Most Israelis do not know John Kerry as well as we Americans do.
It has been encouraging, even inspiring, to read and hear the loud
and angry response in Israel — condemnatory across the board, from right
to left — to the ludicrous ceasefire proposals that were floated this
past week by John Kerry, United States Secretary of State, partly on his own and partly in consultation with two of the world’s most notorious generators
of Israel-hate: Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and the leadership of
Qatar. Erdogan had just accused Israel of barbarism worse than Hitler,
and Qatar underwrites terrorism and murder all over the world, perhaps more than does any other financial center including Iran.
Most Israelis do not know John Kerry as well as we Americans do.
If one picture is worth a thousand words, then this video of John Kerry
testifying in Congress against his own American countrymen is worth an
encyclopedia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucY7JOfg6G4 .
In his 1971 testimony,
he focused on his memories of being in Vietnam during the war effort,
amid the most barbaric of people — American soldiers: “They told stories
that, at times, they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads,
taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly
shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis
Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally
ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal
ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done
by the applied bombing power of this country. . . .
"We found most [Vietnamese] people didn’t even know the difference
between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice
paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning
their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything
to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of
the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they
practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force
was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or
American. . . .
"We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by
search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet
we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the
Viet Cong. We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We
saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My
Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out
chocolate bars and chewing gum.”
This is John Kerry. Replace “Viet Cong” with “Hamas,” “Vietnamese”
people with “Palestinians,” and “Americans” - except for the alleged
torture of which no one in Israel would dare accuse IDF soldiers - with
“Israelis.” Like the movie “Groundhog Day,” this is John Kerry’s
chance, forty years later, to relive his days of self-righteousness, to
conclude his unfinished business, to see the indigenous “Third World”
victims of Western imperialism finally vindicated.
Kerry has presented himself to the American people, and he ultimately was rejected. He is Secretary of State today only because he was an early supporter of Barack Obama for President...
And,
yet, as Israelis rightfully will throw up their hands in disbelief and
frustration, there is reason to hope and to draw conclusions, good
conclusions.
First, the American people had a chance to elect this man President
a few years ago in 2004. He only had to defeat an unpopular George W.
Bush, who was seeking a second term. He came into the Presidential
debates with the reputation of being a world-class debater, a star from
Harvard, facing off a man from Texas whom the liberal media depicted as
an idiot. Indeed, Kerry won the first debate, as Bush entered
completely unprepared. And then the American people got to know Kerry.
The more they learned about him, the more they shrugged and decided
that Bush was not such a bad guy after all.
By the time the election arrived, Bush did not even seem so stupid
any more. Because, in two consecutive debates, he ran circles around
the Ivy League Kerry. So Kerry has presented himself to the American
people, and he ultimately was rejected. He is Secretary of State today
only because he was an early supporter of
Barack Obama for President, at a time when others backed Hillary
Clinton or Kerry’s former running mate, John Edwards. Obama owed Kerry a
favor. And, perhaps unwittingly, Obama did Israel a favor, too.
Despite their antipathies towards Israel, Obama and Kerry
ironically are proving to be an utterly unexpected blessing for Israel.
Pause from bemusement, and consider the miracles now taking place in a
land that is the center of miracles:
Obama is the weakest President America has had since the lackluster
trio of Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan allowed
the United States to slide into Civil War. He is weak and vain,
incompetent, utterly out of his league on the world stage or even in his
own American backyard. A strong, competent President by now would
have muscled Israel into a ceasefire against her own vital national
interests. Consider how even Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and each of the
two George Bushes pressed Israel behind closed doors.
Similarly, Kerry is both incompetent, overly vain, and managed to
lose the respect — and fear — of both Israel and Mahmoud Abbas when he
utterly mishandled the “peace talks” that he tried to press on both
sides a few months ago. They all faced his deadline, all bit their lips
as they waited to see what would happen for being blamed, and they all
saw that nothing happened. Just as Syria learned that Obama does not
enforce ultimata and “red lines,” and just as Vladimir Putin has taken
Obama’s and Kerry’s measure, so have the Israelis and Mahmoud Abbas.
