully engineered global economic cataclysm reverberates across America and around the world.
It was never about buyers who didn't read the fine print when taking out liar loans. It was always about silver-tongued, ruling elite politicians and central bankers, anointed by the shadow government, who ultimately and skillfully stole and continue to steal governments from people and replace them with transnational corporations.
No one could have said it better than David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission, a Bilderberg member and board member of the Council On Foreign Relations in his Memoirs:
Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure-one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.
If you want to know who really runs the world and the lengths to which they will go to establish their globalist hegemony, you must read Estulin's well-documented The True Story of The Bilderberg Group.
As a rhetorical question, can someone please explain to me how it is that progressive liberals such as John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, as well as do-gooder humanitarians with multiple social projects ongoing such as the Rockefellers and every Royal House in Europe, can perennially attend Bilderberg meetings apparently knowing that the final objective of this despicable group of hoodlums is a fascist One World Empire? —Daniel Estulin (P.318)—
NO DIFFERENT really, as a non-Moslem version of the Islamic Jihad to create a world caliphate obeying archaic Koranic rules and only loyal to Allah.
Daniel Estulin is a Madrid-based journalist and an investigative reporter who took on the daunting and dangerous task of researching the Bildeberg Group. Equally intriguing as his harrowing tales of being followed and nearly killed on a couple of occasions while working on the book, is the manner in which Estulin connects the dots between the Bilderberg Group, world events, notable politicians and corporate tycoons and the two other secretive monsters of the ruling elite, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission (TC).
The project lasted fifteen years and was motivated by Estulin's curiosity about how it is that the mainstream media has never covered in depth the meetings of the Bilderberg Group whose combined wealth exceeds the combined wealth of all U.S. citizens.
What Estulin's book makes clear is that the group, along with the CFR and TC, has become a shadow government whose top priority is to erase the sovereignty of all nation-states and supplant them with global corporate control of their economies under the surveillance of "an electronic global police state."
The author emphasizes that not all members of the group are "bad" people, and he implies that membership is structured somewhat like concentric circles in a target scheme within inner core and various levels of relationship between that core and the outer circles of membership.
Almost every famous player in politics and finance in the world is a member of one of the three organizations mentioned above, and their political affiliations range from liberal to conservative, for example, George W. Bush, George Soros, Gerald Ford, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter. Of this private club, Estulin says:
This parallel world remains unseen in the daily struggles of most of humanity, but, believe me, it is there:
a cesspool of duplicity and lies and double-speak and innuendo and blackmail and bribery. It is a surreal world of double and triple agents, of changing loyalties, of professional psychotic assassins, brainwashed black ops agents, soldiers of fortune and mercenaries, whose primary sources of income are the dirtiest and most despicable government-run subversive missions-the kind that can never be exposed.
In the final months of 2007 we are witnessing the stupendous success of the Big Three's strategy for planetary economic hegemony as the cacophony of their carefully engineered global economic cataclysm reverberates across America and around the world.
It was never about buyers who didn't read the fine print when taking out liar loans. It was always about silver-tongued, ruling elite politicians and central bankers, anointed by the shadow government, who ultimately and skillfully stole and continue to steal governments from people and replace them with transnational corporations.
No one could have said it better than David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission, a Bilderberg member and board member of the Council On Foreign Relations in his Memoirs:
Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure-one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.
If you want to know who really runs the world and the lengths to which they will go to establish their globalist hegemony, you must read Estulin's well-documented The True Story of The Bilderberg Group.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
MASS-MURDERER AHMADI-NEJAD CAN SPEAK AT OUR UNIVERSITIES BUT NOT NETANYAHU
Imagine it's 1940, and picture Adolf Hitler speaking at a US university, receiving a polite reception, while Winston Churchill is barred from speaking because his safety cannot be guaranteed.
It's unthinkable, yet the very same pro-fascist dynamic is a reality in 21st Century America.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to America knowing he is a second-class citizen who is denied the free-speech rights enjoyed even by prominent jihadists, having been violently prevented from speaking on campuses in the US and Canada in recent years.
Protestors at Berkeley, the campus once synonymous with the term "free speech," forced the cancellation of Netanyahu's speech there, as well as two subsequent speeches, in November 2000. The Jewish Bulletin of Northern California reported:
Hundreds of protesters shouting "Support the Palestinians, choose a side" and "No free speech for war criminals" blocked the gate leading to the Berkeley Community Theatre Tuesday evening, forcing the cancellation of a scheduled speech by former
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Additional talks by Netanyahu that were scheduled Wednesday and Thursday in San Mateo and San Rafael were subsequently cancelled.
Waving banners reading "Zionism=Nazism" and "End U.S. aid to Israel," the crowd was estimated at more than 500 by the Berkeley Police Department and at 200 to 250 by observers...
The vitriol that greeted Netanyahu at Berkeley only worsened in the ensuing years. Anneli Rufus of the East Bay Express recalled that in 2001:
...Students for Justice in Palestine had become large enough to stage a high-profile sit-in at UC's Wheeler Hall. The group had demanded that the regents divest from companies with significant holdings in Israel.
When the regents failed to respond, dozens of group members chained shut nine of the building's twelve doors. They formed human chains to block two of the remaining doors and ushered students out of the building through the last door. Professor Gordon, who had an important class scheduled that day in Wheeler, burst through the chain of students only to be showered with spit and hit by a student...
Later that year, 23-year-old Aaron Schwartz was walking toward the Hillel building as part of an obviously Jewish group celebrating the annual holiday Simchas Torah.
According to accounts in The Daily Californian and the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, one onlooker mocked the procession by goose-stepping in place, chanting "Heil Hitler," and performing the Nazi salute. After punching Schwartz in the face and knocking him to the ground, the man and his two companions strolled away.
