Column one: Israel’s risk aversion problem

 

by Caroline Glick

 Reblogged from jpost.com

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting with members of the government at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow. (photo credit:REUTERS)

On Wednesday the Obama administration was caught off guard by Russia’s rapid rise in Syria. As the Russians began bombing a US-supported militia along the Damascus-Homs highway, Secretary of State John Kerry was meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, at the UN. Just hours before their meeting Kerry was insisting that Russia’s presence in Syria would likely be a positive development.

Reacting to the administration’s humiliation, Republican Sen. John McCain said, “This administration has confused our friends, encouraged our enemies, mistaken an excess of caution for prudence and replaced the risks of action with the perils of inaction.”

McCain added that Russian President Vladimir Putin had stepped “into the wreckage of this administration’s Middle East policy.”

While directed at the administration, McCain’s general point is universally applicable. Today is no time for an overabundance of caution.

The system of centralized regimes that held sway in the Arab world since the breakup of the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago has unraveled. The shape of the new order has yet to be determined.

The war in Syria and the chaos and instability engulfing the region are part and parcel of the birth pangs of a new regional governing architecture now taking form. Actions taken by regional and global actors today will likely will influence power relations for generations.

Putin understands the opportunity of the moment.

He views the decomposition of Syria as an opportunity to rebuild Russia’s power and influence in the Middle East – at America’s expense.

Russia isn’t the only strategic player seeking to exploit the war in Syria and the regional chaos. Turkey and Iran are also working assiduously to take advantage of the current absence of order to advance their long term interests.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is exploiting the rise of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq to fight the Kurds in both countries. Erdogan’s goal is twofold: to prevent the establishment of an independent Kurdistan and to disenfranchise the Kurds in Turkey.

As for Iran, Syria is Iran’s bulwark against Sunni power in the Arab world and the logistical base for Tehran’s Shi’ite foreign legion Hezbollah. Iranian dictator Ali Khamenei is willing to fight to the bitter end to hold as much of Syrian territory as possible.

Broadly speaking, Iran views the breakup of the Arab state system as both a threat and an opportunity.

The chaos threatens Iran, because it has radicalized the Sunni world. If Sunni forces unite, their numeric advantage against Shi’ite Iran will imperil it.

The power of Sunni numbers is the reason Bashar Assad now controls a mere sixth of Syrian territory. To prevent his fate from befalling them, the Iranians seek to destabilize neighboring regimes and where possible install proxy governments in their stead.

Iran’s cultivation of alliances and proxy relationships with Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaida, and its phony war against Islamic State all point to an overarching goal of keeping Sunni forces separated and dependent on Tehran.

The Iranian regime also fears the prospect of being overthrown by its domestic opponents. To counter this threat the regime engages in large-scale and ever escalating repression of its perceived foes.

Iran’s nuclear program also plays a key role in the regime’s survival strategy. As Khamenei and his underlings see things, nuclear weapons protect the regime in three ways. They deter Iran’s external foes. They increase domestic support for the regime by enriching Iran which, no longer under international sanctions, sees its diplomatic and economic prestige massively enhanced due to its nuclear program.

Finally, there is Iran’s war with Israel and the US. A nuclear-armed Iran is a direct threat to both countries.

And this, too, is a boon for the mullacracy. From the regime’s perspective, fighting Israel and the US serves to neutralize the Sunni threat to the regime. The more Iran is seen as fighting Israel and the US the more legitimate it appears to Sunni jihadists.

This then brings us to the Americans. Like the Russians, the Turks and the Iranians, President Barack Obama and his associates are strategic players. Unlike those powers however, the administration is moved not by raw power calculations but by ideological dictates.

Obama and his advisers are convinced that the instability and radicalization of states and actors throughout the region is the consequence of the actions of past US administrations and those of America’s regional allies – first and foremost, Israel and Egypt. The basis for this conviction is the administration’s post-colonial ideological underpinnings.

Because his strategy is based on ideological beliefs rather than power calculations rooted in reality, Obama’s position cannot be swayed by evidence, even when evidence shows that his administration’s policies endanger US national security.

This brings us to Israel.

Israel has limited power to influence regional events.

It cannot change its neighbors’ values or cultures. Israel can however limit its neighbors’ ability to harm it and expand its ability to deter would be aggressors by among other things, using its power judiciously to influence now forming power balances between various regional and world actors.

Israel has followed this model in Syria with notable success.

At an early stage of the war our leaders recognized that aside from the Kurds, who have no shared border with us, there are no viable actors in Syria that are not dangerous to Israel. As a result, Israel has no interest in the victory of one group against others.

