Obama’s Ludicrous Proposal to Israel Unpacked

By Barry Rubin

Could President Barack Obama’s strategy possibly be more obvious to Israel? Not for the mass media, of course, but for Israel. Here’s a summary: Due to the Obama Administration’s ineptness, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is planning to ask the UN to give it unilateral independence in September. But rather than use its leverage against the PA–including pointing out that what it’s doing is contrary to every U.S.-guaranteed agreement that the PA signed with Israel during the last 18 years–the Obama Administration wants to use its leverage on Israel to force it to save Obama.

You see, Obama will find it hard to escape vetoing the PA’s bid in the Security Council before it ever gets to the General Assembly. This will not make Obama or the United States more popular with Muslims or Arabs. So Obama wants Israel to pay the price in exchange for…nothing.

To avoid the PA declaring unilateral independence without making any concessions, Obama wants Israel to accept what amounts to the PA getting independence without making any concessions! But it won’t be unilateral, right? Obama’s plan is for Israel to negotiate, turn over the all of the West Bank to the PA as soon as possible and then negotiate on all the issues with a PA-led state. Of course, that means Israel would give up all of its bargaining chips at the beginning of the negotiation rather than get something for them at the end in exchange for Palestinian concessions.

And, of course, Obama wants Israel to depend on his promises and support, not exactly reliable, right?

What’s really going on is that Obama wants Israel to take enormous risks and give up a huge amount of political capital, thus endangering its citizens and future in order to spare Obama from vetoing the PA’s initiative. And since Obama takes no strong action against the Fatah-Hamas coalition, he’s asking Israel to give these concessions to an interocutor that includes genocidal-minded antisemitic terrorists working with Iran, Syria, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The argument the Obama administration and its supporters is using–despite being taken seriously in the mass media–is absurd. Namely, Israel must make big concessions to give the PA a state as fast as possible because otherwise the Europeans will support unilateral Palestinian independence at the UN.

But wait a minute! First, if the U.S. government would use real leverage, leadership, and even some arm-twisting, this European action wouldn’t happen. Second, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy have already said they won’t back the PA’s move. So what’s Israel going to do, turn over the West Bank real fast to avoid having Spain and Sweden vote against Israel at the UN? Third, the U.S. government can just veto the plan. Problem over.

If Obama didn’t want to have to veto unilateral independence he should have been pressuring the PA to back down, the UN not to cooperate with this campaign, and his allies not to vote for it. Instead, Obama is seeking the easy way out: have Israel give the PA so much that it gives up the idea voluntarily. Why demand what the United States has already given to you?

And it doesn’t take a genius to understand that the kind of signal Obama is giving the PA is disastrous in other situations. Go against U.S. wishes, sabotage its policies, attack its allies, don’t fulfill your commitments, align with terrorist groups, threaten to do something outrageous…and then the Obama Administration will give in and force your enemies (it’s own allies) to surrender.

Thus, what Obama is doing is ludicrous, trying to get Israel to pay for his mistakes and his refusal to press the PA on anything in exchange for Israel getting nothing and betting its future on a belief that Obama will protect it.

Sounds a bit different from the way the mass media presents things, right? And not bloody likely to happen.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are teased and other articles are available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/. 

Three Amazing Stories That Teach Us: Never Overestimate the Competence of the Media

By Barry Rubin

First, almost all of the major news media has reported about the confrontation between Israeli forces and people who tried to cross Israel’s border as part of a demonstration designed to help wipe that country off the map. But what’s their source? None of them has first-hand information. So in fact all their data came from the Syrian propaganda organs.

That’s right. The Syrian regime is killing hundreds of its own people. No Western government will act against that dictatorship. But when it comes to Israel they accept its claims as truth, and many didn't even tell readers or viewers--at least in the initial reports--where they got the information.

Second, this is from a CNN report on the same story today

“Israel has made peace with the other two parties to the 1967 Six-Day War, Egypt and Jordan, but still occupies the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza as well as the Golan Heights.”

