How Obama Abandoned Israel

  Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas boycotted negotiations, reconciled with Hamas and sought statehood in the U.N.—all in violation of his commitments to the U.S.—but he never paid a price. By contrast, the White House routinely condemned Mr. Netanyahu for building in areas that even Palestinian negotiators had agreed would remain part of Israel.

 By

MICHAEL B. OREN

June 15, 2015 7:09 p.m. ET

‘Nobody has a monopoly on making mistakes.” When I was Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2009 to the end of 2013, that was my standard response to reporters asking who bore the greatest responsibility—President Barack Obama or Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu—for the crisis in U.S.-Israel relations.

I never felt like I was lying when I said it. But, in truth, while neither leader monopolized mistakes, only one leader made them deliberately.

Israel blundered in how it announced the expansion of Jewish neighborhoods and communities in Jerusalem over the border lines that existed before the Six Day War in 1967. On two occasions, the news came out during Mr. Netanyahu’s meetings with Vice President Joe Biden. A solid friend of Israel, Mr. Biden understandably took offense. Even when the White House stood by Israel, blocking hostile resolutions in the United Nations, settlement expansion often continued.

In a May 2012 Oval Office meeting, Mr. Netanyahu purportedly “lectured” Obama about the peace process. Later that year, he was reported to be backing Republican contenderMitt Romney in the presidential elections. This spring, the prime minister criticized Mr. Obama’s Iran policy before a joint meeting of Congress that was arranged without even informing the president.

Yet many of Israel’s bungles were not committed by Mr. Netanyahu personally. In both episodes with Mr. Biden, for example, the announcements were issued by midlevel officials who also caught the prime minister off-guard. Nevertheless, he personally apologized to the vice president.

Mr. Netanyahu’s only premeditated misstep was his speech to Congress, which I recommended against. Even that decision, though, came in reaction to a calculated mistake by President Obama. From the moment he entered office, Mr. Obama promoted an agenda of championing the Palestinian cause and achieving a nuclear accord with Iran. Such policies would have put him at odds with any Israeli leader. But Mr. Obama posed an even more fundamental challenge by abandoning the two core principles of Israel’s alliance with America.

The first principle was “no daylight.” The U.S. and Israel always could disagree but never openly. Doing so would encourage common enemies and render Israel vulnerable. Contrary to many of his detractors, Mr. Obama was never anti-Israel and, to his credit, he significantly strengthened security cooperation with the Jewish state. He rushed to help Israel in 2011 when the Carmel forest was devastated by fire. And yet, immediately after his first inauguration, Mr. Obama put daylight between Israel and America.

“When there is no daylight,” the president told American Jewish leaders in 2009, “Israel just sits on the sidelines and that erodes our credibility with the Arabs.” The explanation ignored Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and its two previous offers of Palestinian statehood in Gaza, almost the entire West Bank and half of Jerusalem—both offers rejected by the Palestinians.

Mr. Obama also voided President George W. Bush’s commitment to include the major settlement blocs and Jewish Jerusalem within Israel’s borders in any peace agreement. Instead, he insisted on a total freeze of Israeli construction in those areas—“not a single brick,” I later heard he ordered Mr. Netanyahu—while making no substantive demands of the Palestinians.

Consequently, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas boycotted negotiations, reconciled with Hamas and sought statehood in the U.N.—all in violation of his commitments to the U.S.—but he never paid a price. By contrast, the White House routinely condemned Mr. Netanyahu for building in areas that even Palestinian negotiators had agreed would remain part of Israel.

The other core principle was “no surprises.” President Obama discarded it in his first meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, in May 2009, by abruptly demanding a settlement freeze and Israeli acceptance of the two-state solution. The following month the president traveled to the Middle East, pointedly skipping Israel and addressing the Muslim world from Cairo.

Israeli leaders typically received advance copies of major American policy statements on the Middle East and could submit their comments. But Mr. Obama delivered his Cairo speech, with its unprecedented support for the Palestinians and its recognition of Iran’s right to nuclear power, without consulting Israel.