But many remember spring 2002 as the season the screaming really started. On spring break, someone hurled the cinderblock through the front door of Berkeley's Hillel Center, scrawling the words F--- JEWS nearby...
The same mentality was on display in spring 2002 at San Francisco State University, where pro-Israel students and elderly Holocaust survivors trying to hold a rally were stopped by violent protestors screaming "F-- the Jews," "Jews, go back to Russia,"
"Too bad Hitler didn't finish the job," and "Get out or we'll kill you."
Threats of "we'll kill you" appear to have led to the logical next step in the recent violent death of 38-year-old pro-Israel activist Daniel J. Kliman in San Francisco.
It appears that present-day northern California is to Jews what Mississippi in the early 20th Century was to African-Americans-the epicenter of explosive hate-although the same bigotry permeates much of the academic world.
That would include Concordia University in Montreal, where Netanyahu was prevented from speaking about the war against terrorism. Daniel Pipes, writing in the New York Post on September 17, 2002, described the violent scene:
... he never made it onto the campus - because a thousand anti-Israel demonstrators staged a mini-riot with the intent of preventing him from speaking...
The anti-Israel forces physically assaulted the would-be audience... They smashed a plate-glass window and threw objects at the police inside. They hurled furniture at police from a mezzanine. As Toronto's Globe & Mail put it, "By lunchtime, the vestibule of Concordia's main downtown building was littered with paper, upturned chairs, broken furniture and the choking aftereffects of pepper spray."
The police, saying they couldn't assure Netanyahu's safety, canceled the event...
Pipes noted a revealing contrast involving another speaker the same week:
On Thursday, Hanan Ashrawi, the former spokeswoman and colleague of Yasser Arafat, went to Colorado College in Colorado Springs to give a keynote speech at a symposium on "September 11: One Year Later."
Protestors noted that Ashrawi is smack on the side of America's enemies in the War on Terrorism. For example, while the U.S. government formally designates Hamas a terrorist group, Ashrawi states she doesn't "think of Hamas as a terrorist group." Also, she considers Israeli civilians living on the West Bank to be "legitimate . . . targets of Palestinian resistance" -- that is, legitimate targets for deadly violence.
Yet the protestors did not block the terrorist spokeswoman from expressing her opinions (a mere year after the 9/11 attacks), and she is just one of countless pro-terror speakers who are welcome on US campuses.
Sheikh Khalid Yasin, a convert to Islam, has been invited to numerous colleges to preach that terrorism is justified, homosexuals should be murdered, and Christian missionaries in Africa are injecting people with AIDS. Terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, of course, have never had to worry about efforts to shut them down at the universities where they teach.
Little wonder that when the genocide-espousing Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University on September 24, 2007, the event did not seem out of the ordinary. His politely received speech was hailed by many observers as a fine display of one of the noblest ideals of institutions of higher learning -the free exchange of ideas.
Hardly anyone in the media noted that, the day before he departed for America, Ahmadinejad re-emphasized the two most heartfelt ideas to which he and his regime are dedicated--"Death to America" and "Death to Israel," emblazoned on signs in a military parade over which he presided.
Were the deaths of America and Israel debatable propositions? For many in the academic world, the answer apparently is yes. After all, they would tell us, that's what universities are for. Let all views be heard.
All views, that is, with certain exceptions, including the anti-terror message of the prime minister of Israel.
Courtesy American Thinker
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/ahmadinejad_can_speak_on_a_us.html
It's unthinkable, yet the very same pro-fascist dynamic is a reality in 21st Century America.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to America knowing he is a second-class citizen who is denied the free-speech rights enjoyed even by prominent jihadists, having been violently prevented from speaking on campuses in the US and Canada in recent years.
Protestors at Berkeley, the campus once synonymous with the term "free speech," forced the cancellation of Netanyahu's speech there, as well as two subsequent speeches, in November 2000. The Jewish Bulletin of Northern California reported:
Hundreds of protesters shouting "Support the Palestinians, choose a side" and "No free speech for war criminals" blocked the gate leading to the Berkeley Community Theatre Tuesday evening, forcing the cancellation of a scheduled speech by former
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Additional talks by Netanyahu that were scheduled Wednesday and Thursday in San Mateo and San Rafael were subsequently cancelled.
Waving banners reading "Zionism=Nazism" and "End U.S. aid to Israel," the crowd was estimated at more than 500 by the Berkeley Police Department and at 200 to 250 by observers...
The vitriol that greeted Netanyahu at Berkeley only worsened in the ensuing years. Anneli Rufus of the East Bay Express recalled that in 2001:
...Students for Justice in Palestine had become large enough to stage a high-profile sit-in at UC's Wheeler Hall. The group had demanded that the regents divest from companies with significant holdings in Israel.
When the regents failed to respond, dozens of group members chained shut nine of the building's twelve doors. They formed human chains to block two of the remaining doors and ushered students out of the building through the last door. Professor Gordon, who had an important class scheduled that day in Wheeler, burst through the chain of students only to be showered with spit and hit by a student...
Later that year, 23-year-old Aaron Schwartz was walking toward the Hillel building as part of an obviously Jewish group celebrating the annual holiday Simchas Torah.
According to accounts in The Daily Californian and the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, one onlooker mocked the procession by goose-stepping in place, chanting "Heil Hitler," and performing the Nazi salute. After punching Schwartz in the face and knocking him to the ground, the man and his two companions strolled away.
But many remember spring 2002 as the season the screaming really started. On spring break, someone hurled the cinderblock through the front door of Berkeley's Hillel Center, scrawling the words F--- JEWS nearby...