The only actor in Syria that Israel has felt it necessary to actively rein in is Hezbollah. So it has acted repeatedly to prevent Hezbollah from using its operational presence in Syria as a means for augmenting its offensive capabilities in Lebanon.

The problem with this strategy is that it has ignored the fact that from Hezbollah’s perspective, there is no operational difference between Lebanon and Syria.

The war in Syria spread to Lebanon years ago.

Now, with Iranian and Russian assistance, Hezbollah is beginning to develop the industrial capacity to bypass Israel and independently produce advanced weapons inside Lebanon. This rapid industrialization of Hezbollah’s military capabilities requires Israel to end its respect for the all-but-destroyed international border and take direct action against Hezbollah’s capabilities in Lebanon.

This brings us to Hezbollah’s boss, Iran. For the past several years, the same caution that has led Israel to grant de facto immunity to Hezbollah forces in Lebanon has led to Israel’s passivity and deference to the Obama administration in relation to Iran’s nuclear program.

With regard to Iran’s nuclear installations, the strategy of passivity has largely been forced onto an unwilling political leadership by Israel’s military leaders.

For the past several years, the IDF’s General Staff has refused to support the government’s position on Iran’s nuclear program.

Our military leaders have justified their insubordination by arguing that if Israel takes independent action against Iran’s nuclear program it will undermine its bilateral relations with the US, which they consider more important than preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Although under the best of circumstances, the IDF’s position would be unacceptable from the perspective of democratic norms of governance, since the ideologically driven Obama administration took power seven years ago, the military’s position has imperiled the country.

So long as Obama – or the ideology that informs his actions – remains in power in Washington, US security guarantees towards Israel will have no credibility.

The IDF’s assessment that ties to the US are more important than preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power will remain incorrect, and dangerously so.

Today is Israel’s opportunity to shape the future of the Middle East by not only preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power, but by preventing a regional nuclear arms race.

The closer Iran comes to emerging as a nuclear power, the more Sunni regimes, including Islamic State, will seek their own nuclear capabilities. It goes without saying that the more regional actors have nuclear weapons, the more dangerous the region becomes for Israel, and indeed for the world as a whole.

For many Israelis, the story of the week wasn’t Russia’s air strikes against US-allied forces in Syria. It was PLO chief and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s speech at the UN General Assembly.

Leftists expressed horror in the face of Abbas’s threat to end the PLO’s adherence to the agreements it signed with Israel in the 1990s (and has stood in material breach of ever since). The government insisted, for its part that the reason the peace process has not brought peace is because Abbas and his PLO refuse to negotiate with Israel.

Unfortunately, both sides’ responses to Abbas’s speech indicate that Israel has lost all semblance of strategic purpose in regard to the Palestinians.

Fifteen years ago this week, on September 28, 2000, the Palestinians opened their terrorist war against Israel. Ever since it has been clear that no Palestinian faction is interested in living at peace with Israel.

Despite this, for the past 15 years, Israel has refused to reconsider its strategic allegiance to the false notion that it has the ability to influence the hearts and minds of the Palestinians and bend them in the direction of peace.

This delusional thinking is what caused the IDF’s General Staff to convene immediately after Operation Protective Edge ended and try to figure out how to rebuild Gaza.

Ever since the cease-fire came into force, Hamas has diverted all the assistance it has received from Israel and the international community not to rebuild Gaza, but to rebuild its military capacity to harm Israel. And yet, from the IDF’s perspective, ever since the war ended our most urgent task has been to save Hamas and the Palestinians alike from reckoning with the price of their aggression.

Likewise, Israel continues to insist that we have a strategic interest in peace with the PLO. Even if this is true in theory, chances are greater that unicorns will fall from the sky and prance through Jerusalem’s Old City than that the PLO will agree to make peace with Israel.

Our continued defense of the PLO as a legitimate actor harms our ability to secure other strategic interests that are achievable and can improve Israel’s regional position. These interests include securing transportation arteries in Judea and Samaria and strengthening Israel's military and political control over the areas. These interests have only grown more acute in recent years with the rise of jihadist forces throughout the region and among the Palestinians themselves.

This brings us back to McCain and his strategic wisdom.

Israel must not allow the risks of action to lure us into strategic paralysis that imperils our future.

