Another way of framing the same question is asking which U.S. president was strongest on pursuing America’s interests.
As Israel and America are different countries, they often have different interests.
Dennis Ross writes: Have the United States and Israel ever had a relationship as bad as the one between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?
That is a question I am typically asked when speaking about my book “Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship From Truman to Obama.” The answer is yes. Ronald Reagan had a poor relationship with Menachem Begin, saying at one point, “Boy, he is a hard guy to like.” And the only leader in the world who George H.W. Bush dealt with but did not like was Yitzhak Shamir, believing Shamir had misled him in their very first meeting after Bush became president.
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In different contexts, the same people are likely to be warmongers or humanitarians. Sometimes, to be humane to your own people, you have to wage war on your enemies. Israel, if it is to survive as a Jewish state in the middle of a hostile Arab region, must be constantly prepared to go to war. It can’t lose one war or it is over.
JTA: Yes, there’s the Avigdor Lieberman who wants to behead bad guys, mandate loyalty oaths and pay Arabs to leave the country — the one who makes fun of the disabled and who dodged a fraud charge.
But Israel’s onetime foreign minister and maybe-next defense minister is not quite the cartoon he’s made out to be – OK, the cartoon he at times seems determined to make himself out to be.
As defense minister, Lieberman would double to two the Cabinet ministers who have seriously considered a two-state outcome: himself and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is more deferential to the United States- Israel relationship than Netanyahu. And his posture toward Israel’s Arab neighbors is not all threat.
It’s time to review three areas where the once and possibly future member of the security cabinet has served as a voice for moderation – but also to keep in mind how his rhetoric undercuts his apparent restraint.
Two states for two peoples, or transfer and a recipe for unrest?
Lieberman has spoken seriously and extensively about peace, and has in fact embraced two states, even though he rankled disability advocates a year ago when he called two-state advocates “autistic.”
One of his most radical ideas would crack the sequencing that famously helped scuttle the 2000 Camp David peace talks: Yasser Arafat, then the Palestinian leader, was considering embracing then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s proposals, but balked when he toured the Arab and Muslim worlds and was told he would be seen as a quisling if he agreed to Barak’s terms, particularly on Jerusalem.
Lieberman’s solution: negotiate holistically. Make peace with the Arabs and the Palestinians simultaneously. It’s a plan that would allow the Palestinians greater leverage, should they coordinate with other Arab nations to extract concessions. That’s one reason why Netanyahu insists on direct talks, where Israel holds more cards. But, the thinking goes, it also could lead to a more stable and permanent peace in the region. Liberman, looking toward activating this plan, could keep Netanyahu focused on working with moderate Arabs in the region.
“The security advantage means cooperation with moderate nations, exchanging intelligence, joint efforts,” Lieberman told Al Monitor in 2014. “With regard to this facet, our partners could gain very nice inputs. And there’s also the economic sphere. I am convinced that one day, we’ll have embassies in Riyadh, in Kuwait, in the Gulf States and other places. The combination of our initiative, technology and knowledge with their tremendous financial reserves can together change the world.”
His proposal to swap heavily populated areas – Arab-heavy regions of Israel bordering the West Bank with Jewish-heavy portions beyond the Green Line – is what has stirred controversy. Lieberman tries to make it sound like common sense: Jews want to live chez-eux, why wouldn’t Palestinians?
For one thing, not every Israeli Arab wants to live in a Palestinian state – subtle but deep-seated differences have emerged between the populations since 1948. Israeli Arabs have said they resent being considered as pawns.
For another, Lieberman proposes paying Israeli Arabs to leave – a transfer policy that would undercut his hopes that Israel would no longer be an international “punching bag,” as he told Al-Monitor.
Yuli Tamir, a former education minister, wrote in Haaretz in 2015 that Lieberman’s plan sets dangerous precedents, by positing that minorities cannot exist with majorities, and by suggesting that majority Arab areas of Israel should seek sovereignty.
Posted inIsrael|Comments Off on JTA: Warmonger or humanitarian? Getting to know Avigdor Lieberman
One of the first pieces I ever published on VDARE.com, on September 4th 2001, was about Australia’s policy towards illegal immigrants. Titled “Nice Guys Get Illegal Immigrants,” that piece reported on the Tampa incident.
Tampa was a small Norwegian cargo ship that had rescued 438 illegals, mostly Afghans, from an Indonesian fishing boat—owned by people smugglers, of course—that had foundered on its way to Australian territory.
The Australian government took a firm line. An international incident involving Australia, Norway, and Indonesia followed.
As my title indicated, the point of my article was to predict that the Tampa illegals would eventually be allowed to settle in Australia. In fact New Zealand took a third of them. Of the others, many were settled in Australia (I can’t find precise numbers), but others were repatriated to Afghanistan when the Taliban government fell.
The Tampa incident led to implementation of the “Pacific Solution,” under which Australia paid small, poor nearby island nations to accommodate illegals in camps while refugee claims were investigated.