The same mentality was on display in spring 2002 at San Francisco State University, where pro-Israel students and elderly Holocaust survivors trying to hold a rally were stopped by violent protestors screaming "F-- the Jews," "Jews, go back to Russia,"
"Too bad Hitler didn't finish the job," and "Get out or we'll kill you."
Threats of "we'll kill you" appear to have led to the logical next step in the recent violent death of 38-year-old pro-Israel activist Daniel J. Kliman in San Francisco.
It appears that present-day northern California is to Jews what Mississippi in the early 20th Century was to African-Americans-the epicenter of explosive hate-although the same bigotry permeates much of the academic world.
That would include Concordia University in Montreal, where Netanyahu was prevented from speaking about the war against terrorism. Daniel Pipes, writing in the New York Post on September 17, 2002, described the violent scene:
... he never made it onto the campus - because a thousand anti-Israel demonstrators staged a mini-riot with the intent of preventing him from speaking...
The anti-Israel forces physically assaulted the would-be audience... They smashed a plate-glass window and threw objects at the police inside. They hurled furniture at police from a mezzanine. As Toronto's Globe & Mail put it, "By lunchtime, the vestibule of Concordia's main downtown building was littered with paper, upturned chairs, broken furniture and the choking aftereffects of pepper spray."
The police, saying they couldn't assure Netanyahu's safety, canceled the event...
Pipes noted a revealing contrast involving another speaker the same week:
On Thursday, Hanan Ashrawi, the former spokeswoman and colleague of Yasser Arafat, went to Colorado College in Colorado Springs to give a keynote speech at a symposium on "September 11: One Year Later."
Protestors noted that Ashrawi is smack on the side of America's enemies in the War on Terrorism. For example, while the U.S. government formally designates Hamas a terrorist group, Ashrawi states she doesn't "think of Hamas as a terrorist group." Also, she considers Israeli civilians living on the West Bank to be "legitimate . . . targets of Palestinian resistance" -- that is, legitimate targets for deadly violence.
Yet the protestors did not block the terrorist spokeswoman from expressing her opinions (a mere year after the 9/11 attacks), and she is just one of countless pro-terror speakers who are welcome on US campuses.
Sheikh Khalid Yasin, a convert to Islam, has been invited to numerous colleges to preach that terrorism is justified, homosexuals should be murdered, and Christian missionaries in Africa are injecting people with AIDS. Terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, of course, have never had to worry about efforts to shut them down at the universities where they teach.
Little wonder that when the genocide-espousing Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University on September 24, 2007, the event did not seem out of the ordinary. His politely received speech was hailed by many observers as a fine display of one of the noblest ideals of institutions of higher learning -the free exchange of ideas.
Hardly anyone in the media noted that, the day before he departed for America, Ahmadinejad re-emphasized the two most heartfelt ideas to which he and his regime are dedicated--"Death to America" and "Death to Israel," emblazoned on signs in a military parade over which he presided.
Were the deaths of America and Israel debatable propositions? For many in the academic world, the answer apparently is yes. After all, they would tell us, that's what universities are for. Let all views be heard.
All views, that is, with certain exceptions, including the anti-terror message of the prime minister of Israel.
Courtesy American Thinker
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/ahmadinejad_can_speak_on_a_us.html
Thursday, May 7, 2009
H.I.H. REZA PAHLAVI SPEECH MAY 06, 2009
ADDRESS GIVEN BY Reza Pahlavi of Iran
ON"Iran-US Relations At a New Cross Roads" University of California – IrvineWednesday, May 6th, 2009
Members of the faculty, students, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:
I am very happy to be back at UCI today. It is a special privilege for me to have the opportunityof addressing you at this important crossroad in the relationship between our two countries, and the significance it has for the future of peace and stability in the Middle East.
Let me begin by saying that a good university where one can study in peace and freedom may seem common place to you. But not so for many thousands of students in my homeland whose eager young minds remain constrained and constantly shackled by a closed and dogmatic atmosphere that has been ruthlessly imposed on them by an unpopular dictatorship.
Consequently, universities in my country are not places for critical learning, and students are not given the kind of opportunities that they need to freely debate contemporary issues or contemplate the shape of the future in the manner that is common practice here in the West.
But having said that, I would like to inform you that students in Iranian universities have refused to accept the imposition of the fate prescribed for them by the state as fait accompli, and have, through their resistance, remained a major thorn in the eyes of the regime.
Their stubborn defiance and their continuing struggle for the promotion of secular democratic values, even from the confines of their “intellectual prison”, has been a source of great inspiration across Iranian society.
Indeed, many in Iran credit the robust movement of Iranian students for freedom, justice and human rights, for being a major impetus behind the kind of similar demands that are now being made by Iranian women, labor unions and ethnic groups throughout the country.
Yet, students in Iran continue to remain quite savvy and realistic about their prospects for the future. They are aware of the challenges that lie ahead in the hazardous road which they have chosen to take for the promotion of their aspirations. They know at the same time that their cause is just while recognizing that there is a battle at hand for the future that belongs to them.
Dear Friends,
My cause is to ensure that they emerge victorious in this battle so that our people may ultimately shrug off the combined yoke of religious fanaticism and political despotism that has brought havoc to the lives of ordinary people, and to the standing of our country in the international community.
However, I have no illusions about the obstacles that lie before us, and the difficulties that we continue to face on a daily basis. But it is my solemn conviction that this is a battle we can win!
The clerical regime is a detested and unpopular tyranny that has done nothing in the last 30-years to safeguard or enhance the welfare, peace of mind and the prosperity of the Iranian people, despite having had access to more than $800 billion of oil revenues!
After coming to power, it did not take the ruling clerics much time to squander the good will of the Iranian people and the international community, and particularly those of our neighbors.