The more Israel allows other actors to determine the nature of the emerging regional order, the less secure Israel will be. The more willing we are to take calculated risks today the greater our ability will be to influence the future architecture of regional power relations and so minimize threats to our survival in the decades to come.

www.CarolineGlick.com

Iran, Nukes, and the End of the World

Reblogged from  http://blogos.org/thetakeaway/iran-nuclear.php
By Kersley Fitzgerald

Earlier this year, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (known as P5+1) struck a deal with Iran with the aim to provide financial incentives in return for the curtailing or postponing of Iran's nuclear weapons development program. You can read the entire text of the agreement — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — here. Alas, I must admit that I did not read it. I didn't trust that I would be able to understand the implications of the specifics or determine the real-world context. For that, I turned to other sources, which you can find here.

The key points of the JCPOA are as follows:

• Reduction of Iran's stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98%
• Immediate shut-down and storage of 2/3 of the centrifuges used to enrich uranium
• No production or acquisition of highly-enriched uranium or plutonium for at least 15 years
• 8-year restriction of missile production/acquisition
• 5-year embargo of conventional weapons, which may be decreased upon Iran's compliance with the nuclear restrictions
• Development of a "road map" to discuss Iran's future nuclear program
• Conversion of the Fordow uranium enrichment plant to a research only facility; redesign of the Arak heavy water plant to preclude the production of weapons-grade plutonium
• Inspectors allowed access to suspicious sites within 24 days of request
• Sanctions can be "snapped-back" upon evidence of Iran "cheating" in specific areas of the agreement
• Release of $100-150 billion dollars of frozen Iranian funds upon compliance

In the background of the negotiations were such fun things as Iran making promises in the meetings then publically claiming the opposite, the UN saying we needed to get some agreement over the nuclear weapons, and Israel rolling its eyes that anyone would actually believe Iran would follow through with anything it had promised. Ideally, Iran will follow all the little points and lose interest in developing nuclear weapons. There is concern they will use its newly released cash to bolster its foreign military involvement by equipping Hezbollah, but hope that they'll get distracted and start fighting the Islamic State instead. In order to determine what will probably happen, it helps to look at the history of Iran's nuclear development, which is covered extensively in the Jewish Virtual Library.

If the entire plotline didn't include terms like "real-world," "Iran," and "nuclear," this would make for a fantastic British comedy. Possibly staring John Cleese. Find a summary here. It's a 30-year story of promises, compromises, broken promises, secrets, politics, broken promises, and an Ayatollah who contradicts everything the government promises.

Here are some of my favorite highlights:

• Iran refusing inspectors access to Parchin nuclear base in 2014 because inspectors had been there in 2005 and found nothing.
• The Iranian Foreign Minister offering to mediate talks between Obama and the Republican congressmen who sent a threatening letter directly to Iran.
• The US Defense Secretary pointing out that one way to ensure Iran's secret underground nuclear facility adheres to the agreement is to melt it with a bunker-buster bomb.
• Everyone acting surprised when it's discovered Israel has been using the surveillance equipment the US provided to them to listen in on P5+1 talks.
• Senior Iranian negotiator Abbas Araghchi waiting a whole 8 days after the JCPOA was signed before agreeing with the Ayatollah that Iran doesn't have to comply with the conventional weapons embargo or the nuclear site inspections.

Will Iran develop nuclear weapons? Almost certainly. Do they already have them? Possibly. Will they comply with JCPOA? Of course not. Will they attack Israel?

It's unknown, but here's where we go from news and speculation to biblical prophecy. In the great battle described in Ezekiel 38-39, Israel's enemies come primarily from the north. It's possible that the Antichrist will broker a peace between Israel and its enemies before Iran uses their nukes. Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia lie between Israel and Iran; it would unwise for Iran to cover Saudi Arabia (or Egypt, for that matter) with nuclear fallout. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied that it has nuclear weapons — is Iran willing to take that chance? The End Times prophecies regarding wars in and around Israel mention armies, not necessarily faceless, bloodless nuclear weapons. That doesn't preclude a suitcase bomb, but an ICBM is less likely.

What does this mean for Israel? What does it mean for Israel's allies? How should Christians respond?

First of all, don't freak out. Be anxious for nothing. Remember that God's in control. He knows what will happen, and He's already got a plan for it. Conspiracy theories are useless. Panic is useless. Flying into a rage whenever Iran refuses to abide by the agreement is useless. Picking apart the JCPOA is an interesting intellectual exercise, but pointing fingers and angrily casting blame is useless.

There are three things we can do:

• Support Israel. Use whatever political clout we have as Bible-believing individuals to encourage the US government to support and protect Israel.
• Pray. Pray for cool heads and open borders that let the Gospel in. Pray that individuals in Iran will meet Christ. Pray for another Stuxnet and that Iranian officials will actually get distracted from nuclear research. Pray that UN officials will have wisdom and the fortitude to restore sanctions if need-be.
• Be at peace. God brings the peace that passes all understanding (Philippians 4:7). According to the world, we should be beside ourselves with worry about Iran. But God's not surprised. Christ is the Prince of Peace, and if He does not reign on the earth, we should at least prove He reigns in our hearts.