At least this CNN item listed Syria as the source of casualty figures. But what’s wrong with the above sentence?

A. Who says they are “Palestinian territories?”

B. The populated areas of the West Bank have been governed by the Palestinian Authority for 17 years. The PA has received billions of dollars to run the show, has its own schools, health system, security forces, you name it. But CNN reports it as being “still” occupied.

C. And of course Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip completely six years ago, yet CNN also acts as if that’s still “occupied,” too. The area lives under a revolutionary Islamist regime dedicated to Israel’s destruction yet supposedly Israel controls it.

But the third item is best. Let me explain. In an article remarking about how we are now told that the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Syria’s regime, for example, are the good guys protecting everyone from even worse extremists, For example, we have been told for several years that dictator Bashar al-Assad is really a reformer held back by the “old guard.” (The alleged members of this old guard are never named because in fact they don’t exist.

I added this note:

“[PS: I hate to use the most over-used analogy in the world but arguing that Israel should make a deal right away because of the “shifting sands” is like British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain arguing in 1938 that the Czechs better give up the Sudetenland fast before the real radicals take over in Germany or, at least, the current chancellor there gets impatient.]”

Now, it ran through my mind that something like this had actually happened in the 1930s—Western news media presenting Hitler as the relative moderate—but I didn’t have the time to research it. But a clever reader did and found this New York Times article from September 17, 1935:

After Hitler excluded Jews from German citizenship and prohibited marriages between Jews and “Aryans,” (known in history as the Nuremberg laws) the article continued:

“The new laws, while in line with the anti-Semitism which has been a large part of the Fuhrer’s inspiration from the beginning are no doubt to be taken as encouragement to the Radical wing of the party….The best to be said of the new laws is that they may offer German Jewry the process of law in place of arbitrary bullying and local tyranny.”

So there you have it: Hitler was trying to appease the radical Nazis and the Nuremberg laws offered Jews some legal recourse.


Another reader came up with more examples. Here are my two favorites:



1. The Glasgow Herald "Uneasy Germany" August 8, 1932

"Murder, arson, and outrage continue to shatter the internal peace of Germany...[...]...There is no mystery as to the perpetrators of most of the outrages. They are members of Hitler's "Brown Army." Herr Hitler and his more moderate colleagues, while professing that the incidents are the consequence of "Red" provocation, are said to deplore the terrorist tactics of some sections of their followers."

2. Hitler Not Yet Master; 'Strong Men' Still Rule," March 22, 1933 St. Joseph Gazette

"The extreme Nazis have undertaken to drive Jews out of public and commercial life...Goering, at the head of the police and of the extreme Nazi wing, has egged on the attacks.

"But Hindenburg, Papen, the Nationalists and the moderate wing of the Nazis have opposed the campaign and several times this element has compelled Hitler to put restraints on Goering and on his own wild followers.

"The Nazi extremists have not liked this intervention. They may undertake to strike back. Then we shall see some real fireworks."

Truly, when it comes to bad arguments (and New York Times foolishness) there is nothing new under the sun.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/.

Barack Obama's "Muslim Problem"

By Barry Rubin

The idea that President Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim is ridiculous. (And don’t write me disagreeing because there’s no proof.)

BUT this red herring has blocked a serious discussion of what is Obama’s attitude toward Islam. As so often happens regarding the Middle East and Islam, people spend their time and passions focusing on the wrong issue.

I think two points can be made reasonably:

• Based on his youthful experience, Obama thinks he is a great expert on Islam. He isn’t. And the Islam he came in contact with at the time (in Indonesia mainly) was quite different from what he has to deal with in the Middle East today. Particularly, he genuinely does not seem to comprehend revolutionary Islamism. And since that's the main international threat in the world today his failure creates a gigantic problem for the future of what used to be called the Free World.

• Obama has a strong sympathy and empathy for Muslims. In theory, that’s just fine but it has led to a policy of trying to win the love of the Muslim-majority world rather than to develop strategies that work and protect U.S. interests. Another theme that emerges from this is his relentless mirror-imaging in which Egypt's revolution becomes equivalent to Rosa Parks protesting against segregation on buses in the Southern United States and the quest for democratic liberty by America's Founding Fathers.