Looking back over time, it is hard to imagine any other outcome, since those who had taken power in Tehran were part and parcel of a revolutionary, revisionist regime that was bent on changing the status quo, not just in the region or in the Islamic world, but everywhere else as well.
However, so long as the regime had not alienated the majority of the population at home, their ambitions for actually implementing the export of their radical ideals and religious extremism were largely confined to senseless ranting and sloganeering.
With the exception of adopting a foreign policy based on militant anti-Americanism that came into full view following the seizure of American diplomats in Tehran and which has continued to remain with us to this day, the regime never saw the need to indulge beyond a war of words to demonize states like Israel for violating the rights of the Palestinians, or some Arab states as being subservient lackeys of the US, and in the case of Saudi Arabia and its leadership, which were the prime source of Khomeini’s personal venom and hatred, the un-rightful and usurping custodians of Islam’s holiest shrines in Mecca and Medina.
But as the initial euphoria that had come about in the aftermath of the revolution started giving way to a more sober understanding of realities at home, things began to change. First and foremost, the prolonged war with Iraq in which hundreds of thousands of Iranian lives were needlessly sacrificed, was used as a vehicle for consolidating fundamentalist rule across the country and brutally crushing every trace of opposition.
Moreover, as the regime’s ineptitude became more apparent with the way in which our nation was being so grossly mismanaged, the need to rely on other factors – for example, the construction of a “forward line of defense” for the protection and the preservation of the Islamic Republic – became more urgent; hence, the range of various controversial Iranian policies which we have seen in the course of the last twenty somewhat years, starting with the creation of Hezbollah in Lebanon as far back as the early 1980s, to the financial and other support that isgiven to radical groups like Hamas in Palestine, or the meddling that have gone on with hardline Shiite groups in Iraq, Afghanistan or Bahrain… and the list can go on.
It is ironic that this whole notion of the Islamic government’s quest for a “forward line of defense” should be confirmed and validated by none other than Mohammad Khatami, a former President of the regime.
In response to a question posed to him by a senior US diplomat who testified before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this year, suggesting that Iran’s arming of Hezbollah and Hamas could potentiality spark a terrible conflict between Israel andothers in that region, Khatami had responded by reminding that “Iran planned its line of defense from external lines”.
In other words, promoting regional conflict and instability is perceived by the regime as a key consideration of its survival! So, contrary to the opinion of some who continue harping on how strong the Islamic regime has become as a result of various American policies here and there, my response is to say:
Nonsense!
I say this because no government with a strong popular base sacrifices the peace of mind and prosperity of its people in order to exhibit lines of “forward defense” in the manner I just described.
In the case of the regime’s nuclear ambitions which has now become the centrepiece of Iran’s dispute with the international community, what kind of government that sits on some of the world’s largest oil and gas reserves, would subject its own citizens to undue and damaging economic sanctions or potential war through a lack of transparency, if its only real intent was to pursue a peaceful nuclear program for creating electricity?
Therefore, my suggestion is that, far from being either self assured or strong, the kind of costly aggressive policies which the clerical regime has pursued – whether in support of their surrogates in places like Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan, or those which they have pursued in defiance of the UN Security Council in their dangerous search for nuclear weapons – are clear manifestations of the kind of insecurity that any unpopular regime feels when it knows that is hated by a vast majority of its own people.
I now wish to turn to the all important issue of Iran-US relations at this critical juncture.
Despite President Obama’s personal popularity and the new momentum which his administration has been able to generate since taking office earlier this year, it is foolish to think that a serious breakthrough with Iran can be achieved, as if the factors that have exacerbated Iran-US relations in the course of the past 30 years have miraculously disappeared!
Since its inception in 1979, the ruling clerics in Iran have pursued ideologically -based policies aiming at the ascendancy of a doctrinaire Shiite state.
Enmity with the United States has been a central part of that doctrine. The regime perceives the US as a pillaging force, anchored in the Islamic heartland through the state of Israel, and a corrupting cultural beacon for the Islamic youth. Moreover, the US is seen as the main obstacle that stands in the way of the geo-strategic goals and hegemonic ambitions of the clerical regime in the region.
In the course of the last 30 years, five U.S. presidents have sought to meet this challenge, using to no avail a range of policy tools – from containment to appeasement to plain threat of force.
To no little extent this failure has been due to a flawed understanding of the nature of the adversity as well as random and haphazard use of these tools.
Today, the new US administration, in its hope for ending the gridlock that has stifled both parties in the last three decades, has indicated that it privileges engagement over confrontation. But if the objective of the dialogue is to dissuade the Islamic regime from pursuing its current policies, a first question to ask is: what leverage does President Obama have for ensuring a different outcome?
If this leverage is predicated on America’s restored world standing and Mr. Obama’s own personal prestige and popularity, the US government may still be in for more frustrations and disappointments. It is quite possible that the Islamic leadership will respond to a call for engagement in order to gain the moral legitimacy it lacks by becoming a dialogue partner to the US President and his western allies, without any willingness to compromise on the kind of key issues that are critical for both the US and its Western allies.
If President Obama’s objective from direct engagementwith Iran is to use diplomatic channels to persuade the Iranian regime to change some of its key controversial policies such as its nuclear ambitions or its various negative regional interferences, then as we have already witnessed in recent weeks, he is in for a big surprise.
In fact, it is the Iranian leadership which is calling the shots and asking for the US to change its behavior, before they sit down to talk!
My primary concern here is that, at the end of the day, millions of nameless freedom loving Iranians who are the West’s only real natural friends and allies in Iran, should not bear the brunt of any mishap as a consequence of any possible misperception.
Here it is most pertinent that I say something about President Obama’s much publicized Iranian New Year message that was widely distributed on March 21st.