Our reaction to world events like this ultimately come down to what we believe and what we value. If we value things of this earth, like countries and political peace, we're going to be disappointed. If we value Christ, we've already won.

Column one:American Jewry’s fateful hour

Photo by: REUTERS / JONATHAN ERNST By CAROLINE B. GLICK 08/13/2015   If the communal leadership and its members fail to fight, American Jews will find themselves communally disenfranchised.

American Jewry is being tested today as never before. The future of the community is tied up in the results of the test. If the Jews of America are able to mount a successful, forceful and sustained opposition to President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, which allows the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism to become a nuclear-armed state and provides it with $150 billion up front, then the community will survive politically to fight another day. If the communal leadership and its members fail to fight, American Jews will find themselves communally disenfranchised. On the face of it, there is no reason this fight should have been anything more than a hopeless – but relatively insignificant – ordeal. Given that all Obama needs to do to secure the implementation of his nuclear pact with the mullahs is secure the support of a one-third minority in one house of Congress, he might have been expected to go easy on his opponents since they have so little chance of defeating him. Instead, Obama has decided to demolish them. He has presented them with two options – capitulate or be destroyed. Consider Hillary Clinton’s behavior. On Tuesday the Democratic presidential front-runner and former secretary of state ratcheted up her statements of support for Obama’s nuclear pact with the ayatollahs. Speaking to supporters in New Hampshire, Clinton said, “I’m hoping that the agreement is finally approved and I’m telling you if it’s not, all bets are off.” On its face, Clinton’s mounting support for the deal makes little sense. True, her principal rival for the Democratic nomination, socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, announced his support. But this deal will probably not be an issue by the time Democrats begin voting in their primaries. On the other hand, the deal is not popular among either the general public or key Democratic donors. According to a poll taken this week by Monmouth University, only 27 percent of the general population and only 43 percent of Democrats want Congress to support the deal. Then there is the funding issue. Clinton hopes to raise $2.5 billion to fund her campaign. Her chance of securing that support – particularly from Jewish Democrats – is harmed, not helped by openly supporting the deal. So why is she speaking out in favor of it? The same day Clinton escalated her support for the deal, the FBI seized Clinton’s private email server and her thumb drive amid reports that the inspector-general of the US intelligence community concluded that there were top secret communications on her email server. Simply storing top secret communications, let alone disseminating them, is a felony offense. Clinton submitted more than 32,000 emails from her server to the State Department. A random sample of 40 emails showed up four classified documents, two of which were top secret. If the same ratios hold for the rest of the emails she submitted, then she may have illegally held some 3,200 classified documents, 1,600 of which were top secret. While Clinton is presenting the investigation as a simple security issue, she may very well find herself quickly under criminal investigation. At that point, her dwindling White House prospects will be the least of her worries. But there is one person who can protect her. If Obama wishes to close or expand a criminal probe of Clinton’s suspected criminal activities, he can. As Roger Simon from Pjmedia.com wrote this week, “Hillary Clinton is in such deep legal trouble over her emails that she needs the backing of Obama to survive. He controls the attorney-general’s office and therefore he controls Hillary (and her freedom) as long as he is president.” The prejudicial indictment of Sen. Robert Menendez – the most outspoken critic of Obama’s deal with the ayatollahs in the Democratic Party – on dubious corruption charges in April shows that Obama isn’t above using his control over the Justice Department to persecute political opponents. Then there is Obama’s treatment of Sen. Charles Schumer. Last Thursday night, the senior senator from New York and the next in line to lead the Democratic minority in the Senate informed Obama that he will oppose his nuclear deal. Schumer asked Obama to keep Schumer’s position to himself in order to enable Schumer to announce it on Friday morning. Rather than respect Schumer’s wishes, the White House set its leftist attack dogs on Schumer. By the time Schumer announced his plan to oppose the deal he had been called a traitor, a warmonger and an Israeli agent by leftist activist groups who pledged to withhold campaign contributions. Schumer was compared to former Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman. Lieberman was forced to face a primary challenge in his 2006 reelection bid. His opponent, Ned Lamont, was generously supported by leftist activists led by George Soros. Lamont’s campaign was laced with anti-Semitic overtones, and Lieberman lost. He was forced to run in the general election as an Independent and won by virtue of the support he received from Republican voters and donors. White House press secretary Josh Earnest threatened that Schumer could