Tag Archives: morality

Negotiate with Terrorists?

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Democratic Party Presidential contender and current Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) had some thoughts from the Progressive side of the situation unfolding in Iraq. In supporting President Barack Obama’s tepid moves vis-à-vis ISIS, the Yezidis, and the Kurds, Warren said this:

It’s a complicated situation right now in Iraq and the president has taken very targeted actions to provide humanitarian relief that the Iraqi government requested, and to protect American citizens. But like the president, I believe that any solution in Iraq is going to be a negotiated solution, not a military solution. We do not want to be pulled into another war in Iraq.

Warren added this, exposing Progressives’ misunderstanding, generally, of what is required to destroy a terrorist entity:

It’s a very complicated situation in Iraq. The president has now taken two very targeted actions, and those two actions will change the mix of what’s happening in Iraq, and we’ll have to just monitor it[.]

Of course it’s wholly insufficient for us to toss our shoes onto the field and expect the terrorists to cut and run. A cynical man might suggest that the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party is projecting its own world view onto hardened thugs.

And just to seal the muddle, Andy Metzger of MassLive, summarized Warren’s position thusly, taking her at her word that she actually was serious:

While calling for a negotiated solution, Warren said the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is a terrorist organization and the US does not negotiate with terrorists, while leaving open the possibility the US could assist the Iraqi government negotiating with ISIS.

How, indeed, does one negotiate with terrorists? Never mind that this administration has brought this on the Iraqi people, the Kurds, and itself when it abandoned Iraq three years ago under its disingenuous claim that it was “leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.”

We’re entering a very dangerous period in the life of our nation. The Progressives of the Democratic Party simply are unable to see the error of their ways, and they want, post-2014, post-2016, to continue the obviously disastrous policies of the Obama administration.

Lasting Solutions

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President Barack Obama has said, in defense of his inaction against the current and planned atrocities of ISIS, that there can be no lasting solution in Iraq until the Iraqis have resolved their governmental failures and impasse—a true national reconciliation.

He’s right about the need for political resolution—for Iraqis. What Obama carefully elides, though, is the lasting solution that will occur vis-à-vis Yezidis and Kurds if we continue our inaction.

And continue to do nothing we are. Oh, much is made of our having dropped blankets, water, tents, and tens of thousands of meal rations onto a mountain top for the trapped Yezidis. But British estimates range from 50,000-150,000 Yezidis trapped—all of whom must have food for several days. “Tens of thousands” of rats won’t feed all of them for a single day if the British estimates are anywhere near accurate.

And the American air strikes? We’re continuing to shoot up individual artillery guns, the odd APC, an occasional convoy. There is, though, no deliberate, focused, active air campaign of any sort with a view to destroying ISIS’ forces as they continue to press the Yezidis and the Kurds’ Peshmerga—and then the Kurds themselves.

We’ve begun flying arms to the Kurds? We’ve begun “expediting” arms deliveries from third parties; maybe we’ve authorized the CIA to engage in arms trafficking with the Kurds. But these typically are small arms—of little use against the captured American APCs, tanks(!), artillery, etc being used by ISIS.

The lasting solution that will result from Obama’s reluctance to act absent a lasting solution is the extermination of the Yezidis and the enslavement of surviving Kurds. The lasting solution we should be putting in place is the destruction of ISIS.

By the time we elect a new President, though, it may well be too late.

Laughingstock, Part 2

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I’ve written before about this matter. This week, Spiegel Online International, not a fortress of Conservatism, brought it up again.

John Kerry has spent months rushing from one conflict to the next, but has little show for it. His failures are symptomatic of an America that lacks a foreign policy identity—and of a country that seems uncomfortable with its role as a superpower.

And

In recent days, global diplomacy has seemed like an absurd form of theater, with John Kerry in the role of the tragic hero. He doesn’t look like the secretary of state from a world power, Haaretz jeered, but like “an alien who just disembarked his spaceship in the Mideast.”
…

The helplessness of the world’s most important foreign minister shows just how little influence the US still has in the Middle East. And with each failure, Washington’s influence in the rest of the world erodes as well. A civil war is raging in eastern Ukraine, an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program is still a long way off, Islamist terrorists now control large swaths of Iraq—and the US doesn’t appear to be in a position to do anything about it.

And

Kerry has an “incomprehensible obsession and a sense of messianism,” Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon spat at the beginning of this year. “The only thing that might save us is if John Kerry wins the Nobel Prize and leaves us be.”

Daniel Hamilton of Johns Hopkins University [said,] “What he is lacking is a strategic vision. And he is working with a president who is primarily concerned with domestic issues.”

Sadly, it just doesn’t get any better than this. Unless we take appropriate action this fall. And again in 2016. And again in 2018. And again in….

An Attack on the UNRWA School in Rafah

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…for which the US—President Barack Obama and his mouthpiece, Valerie Jarrett and Samantha Power, and his State Department’s mouthpiece, Jen Psaki, have roundly condemned Israel. A typical Obama administration rush to judgment without tarrying for such trivia as facts.