More than that, it is important for every Israeli to understand
what really is on Obama’s and Kerry’s plate today, in between Kerry’s
efforts to cry “ceasefire!” in a crowded military theater. The
situation, as it now stands:
1. Crimea - Ukraine – Russia. Putin has seized Crimea from right
under Obama’s nose, and he rightly guessed that Obama and Kerry would
not know how to stop him or force a reversal. Obama came back and lectured, saying
that Putin is “on the wrong side of history.” Putin somehow recovered
from the insult and next supplied Ukrainian separatists with the kinds
of weapons that recently took down Malaysian Flight MH17. Still on the
wrong side of history. Now Putin not only is supplying separatists with
weapons to fight a civil war, but he has launched a Cruise missile,
violating a sacrosanct treaty that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev
had signed in 1987 at the height of the Cold War. That now is on
Obama’s plate. Obama and Kerry need to deal with that — immediately.
2. ISIL/ISIS is shaping a modern-day Islamist Caliphate out of
northeastern Syria and western Iraq. The Syria of past decades no
longer exists. While Al Qaeda is nowcrucifying Christians ,
ISIL has driven Christians out of Mosul where they had lived for nearly
two thousand years. Nouri al-Maliki is struggling to
hold Iraq together, and Obama wants a replacement for Maliki to
save what is left, to bring in Sunnis and to hold Baghdad. When Obama
became President, George Bush had left a long-term apparatus in place to
secure gains in Iraq, and Obama abandoned those achievements when he failed to reach a
comparatively common status-of-forces agreement with Maliki. Now all
ofIraq may fall — either to ISIS/ISIL, or it might become an extension
of Shiite Iran, as Lebanon often has been an extension of Assad Syria.
Obama and Kerry need to deal with that — immediately.
3. Libya is going into partial civil war, and Benghazi is in
insurrection. Although he and his Administration dishonestly claimed
originally that the American ambassador to Libya had been murdered on
September 11, 2012 in Benghazi because of a cheaply made short homemade
clip on Youtube, Obama in fact presided over a security disaster that
saw Al Qaeda regroup in Libya and wreak murderous chaos against America
by design on the eleventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001 World
Trade Center bombing. Obama proudly “led from behind,”
and we therefore left no long-term apparatus in place to secure the
gains in Libya from disappearing in a vacuum when Kaddafi fell. Obama
and Kerry now need to deal with that — immediately.
4. Iran is building nuclear weapons that not only will
threaten Israel but also will have capabilities of endangering all of
Europe and eventually the United States. Obama and Kerry need to deal with that — immediately.
5. Tens of thousands of unaccompanied children presently are being
smuggled into America by drug dealers and cartels from El
Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. The problem erupted into a frenzy
when Obama started advancing the argument that, although illegal
immigration cannot be countenanced, the children of adult lawbreakers
should not be punished. Word reached South America that Obama will not
deport children, and the race to the border commenced, with drug cartels
inducing desperately poor parents to pay a king’s ransom in return for
promises to smuggle the little ones into America and away from drug-gang violence in
their own countries. The flood tide has gotten so bad that Governor
Rick Perry has called his state’s National Guard to guard
the Texas border, while cities around the country are seeing everyday
citizens riot against secret Obama efforts to move undocumented children into their towns. America even has refugee camps forming here. Obama and Kerry need to deal with that — immediately.
6. All of America, across the political spectrum, recently was
shocked to learn that the nation’s heroes, past veterans of American
military service, who are assured premium quality health care at special
hospitals run by the United States Veterans Administration (VA), in
fact have been the victims of scandalous VA incompetence,
bordering on criminal misconduct. Dozens of veterans were allowed to
die, many needlessly, because they were put on lengthy “waiting lists”
to see doctors, so never received medical care in time. Two thousand or
more others never even were put on the “waiting lists.”