expect to be challenged in his bid to replace outgoing Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid when Reid retires next year. Responding to the onslaught against him, while maintaining his opposition to the deal, Schumer reportedly told his Democratic Senate colleagues that while he was opposing the deal, he would not lobby then to join him in opposition. The White House led- and instigated-assault on Schumer is interesting because of what it tells us about how Obama is using anti-Semitism. In all likelihood, Schumer would have demurred from lobbying his Senate colleagues from joining him in opposing the deal even if Obama hadn’t fomented an openly bigoted campaign to discredit him as a Jew. The mere threat of denying him his long-sought goal of heading the Democratic Senate faction, not to mention the possibility of mounting a primary challenge against him, probably would have sufficed to convince him not to take any further steps to oppose the deal. So what purpose is served by calling a senior Democratic senator with a perfect leftist record on domestic issues a traitor, a warmonger and an agent of Israel? In all likelihood, the decision to attack Schumer as a disloyal Jew does not owe to some uncontrollable anti-Semitic passion on Obama’s part. Even if Obama is in fact an anti-Jewish bigot, he is more than capable of concealing his prejudice. After all, as we learned over the weekend from Iranian media reports translated by MEMRI, Obama told the Iranians four years ago that they could have the bomb. According to MEMRI’s findings, Iranian negotiators said that Obama sent then-Senate Foreign Affairs Committee chairman John Kerry to Oman in 2011, while Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was still Iran’s president, to begin nuclear negotiations. During the course of those early contacts, Obama agreed that Iran could continue enriching uranium in breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and a host of binding UN Security Council resolutions. He also agreed that Iran would not be required in the framework of a nuclear deal to reveal all of the possible military dimensions of its past nuclear work. In other words, he told the Iranians that he would not stand in their way to the bomb. Obama managed to hide his concessions from the American people. He orchestrated a spectacle of “serious” negotiations with the P5+1 and Iran, where he pretended that the concessions he had made four years earlier were made at the very last moment of the nuclear talks in Vienna. Given his obvious skill, it is clear that he would only play the anti-Semitism card if he believed he had something to gain from it. So what is he planning to do that anti-Semitism can help him to accomplish? Over the past month, Obama has demonized and criminalized opponents of his nuclear deal. Last week at American University Obama said that his Republican opponents are the moral equivalent of “Death to America”-chanting jihadists. Obama presented deal opponents in general as warmongers who would force the US into an unnecessary war that his deal would otherwise prevent. And, since he said that among all the nations of the world, only Israel opposes the deal, it easily follows that the Jews who oppose the deal are traitors who care more about Israel than America. And then this week his troops let it be known that Schumer is a warmonger and a traitor. And a Jew. In his meeting with American Jewish leaders last Tuesday, Obama said that if the community dares to criticize him personally, it will weaken the American Jewish community and as a result, the strength of the US-Israel relationship. If Jews – like Republicans – are warmongering traitors, obviously they should be made to pay a price. By singling out and demonizing Jewish American opponents of the deal as corrupt, treacherous warmongers, Obama is setting the conditions for treating them as disloyal citizens can expected to be treated. In other words, at best, Jewish opponents can expect to find themselves treated like other Obama opponents – such as Tea Party groups that were hounded and harassed by the IRS and other governmental organs. AIPAC can expect to be subjected to humiliating, public and prejudicial probes. Jewish institutions and groups can expect to be picketed, vandalized and sued. Jewish activist can expect to be audited by the IRS. In that meeting with American Jewish leaders, Obama seemed to present them with a choice. He reportedly told AIPAC’s representatives, “If you guys would back down [from their opposition to the deal], I would back down from some of the things I’m doing.” Actually, he gave them no real options. Obama effectively told the leaders of the American Jewish community that as far as he is concerned, Jews have no right to advance their collective concerns as Jews. If they do, he will attack them. If they give up that right under duress, then he will leave them alone. So remain free and be hounded, or give up your rights and be left alone. Some commentators have characterized the fight over the deal as a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. This may be the case. But first and foremost, it is a fight over whether or not Jews in America have the same rights as all other Americans. To be sure, Israel will be harmed greatly if Congress fails to vote down this deal. But Israel has other means of defending itself. If this deal goes through, the greatest loser will be American Jewry.

Our World: The anti-peace administration - Opinion by Caroline Glick

"For all their talk about Middle East peace, Obama and his advisors are not at all interested in achieving it." 

