Empty advice

According to the statement of Simon Wiesenthal Center’s mission, it “confronts anti-Semitism, hate and terrorism, promotes human rights and dignity, stands with Israel, defends the safety of Jews worldwide, and teaches the lessons of the Holocaust for future generations”. None of these goals appear to be served by the recent article by Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman* in New York Daily News (June 27, 2013). The article justly rebukes the Obama administration (Sec’y Kerry) for wasting money and effort on trying to engage the corrupt Palestinian Authority. It also proposes to “empower those who want to live in peace”. That might have been a smart advice, except none of “those” is named in the article. None, that is, unless one counts “a mother of two martyred sons” who laments PA’s economic incompetence, and a sheikh who would vote for Hamas “tomorrow”, given a chance. Apart from outrageously calling the dead terrorists martyrs with no quotation marks or explanation of what this “martyrdom” means for Israelis, even more disconcerting is that the authors refer to that sheikh as a “pragmatist” just because he wants “the basic social services” – this is after the thousands of rockets that have been fired from Gaza where the peaceful “pragmatists” of the sheikh’s kind won.

It is true that the PA is no peace partner and is corrupt, but the article’s advice is vacuous as it neither proposes any valid alternative nor tells the truth: there are no “peace partners” for Israel. In fact, none is needed or possible. There can be no partnership between the aggressors and the aggressed, just as no partnership can exist between the murderer and his victim. What is needed is that the Arab aggressors who have waged the war against Israel for as long as it has existed – the irredentists who do not agree to that existence in any shape or form – stop their war and their antisemitic poisoning of their children’s minds. Nobody among the Palestinian Arabs is known to have the political will, stature, and means for ensuring that. This needs to be clearly understood, and a good start for that would be calling terrorist murderers terrorists rather than “martyrs”, and using the correct geographic names Judea and Samaria rather than the meaningless and ahistoric “West Bank” that Jordan invented during its illegal occupation of the land to render not only the territory but even toponymy Judenrein. Without that understanding, the efforts and money will continue being wasted in pursuit of mirages. 

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*Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Brackman, a historian, is a consultant to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/kerry-challenge-empower-palestinians-article-1.1384187#ixzz2XvrBUxdZ

The Benghazi trial

"...weighed on the scales and found wanting." Daniel 5:27

Perhaps not since the Moscow show trials have we seen such rhetoric as directed by our progressive intelligentsia at the reactionary "right-wing". Which is only fitting, considering that those trials were exactly against the "right opposition". As well as against the "left" one. Here is what one of my progressive comrades is dreaming about: "I think joe [Biden] would headbutt him [Ryan] right in his perfectly shaved chest thereby exploding his blackened, right-wing heart." Apart from the suggestive body imagery, the only thing different is that the dreams of those who called for death of the enemies of the People in Moscow of the 1930's came true - often just before the dreamers themselves were tried as well and executed. This mind-paralyzing hatred, producing verbal vomit of vulgarity at the slightest attempt of the opponent to bring up information to the contrary, makes impossible any discussion.

Supposedly capable of thinking critically, intelligent scientists recite as if on command - without a second thought (or a first one) - the trivial and pathetically petty talking points offered to them by the party apparatchiks via the tame media: free contraception for women, dog on Romney's car roof, Romney's "magic underpants" and "binders". This is at the time when the terror attack and murders in Benghazi draw into the sharpest focus the incompetence, cowardice and dishonesty of Obama's junta. The free minds of intelligentsia suspend their abilities and repeat those talking points like a character in a science fiction novel by the Strugatsky brothers, The Snail On The Slope: suddenly a little violet cloud would form around his head, taking over control of his mind, and he would start announcing senseless but jubilant headlines about the Glorious Girlfriends' successes in the ongoing transformation of the Forest.

It is painful to watch the grimacing of the dissembling Obama Politburo, unable to disguise their lies, and the sad slant of Obama's speechifying head 1.5 months after the Benghazi events that the next day did not prevent him from enjoying his trip to Vegas and his laughing there at his own jokes. Or was a day not enough for the four deaths he observed happening in real time to sink in? To understand that he was responsible for them - that it was due to his and his coterie's negligence or willfully fatal decision that the people were dead? "Sacrificed their lives", as per the trite and false solemnity of Hillary Clinton's, whose honorary position of a former US president's wife, shared in part with others, made her eligible to be a foreign minister of the only superpower. The sacrifice was indeed made - but not by the ambassador and the fallen heroes who, denied any support, held for hours against the incredible odds, fighting mortar-armed thugs. They were sacrificed - by Obama,  Biden, Clinton, Panetta and who knows who else - on the altar of Islam-appeasing progressive ideology and self-congratulatory conclusions that "al Qaeda is on its heels". 