Unlike his predecessor, in a message that was deliberately addressed to both the Iranian people and the Iranian government, President Obama made specific reference to the words of one of Iran’s most eminent and revered poets, Saadi, who lived in the 13th Century.
As a matter of fact, the very same poem also graces the entrance to the Hall of Nations of the United Nations building in New York, with this call for breaking all barriers:
Human beings are members of a whole,
In creation of one essence and soul.
If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain.
If you have no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain.
My country’s rich history of culture and civilization has ingrained Saadi’s words into the subconscious of the overwhelming majority of our people who are today the main victims of their brutal and bloodstained rulers.
While I applaud President Obama for his courage and initiative in wanting to advance a new agenda, I am not at all sure about the wisdom of putting a suffering people on the same footing as an oppressive government.
By highlighting this point, my aim is to draw your attention to the responsibility that we all have, as human beings, for showing care and compassion for those most in need of our understanding.
In the case of Iran, I assure you that it is the people and not their ruthless government that needs to be assured of this understanding. It is they who need your support and solidarity, and not their oppressive government.
I do not object to the new US administration’s call for engagement and dialogue with the Islamic Republic, if that should serve the higher interests of world peace.
But if a sober assessment should bring us to conclude that the Islamic regime is unlikely to deviate from its ideological line and enmity towards the United States, then it may be worth recalling that the real Iran has little in common with those who have usurped power and face the world with a clenched fist.
This is a good juncture to tell you why the debate between idealists and adherents of realpolitik has not led to a solution for dealing with the Islamic Republic effectively. Idealists emphasize democracy and human rights over security and economic interests, while realpolitik does the reverse.
But in the case of Iran this is a false dichotomy. Here, idealism is realism! The history of nuclear diplomacy with Iran provides ample proof that external economic and diplomatic pressures are not enough to make the clerical regime change course.
One must look at support for democracy and human rights as the means of increasing internal popular pressure on the regime for it to yield. It is not that diplomats should add human rights and democracy to their list of demands, adding to their burden.
I argue that policies that strengthen the voices of Iranian people will be the most important instrument of pressure available to diplomats. That is why I say: “here idealism is realism.
”Ladies and Gentlemen,
Prior to concluding my remarks, I want to just say a few words regarding the so-called presidential elections in Iran.
To all the hype that is being given to this upcoming event that is scheduled for June 12th, I just want to remind you of the following:
Today, Iran is not a democracy, and the election process does not in any shape or form reflect the will and aspirations of the Iranian people!
Thus any submission to the propaganda put forth by Iranian lobbyists and apologist who harpon the fact that, contrary to some other countries in the Middle East, “at least some form of elections are conducted in Iran!” is highly misleading.
In simple terms, all the candidates are closely vetted by the state, and irrespective of the kind of differences that they may have in style or presentation, they all adhere to the same agenda when it comes to most issues of consequence to ordinary people in the country or the international community.
At the end of the day, whoever is elected must carry out in full whatever decision or policy that is prescribed for him by the country’s Supreme Leader. In short, whether Ahmadinejad is re-elected or not will not make much of a difference.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
In closing, let me reiterate that my compatriots’ hopes and aspirations for a promising future in a free and prospering society should not be compromised for the sake of certain ploys that will in all probability come to nothing.
It should never be forgotten that beneath the unpleasant face ofpeople like Khamenei or Ahmadinejad, there exists another Iran; an Iran which yearns for change.
Female activists, restless youths, unionists, teachers and academics, writers and artists, ethnic and religious minorities, and disenfranchised citizens have been part of a nation-wide struggle for change.
These are the true voice of Iran! These are the people that risk all for a better tomorrow…
And I implore you: do not deny my valiant compatriots, your support. You must let the youth of Iran know that they are not alone, that you have heard their cry for freedom.
You must not, you cannot, in all conscience, turn your back on them in their hour of need; for THEY…ARE…THE FUTURE!
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
OBA-HUSSEIN'S UNREAL WORLD VIEW
Is the real world ready for Obama's unreal world view?
by Sol Sanders
Only the historians decades hence, if then, will know what measure of President Barack Hussein Obama's worldview was conditioned by the small band of 60s Stalinists and fellow-travelers his mother and he moved in as a child and as a young man and what part was formed of an innate cunning that produced a more pragmatic — if often uninformed — view as he entered the real world.
One aspect is already clear, however: the terrible choices that are presented all of us in life, but particularly the ones for the world's most powerful figure as president of the United States, have come down on him hard.
He admits as much in his casual statements about how surprised he is that all problems come to the presidency [the phenomenon Harry Truman described as "the buck stops here"], or his finding that there were so many important issues at a given moment. That much comes through despite all the teleprompterspeak he so skillfully employs in what now seems an unending appeal for public support in his continued drift as a campaigner.
Leaving aside the turbulent domestic scene and its problems — not a small aside since they must in the nature of things demand his first priority — it is perhaps in foreign policy where the nature of reality throws more cold water at his [mostly] sunny rhetoric.
And while Europe seemingly retreats into self delusion, self indulgence and impotency, after almost 500 years of dominating world events, Obama is drawn to the problems of Asia as those needing attention as immediately threatening world peace and stability.
He seems loathe to try to strip out in an analytical way the inevitable debris left over not only from the Bush Administration but decades of U.S. policy before him. Amid the machinations of a wide gaggle of discordant advisers, many of what he purports to be new initiatives are not new or if new, have already met stalemate.
That is despite his steadfast determination to ignore the reality with his endless rhetoric.
Nowhere is the hollow call of the Obama trumpet so off key as in the Mideast.
Obama's highly publicized one-year schedule for achieving a two-state solution in the Israel-Palestine affair is a non sequitur. "The Palestine Project", now the rallying cry for the European left from the entertainment world glitterati to reawakening virulent anti-semites, is at its lowest ebb for decades.
