Are we reliving the build up to World War I?

Hard to believe that war was almost a century ago now. My paternal grandfather fought in it.

…is the sine qua non of any serious peace agreement in Israel:

The Irish no longer care. They are neither Catholic nor nationalistic. The IRA thugs of 1970 came from four-child families. Today the Irish have fewer than two children on average. Let the matter simmer for another twenty years, and the Palestinian Arabs will look more like the Irish of 1996 than the Irish of 1970. At that point, the “narrative” will change, because no one will care about the old “narrative.”

In the meantime the Israeli settlers have built a garden and a workshop where before there were bare rocks, and thriving communities that are integral parts of Israeli society. It takes longer to get crosstown in Manhattan in traffic than it does to drive from the center of Tel Aviv to Ariel, the largest town in Samaria. This is yet another accomplishment of Jewish ingenuity and industriousness, and it is (or should be) an inspiring example to all who hope for a better life for the peoples of the Middle East. We will know that the Palestinians want peace when they admire rather than abhor this effort.

As science progresses, so also peace will come to that region, funeral by funeral.

[Update a while later]

Related: The daily lies about Israel.

Simply put, he prefers Iran over Israel:

The fact that Obama has adopted a Lindberghian policy doesn’t mean that in this new context he is not being realistic. The worrisome reality is that the relative strengths in the much-discussed, historical hostility between Sunnis and Shiites in the Middle East, are not balanced, this according to a reliable security source with access to intelligence data. Syria is the main area for this struggle and what the US and Israel see is that the Shiites, backed by Iran, are a solid power with the ability to control and carry out a clear policy.

In contrast, the Sunnis do not have any real power at this point. They are fragmented. The Syrian opposition has not proved that it is internally cohesive and can control and keep order in major sections of Syria, let alone in Iraq. They were unable to retain power even in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood won control. So the Americans handed over Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to Iran.

There is no doubt that Preisdent Obama knows very well that he is turning into a partner of leaders who have committed crimes against humanity and a friend of those who declare their intentions of doing so. No problem. He simply prefers Iran over Israel.

It does seem a theory that best fits the evidence.

A non-government handbook to train government employees, that corresponds to reality.

…is the marginalization of the Jewish state:

The relation between Obama and Netanyahu in the White House meeting reflected and prefigured the relation between the U.S. and Israel on the international and diplomatic stage, culminating in an agreement with Iran in which Israel had no part and was effectively ostracized. To say that Obama has no love for Israel is to put it mildly.

It would be interesting in this context to see the Khalidi/Obama video squirreled away by the Los Angeles Times. Rashid Khalidi, a former PLO spokesman and current Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, makes no secret of his hatred for Israel. Obama and Khalidi were good friends, and as Discover the Networks reports, “In 2003 Obama would attend a farewell party in Khalidi’s honor when the latter was leaving the University of Chicago to embark on his new position at Columbia.” The event was filmed and one may plausibly wonder what revelation the LAT is suppressing with regard to Obama’s participation, especially as Obama had praised Khalidi for having “challenged my thinking.” Israpundit’s Ted Belman puts it succinctly: “What was said at this event was presumably so damaging to Obama’s political career that the LA Times, that liberal bastion, who came into possession of a tape of the event, refused to release it.”

In any case, everything Obama has done vis à vis the Jewish state — favoring anti-Zionist rabbis and organizations, inveighing against housing construction in its own capital city, supporting the Palestinians in fruitless rounds of “peace talks,” insisting that Israel retreat to its indefensible pre-1967 borders, leaking military secrets about Israeli pre-emptive actions against Syria and Hezbollah — indicates that Obama would like to see Israel confined to a tiny sliver of land, boxed in between the sea and the Arabs, reduced to a rump state at the mercy of its enemies, and eventually ushered out of the corridors of history. This puts him in league with the ayatollahs. This is Obama’s version of the knockout game.

Except in the knockout game, the victim selection is random.

…continue. Now the administration is surrendering to China, while pretending they aren’t.

Thoughts from Mark Steyn:

Many pundits reached for the obvious appeasement analogies, but Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal argued that Geneva is actually worse than Munich. In 1938, facing a German seizure of the Sudetenland, the French and British prime ministers were negotiating with Berlin from a position of profound military weakness: It’s easy to despise Chamberlain with the benefit of hindsight, less easy to give an honest answer as to what one would have done differently playing a weak hand across the table from Hitler 75 years ago. This time round, a superpower and its allies accounting for over 50 percent of the planet’s military spending was facing a militarily insignificant country with a ruined economy and no more than two to three months’ worth of hard currency — and they gave it everything it wanted.

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I would add two further points. First, the Munich Agreement’s language is brutal and unsparing, all “shall”s and “will”s: Paragraph 1) “The evacuation will begin on 1 October”; Paragraph 4) “The four territories marked on the attached map will be occupied by German troops in the following order.” By contrast, the P5+1 (U.S., U.K., France, Russia, China, plus Germany) “Joint Plan of Action” barely reads like an international agreement at all. It’s all conditional, a forest of “would”s: “There would be additional steps in between the initial measures and the final step . . . ” In the postmodern phase of Western resolve, it’s an agreement to reach an agreement — supposedly within six months. But one gets the strong impression that, when that six-month deadline comes and goes, the temporary agreement will trundle along semi-permanently to the satisfaction of all parties.

Secondly, there are subtler concessions. Explaining that their “singular object” was to “ensure that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon,” John Kerry said that “Foreign Minister Zarif emphasized that they don’t intend to do this, and the Supreme Leader has indicated there is a fatwa which forbids them to do this.” “The Supreme Leader” is not Barack Obama but Ayatollah Khamenei. Why is America’s secretary of state dignifying Khamenei as “the Supreme Leader”? In his own famous remarks upon his return from Munich, Neville Chamberlain referred only to “Herr Hitler.” “Der Führer” means, in effect, “the Supreme Leader,” but, unlike Kerry (and Obama), Chamberlain understood that it would be unseemly for the representative of a free people to confer respectability on such a designation. As for the Führer de nos jours, Ayatollah Khamenei called Israel a “rabid dog” and dismissed “the leaders of the Zionist regime, who look like beasts and cannot be called human.” If “the Supreme Leader”’s words are to be taken at face value when it comes to these supposed constraints preventing Iran from going nuclear, why not also when he calls Jews sub-human?

As George Turner noted the other day, Iran dealing with Obama/Kerry is easier than taking candy from a baby. It’s more like a baby waddling around handing out candy to adults.