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Friday Afternoon Roundup - All the Change That's Fit to Hope For

Posted: 08 May 2009 03:54 PM PDT

The Deficits keep rising, unemployment figures are out sight, the talking heads

keep smirking and the thuggery continues. After the Obamamessiah Hope and

Change Express threw the Fifth Amendment and billions in taxpayer money

out the window, so his UAW union backers could take over a major American
automaker and insure their cushy featherbedded jobs will took anything

from Serta and Sleepys...

The ride continues as Obama does more traveling around the world, as if

he had bet Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg that he could race him around the

world, while humiliating himself and America in the process.

Unlike Geert Wilders, Michael Savage and whatever random people the
daffy Home Secretary dug up from a 5 minute internet search for the
words "Radical Extremist", we can assume that Obama will be welcome
back.

But first up he'll be visiting Germany to apologize for World War 2. And

then more apologies to the Muslim world. At the rate Obama is going, the
Presidency has become indistinguishable from an international, "Sorry We
Ever Did the Right" tour.

Of course the Middle East is still on the agenda, because apparently the best

way to say Sorry to the Muslim world is to hand them Israel on a platter.

The latest shot involves browbeating Israel over its nuclear capability.

President Obama’s efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons threaten

to expose and derail a 40-year-old secret U.S. agreement to shield Israel’s

nuclear weapons from international scrutiny, former and current U.S. and
Israeli officials and nuclear specialists say.

The issue will likely come to a head when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu meets with Mr. Obama on May 18 in Washington. Mr. Netanyahu
is expected to seek assurances from Mr. Obama that he will uphold the U.S.
commitment and will not trade Israeli nuclear concessions for Iranian ones.
Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller, speaking Tuesday at a U.N.
meeting on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), said Israel should
join the treaty, which would require Israel to declare and relinquish its
nuclear arsenal.

However, Ms. Gottemoeller endorsed the concept of a nuclear-free Middle
East in a 2005 paper that she co-authored, “Universal Compliance: A Strategy
for Nuclear Security.”

“Instead of defensively trying to ignore Israels nuclear status, the United States
and Israel should proactively call for regional dialogue to specify the conditions
necessary to achieve a zone free of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons,”
she wrote.

The paper recommends that Israel take steps to disarm in exchange for its
neighbors getting rid of chemical and biological weapons programs as well
as Iran forgoing uranium enrichment.

Of course the beauty of this charade is that Israel gets to play Japan and

Iran gets to play North Korea, which can promise 80 times over to end its

nuclear program, only to keep going full speed.

So the Obama Administration is set to compromise confidential information

between allied states, while equating Israel's defensive nuclear capability with

Iran's offensive nuclear capability.

This way Obama can fulfill his promise to oppose Iran's nuclear capabilities,

by instead opposing nuclear weapons in general-- and then blame Israel for

not going along.

Of course if Israel does go along, it will have traded its best defense against

a nuclear attack, MAD, in favor of empty promises from Iran, which will
be able to develop nuclear weapons anyway in order to strike a now

defenseless Israel.

Catch 22, is the favorite game of the Obama Administration when it comes

to Israel, and whatever you do, you lose.As Norman Podhoretz writes
in Commentary Magazine

No wonder, then, that the Obama administration is already reverting to

the old pre-Bush assumptions that have repeatedly been discredited in

practice: that Israeli “intransigence” is the main obstacle to ending the
conflict with the Palestinians; that “restarting” the “peace process”

therefore requires putting the onus back on Israel; and that this in turn

necessitates forcing Israel back to the 1967 borders. In other words,

Jerusalem must be redivided and the major centers of Jewish

population in the West Bank that Bush had promised would remain

part of Israel must also be evacuated and the West Bank as a whole

be made Judenrein.

And when we've handed all that over to Obama's Hamas allies on a

platter, in exchange for another round of terrorism... the same pattern

that has played out non-stop over the 17 years that Israel has worked

to achieve peace through concessions... we can expect to see Hamas

running both Gaza and the West Bank... while Israel is being

pressured to open the Egypt and Jordanian borders, as well as
dismantle the checkpoints into Israel, and not respond to the terrorist
attacks and weapons smuggling that open borders and a Hamas run

Palestinian Authority is sure to create.

Anyone need a map?

As Melanie Philips writes in her Spectator column This, says CR, is

based on the totally mistaken belief that Ahmadinejad is a Stalin

figure, a devil with whom it is possible to do deals – whereas in
fact the correct analogy for Ahmadinejad is not Stalin but Hitler:

Unlike the monster Stalin, who, in the years leading up
to World War II, consistently put the Soviet Union's national
interest, as he saw it, ahead of the country’s Communist ideology,
to the point of betraying overseas Communists (his ‘useful idiots’)
and the cause of world revolution--from China to Germany--

Ahmadinejad intends to overthrow the balance of power, globally
as well as regionally, by destroying Israel, driving America (the
‘Great Satan’) out of the Middle East, and dominating the region for
decades to come--for starters. He dreams of a ‘world without America
and Israel’ and he intends to make his dreams come true.

If this theory is correct – big if – the explanation for forcing Israel to
sacrifice its security on the grounds that a Palestine state is necessary
to get the Arab states on side in the fight to contain Iran clearly doesn’t
hold up. In which case, Obama would be throwing Israel under the bus
just because he wants it gone altogether -- as analysed here in terrifyingly
plausible detail.

