Showing posts with label extremism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label extremism. Show all posts

Saturday, August 01, 2015

Obama Hiding Text of Iran Nuclear Deals And Unclassified Documents From the American People and... Congress

By The Investigative Project on Terrorism

Crucial aspects of the Iran nuclear deal remain hidden from the public, and in some instances, from the American government, Bloomberg reports.

In a closed-door session with House members Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry revealed that two side deals between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were reached. Kerry said he neither read nor possesses the secret agreements.

According to U.S. Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., a member of the House Intelligence Committee who attended the closed-door session, Congress also is in the dark on these agreements.

"Kerry told me directly that he has not read the secret side deals. He told us the State Department does not have possession of these documents," Pompeo told Bloomberg View columnists Josh Rogin and Eli Lake.

Furthermore, other secret agreements kept from the public were presented to Congress on Monday – part of 18 documents the White House were required to disclose – including secret letters of understanding between the U.S., France, Germany , and the United Kingdom that outline some of the ambiguous aspects of the nuclear deal.

Seventeen of these documents are unclassified, yet they are stored in ultra-secure facilities intended for top-secret information, the Daily Beast reports. These extraordinary precautions indicate that the Obama administration is seeking to keep unclassified documents from reaching the public.

*CRUNCH* THIS POPCORN IS GETTING GOOD! Federal Judge Slaps Hillary and Huma With Full Disclosure Demands

By Judicial Watch

(31 July 2015, Washington DC) – Today U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the U.S. State Department to request that Hillary Clinton and her top aides confirm, under penalty of perjury, that they have produced all government records in their possession, return any other government records immediately, and describe their use of Hillary Clinton’s email server to conduct government business. The court issued the ruling late today after holding a status hearing in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information lawsuit that sought records about Huma Abedin, the former Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-01363)). The lawsuit reopened last month because of revelations about Hillary Clinton’s email records.

The text of Judge Sullivan’s minute order, which was issued at 5:46 pm:

As agreed by the parties at the July 31, 2015 status hearing, the Government shall produce a copy of the letters sent by the State Department to Mrs. Hillary Clinton, Ms. Huma Abedin and Ms. Cheryl Mills regarding the collection of government records in their possession. These communications shall be posted on the docket forthwith. The Government has also agreed to share with Plaintiff’s counsel the responses sent by Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills. These communications shall also be posted on the docket forthwith. In addition, as related to Judicial Watch’s FOIA requests in this case, the Government is HEREBY ORDERED to:

Friday, July 31, 2015

Improbable Dialogue Comix

Masterfully illustrated by our year-round summer intern, Biff Spackle (follow Biff on Twitter at @BiffSpackle).

You can see some of our all-time best comic strips here.
 

CHANGE, PART 1,803: Obama Edits Oath of Allegiance for New Americans, Deletes Pledge to Defend the U.S.

By Warner Todd Huston

Newly naturalized Americans will no longer have to pledge to defend the USA thanks to the Obama administration’s decision to remove the lines requiring new citizens to bear arms on behalf of the United States or perform noncombatant duties in the armed forces in times of war.

Obama’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services ruled that effective on July 21 of this year, some candidates for naturalization will skip the services clause while taking the oath to become Americans.

So that means that in an age when people are streaming here to pretend to become Americans in order to commit acts of terror, now Obama won’t even ask them to voice the words that they will defend the USA.

The current oath reads as follows:

Here is the Ironclad Case for Impeaching IRS Head John Koskinen

By Logan Albright

Key members of the House Freedom Caucus are demanding that IRS Commissioner John Koskinen be removed from office. In an op-ed written for the Wall Street Journal, Reps. Jim Jordan and Ron DeSantis told President Obama that if the Commissioner is not removed, they will begin the proceedings to impeach him.

Modern Americans view impeachment with a sort of awe and reverence. To most, it seems like an inconceivably drastic thing to do. But it was not always this way, nor was it the intention of the founders. Impeachment has always been a practical tool for getting rid of bad actors in government and, given the amount of government corruption we see today, a tool that should be used with much greater frequency.

If there is any doubt that Koskinen is a worthy target for impeachment, let’s run down a few of his misdeeds since he assumed the office in 2013.

First, the IRS targeting scandal. In 2013, it emerged that the IRS had been targeting conservative non-profit groups, delaying their applications, demanding ridiculous amounts of paperwork including highly invasive personal questions, and general obstructing conservative grassroots activities. The American Enterprise Institute estimated that this depressed Republican voter turnout in the 2012 elections, and could have even made the difference between Barack Obama winning or losing.

Of course, this was all before Koskinen became commissioner, so what does it have to do with him? Koskinen assumed office in December 2013, during the ongoing investigation into the scandal. Any serious public servant would have done everything possible to clean up the agency and get to the bottom of the wrongdoing. Koskinen instead chose to obstruct. Koskinen responded to subpoenas for emails regarding the scandal with the unbelievable claim that all the emails from the specified time period had suddenly gone missing.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

DEMOCRAT POLICIES WORK! Which country is out of food, pays doctors $15 a month, and has no beer?