President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and White House aides receive an update from Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz via teleconference in Lausanne. (photo credit:WHITE HOUSE)

The US has striven to achieve peaceable relations between the states of the Middle East for nearly 70 years. Yet today, US government is disparaging the burgeoning strategic ties between the Sunni Arab states and Israel.

In a briefing to a delegation of visiting Israeli diplomatic correspondents in Washington last week, a senior Obama administration official sneered that the only noticeable shift in Israel-Arab relations in recent years is that the current Egyptian government has been coordinating security issues “more closely” with Jerusalem than the previous one did.

“But we have yet to see that change materialize in the Gulf.”

If this is how the US views the state of Israel’s relations with the Arabs, then Israel should consider canceling its intelligence cooperation with the US. Because apparently, the Americans haven’t a clue what is happening in the Middle East.

First of all, to characterize the transformation of Israeli-Egyptian relations as a mere question of “more closely” coordinating on security issues is to vastly trivialize what has happened over the past two years.

Before then Egyptian defense minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi overthrew the US-backed Muslim Brotherhood regime headed by Muhammad Morsi in July 2013, there was a growing sense that Morsi intended to vacate Egypt’s signature to the peace deal with Israel at the first opportunity. Just a month after Morsi ascended to power in January 2013, the Muslim Brotherhood began threatening to review Egypt’s continued commitment to the peace treaty.

The main reason Morsi did not cancel the peace deal with Israel was that Egypt was bankrupt. He needed US and international monetary support to enable his government to pay for imported grain to feed Egypt’s destitute population of 90 million.

During his year in power, Morsi used Hamas as the Brotherhood’s shock troops. He embraced Iran, inviting president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit Cairo in February 2013.

If Morsi were still in power today, with its $150 billion in sanctions relief Iran would have been in a position to support Egypt’s economy. So it is possible that if Morsi were still president, he would have felt he had the financial security to walk away from the peace treaty.

In happy contrast, under Sisi, Israeli-Egyptian ties are closer than they have ever been. Just last week Egyptian diplomats told Al Ahram that Israel’s support was critical for building administration support for Sisi.

Over Ramadan, Egyptian television broadcast a pro-Jewish mini-series.

Israel is closely working with the Egyptians on defeating the growing threat of Islamic State, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups waging a bloody insurgency against the regime in Sinai.

Last summer, it was due to the close coordination between Sisi and Israel that the US failed to force Israel to accept Hamas’s cease-fire terms, as those were represented by the Islamist regimes of Qatar and Turkey.

In part due to Israel’s critical support for Sisi’s government, and in part owing to their opposition to Iran’s rise as a regional hegemon armed with nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan have all joined Egypt in viewing Israel as a strategic partner and protector.

Last year Saudi Arabia together with the UAE and Jordan supported Israel and Egypt in opposing Hamas and its American, Turkish and Qatari defenders. Had it not been for this massive Arab support, it is very likely that Israel would have been forced to accept the US’s demands and grant Hamas control over Gaza’s international borders.

In June, as negotiations between the US and the other five powers and Iran were moving toward an agreement, the Council on Foreign Relations in New York hosted a meeting between then incoming Foreign Ministry director general Dore Gold and retired Saudi General Anwar Eshki, a former advisor to the Saudi ambassador to the US. The two revealed that over the previous 18 months, they had conducted five secret meetings to discuss Iran.

Although President Barack Obama harangued Israel in his speech at American University last Wednesday, claiming that the Israeli government is the only government that has publicly opposed his nuclear deal with the Iranians, Monday US congressmen now shuttling between Egypt and Israel told Israeli reporters that Egypt opposes the nuclear deal.

As for the Gulf states, according to the US media, last week they told visiting US Secretary of State John Kerry that they support the nuclear deal.

Kerry addressed his counterparts in the Gulf Cooperation Council.

But the fact is that the only foreign minister who expressed such support was Qatari Foreign Minister Khaled al-Attiyah. To be sure, Attiyah was charged to speak for all of his counterparts because Qatar holds the GCC’s rotating chairmanship. But given that Qatar has staked out a pro-Iranian foreign policy in stark contrast to its neighbors and GCC partners, Attiyah’s statement is impossible to take seriously without the corroboration of his colleagues.

As for Qatar’s statement of support, Qatar has worked for years to cultivate good relations with Iran. It might have been expected therefore that Attiyah’s endorsement of the deal would have been enthusiastic. But it was lukewarm at best.

In Attiyah’s words, Kerry promised that the deal would place Iran’s nuclear sites under continuous inspections. “Consequently,” he explained, “the GCC countries have welcomed on this basis what has been displayed and what has been talked about by His Excellency Mr. Kerry.”