The Pacific Solution has undergone some modifications and name changes, but is still the basis of Australian policy towards illegals today.
Australians seem stubbornly resolved that right of settlement in their country should be determined by them and their representatives, not by people-smuggling criminal gangs.
To their great credit, Australia has continued to apply its immigration laws firmly, refusing settlement rights to illegals except where claims to refugee status meet a high standard of proof.
As Prime Minister John Howard said at the time of the Tampa incident: “We cannot surrender our right as a sovereign country to control our borders. We cannot have a situation where people can come to this country when they choose.”
That approach is very shocking to immigration romantics in Australia and elsewhere. Monday’s New York Times ran an op-ed by Roger Cohen, a stalwart defender of the Indonesian crime cartels huddled masses yearning to breathe free:
SYDNEY, Australia — The Australian treatment of refugees trying to reach this vast, thinly populated country by boat follows textbook rules for the administering of cruelty. It begins with the anodyne name for the procedures — “offshore processing” — as if these desperate human beings were just an accumulation of data.
Note please that Australia is “thinly populated” for a very good reason: most of the place is uninhabitable.
It continues with the secrecy shrouding what goes on “offshore” in the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, where a total of more than 1,350 people languish with no notion of how their limbo will end, where they will go or how to get answers to their predicament. Under the Australian Border Force Act of last year, disclosure by any current or former worker of “protected information” is punishable by up to two years in prison.
It goes further with the progressive dehumanization of people — dubbed “illegals” without cause — who are caught in this Australian web under a policy now dating back almost four years. They are rarely visible. They are often nameless, merely given identification numbers. Women and children are vulnerable in squalid conditions where idleness and violence go hand in hand.
While I’m trawling my archives, I may as well link to a piece I wrote back in October 2000 scoffing at news outlets putting scare quotes around the i-word. [Who Are You Calling “Illegal”? National Review Online, October 17th 2000.] Why don’t they listen?
The refugees are consistently demeaned, as when the conservative immigration minister, Peter Dutton, said this month that they could not read and would somehow contrive at once to steal Australian jobs and “languish in unemployment queues” — a statement that prompted Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to call Dutton “outstanding,” no less.
Turnbull, who came to office with a reputation for being from the more progressive wing of the conservative Liberal Party but has proved beholden to the hard-line right, faces an election in early July. Clearly both he and Dutton reckon casting the marooned of Nauru and Manus Island as threats to Australia will play well with voters.
Beyond electoral calculations, people are dying. Last month, a young Iranian refugee, Omid Masoumali, self-immolated on Nauru and died in a Brisbane hospital. Soon after, a 21-year-old Somali refugee, identified only as Hodan, set herself on fire and was taken in critical condition to Brisbane. Their acts were reflections of the desperation and exhaustion inflicted by Australia under a policy that was supposed to be temporary, has not been thought through, and places people in conditions of hopelessness.
Perhaps “offshore processing” was supposed to afford the government plausible deniability. Australia would pay billions of dollars to poor Nauru and poor Papua New Guinea to take a big problem off its hands. But in reality there can be no plausible deniability. On the contrary, by any ethical standard, the policy engages Australian responsibility for cruelty.
Dutton even suggested that human rights advocates bore responsibility for the self-immolations by giving asylum seekers “false hope.” He said the government was “not going to stand for” people trying to twist its arm. Well, a dead person cannot do that, of course.
True: but when a person tells you, “If you don’t do as I wish, I’ll kill myself,” the choice before you is either to clearly assert your own autonomy or to surrender your will to his.
“We don’t see the boats, we rarely see a human face and there is a black hole of accountability,” said Madeline Gleeson, a human rights lawyer and the author of the recently published book Offshore. She told me, “The international community does not understand how outrageous this policy is, how far from basic human standards and how shot through with violence and sexual abuse.”
The government argues it is keeping the country safe from terrorism, preventing a proliferation of Australia-bound boats that could result in deaths on a scale seen in the Mediterranean, and ensuring its immigration policy remains orderly. In the current fiscal year, the country has offered to take in 13,750 people under its Humanitarian Program, and committed, exceptionally, to a further 12,000 from the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts (a handful of them have been processed). But it has vowed that nobody in Nauru or on Manus Island will gain admission to Australia.
Australia’s “offshore processing” is falling apart and must end. The Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea ruled in April that the Australian-funded detention center on Manus Island was illegal. In Australia, only retroactive legislation enacted after a lawsuit was filed provided legal support for a policy that was in effect pursued illegally since 2012.
This country’s history includes the long and unhappy chapter of its White Australia policy under which a vast land mass was portrayed as under threat of invasion by uncivilized “natives” from across Asia. Politicians like Dutton are playing scurrilously on similar fears.