By Daniel Greenfield

Venezuela used to have oil literally coming out of the ground. Then the Socialists took over and under Hugo Chavez made it a model for the world... to run away from. Here's what's going on in Venezuela now.

Universal Health Care - Venezuela's widely praised government health care system is doing great. Doctors are being paid $15 a month

In some hospitals, they had less than a third of the medical supplies they require. Almost every patient told me they had to buy at least some of their drugs on the street.

Oncologists said that people who were diagnosed with breast cancer sometimes had to wait more than 18 months for treatment, while surgeons said that other patients often die while waiting for operations.

It's not just a lack of medicines that is making life difficult. Spiralling inflation, which topped 600 percent in July 2015, has meant that doctors' salaries are now worth less than £10 per month.

That's about $15 a month. But even that may be optimistic because Venezuelan currency is monopoly money. Obama had to bail out Cuba because Venezuela couldn't keep carrying Castro.

 It’s taken what, no more than a couple of decades, to turn an oil rich middle income country into something worse than most sub-Saharan economic wastelands (the minimum manufacturing wage in Ethiopia is currently $21 a month or so).

Minimum wage in Venezuela is now about $11 a month. But that's okay because there's no food to buy so the government is just confiscating it from farmers, Bolshevik style.

Sanctuary Cities Represent Naked Crimes against the American people

Testimony of Jessica M. Vaughan before Congress:

Thank you for the opportunity to testify on the public safety problems created when local governments adopt policies that obstruct immigration enforcement, commonly known as sanctuary policies. According to ICE records, as of October 2014 there were 276 such jurisdictions in the United States. Over an eight-month period in 2014, more than 8,100 criminal aliens who were the subject of detainers were instead released back to the streets as a result of local non-cooperation policies. Approximately two-thirds of these individuals had a serious criminal history at the time of their release. Nearly 1,900 have subsequently re-offended. Only 28 percent have been re-apprehended by ICE.

Sanctuary policies do nothing to build trust between immigrant communities and local law enforcement. They do not improve access to law enforcement services for immigrants; nor have they been shown to increase the likelihood that more immigrant crime victims will report crimes. On the contrary, they destroy the trust of the community at large that the laws will be faithfully enforced to preserve the quality of life for all.

Despite widespread public outrage at the San Francisco Sheriff’s policies that caused the release of a man with five prior deportations and seven felony convictions, and who was the subject of an ICE detainer, who then went on to kill Kathryn Steinle, it is clear that some jurisdictions will not budge from their criminal alien sanctuary policies. To make matters worse, the Obama administration’s new Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) explicitly allows local jurisdictions to obstruct ICE – and also establishes the entire country as a sanctuary for nearly all illegal aliens by further narrowing enforcement priorities and severely restricting the ability of ICE officers to deport removable aliens, including many with criminal records. Therefore, Congress must step in to correct the situation by a) clarifying in the law that local law enforcement agencies are expected to comply with ICE detainers; b) establishing that local law enforcement agencies will have qualified immunity when cooperating in good faith; c) implementing sanctions for those jurisdictions that continue to refuse to obstruct enforcement; and d) reversing the Obama administration’s non-enforcement policies.

Where Have All the Bullets Gone?

By James Simpson

Since the day President Obama was elected, gun owners have been on an unprecedented buying spree, purchasing everything from .22 ammunition to every kind of semi-automatic firearm available.

Their fears are not unwarranted — especially because, for a while, the federal government seemed to be racing private owners to buy the ammo first.

Closer examination shows that some fears of federal activity on this front are overblown. Others, though, are deeply rooted in legitimate concerns.

While Obama claims to support “common-sense” gun laws, he has made high-profile public announcements telegraphing his anti-gun intentions and engaged in behind-the-scenes gun control — tweaking government regulations to deny gun rights to veterans, seeking the same for Social Security recipients, and using the ATF to ban certain types of popular ammo. Calling guns more dangerous than terrorism, Obama recently indicated he’ll devote the rest of his time as president to gun control.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

John Kerry’s War: Nuclear Shot and Chaser

John Kerry yesterday in the House of Representatives:
REP. REID RIBBLE: For 228 years, the Constitution allowed treaties to [pass] with the advice and consent of 67 U.S. Senators. Why is this not considered a treaty?

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: Well Congressman, I spent quite a few years trying to get a lot of treaties through the United States Senate, and it has become physically impossible... That's why. Because you can't pass a treaty anymore. It has become impossible to schedule, to pass, and I sat there leading the charge on the Disabilities Treaty which fell to basically ideology and politics. So I think that is the reason why.
John Kerry today in the Senate:

THE TROUBLE WITH TRUMP: 12 Years of Presidential Narcissists?

By Richard Larsen

After seven years of a narcissistic president, the last thing the nation needs is another four. Donald Trump has all the same outward egocentric manifestations to which we’ve become accustomed. The problem with politicians imbued with such characteristics, is that everything they do is all about them, not those whom they are elected to serve, or the Constitution to which they take an oath of fealty.