Similarly, in May 2011, the president altered 40 years of U.S. policy by endorsing the 1967 lines with land swaps—formerly the Palestinian position—as the basis for peace-making. If Mr. Netanyahu appeared to lecture the president the following day, it was because he had been assured by the White House, through me, that no such change would happen.

Israel was also stunned to learn that Mr. Obama offered to sponsor a U.N. Security Council investigation of the settlements and to back Egyptian and Turkish efforts to force Israel to reveal its alleged nuclear capabilities. Mr. Netanyahu eventually agreed to a 10-month moratorium on settlement construction—the first such moratorium since 1967—and backed the creation of a Palestinian state. He was taken aback, however, when he received little credit for these concessions from Mr. Obama, who more than once publicly snubbed him.

The abandonment of the “no daylight” and “no surprises” principles climaxed over the Iranian nuclear program. Throughout my years in Washington, I participated in intimate and frank discussions with U.S. officials on the Iranian program. But parallel to the talks came administration statements and leaks—for example, each time Israeli warplanes reportedly struck Hezbollah-bound arms convoys in Syria—intended to deter Israel from striking Iran pre-emptively.

Finally, in 2014, Israel discovered that its primary ally had for months been secretly negotiating with its deadliest enemy. The talks resulted in an interim agreement that the great majority of Israelis considered a “bad deal” with an irrational, genocidal regime. Mr. Obama, though, insisted that Iran was a rational and potentially “very successful regional power.”

The daylight between Israel and the U.S. could not have been more blinding. And for Israelis who repeatedly heard the president pledge that he “had their backs” and “was not bluffing” about the military option, only to watch him tell an Israeli interviewer that “a military solution cannot fix” the Iranian nuclear threat, the astonishment could not have been greater.

Now, with the Middle East unraveling and dependable allies a rarity, the U.S. and Israel must restore the “no daylight” and “no surprises” principles. Israel has no alternative to America as a source of security aid, diplomatic backing and overwhelming popular support. The U.S. has no substitute for the state that, though small, remains democratic, militarily and technologically robust, strategically located and unreservedly pro-American.

The past six years have seen successive crises in U.S.-Israeli relations, and there is a need to set the record straight. But the greater need is to ensure a future of minimal mistakes and prevent further erosion of our vital alliance.

Mr. Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States and a member of the Knesset, is the author of “Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide” (Random House, 2015).

Catholic Church: Haven for Child Molesters or Refuge for Terrorists?

Thousands of Catholic clergy and religious have raped and sodomized tens of thousands of children—perhaps more than 100,000 children—since 1950. These crimes were committed in secret, and bishops nurtured that secrecy. Over 17,000 survivors have broken through the silence, and their accounts have created an in-depth picture of the crisis, both in their own writings and in the work of journalists and law enforcement officials. Attorneys have obtained diocesan documentsthat reveal additional survivor witness and also document parts of a huge cover-up. But for every account that is known, hundreds are not yet public. Here are some numbers documenting the Church's role in molesting innocent boys and girls.
 25,383 – using the current USCCB rate of victims per priest (2.6) and the New Hampshire level of accused priests (8.9%)
  46,125 – using the Boston archdiocesan count of victims and the Boston share of U.S. Catholics
100,000 – using Rev. Andrew Greeley's 1993 partial estimate of 2,500 accused priests and 50 victims per priest
320,000 – using the USCCB's current count of accused priests (6,427) and Greeley's estimate of 50 victims per priest.
By any standard, this "church" is, to put it politely, incredibly immoral.

This is the same Church that aided and supported the Nazis in Germany.
Nazi leaders of Catholic background included Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Joseph Goebbels.
Hitler did well in monastery school. He sang in the choir, found High Mass and other ceremonies intoxicating, and idolized priests. Impressed by their power, he at one time considered entering the priesthood.
Rudolf Hoess, who as commandant at Auschwitz-Birkinau pioneered the use of the Zyklon-B gas that killed half of all Holocaust victims, had strict Catholic parents. Hermann Goering had mixed Catholic-Protestant parentage,

Now the Catholic Church has announced they will support the Palestinian Arabs in their campaign to destroy Israel.

The Catholic Church is a disgrace to decency and the term "Christian".

