Standing next to US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday morning, Justice
Minister Tzipi Livni gushed that through his indefatigable efforts to bring
Israeli and Palestinian officials to Washington, Kerry proved that “nothing can
stop true believers.”
As usual, the cognitively challenged Livni told us
something she hadn’t intended to say. The term “true believer” was coined by
Eric Hoffer in his classic work The True Believer from 1951, which Livni has
obviously not read. Hoffer’s epic study of the psychological roots of fanaticism
described a true believer as a person so fanatically committed to a cause that
no amount of reality can make him abandon it.
And that just about sums up
Kerry, and the man he works for, US President Barack Obama.
Kerry visited
Israel six times in the four months leading up to the meetings in Washington
this week, during which Americans, Palestinians and Israelis discussed the size
of the table they will be sitting around in the coming
discussions.
During the same four months, the Syrian regime used chemical
weapons against its opponents on multiple occasions. Most recently, they gassed
Palestinians in Yarmuk refugee camp outside Damascus, killing 22
people.
During those four months, al-Qaida strengthened its control over
the Syrian opposition groups fighting the regime.
During those four
months, the Syrian civil war became a focal point of a wider Sunni-Shi’ite
religious war that has already spread to Lebanon and Iraq. In its
post-US-withdrawal role of Iranian satrapy, Iraq has allowed Iran to use its
territory and airspace to transfer war materiel to the Syrian
regime.
During those four months, the Obama administration decided to
begin arming the al-Qaidadominated rebel forces. It has also deliberately raised
the risk of a Syrian-Israeli war by informing the media every time that Israel
attacks missile sites in Syria.
Also during the four months that Kerry
obsessed over convincing PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas to send his representative to
Washington, Egypt experienced its second revolution in which, buffeted by
millions of demonstrators who filled the squares of Egypt’s cities, the Egyptian
military overthrew the US-supported Muslim Brotherhood regime.
The Obama
administration was quick to jump onto the bandwagon of the first Egyptian
revolution in January 2011. That revolution led to the military’s ouster of
then-president Hosni Mubarak, a staunch US ally, and so paved the way for the
totalitarian and deeply popular Muslim Brotherhood to rise to power.
When
the Brotherhood became subject to its own revolution due to its incompetent
handling of Egypt’s failed economy and its single-minded focus on transforming
Egypt into an Islamist state as quickly as possible, the Obama administration
was confounded. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal this week, a senior
administration official expressed complete befuddlement at events in Egypt.
“None of us can quite figure this out,” the official said. “It seems so
self-defeating.”
And that is the thing of it. In its support for the
Brotherhood, the administration was implementing its wholly unfounded,
dead-wrong ideological belief that the Muslim Brotherhood is a progressive,
“largely secular” organization that is dedicated to good works. And now that the
Egyptian military, supported by about half of the Egyptian people, has rejected
the Brotherhood, its actions are incomprehensible to the Obama
administration.
In the face of massive documentary evidence, and facts on
the ground, (Egypt has run out of food, and rather than get them some,
overthrown president Mohamed Morsi rammed through a totalitarian Islamist
constitution), the Obama administration still clings to its ideological belief
that the Muslim Brotherhood is a positive, progressive, “largely secular”
organization that is devoted to good works for the poor.
So, too, in
Syria. The administration thinks it is okay to fund the Free Syria Army, because
its leadership is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Owing to the
administration’s blind faith in its belief that the reason that the US is hated
in the Muslim world is because it has opposed populist Islamist forces, Obama
and his advisers think it makes sense to arm those forces in Syria now – so long
as the Muslim Brotherhood is able to hide the fact that it is dominated by
al-Qaida for a sufficient number of news cycles to sell this fiction to the
media.
The administration’s faith in Islamist reasonableness holds for
the Shi’ite Islamists just as strongly as it does for the Sunni Islamists. This
is why it maintains its commitment to negotiating with Iran’s fanatical regime
about its nuclear weapons program, despite overwhelming evidence that the
Iranians are using the negotiations as a means to develop their bomb in
peace.
This week David Albright and Christina Walrond at the Institute
for Science and International Security in Washington published a deeply
disturbing report. They explained that based on what we know, Iran will reached
“critical capacity” in its nuclear program by mid-2014. Albright and Walrond
defined critical capacity as “the technical capability to produce sufficient
weapongrade uranium from its safeguarded stocks of low enriched uranium for a
nuclear explosive, without being detected.”
Albright and Walrond then
explained the many ways Iran can speed up the process, and hide its achievement
from the international community for long enough to make it too late to conduct
military strikes on their nuclear facilities to prevent Iran from becoming a
nuclear power.
In other words, they told us politely, and diplomatically,
if urgently, that we have arrived at the moment of decision. Will the US or
Israel strike Iran’s nuclear installations to prevent it from becoming a nuclear
power, or will Iran become a nuclear power? If we wait much longer, we won’t
have sufficient time to act.