The White Australia policy was an effort to maintain Australia’s character as a European settler nation. In 1926, when my father went to Australia, the population was 5½ million. China and Imperial Japan at that time had populations of 320 million and 80 million respectively; and “uncivilized” is not an inappropriate descriptor for Warlord China. Was the White Australia policy unreasonable?
A nation of immigrants, short of agricultural labor, Australia has benefited when it has overcome its fears, as with the admission of Vietnamese “boat people” in the 1970s. As Steven Glass, an international lawyer, observed in introducing Eva Orner’s new movie, “Chasing Asylum,” “What, exactly, are we scared of?” Even women raped and impregnated on Nauru have been treated as if they are security threats.
Bring those stranded in Nauru and on Manus Island, many of whose refugee claims have already been deemed legitimate, to Australia. Treat them with humanity as their demands for permanent settlement are assessed. Scrap a policy that shames a nation with its pointless cruelty. [Australia’s Offshore Cruelty by Roger Cohen; NY Times, May 23rd 2016.]
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For a clue, consider how badly the elite media continues to miss the point of the most notorious thing he ever said, this infinitely denounced passage in his June 16, 2015, speech announcing his candidacy:
When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically. The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems…. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
Obviously from context, Trump’s “They’re rapists” does not mean, as often alleged, “They’re all rapists.” Instead, he’s raising the apparently excessively subtle question: “Why, with all the world to choose from, do we let immigrate any rapists?”
After all, the Harvard admissions office doesn’t feel satisfied if they hold their rapist admission rate down to the national average. America is the Harvard of immigrant destination countries, so why should it import problem people?
But, to the press, that question seems inappropriate to ask. America isn’t worthy of high standards like Harvard is. Instead, the 7 billion citizens of foreign countries should be assumed to have a civil right, under the Zeroth Amendment to the Constitution, to move to America whenever they feel like it—especially if a majority of Americans don’t want them here.
Moreover, it’s striking how few in the press demonstrated any understanding of Trump’s statement “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.”
The obvious question ought to be: Who is the “they” in that sentence?
“One reason that nobody in the U.S. pays attention to Mexico is because Mexican elites have wanted it that way.”
Clearly, Trump is accusing the Mexican ruling class—the politicians and billionaires like Carlos Slim, the largest single shareholder of The New York Times—of dumping their surplus population on the United States.
That Mexico’s elites are outmaneuvering America’s leaders strikes Trump as a bad thing. Yet, to the American media, the very existence of a Mexican ruling caste with interests different from those of American citizens doesn’t seem to register as a concept with which they are able to deal. Sure, Mexico is a country of over 120 million people that shares a 1,950-mile border with the U.S., but it’s not, you know, Israel when it comes to being important to American interests.
Slim is intermittently the richest man in the world, which could be thought an intriguingly curious phenomenon in a country that is supposed to be so poor that it would be a war crime to tell their illegal aliens to go home.
And Slim has close ties of blood and marriage to the fascist warlord clans of Lebanon that carried out some of the most notorious atrocities in recent Middle Eastern history. Yet that human-interest story never came up in the American press.
The New York Times, though, has been covering the Mexican ruling class’ objections to Trump. For example:
But it hasn’t mentioned the dirty little secret of this whole contretemps. As one of the rare Mexican-American pundits, Ruben Navarette Jr., pointed out last summer:
Mexican Elites Secretly Agree With Donald Trump
They’re all hating on him now, but the fact is, when they’re just among themselves, Mexico’s elites roundly agree with The Donald on Mexican immigrants.
Of the many different reactions to Donald Trump’s inaccurate and insulting comments about how Mexican migrants to the United States come from the bottom of the barrel, one of the most interesting has been that of wealthy and powerful Mexican elites who are suddenly long on indignation and outrage but short on memory and self-awareness. That’s because Trump’s dismissive comments about how the United States has become a “dumping ground” for castaways from Mexico sound like something you’d hear bandied about at a Guadalajara country club or a fancy banquet in Mexico City.
What other jobs are they going to do? Computer programmer? The average Somali IQ is 68, below what is considered mentally retarded.
Washington Post: LIBERAL, Kan. — First a stream of newcomers started renting ramshackle homes by the train tracks, and then a two-room mosque opened on a nearby street corner, and then an African grocery store took the space of what had once been a used car lot.
And then, one day early last year, a bus pulled up to the Greyhound station and out came the latest arrival to the growing neighborhood known as “Little Somalia.” Mohamed Ahmed, 23, held one suitcase and clutched a plastic bag with migration documents — the evidence of a trek in which he’d fled warring Somalia as a young child, lost his father and spent years living with the remainder of his family under a United Nations tent in the Kenyan desert. His journey to America had been nearly two decades in the making, and now he was coming to its heartland — as were thousands of other Somali refugees — to take a grisly job that few others in his new country wanted to take.
Posted inSomalia|Comments Off on WP: For Somalis, hope falls to the cutting floor – Refugees entrapped by popular meat industry
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