Lenny Ben-David, Managing Director of the Israel Consult, Inc, and erstwhile Israeli Deputy Chief of Mission in DC, has put together some imagery that sheds light on the…incident…with the school. I’ve reproduced them below, together with Ben-David’s twitter captions of them.

Propagan Scandal at Rafah UN school 1. #Israeli attack took place OUTSIDE school, vics dragged inside. see drag marks pic.twitter.com/s48UVUciG5Rafah_1Propag Scandal at Rafah UN school 2. Pic of vics arranged inside school. All 4 men of military age. See drag marks pic.twitter.com/1ZsDtPkJ5yRafah_2Propag Scandal at Rafah UN school 3. Need a child in pic. Striped shirt man brings her. #Israel claimed hit PIJ men pic.twitter.com/hWWBZdSyIC [To which I add: compare the background of this image with the background of the first image: the child, here, clearly is being carried into the school from the outside.]Rafah_3Propag Scandal at Rafah UN school 4. Striped shirt arranges her pathetic body next to PIJ men. Photogs ate it up pic.twitter.com/KTEgM3qgAdRafah_4Prop Scandal at Rafah UN school 5. Poor girl’s final act. Run w her for cameras. Note water to wash away drag marks pic.twitter.com/5f5k6D602oRafah_5These “casualties” obviously were generated well outside the school and carried in for a cynical arrangement. Which our administration, among others, fell for.

That the school wasn’t even hit, much less the target, is shown here.

Will we see soon (or at any time) an apology to Israel by Obama or any of his minions? Maybe not.

 

h/t Power Line

What about a Palestinian’s right to freedom?

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This is the headline of a FoxNews op-ed by Faheem Younus, President of the Baltimore branch of Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA and a senior fellow at the University of Baltimore’s Hoffberger Center for Professional Ethics. It’s a fair question.

Younus asks us to

think of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of the movie “Shawshank Redemption,” which shows the quest for freedom of an innocent banker serving two life sentences under hopeless circumstances. The cast goes like this: the criminals are Hamas, the warden is Netanyahu, Andy—the banker convicted of murder—is your average Palestinian, and Shawshank is Gaza.

His strawman includes his claim that ordinary Palestinians—Gazans, actually—are prisoners of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then Younus expands his claim:

But lately, the Palestinian’s moral right to exist has become a political wrong to list.

Recently, it has become evident that millions of innocent Palestinians will serve life sentences in this Shawshank, that there is no two-state solution, that their yearning for freedom is being swallowed by the biblical dream of a Greater Israel, stretching all the way from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.

Of course, Israel has made no such claim. Israel favors a two-state solution (which, of necessity, includes the Palestinians’ “moral right to exist”), having learned from the West’s colonial days, followed by general colonial independence and trade, that the path to prosperity, for Israelis and for Palestinians, including Gazans, is through states freely trading with each other.

While purporting to decry Hamas’ behavior, though, what Younus does not discuss is that when Hamas and Fatah merged under the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas’ leadership, the PA became a terrorist state. Younus denies this (without substantiation), and the PA’s initial rhetoric also denied it. The ensuing empirical facts, though, prove the terrorist nature of the unity government, this new PA. The PA launched their latest terror war just weeks after the unity government’s formation; it has pursued its terrorism with rocket attacks against Israel’s nuclear facility; it has pursued its terrorism with endless rocket firings into Israel with the sole purpose of killing as many civilians and children it can; it has pursued its terrorism by storing its rockets in hospitals, UN facilities (it’s impossible to believe the UN had no complicity in this), and private homes; it has pursued its terrorism through firing from these same homes and hospitals; it has pursued its terrorism by using Gazan civilians and children as personal shields in engagements with the IDF; the list goes on and on and on.

The ensuing empirical facts also include these two: the Fatah part of the PA has been utterly silent on this terrorism. Fatah’s silence is a deafening roar of approval of the PA’s terrorism. Also, Abbas has openly stated he agrees with the attacks.

Gazans—ordinary Palestinians—are not at all prisoners of Netanyahu or of Israel generally. They’re hostages of the terrorist PA, and badly abused by it.

As to that rejection of a two-state solution and a favoring of Younus’ mythical Greater Israel, this is what Netanyahu has said:

“If we were to pull out of Judea and Samaria, like they tell us to…there’d be a possibility of thousands of tunnels” being dug by terrorists to attack Israel, [Netanyahu] said. There were 1,200 tunnels dug in the 14-kilometer border strip between Egypt and Gaza alone…. “At present we have a problem with the territory called Gaza,” the Prime Minister said. But the West Bank is 20 times the size of Gaza. Israel, he said flatly, was not prepared “to create another 20 Gazas” in the West Bank.

The Palestinians do, indeed, have their own right to freedom. And to the prosperity that goes with freedom. The path to that, though, demands that the PA release these innocents from their bondage. The path to that demands an end of terrorist wars against Israel. The path to that demands a verifiable—and verified—removal of the PA from its avowed goal of the utter destruction of Israel.