But for Kerry and his fellow true believers
the most urgent priority was to convince the Palestinians to sit in the same
room as Israelis. And this week they scored a great victory for US foreign
policy by achieving their goal.
In her brief remarks, not only did Livni
inadvertently tell us that Kerry is a fanatic. She also told us that she is a
fanatic.
Livni said, “[I]t took more than just a plane ticket to be here
today. A courageous act of leadership by Prime Minister Netanyahu that was
approved by the Israeli government made this visit here and the beginning of the
negotiation possible.”
The “courageous act” she referred to was the
government’s decision to release 104 “Palestinian prisoners” from Israel’s
prisons. The demand for their freedom was the obstacle Abbas placed in the way
of Livni acquiring her long-sought-after plane ticket to peace talks and five
star receptions at Kerry’s Washington mansion.
The 104 “prisoners” are
made up of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. They are not car thieves or
pickpockets. They are monsters with human faces. All 104 are serving life
sentences for murder or attempted murder. Their crimes were gruesome acts of
barbarism marked by demonic cruelty.
Yusef Said al-Al and Ayman Taleb Abu
Sitteh stabbed David Bubil and Haim Weitzman to death and mutilated their
bodies, cutting off their ears as souvenirs.
Three other “Palestinian
prisoners” hacked four teenagers to pieces, killing them with pitchforks,
hatchets and knives.
Thirteen-year-old Oren Baharmi was raped and
murdered by Amad Mahmad Jamil Shehada.
And the list goes on and on, and
on.
There was nothing even vaguely courageous about Netanyahu’s decision
to release these monsters.
There was nothing even vaguely courageous
about his cabinet members’ decision to vote for their release. Theirs was an act
of utter cravenness. They dishonored the victims, the victims’ families and the
nation as a whole.
And they endangered the country. According to the
Almagor Victims of Terror organization, from 2000 to 2008, 180 Israelis were
murdered by Palestinian terrorists released by Israel in previous “deals.” And
those terrorists had been imprisoned for non-lethal actions, (i.e., without
blood on their hands).
The fact that Netanyahu and his ministers passed
this decision simply to provide a sufficient payoff to Abbas for him to send
Saeb Erekat to Washington to talk about nothing with Livni, makes their actions,
not only craven, but insane.
Livni’s obscene characterization of this
cowardly, life-threatening injustice as a “courageous act,” exposes her as well
as a true believing fanatic.
Only a fanatic could say such a
thing.
In his remarks, Kerry said that the talks about the size of the
table are going to bring about a situation where Israel will achieve, “not just
the absence of conflict, but a full and lasting peace with the Arab and Muslim
nations.”
Like Kerry’s demand that Israel free the terrorists, this
statement bespeaks an underlying fanatical dementia. Regarding the “Arab and
Muslim nations,” in Syria, neither the al-Qaida forces nor the regime have
mentioned anything about putting down their weapons if Israel coughs up
Jerusalem and Elon Moreh. The same goes for Hezbollah, Iran and their friends
and enemies warring for power throughout the region.
As for the
Palestinians, if they were interested in “lasting peace” with Israel, they
wouldn’t demand freedom for terrorist murderers. Moreover, while Kerry was
exulting in his brilliant success, Abbas announced that in his version of
“lasting peace,” Jews will be wiped off of the map of Palestine.
As Abbas
put it, “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single
Israeli – civilian or soldiers – on our lands.”
So again, while Kerry and
Livni see rainbows and unicorns, Abbas sees a Jew-free Palestine, with the
600,000 Jews of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria rendered homeless refugees to make
room for his anti-Semitic fiefdom.
It is not surprising that Kerry, Obama
and Livni are going along with this obscenity. It is not surprising that
fanatics who pray to the god of the two-state solution think it is courageous to
free Jewish-baby killers. It is not surprising they think the most important
thing on the international agenda is to secure Israel’s surrender of land, our
legal rights, and our ability to defend ourselves to a terrorist group that
hates Jews so much it requires all of us to be gone before it will do us the
favor of accepting sovereignty.
What is surprising – and frightening – is
that Netanyahu, who is not a true believer, and knows that they are true
believers, is going along with this.
Netanyahu knows that Israel cannot
survive without Judea and Samaria. He knows what the Muslim Brotherhood is. He
knows the nature of the Iranian regime. He knows that the PLO is no different
from Hamas. Their goal is the same – they want to destroy
Israel.
Netanyahu knows that Obama is hostile to Israel and that he will
not lift a finger to block Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
So why is
he going along with their insanity? In bowing to US pressure and approving the
release of 104 terrorist murderers from prison, Netanyahu behaved like a coward.
In bowing to US pressure not to bomb Iran’s nuclear installations, Netanyahu is
being a coward.
The most important question for Israel today then is
whether our leader is capable of being anything
else.
caroline@carolineglick.com
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