There is no negotiating partner for the Israelis — not only one that would make a Sadat-like statement accepting the Jewish state's right to exist but a deepening division between a once dominant secular Jerusalem Arab elite and the Hamas Muslim fanatics throws up. There is no unified Palstinian representation.
Israeli opinion has moved right, in obvious reaction to the facts on the ground, that is, the chaos in "Palestine" and the almost daily repeated threat from Teheran. And, ironically, a tacit alliance is developing between Cairo and Jerusalem against the suspected weakness of Obama vis-à-vis the growing threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.
It has never been true that Israel-Arab was the beginning and the end-all of problems in the umma, the Muslim world. But it is now dramatically clearer although not recognized in Washington.
From Morocco to Tokyo, among the Afro-Asian leadership — however much his popularity with the street as the first African-American president enthralls — dismay on the part of traditional friends and allies is apparent. Old enemies seem caught in equal parts bafflement and encouraged by his naïveté.
This is leading to important if little remarked occurrences everywhere which are inferentially related to his public statements. Thus Rabat broke diplomatic relations with the mullahs in Teheran, exhibiting the fear throughout the Sunni Arab Establishment that Obama's perceived Iran strategy is dangerously imperiling them..
The Moroccans were explicit about the threat when they came to the support of the Bahraini monarch, King Hamad Bin Isa al-Khalifa, against outright territorial claims by Iranian officials to that little oil kingdom. The Gulf has seen nothing like it since Iraqi Saddam's claims on Kuwait which led to two wars.
The Tehran challenge becomes acute, based on longstanding agitation among Bahrain's dissatisfied Shia majority. Critical is that the Morrocan monarch Mohammed unlike other Arab leaders claims descent from the Prophet and therefore to Sunni religious as well civil and national leadership. But for Obama and the U.S. directly Tehran's claims make another point: the little Persian Gulf sheikhdom is the site of the American Fifth Fleet headquarters, the main stabilizing force in the area.
Were that not enough, Hizbullah — the terrorist organization that Washington in its absent mindedness forgets has taken more lives than any other radical Muslim grouping — is about to cap its growing control of the Lebanese army with an election victory.
That would end the always precarious sectarian balancing act that has characterized the state since the French set it up in the post-World War II era as a Middle East sanctuary for Christians.
The control of Syria over Lebanon which Sec. of State Clinton challenged with nothing more than mantras when she dropped in on Beirut in her first trip to the area is increasing by the day.
Meanwhile, Obama's first above-board initiative in the area, sending State Dept. delegates to Damascus, has not moved Basher al-Hafaz' dicatorship one inch from its alliance with Teheran [and through Teheran with North Korea] as he continues to facilitate weapons flowing to Hizbullah.
Obama's elaborate state visit to Turkey under the benighted assumption that Turkey's old role as the quintessential modernizing state of the Third World — a cliché which no one has believed since World War II — has resulted in no settlement with Ankara.
In fact, the Turkish "moderate" Muslim administration in a drunken sailor "multidirectional" foreign policy is jeopardizing the Bush Administration's partially successful effort to make it the hub for an effort to limit Europe's dependence on Russian fossil fuels from new sources in Central Asia.
Turkey has mocked its alliance with Israel [and NATO] with overtures to Hizbullah and negotiations to increase its own dependence on Russian gas, its "neutral" stance in last summer's Moscow attack on its neighbor Georgia.
It refuses to join American and NATO efforts to use sanctions to curb Iran before it reaches weapons of mass destruction. So much for the much heralded seminal speech to the Muslim world with which Obama was to turn everything around which, luckily, Obama decided not to give in Turkey.
In Afghanistan-Pakistan, the Obama has thrown initiative after initiative at the crumbling ceiling hoping something would stick, and accompanied it with ceaseless — often ill conceived — public announcements. [One of Obama's campaign tidbits was a threat to intervene directly with U.S. forces in Pakistan.]
The Aministration daily contradicts itself on the depth of the crisis. [Gauletier and notorious bull-in-china Richard H.A. Holbrooke contradicted the President within a 24-hour span on the depth of the crisis.] Reversing the Bush assistance in toppling the quasi-military regime of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the Obama Administration is moving to closer and closer relations with the military, the only substantial national force in the country.
Admitting the fecklessness of President Asif Ali Zardari, the new massive aid [$400 million in the next year] aid will detour around the State Dept. and the Islamabad civilian leadership for a direct military-to-military effort. But it will have to be a subtle strategy which nothing so far from this Administration suggests.
Paralyzed by the month-long unpredictable Indian elections, Washington has made no progress in that long, long trek of trying to patch up India-Pakistan relations.
New Delhi refuses to even have a backroom discussion of Kashmir — the issue between India and Islamabad that must be defused if Pakistani generals are to turn their full attention to the sanctuaries along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and their own growing internal terrorism. The Obama Administration's pre-inaugural suggestion of sending former President Bill Clinton as mediator only aggravated the wound.
Meanwhile, 750,000 Indian security forces maintain a precarious peace in Kashmir itself with a growing majority probably in favor independence of both neighbors, another ministate which would be a troublemaking defenseless entity.
In East Asia, the Obama Administration — stuck with the failed Bush policy of trying to negotiate an end to North Korea's nuclear arming and proliferation of weapons through a Six Nation multilateral talkfest dependent on Beijing — adds to the confusion.
Clinton told a Congressional panel the Administration wants to continue food aid to Pyongyang [to avert famine] and get an extension of the president's authority to waive sanctions against a terrorist state. But not only does North Korea refuse to return to the negotiating table, but indirectly seemingly confirms the suspicion that it is working on a second uranium track to make bombs.