In Phoenix, Arizona alone, the wait to see a doctor was four months,
with 1,700 never even wait-listed. The scandal began with Phoenix and
now has been revealed to be systemic throughout the country. Obama needs to deal with that — immediately.
7. The Internal Revenue Service of America (IRS) oversees
income-tax collection. Americans have a long-admired national system of
voluntary and mostly honestly reporting income and paying taxes every
year. The IRS properly audits suspicious situations, keeping the system
honest and the “playing field level” for everyone. It has long been a
central principle of American society that the IRS never mixes politics
with tax-collecting, and the effort by the Nixon White House to
politicize the IRS led to an Article ofImpeachment against
him: “He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and
agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in
violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential
information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized
by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of
citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be
intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.” Forty years later,
it now emerges that Obama supporters in the IRS targeted lawful
anti-Obama political groups for excruciating audits during the months
preceding the 2012 Presidential elections that saw Obama reelected. At
the center of the scandal that has shocked much of the country is a
woman named Lois Lerner, who was Director of the Exempt Organizations
Unit of the IRS. In Congressional hearings, she repeatedly has invoked
her right, as an American, to refuse to testify about her role in the
scandal — on grounds that her testimony may lead to her incrimination.
WhenCongress demanded that
the IRS produce copies of emails from Lerner’s computer, the IRS
produced documents and did not produce many thousands more, ultimately
saying that Lerner’s computer had “crashed,” and all her emails were
lost. Americans know that, if the IRS demands emails of them during an
IRS audit, that excuse will not work. Now, amid all the scandal, new
experts within IRS have emerged to testify that her computer hard disk
did not crash, just sustained scratches,
and thousands of pages still probably could have been produced. The
investigators are wondering whether Lerner contacted and coordinated
with people in the Obama White House when targeting his opponents for
audits. Yes, Obama needs to deal with that — immediately.
8. “Operation Fast and Furious.” The
Obama Administration concocted a plan to trace weapons sales by and to
Mexican drug cartels by introducing 1,400 firearms intoMexico in October
2009, then monitoring their transfers. Thing is, the Obama
Administration lost track of the weapons that now were circulating among
the drug cartels. Compounding the calamity, U.S. Border Patrol agent
Brian Terry was murdered at the border in December 2011, and two of the
“Fast and Furious” firearms were found at the scene of the murder.
Obama needs to deal with that — eventually.
9. On March 31, 2014, United States Marine Sergeant Andrew
Tahmooressi was driving along the southern border of the United States.
He made a wrong turn, accidentallyentering Mexico.
In his car’s trunk were three legally registered guns, a very common
phenomenon in the American culture, particularly for a Marine. Four
months later, the Mexicans will not release him, have abused him in
prison, and Obama for some inexplicable reason cannot get him freed.
The story is on the national news every other night, and his mother pleads passionately. Obama needs to deal with that — immediately.
10. Continued cracks in Obama’s much-vaunted “Affordable Care Act,” also known as ObamaCare. The majority of Americans hate the law, and it is killing aspects of the American economy and personal household income, as employers reduce hiring full-time 40-hour-weekly workers and instead hire
workers for 29 hours a week, because the law does not require employers
to pay ObamaCare premiums for workers who work fewer than 30 hours a
week. A wide range of lawsuits against
the law are moving forward in the courts, and one provision after
another has been getting overturned. Obama needs to deal with that —
pretty soon.
11. The mad rush of corporate inversions,
as major American corporations link up with small irrelevant European
companies in a ruse to avoid inflated American corporate taxes and
stifling corporate regulations, now has erupted — seemingly overnight —
as the new rage in American markets. Obama needs to deal with that —
immediately.
12. The paralyzed American jobs market is seeing unemployment “drop” not because of more full-time, good-paying jobs but because a
record number of Americans have given up looking for work altogether
and utterly have abandoned the work force, turning instead to Government
safety nets and hand-outs that have been redesignated
as "entitlements." With “job growth” coming in part-time, low-paying
jobs, as employers avoid having to pay benefits or to pay for employees
to be on Obamacare if they work fewer than 30 hours a week, the American
economy just has not burst forth in six years of Obama’s stewardship.