The problem of course is that Kerry wasn’t telling the truth. And the Arabs knew he was lying. The deal does not submit Iran’s nuclear sites to a rigorous inspection regime. And the GCC, including Qatar, opposes it.

In his briefing with Israeli reporters, the high-level US official rejected the importance of the détente between Israel and its Arab neighbors because he claimed the Arabs have not changed their position regarding their view of a final peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

But this is also nonsense. To be sure, the official position of the Saudis and the UAE is still the so-called Arab peace initiative from 2002 which stipulates that the Arabs will only normalize relations with Israel after it has ceded Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the Golan and allowed millions of foreign-born Arabs to freely immigrate to the shrunken Jewish state. In other words, their official position is that they will only have normal relations with Israel after Israel destroys itself.

But their official position is no longer their actual position. Their actual position is to view Israel as a strategic ally.

The senior official told the Israeli reporters that in order to show that “their primary security concern is Iran,” then as far as the Arabs are concerned, “resolving some of the other issues in the region, including the Palestinian issue should be in their interest. We would like to see them more invested in moving the process forward.”

In the real world, there is no peace process. And the Palestinian factions are fighting over who gets to have better relations with Iran. Monday we learned that PA leader Mahmoud Abbas wishes to visit Iran in the coming months in the hopes of getting the money that until recently was enjoyed by his Hamas rivals.

Hamas for its part is desperate to show Tehran that it remains a loyal client. So today, no Palestinian faction shares the joint Israeli-Saudi-Egyptian interest in preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear armed regional hegemon.

The administration showed its hand in that briefing with the Israeli reporters last week. For all their talk about Middle East peace, Obama and his advisors are not at all interested in achieving it or of noticing when it has been achieved.

You will NOT BELIEVE who was best man at John Kerry’s daughter’s wedding

Reblogged from allenbwest.com

Written by Michele Hickford, Editor-in-Chief on July 28, 2015

You not might be aware that in 2009, the daughter of Secretary of State John Kerry, Dr. Vanessa Bradford Kerry, John Kerry’s younger daughter by his first wife, married an Iranian-American physician named Dr. Brian (Behrooz) Vala Nahed, an Iranian-American physician.

Of course you’re not aware of it.
Brian (Behrooz) Nahed is son of Nooshin and Reza Vala Nahid of Los Angeles. Brian’s Persian birth name is “Behrooz Vala Nahid” but it is now shortened and Americanized in the media to “Brian Nahed.” At the time his engagement to Bradford Kerry, there was rarely any mention of Nahed’s Persian/Iranian ancestry, and even the official wedding announcement in the October 2009 issue of New York Times carefully avoids any reference to Dr. Nahed (Nahid)’s birthplace (which is uncommon in wedding announcements) and starts his biography from his college years.
Gosh, I wonder why??

Gee, do you think Secretary Kerry should have recused himself from the negotiations with Iran at the very outset because of his long-standing relationship to his Iranian counter-part, Mohammad Javad Zarif? Let me explain.
Zarif is the current minister of foreign affairs in the Rouhani administration and has held various significant diplomatic and cabinet posts since the 1990s. He was Kerry’s chief counterpart in the nuclear deal negotiations.

Secretary Kerry and Zarif first met over a decade ago at a dinner party hosted by George Soros at his Manhattan penthouse. What a surprise. I have to say, connecting the dots gets more and more frightening.
But it gets even worse. Guess who was the best man at the 2009 wedding between Kerry’s daughter Vanessa and Behrouz Vala Nahed? Javad Zarif’s son.
Does this bother anyone at all?

Apparently Kerry only revealed his daughter’s marriage to an Iranian-American once he had taken over as Secretary of State. But the subject never came up in his Senate confirmation hearing, either because Kerry never disclosed it, or because his former colleagues were “too polite” to bring it up.
As Front Page Magazine pointed out several months ago, the nuclear talks with Iran were a tragic farce, choreographed and orchestrated by Iran.
And unfortunately, we’re going to have to live with the consequences. At least, I hope we live. 

[Note: This article was written by Michele Hickford, Editor-in-Chief]

Will Israel save the world a third time?