The beleagured regime — King Jong Il is probably terminally ill and has made a drastic lunge toward giving more control to the military in an effort to assure one of his delinquent sons may inherit the dynasty — is harder to read than ever. But there seems no inclination in Beijing, fearing something worse [for them, including an implosion which would bring about Korean reunification] might occur, is hardly a reliable partner.
Administration spokesmen, are prepared to buy into China's game of chicken — pitting its hoard of American debt against any Washington pressure to open its markets or play a role in international problem solving. S
ec. of Treasury Timothy Geithner shocked the professional financial world with comments entertaining a Chinese suggestion of an alternative to the dollar as a world reserve currency; something he almost immediately backed away from, a suggestion which on its face was impractical and inimitable to Beijing's own interests.
One has to brace for a promised Obama Administration review of Taiwan policy, now further complicated by a very successful wooing of the KMT government by the Mainland. Both South Korea, with a new and determined conservative government, and Tokyo find themselves often out on a limb with sudden changes in U.S. policy, particularly toward North Korea — granted something inherited again from the dying years of the Bush presidency.
To be sure, many if not most of these problems are the accretion of pre-Obama problems and an inheritance no one should have wished on any presidency.
But precisely because the Obama presidency spends so much of its time trying to escape the past, apologizing, ignoring continuations, adopting contrary tactics simply out of an effort to be different, endless rhetoric where often silence might be helpful, it is creating new and difficult atmospheric conditions if not altering the fundamentals themselves.
One of the many problems — as well as the blessings — which the digital revolution has brought with it is adding to the fundamental life problem of distinguishing perception from reality. In another context, Richard P Feynman, 1965 Nobel laureate in physics, put it well:
"Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
In a politician as skillful as Obama, it is often not possible to distinguish how much his understanding of reality differs from that perception of a lack of realism he presents through his greatest weapon, his oratory.
But there has to be a growing suspicion that the wedge is widening, that he is still a long way from accepting and working with what is in fact the hard facts of international political life.
It augurs badly for the Republic.
by Sol Sanders
Only the historians decades hence, if then, will know what measure of President Barack Hussein Obama's worldview was conditioned by the small band of 60s Stalinists and fellow-travelers his mother and he moved in as a child and as a young man and what part was formed of an innate cunning that produced a more pragmatic — if often uninformed — view as he entered the real world.
One aspect is already clear, however: the terrible choices that are presented all of us in life, but particularly the ones for the world's most powerful figure as president of the United States, have come down on him hard.
He admits as much in his casual statements about how surprised he is that all problems come to the presidency [the phenomenon Harry Truman described as "the buck stops here"], or his finding that there were so many important issues at a given moment. That much comes through despite all the teleprompterspeak he so skillfully employs in what now seems an unending appeal for public support in his continued drift as a campaigner.
Leaving aside the turbulent domestic scene and its problems — not a small aside since they must in the nature of things demand his first priority — it is perhaps in foreign policy where the nature of reality throws more cold water at his [mostly] sunny rhetoric.
And while Europe seemingly retreats into self delusion, self indulgence and impotency, after almost 500 years of dominating world events, Obama is drawn to the problems of Asia as those needing attention as immediately threatening world peace and stability.
He seems loathe to try to strip out in an analytical way the inevitable debris left over not only from the Bush Administration but decades of U.S. policy before him. Amid the machinations of a wide gaggle of discordant advisers, many of what he purports to be new initiatives are not new or if new, have already met stalemate.
That is despite his steadfast determination to ignore the reality with his endless rhetoric.
Nowhere is the hollow call of the Obama trumpet so off key as in the Mideast.
Obama's highly publicized one-year schedule for achieving a two-state solution in the Israel-Palestine affair is a non sequitur. "The Palestine Project", now the rallying cry for the European left from the entertainment world glitterati to reawakening virulent anti-semites, is at its lowest ebb for decades.
There is no negotiating partner for the Israelis — not only one that would make a Sadat-like statement accepting the Jewish state's right to exist but a deepening division between a once dominant secular Jerusalem Arab elite and the Hamas Muslim fanatics throws up. There is no unified Palstinian representation.
Israeli opinion has moved right, in obvious reaction to the facts on the ground, that is, the chaos in "Palestine" and the almost daily repeated threat from Teheran. And, ironically, a tacit alliance is developing between Cairo and Jerusalem against the suspected weakness of Obama vis-à-vis the growing threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.
It has never been true that Israel-Arab was the beginning and the end-all of problems in the umma, the Muslim world. But it is now dramatically clearer although not recognized in Washington.
From Morocco to Tokyo, among the Afro-Asian leadership — however much his popularity with the street as the first African-American president enthralls — dismay on the part of traditional friends and allies is apparent. Old enemies seem caught in equal parts bafflement and encouraged by his naïveté.
This is leading to important if little remarked occurrences everywhere which are inferentially related to his public statements. Thus Rabat broke diplomatic relations with the mullahs in Teheran, exhibiting the fear throughout the Sunni Arab Establishment that Obama's perceived Iran strategy is dangerously imperiling them..
The Moroccans were explicit about the threat when they came to the support of the Bahraini monarch, King Hamad Bin Isa al-Khalifa, against outright territorial claims by Iranian officials to that little oil kingdom. The Gulf has seen nothing like it since Iraqi Saddam's claims on Kuwait which led to two wars.
The Tehran challenge becomes acute, based on longstanding agitation among Bahrain's dissatisfied Shia majority. Critical is that the Morrocan monarch Mohammed unlike other Arab leaders claims descent from the Prophet and therefore to Sunni religious as well civil and national leadership. But for Obama and the U.S. directly Tehran's claims make another point: the little Persian Gulf sheikhdom is the site of the American Fifth Fleet headquarters, the main stabilizing force in the area.