So Obama's "Islamophilia" makes him have a huge "Muslim problem." The problem is not that he "likes" Muslims but that he doesn't distinguish among them. It's the difference between loving Russia, its people and its culture a generation ago, and not understanding the problem of Communism. 

By believing that the only problems are: a tiny group of evil people (al-Qaida) and mistakes made by U.S. policy, Obama is missing the biggest political development in the world today. 

It's like saying after the Russian Revolution that the real problem is a small group of anarchists who want to hijack Bolshevism, but that if the United States is only nice enough to the Communists, shows them that America isn't their enemy, and helps them get rid of a few extremists everything will be great.

 

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com
 

In One Sentence Here is What Obama Doesn't Understand About the Middle East

By Barry Rubin

Here's the sentence:

The changes in the region are producing more extremism, not more moderation.

That applies to attitudes toward America and Israel as well as on internal social issues.
Rachi Ghanouchi, head of Tunisia's Islamist movement--a man long portrayed as a moderate in the West--just publicly came out and called for Israel's destruction. And what does Voice of America tell us and the Arabs? That Ghanouchi is a moderate who doesn't want an Islamist state! Your tax dollars at work. What does CBS News tell us? That the Islamist party denounced the killing of a priest. Obviously very tolerant people.

Of course, the Tunisian Islamists are far weaker than those in Egypt. Still, the West is deluding itself in thinking they are moderate.

Yet let's listen--thanks to MEMRI--at what the VOA and CBS producers counterpart in the Arab world is saying. In an article written for a Qatari and a Jordanian newspaper, entitled "Israel Is Surely Temporary," Samir al-Hijjawi says

"It's time for Israel to go... It's time for the end of the great lie... It's time [for Israel] to go because the regimes protecting [it]... are toppling one by one." He added that the recent  protests on Israel's borders prove the Palestinians and Arabs will never relinquish all of Palestine because it is sacred Muslim territory.

I'll bet that every producer and pretty much every staff member of al-Jazira--the station Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has recommended as accurate--agrees.
Get it? For Obama, the "Arab Spring" means moderation and democracy. To most Arabs and Muslims, it represents a resurgence of Islamism and nationalism, the prelude for getting rid of Israel and U.S. influence in the region.

I'd be bothered less if Obama acknowledges that but claimed that his proteges would win. The fact that he has zero percent understanding of the threat is the prelude to disaster. The fact that almost all Western newspapers and television news operations think the same way as Obama makes the situation even worse.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com

 

Obama’s Middle East Policy Will Collapse In September

By Barry Rubin

Prediction: In September, President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy blows up in his (and our) face(s). It’s totally obvious and yet no one is focusing on it.

I’m not referring to the Palestinian Authority’s bid for unilateral independence at the UN. I’m referring to the Egyptian parliamentary election.

It is totally obvious that in that election Egypt will elect a radical, anti-American, hate-Israel parliament which will then write the country’s new constitution. This is a turning point in Middle East history. And Obama is unaware of it. Quite the contrary, he declared in his State Department speech that everything is great with the “Arab spring.” Nothing can go wrong. It is the expression of a yearning for prosperity and freedom.

The Arab spring began when a frustrated man in Tunisia set himself on fire.

It will now move to the new phase: the whole Middle East will be set on fire.

Is that alarmist? Not at all, except in the sense that when one sees a fire he sets off the fire alarm.

Don’t be distracted by the question of whether Islamists will have a majority or the even narrower question of whether the Muslim Brotherhood will have a majority.

There WILL be a radical majority, there MIGHT be an Islamist majority, there won’t be a Muslim Brotherhood majority but it will ALMOST CERTAINLY be the largest single party.

Why do I say this? Well, Amr Moussa, who isn’t an Islamist and is Egypt’s most popular and important Egyptian politician says so.