With elections for the United States Senate and the House of
Representatives only three months away, Obama needs to deal with that —
immediately.
In a land of Israel that counts its epochs in miracles, this above
list — and it is not complete — is a miracle of miracles. As Hamas was
building a city of tunnels, and no one — including the best of Israeli
intelligence — imagined anything of this proportion, war erupted in the
aftermath of the excruciating national tragedy of the three boys en
route home for Shabbat with their families, whom Hamas kidnaped and
murdered. If war had not erupted now but later, then there would be
another 30 tunnels in time, or 50 or 100.
The planned Rosh Hashanah attack through Gaza tunnels and
into kibbutzim would have been a calamity. Instead, as the unexpected
war (at least to Israeli civilians) brought Israel face–to-face with the
tunnels, this war came at a time when the above 12 factors are in full
play, with the weakest and most unsuited and incompetent American
President since the 1850s, and a narcissistic Secretary of State who is
hapless and clueless, at the American wheel. Mr. Kerry miraculously
dissipated his status and stature by imposing a foolish negotiating
deadline and purposeless tizzy during the “peace talks” he tried to
generate through March and April, and he further has destroyed his
standing by submitting presently a proposed “ceasefire” that was so
inadequate in addressing Hamas rocket-fire and tunnels, and that so
utterly disregarded the need for an infrastructure to assure that Gaza
is demilitarized and stays that way, that Bibi Netanyahu’s cabinet could
reject the proposal unanimously 19-0 and still enjoy the support of 91% of the Israeli Jewish voting population.
It is a miracle, and one only can hope that Israel’s elected
leadership will continue to grasp the full dimensions of opportunity
that exist right now as Obama’s and Kerry’s plates fill heavier by the
day with so many burning and urgent crises that former U.S. Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright, assessing the situation now submerging Obama
and Kerry, says simply that “the world is a mess.”
And all of this comes only three months before an American national election when Obama potentially may lose his
United States Senate majority to the Republicans, which will finish off
his agenda for his remaining two years. Indeed, even if his party
somehow saves his Senate majority, the very threat of losing it all
compels him now to devote inordinate time to fundraising — specifically
right now, just during the heart of the Israel-Hamas war — with no way
to focus on everything at once, and circumscribed in his ability to
over-do his pressure on Israel at a time when he is compelled to tell
millionaire Hollywood Jewish liberals every night, as he vacuums their
pockets clean and absorbs their money at fundraising soirees and
dinners, that he bleeds for Israel, something they need to hear
regardless of whether he is speaking truth or whether they even care.
Mr. Kerry has picked the wrong time to cry “Ceasefire” in a crowded
military theater. With Iran manufacturing trouble, Iraq in flames,
Syria splitting like an amoeba, Libya back in chaos, Putin on the march
into Ukraine through proxies, Christians being driven from the
caliphate, scandals at home regarding IRS harassing political opponents,
lost emails, children surging at the border and living in refugee
camps, veterans dying at home while waiting for the Government to let
them see a doctor, American elections only three months away — and so
much more — Hamas miraculously picked the worst possible time for them
to start a bloody fight with Israel, and this moment offers Israel the
first opportunity since 1967 to fight a just war to a conclusion that
can extend until Israel believes it properly and satisfactorily has
achieved the goals needed to make this the last war with Hamas.
Rabbi Dov Fischer is author of General Sharon’s War Against
Time Magazine (Steimatzky: 1985). His political commentaries have
appeared on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, The Weekly
Standard, National Review, Los Angeles Times, and in other major
American publications. He formerly was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA
Law Review, is an adjunct professor of law at two prominent American law
schools, and is Rav of Young Israel of Orange County, California. His
writings can be found at www.rabbidov.com
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