Were that not enough, Hizbullah — the terrorist organization that Washington in its absent mindedness forgets has taken more lives than any other radical Muslim grouping — is about to cap its growing control of the Lebanese army with an election victory.
That would end the always precarious sectarian balancing act that has characterized the state since the French set it up in the post-World War II era as a Middle East sanctuary for Christians.
The control of Syria over Lebanon which Sec. of State Clinton challenged with nothing more than mantras when she dropped in on Beirut in her first trip to the area is increasing by the day.
Meanwhile, Obama's first above-board initiative in the area, sending State Dept. delegates to Damascus, has not moved Basher al-Hafaz' dicatorship one inch from its alliance with Teheran [and through Teheran with North Korea] as he continues to facilitate weapons flowing to Hizbullah.
Obama's elaborate state visit to Turkey under the benighted assumption that Turkey's old role as the quintessential modernizing state of the Third World — a cliché which no one has believed since World War II — has resulted in no settlement with Ankara.
In fact, the Turkish "moderate" Muslim administration in a drunken sailor "multidirectional" foreign policy is jeopardizing the Bush Administration's partially successful effort to make it the hub for an effort to limit Europe's dependence on Russian fossil fuels from new sources in Central Asia.
Turkey has mocked its alliance with Israel [and NATO] with overtures to Hizbullah and negotiations to increase its own dependence on Russian gas, its "neutral" stance in last summer's Moscow attack on its neighbor Georgia.
It refuses to join American and NATO efforts to use sanctions to curb Iran before it reaches weapons of mass destruction. So much for the much heralded seminal speech to the Muslim world with which Obama was to turn everything around which, luckily, Obama decided not to give in Turkey.
In Afghanistan-Pakistan, the Obama has thrown initiative after initiative at the crumbling ceiling hoping something would stick, and accompanied it with ceaseless — often ill conceived — public announcements. [One of Obama's campaign tidbits was a threat to intervene directly with U.S. forces in Pakistan.]
The Aministration daily contradicts itself on the depth of the crisis. [Gauletier and notorious bull-in-china Richard H.A. Holbrooke contradicted the President within a 24-hour span on the depth of the crisis.] Reversing the Bush assistance in toppling the quasi-military regime of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the Obama Administration is moving to closer and closer relations with the military, the only substantial national force in the country.
Admitting the fecklessness of President Asif Ali Zardari, the new massive aid [$400 million in the next year] aid will detour around the State Dept. and the Islamabad civilian leadership for a direct military-to-military effort. But it will have to be a subtle strategy which nothing so far from this Administration suggests.
Paralyzed by the month-long unpredictable Indian elections, Washington has made no progress in that long, long trek of trying to patch up India-Pakistan relations.
New Delhi refuses to even have a backroom discussion of Kashmir — the issue between India and Islamabad that must be defused if Pakistani generals are to turn their full attention to the sanctuaries along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and their own growing internal terrorism. The Obama Administration's pre-inaugural suggestion of sending former President Bill Clinton as mediator only aggravated the wound.
Meanwhile, 750,000 Indian security forces maintain a precarious peace in Kashmir itself with a growing majority probably in favor independence of both neighbors, another ministate which would be a troublemaking defenseless entity.
In East Asia, the Obama Administration — stuck with the failed Bush policy of trying to negotiate an end to North Korea's nuclear arming and proliferation of weapons through a Six Nation multilateral talkfest dependent on Beijing — adds to the confusion.
Clinton told a Congressional panel the Administration wants to continue food aid to Pyongyang [to avert famine] and get an extension of the president's authority to waive sanctions against a terrorist state. But not only does North Korea refuse to return to the negotiating table, but indirectly seemingly confirms the suspicion that it is working on a second uranium track to make bombs.
The beleagured regime — King Jong Il is probably terminally ill and has made a drastic lunge toward giving more control to the military in an effort to assure one of his delinquent sons may inherit the dynasty — is harder to read than ever. But there seems no inclination in Beijing, fearing something worse [for them, including an implosion which would bring about Korean reunification] might occur, is hardly a reliable partner.
Administration spokesmen, are prepared to buy into China's game of chicken — pitting its hoard of American debt against any Washington pressure to open its markets or play a role in international problem solving. S
ec. of Treasury Timothy Geithner shocked the professional financial world with comments entertaining a Chinese suggestion of an alternative to the dollar as a world reserve currency; something he almost immediately backed away from, a suggestion which on its face was impractical and inimitable to Beijing's own interests.
One has to brace for a promised Obama Administration review of Taiwan policy, now further complicated by a very successful wooing of the KMT government by the Mainland. Both South Korea, with a new and determined conservative government, and Tokyo find themselves often out on a limb with sudden changes in U.S. policy, particularly toward North Korea — granted something inherited again from the dying years of the Bush presidency.
To be sure, many if not most of these problems are the accretion of pre-Obama problems and an inheritance no one should have wished on any presidency.
But precisely because the Obama presidency spends so much of its time trying to escape the past, apologizing, ignoring continuations, adopting contrary tactics simply out of an effort to be different, endless rhetoric where often silence might be helpful, it is creating new and difficult atmospheric conditions if not altering the fundamentals themselves.
One of the many problems — as well as the blessings — which the digital revolution has brought with it is adding to the fundamental life problem of distinguishing perception from reality. In another context, Richard P Feynman, 1965 Nobel laureate in physics, put it well:
"Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
In a politician as skillful as Obama, it is often not possible to distinguish how much his understanding of reality differs from that perception of a lack of realism he presents through his greatest weapon, his oratory.
But there has to be a growing suspicion that the wedge is widening, that he is still a long way from accepting and working with what is in fact the hard facts of international political life.
It augurs badly for the Republic.
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