Mudar Zahran

Reblogged from Israel Hayom. As a Jordanian-Palestinian politician, I and many other Arab politicians and decision-makers have come to learn that Israel is vital for our own existence. In fact, Israel has saved us, and the world, from two global disasters. The first time Israel saved us all was at the beginning of the 1980s, when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was one of the West's strongest Arab allies. He was against the Islamic Republic of Iran and was viewed as a necessary asset for Western governments and as a regional balance against Iran's might. The West was in love with Saddam to the point of allowing him a nuclear program, which he obtained with France's help.    Just as Iran does today, Saddam said his nuclear program was for "peaceful and civilian use." Saddam's nuclear reactor was built with the approval of the United States. Israel, however, did not buy Saddam's claims, and in 1981 sent its pilots on a mission -- which they were unlikely to return from -- to destroy Saddam's nuclear reactor. As reports confirmed, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush was enraged by Israel's actions while President Ronald Reagan's first reaction to the news was, "Boys will be boys." Arab and Western governments condemned Israel's strike and some even spoke of action at the U.N. Unsurprisingly, Western media outlets grilled Israel. Just nine years later, Saddam occupied Kuwait, threatened the entire Gulf region, and openly spoke of controlling "the Arabs' oil wealth," which could have brought the West to its knees. The U.S. and many Western states had to risk blood and money to get Saddam out of Kuwait, but they did not fear a nuclear attack from him or that he might use dirty bombs. Therefore Operation Desert Storm went smoothly. Had Saddam still had his nuclear program, the entire situation and its outcome could have been different. In fact, Saddam might have stayed in power until today were it not for Israel taking the risk of destroying his nuclear program. In short, Israel saved the world from a power freak who came close to getting nuclear weapons. That was not the only time Israel saved the world. Another Arab dictator, Bashar Assad, had a secret nuclear program and built a reactor with the help of North Korea. While many governments were still not sure the program even existed, Israel did not waste any time. Israeli jets reportedly bombed Assad's reactor in 2007, reducing it to rubble. There were also reports that some North Korean and Iranian nuclear scientists were killed in the attack. While the world did not exactly condemn the move, many saw it as uncalled for because Assad was closely cooperating with the U.S. on fighting al-Qaida in Iraq and had caught several terrorists and handed them over to U.S. forces. Many Western governments viewed Assad as an ally, just has they did Saddam. Barely four years later, a civil war erupted in Syria and the country quickly turned into an Islamist stronghold, with territory split between the Islamists -- mainly the Islamic State group and the Nusra Front -- and Assad. Both Assad and the Islamists butcher civilians. Assad used chemical weapons to kill Syrian civilians in 2013.  Let's think: Assad butchers his own people, including women and children. Would he have been reluctant to threaten the world with nuclear weapons had his nuclear program not been destroyed? Also, given Syria's large area, would Assad have hesitated to use a nuclear weapon on one or two Syrian cities to silence the rebels? Basically, Israel saved the world and the Syrian people from a bloodthirsty dictator. What is most interesting is the fact that Assad's nuclear reactor was in Deir el-Zour, in northeastern Syria, which fell in the hands of the Islamists quickly after the civil war began. Can we imagine what those Islamists could have done with a nuclear reactor? They would have threatened the rest of Syria, neighboring countries (including Turkey), and the West with at least dirty bombs, if not something more advanced. Today, the U.S. has reached a deal with Iran about its nuclear program. On paper and in theory, the deal could pass with many observers as acceptable and even fair to all parties. Such observers do not understand what Israel understands very well: Not only is Iran ruled by Shiite Islamist radicals who will not keep their word, but if Iran gets the bomb, it will be the only nuclear power that would not fear the consequences of launching a nuclear attack on any country, even the U.S. If Iran attacks any country with nuclear weapons, and that country responds in kind, Iran could not care less; its leaders want to die as martyrs, go to heaven, and meet the virgins. While North Korea's dictator is ruthless, inhumane and even crazy, he won't launch nuclear attacks on a whim because he knows there would be counterattacks. He does not want to die or lose the country he rules. On the other hand, a collective martyrdom of the entire Iranian nation might be exactly what Iran's mullah leaders are looking for. Therefore, they will press the button at the right time. Iran's leaders might even seek the end of the entire planet through using nuclear weapons to fulfill their vision of the "returning Shiite Messiah, al-Mahdi, who would return only after a global disaster." This is what Israel knows about Iran's ideology and most others do not.  Will Israel take the initiative to save the world a third time, possibly by destroying Iran's nuclear program? We cannot tell nor even suggest that should happen. Nonetheless, if Israel does not do anything and Iran begins threatening the world with nuclear weapons someday, those demonizing Israel, boycotting it and labeling it as an evil state today will wish they had supported it instead. Very difficult times are ahead, and Israel is embodying the Palestinian Arab proverb, "What good does your mind do you if everyone around you has gone mad?"  Mudar Zahran is a Jordanian-Palestinian who resides in the U.K.