The one thing you can reliably count on from Obama is that his image is

too fragile to play the Bad Cop, which is why he'll always take on the

Good Cop role, while letting his subordinates and proxies do the dirty

and ugly deeds.

Want to pressure Israel? Let Biden step out and do it, he's got experience.

Let Rahm work his magic by pressuring AIPAC's big donors into

promoting the two state solution. Let James L. Jones and his string
of appointees lay down the law for Israel in diplomatic language,

Obama will be paying a visit to a concentration camp, and issuing
platitutdes about hope and redemption.

The fist is still there, it's just covered in a whole lot of disingenuous

hand waving and smiley face stickers. "No, we're not pressuring Israel.
It's tough love. It's a friendly suggestion. No one is more Pro-Israel than

us, except maybe Hamas."

Meanwhile Dymphna at Gates of Vienna has cited and discussed my

article Obama's Plan to Destroy Israel, and added her own commentary

which makes for interesting reading.

Also interesting is a translated editorial in favor of Wilders...

It was pathetic to hear the British foreign minister David Miliband defend

the decision, and the Orwellian behavior of the British government was

underlined by Jacqui Smith’s request that — in the future — Islamic
terror be described as ‘anti-Islamic activity’. It aroused some unpleasant
memories of the rejection by communist regimes of critical foreigners

whose critical manifestations could be interpreted as threats against

public order and undermining society.

Of course the more ideologically stratified a political system becomes,

the more need it has to keep people with dissenting opinions out. But
the question here is not merely one of ideological stratification, but

furthermore is an acknowledgment of the inherent instability within

the system itself.

Talk of incitement to violence is a transparent admission of how

unstable a system based on denial and dhimmism really is.

Exposing Liberal Lies

has more on the Obama Administration as a rerun

of the Carter Administration

Maggie's Notebook
remembers the heroic saga of the Philadelphia V

Philadelphia took up its fire support station as the transports offloaded
troops in the early morning darkness of 8 November. Shore batteries
opened fire at 0428, and within two minutes Philadelphia joined New York
(BB-34) in bombardment of Batterie Railleuse [manned by our good
friends, the Vichy French!] which, with four 130mm. guns, was the
strongest defense unit in the Safi area. Later in the morning,
Philadelphia bombarded a battery of three 155mm. guns about three
miles south of Safi. Spotter planes from the cruiser also got into the act
by flying close support missions. One of Philadelphia's aircraft discovered
and bombed a Vichy French submarine 9 November in the vicinity of
Cape Kantin. The next day the Vichy submarine Medeuse, one of eight
that had sortied from Casablanca, was sighted down by the stern and
listing badly to port beached at Mazagan, north of Cape Blanco.
Thought to be the same submarine previously attacked off
Cape Kantin, Medeuse was again spotted by a plane from Philadelphia
and was subsequently bombed.

At IsraPundit, an article by Arieh Eldad,

"The Sun Orbits the Palestinian State"

For hundreds of years, the Catholic Church believed that the sun orbits
the earth. Whoever dared oppose this view was branded insane or a
heretic.

Religious dogmas are not overturned by logic. An argument between the
believers of different faiths is rarely resolved by rational argument. The
prophet Habukuk says, “The righteous man lives by his faith.” (Today we
say, “A man lives by his faith,” and by this we mean that every man has
his own personal belief system, and all do not need to believe in one thing.)

Samuel Huntington in his book The Clash of Civilizations counted over
130 armed conflicts around the world in the year 2000. Approximately
95 percent of these were between Moslems and their neighbors. Islamic
borders are bloody. Almost everywhere on the planet, Moslems are
attempting to expand at the territorial expense of their neighbors. The
illness is global. But for some reason the believers think that the conflict
in the Land of Israel is local, of a different nature, and territorial
concessions will resolve the conflict. In like manner did many
Europeans believe in 1938 that territorial concessions to Hitler
would satisfy his hunger and bring peace. For who could believe then
that Hitler wanted to take over the world? And who believes today
that Islam wants to take over the world? If only the Jews
would give up their homeland, there would be peace.

IsraelMatzav meanwhile covers the Coming Obama- Netanyahu schism,

which I would argue is already here.

The confrontation between Obama and Netanyahu is coming. The dispute
between Obama and Netanyahu over the 'two-state solution' is a real
dispute, but in the current context it is so unimportant - as pointed out by
Krauthammer - as to make it look phony.

The real schism is over Iran. Obama naively trusts in his own ability to
negotiate with Iran (or is just indifferent to Israel's continued existence)
because his risks from being wrong are much smaller. For Israel and
Netanyahu, the risks are existential. Israel must act when it deems it
necessary to do so. If that means a schism with the United States - at
least so long as Obama is in power - so be it.

At Shemittah Rediscovered

meanwhile a petition to Jewish organizations in the US not to abandon

Israel in the face of pressure from the Obama Administration.

Avid Editor looks back at the May 8th 1945 anniversary

Desert Conservative takes on

Obama's threat to withhold Stimulus funds

from California

Via a New Dark Age is Dawning,

the joys of an NHS system filled with Muslim doctors

MAIL Online: A Muslim dentist refused to treat patients unless
they wore traditional Islamic dress, it was alleged today.

Omer Butt, 32, ordered women to put on head scarves or he
would not register them or their families at his NHS-funded
clinic, it was claimed.

At least two patients were left in pain after they declined to
follow his self-imposed rules, the General Dental Council
heard.