The Benghazi 9-11 would be the downfall of any administration - and not through its natural convenient removal by the upcoming elections, but by the public outcry demanding immediate impeachment and criminal prosecution. In the show trials of the 1930's in the Soviet Union, the guilt was invented - to get rid of Stalin's possible competitors and to suppress any dissent, the perennial dream of the progressive intelligentsia. The actual 9-11 crime and lies of Obama's clique should be enough to shatter that dream and put him out of his political misery. 

State oracles

Reportedly, Hillary Clinton has said, "We couldn't have predicted Mubarak's downfall". That is no surprise and no reason to write anything about. After all, the State Department could not predict the downfall of the Soviet Union either, a much more important and expected event, about which generations of Americans dreamed and President Reagan tirelessly worked on. What is surprising is Ms. Clinton's chutzpah in admitting her and her department's utter incompetence and lack of elementary work effort. Obviously, this is not about predicting some event that may or may not happen, anything at least as uncertain as the demise of the Soviet Empire. The only way the State Dept. could not have predicted Mubarak's downfall is if a former president's wife (it's difficult to find any other credentials that were supposed to qualify H. Clinton for her current post) and her subordinates were certain about Mubarak's immortality. The pharaoh is 82. Even if he were to live a long and happy life, it would still not prevent him from retirement in a very foreseeable future. Foreseeable, that is, if you are a sane person rather than Ms. Clinton who could not have imagined she would have to part with the dictator whose pockets she was so lovingly lining, and whose country she was supplying with weaponry that can be used only against Israel. If it were not for Israel's military superiority, the worthless piece of peace paper, for which Israel paid with Sinai's oil, would protect Israel as well as it has against rabid antisemitic incitement in Egypt. The only thing that was needed to predict Mubarak's downfall was to find out how old he is. One wouldn't even need to know, as has become suddenly known immediately after the "downfall", that both the army and Mubarak's own party had called for his resignation.

There is a good Russian saying, "Беда, коль пироги начнет печи сапожник, а сапоги тачать  - пирожник" - translated, it would be bad if a cobbler started baking pies and a baker making boots. This is what we get with the current administration of dilettantes led by a man whose relevant credentials hardly amount to a line in a resume.

Dashing general

Call me paranoid (probably many of us who come from the Soviet Union are justifiably so anyway), but I doubt General Stanley McChrystal was indeed reckless to say what he said regarding the Supreme Balaboss. No way he did not know the MO¹ and ROE² when dealing with a CO³, especially as hollow as BHO. Surely Stan knew that one is not supposed to malign anybody a notch above you in the Army hierarchy - that's the whole Army thing. No army can function if the lines of authority are not strictly maintained. My uneducated guess is that the general, far from being rash, mindless and a bad example to his subordinates, did it - the only alternative left - on purpose. Say, got tired of the supreme incompetence of the likes of Biden and his golf buddy in the WH (do they often get to play together or the interests of national security keep them playing separate?). Say, decided that whatever comes  - resignation or retirement, - his replacement will be listened to with greater attention and the critical decisions will not take forever. He did apologize, but I am willing to read into that apology non-admission of guilt: he said, "What is reflected in this article falls far short of [his] standard [principles of personal honor and professional integrity]", and the reflections are not necessarily true.  Especially when those reflections are in a leftist musical gossip magazine (a nice picture of The Beatles playing in water though).

All this may be a stretch or wishful thinking, but it does not matter much. Even if the general said it thoughtlessly, and carelessly entertained that kind of disparaging remarks about the administration from his subordinates, it tells at least as much about the administration as it does about McChrystal's army etiquette. To wit, that the administration has not earned as little respect from people who risk their lives every second as for them to at least follow their common rules of conduct. These people see their Supreme Commander on the news declaring that they serve America's vital interests, which, one guesses, will cease to be so in, oh, about a year when the troop withdrawal is scheduled to start, with no victory mentioned. They know that it took months for him to accept McChrystal's request for more troops on which their lives depended, and then deducting a quarter from the number requested. Those who do research using governmental funding are well familiar with the thinking behind deductions like that. This is one of the many ways for bureaucrats to exercise their power and show their creativity - to cut a study's budget by 15, 25 or another round number of percentage points, despite the fact that the budget has been approved by peer review, i.e. by people who know how much is needed to do what's planned. It is not good for research, nor is it for the Army where lives are at stake. This is the type of strategy Leo Tolstoy made a joke of in War and Peace, talking about German generals-bureaucrats with their calculations, "Die erste Kolonne marschiert... die zweite Kolonne marschiert... die dritte Kolonne marschiert." Call me a doubting Thomas, but I am afraid that Gen. Petraeus, who has been exposed to Obama's "strategery" before, does not hold a lot of respect for him either. How long will it take for him to have enough?
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¹MO, modus operandi
²ROE, rules of engagement
³CO, commanding officer