I Knew MLKJR, I worked with MLKJR, and You, Mr.Sharpton, are no MLKJR

As the riots raged in Baltimore Sharpton and other race profiteers who line their pockets by stirring black communities into violence, he made an awfully ridiculous statement about himself.

As Sharpton took the stage, he compared himself to the late, great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — an actual, respected civil rights leader who made effective changes without burning down U.S. cities.


But Sharpton’s comparison didn’t sit well with King’s niece, Dr. Alveda King, who recently told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto that Sharpton was sorely mistaken when he told his followers that violence, like the kind that took place in Baltimore, did happen when MLK was around and that people should “do their research” before claiming that it didn’t.

Dr. Alveda King told Cavuto, “I’m astounded, because when Rev. Sharpton says you need to do research — research will show that my uncle, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. … who actually came from a background where it would have been easy for him to be violent — they were trained in non-violence, conflict resolution.”

She continued defending her uncle, along with her father and other civil rights leaders who were able to make change without raising a hand, looting drug stores or throwing bricks at police officers.


“So yes, do your research, and every time, you will see … young people following non-violent conflict resolution. Did they want to riot?” she said. “Yes — but there was a standard, there were teachers, there were leaders who helped them not fight.”

“So Reverend Sharpton might have to do some research himself,” she said (H/T IJ Review).


Its laughable that Sharpton would compare his actions to those of MLK, as Sharpton’s only true intention is to grow the bottom line of his National Action Network.

Dr. King did it for the betterment of humanity.

America's incomprehensible conduct

Dr. Haim Shine

The incomprehensible, and borderline delusional, conduct of the American government vis-à-vis the Iranian nuclear program takes us back to an interview that then-U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull gave to Time magazine in April 1933. In that interview, Hull claimed that Germany's bad attitude toward Jews had been largely eliminated. But in the years that followed, it turned out that this was not the case, and it was the Jews who were eliminated by Germany.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are now, like Hull back then, shutting their eyes to the dangers of the world and closing their ears to the thunderous drums of war. It appears that all they care about is achieving a historical "legacy" -- via a nuclear deal with Iran and the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Fortunately for Obama and Kerry, they will not have to answer for their recklessness, negligence and blindness. By the time the consequences of their actions become clear, they will be private citizens. American history books will tell the tale of the country's first black president, who at first inspired great, almost messianic, hope, but ultimately left behind a tired and broken nation unable to differentiate between good and bad, or right and wrong.

Every wise person knows the Iranians will not live up to what they pledge regarding their nuclear program. All Iranian "compromises" on this matter, which will be applauded by world powers, will be based on a total lie. All means, including lies and deception, are viewed as permissible by Iran in its quest to fulfill its dream of establishing a caliphate, which the possession of nuclear weapons would help bring about.

World powers will never be able to truly monitor the progress of Iran's nuclear program. And any intelligence gathered by Saudi Arabia or Israel about Iranian violations of a nuclear deal would likely not convince world powers, who do not have the will or determination to use force against Iran.

It is now clear how right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was to call on the world to prevent a rogue terror state from obtaining nuclear weapons. If only the West was to maintain, and perhaps bolster, the sanctions on Iran for a little while longer, Iran would come crawling on its knees to an agreement. But unfortunately, it is the West which is now crawling on its knees. If Obama was to wake up at the last moment and end this madness, the citizens of the world would thank him.

This is not the first time in history in which the Jews have had to stand alone against the ultimate evil. Pharaoh was the first we had to deal with, and many others followed him. But now, thanks to the Israel Defense Forces, we have the military strength not just to survive, but also to stand up to evil and defeat it. There is no doubt that, at the moment of truth, a determined Israel will know how to deal with the threat.

The closing of the Straits of Tiran in 1967 led to the outbreak of the Six-Day War, from which Israel emerged victorious. It may be that the current struggle for control the Bab-el-Mandeb strait off the coast of Yemen represents the opening of a war over the identity of the new-old Middle East. "And God shall be seen over them, and His arrow shall go forth as the lightning: and the Lord God will blow the horn, and will go with whirlwinds of the south" (Zechariah 9:14).