There is no sign—no sign—that the moderates are organizing serious parties. Instead of getting to work, they’re complaining. Meanwhile four radical, anti-American, passionately anti-Israel forces are organizing:

--The Muslim Brotherhood, which should get one-third or more of the seats and is contesting half of them, obviously in the districts where it has the best chance of winning.

--Smaller and even more radical Islamist parties (referred to as Salafists) who could form agreements with the Brotherhood so that they won’t hurt each other’s chances.

--Left-wing neo-Marxist parties.

--Radical nationalists.

There will probably be a number of independents who will be courted and won over by one of these blocs.

Imagine the day after that election. What will the mass media say? What will the American politicians say?

--That they were wrong about the Egyptian revolution and the Muslim Brotherhood?

--That by helping to bring down the old regime, U.S. policy foisted a disaster on the region and on its own interests?

--That by celebrating how great the “Arab Spring” is and refusing to acknowledge the real threats and problems, Obama made catastrophic errors.

--That his policy has led to many advances for America’s enemies?

--That Israel is in a far worse strategic situation and certainly can’t and shouldn’t make any more concessions?

--That the Islamists are emboldened and thus both Hamas and the radicals who run Fatah are taking an even harder line?

--That the loss of faith in America by its Arab allies is now undeniably clear and they are scrambling to make their own deals with Iran and other extremists?

--That there is a real possibility of a war in which Egypt either joins directly or backs Hamas? Imagine, Egypt stays “neutral” but nobody stops thousands of Egyptian volunteers from crossing into Gaza to fight or even across the Egypt-Israel border to launch terror attacks?

--What will the Obama Administration do if in practice Egypt tears up the Israel-Egypt peace treaty even if it pretends that it isn’t doing so?

--People are insisting that if Hamas in practice becomes part of the Palestinian Authority that the United States, and certainly Congress, will cut off aid. But what will happen when the Obama Administration does everything possible to prevent an aid cut-off and nothing possible to pressure the PA into changing its policy or behavior?

These are not speculations. These things WILL happen. Nobody in the United States or Europe is seriously discussing these scenarios and what should be done about them.

And I didn’t even mention the Egyptian presidential elections or, for that matter:

--An emboldened Turkish Islamist government if it wins the June 11 elections the:re,

--A Lebanese government controlled by Syria and its clients, especially Hizballah, if it ever gets a new prime minister and cabinet installed in that country.

--The survival of an anti-American Syrian government that has murdered hundreds of its citizens and will be arresting and torturing thousands, in part due to the Obama Administration's failure to try to overthrow it?

--The sight of Iran ever closer to nuclear weapons and admissions that the sanctions had only a limited effect?

These are not far-out scenarios. All of them have a 90 percent or more likelihood of happening.

I don’t want to take your time here for a history lesson but consider precedents:

--1952. Radical regime takes power in Egypt. U.S. realizes the threat by April 1955 but then saves the regime from being overthrown by Britain, France, and Israel in 1956. Result: Violence, disruption, and anti-American problems in the region for decades.

--1979. Radical regime takes power in Iran. U.S. policy makes a mess in dealing with the revolutionary crisis. Americans taken hostage, revolutionary Islamism flourishes, thirty plus years of violence, September 11, Islamist movement still growing. By the way, why does not one of the hundreds of "experts" on television and in the mass media remember that the Iranian revolution began after President Jimmy Carter urged reform on the shah and ended with the United States calling on the shah to go away? Remind you of anything?

September 2011 will be another of those moments. Mark that on your calendar. On the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the United States will be watching the triumph of the ideology and movement--not Usama bin Ladin, of course, but his smarter counterparts--in much of the Middle East.

PS: Here's an excellent guide to Egypt's political parties so far which proves my point . Note that there isn't a single serious moderate party. Amr Mousa isn't forming a party while Muhammad ElBaradei, Obama's favorite, isn't doing anything but complain. There is a "Facebook party." So far it has 1000 "likes." Egypt has about 85 million people.


Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/.