Dr. Charles Krauthammer, a psychologist by profession, has said it’s clear that the current inhabitant of 1600 Pennsylvania Av. is a narcissist. “This is a guy, you look at every one of his speeches, even the way he introduces high officials — I’d like to introduce my secretary of state. He refers to ‘my intelligence community.’ And in one speech, I no longer remember it, ‘my military.’ For God’s sake, he talks like the emperor, Napoleon. He does have this sense of this all being a drama about him, and everybody else is just sort of part of the stage.”

Dr. Sam Vaknin, the author of the “Malignant Self Love,” and an expert on narcissism, concurs. Vaknin says, “Obama’s language, posture and demeanor, and the testimonies of his closest, dearest and nearest suggest that the president is either a narcissist or he may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Narcissists project a grandiose but false image of themselves. After listing several 20th century examples, he explains how they all “created a personality cult around themselves and with their blazing speeches elevated their admirers.”

THUNDER: Federal Judge Threatens to Hold IRS Chief and DOJ Attorneys in Contempt of Court Over Lerner Cover-Up

By Judicial Watch

U.S District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan today threatened to hold the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department attorneys in contempt of court after the IRS failed to produce status reports and newly recovered emails of Lois Lerner, former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the IRS, as he had ordered on July 1, 2015.

During the a status hearing today, Sullivan warned that the failure to follow his order was serious and the IRS and Justice Department’s excuses for not following his July 1 order were “indefensible, ridiculous, and absurd.” He asked the IRS’ Justice Department lawyer Geoffrey Klimas, “Why didn’t the IRS comply” with his court order and “why shouldn’t the Court hold the Commissioner of the IRS in contempt.” Judge Sullivan referenced his contempt findings against Justice Department prosecutors in the prosecution of late Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) and reminded the Justice Department attorney he had the ability to detain him for contempt. Warning he would tolerate no further disregard of his orders, Judge Sullivan said, “I will haul into court the IRS Commissioner to hold him personally into contempt.”

After the hearing, Judge Sullivan issued the following “minute order”:

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

MARTIN PERETZ: The Democrat Party is on the Edge of the Abyss

By Martin Peretz, Editor-in-chief of The New Republic, 1974-2013

How the party of FDR and JFK deals with the Iran agreement will determine its credibility on foreign policy for decades to come.

Two of the most powerful members of the Democratic Party, former and current senators from New York, now hold the fate of the putative deal with Iran in their hands. Because they alone can overturn it, this means that presumptive presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and presumptive Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer carry a heavy burden that will deeply affect their personal reputations and, most probably, the trustworthiness of the Democrats in foreign policy for at least a generation.

Their former senatorial colleagues Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John Kerry already own their decision, though their logic still remains unclear to both the most diligent and the most casual observer. The president asserts that his piece of paper will prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, presuming both the honesty of a regime that has displayed mendacity and hostility for 35 years as well as the existence of a wide-ranging verification capability that his own agreement has fatally compromised. And then, of course, there is the sunset provision that enables Iran to acquire nuclear weapons anyway. As they congratulate themselves on the hard work that produced this bizarre document—Bloomberg News related that “[a]ll present were in a kind of awe”—have these former Solons stopped to wonder why Iran negotiated in the first place when their leaders still insist on claiming they don’t want nuclear weapons? The entire process is built on lies. If the Iranians didn’t want nukes, then why would they want a time limit?

Of course the Iranians are dissimulating—they want the funds that come from sanctions relief, the legitimacy that comes from press conferences with great powers in central Europe, and, finally, an eased path to nuclear weapons. They have managed to achieve all three, without having to pause their “Death to America” street rallies, return their American hostages, curb their aggression in the Middle East, or release their defrauded presidential candidates from house arrest. (Nor has the U.S. President seen fit to even mention these ongoing depredations.) On the U.S. side, the assertion is that Iran will modify its irredentist behavior, even as its last demand (to which Obama and Kerry shamefully caved) was to lift the arms and ballistic missile embargos. Not exactly evidence-based decision-making when you consider the Ayatollah Khamenei’s comment just this weekend: “Our policies toward the arrogant government of the United States will not be changed at all.”

PLUNDER AND DECEIT: Mark Levin Pulls Back the Curtain on an Ominous Future for America’s Next Generation

Author, radio show host and Constitutional attorney Mark R. Levin has written a fifth consecutive bestseller. Entitled Plunder and Deceit, it serves as a comprehensive guide to one of the nation's great mysteries.

Why, for the first time in modern history, do the majority of Americans now believe that their children will be worse off than they are?

The reasons are manifold. Consistent with his prior works on topics of law and government, Levin describes a national political system that has completely unshackled itself from the Constitutional bonds that were intended to limit its scope and power. The hundred-year effort by the progressive movement to implement socialism in America has finally reached a terminal stage.

Americans are no fools; they know that, despite the government's best efforts to position economic data as good news, the future is very bleak indeed.

It is not simply the fact that the federal government is borrowing, spending and printing currency on a scale never before seen in world history. Its debts and unfunded obligations are, by some estimates, over $200 trillion and have accelerated from merely insane under George W. Bush to flatly suicidal at the direction of Barack Obama. It is certain that, without a rapid course correction, the economy is on the road to long-term collapse.

And, ominously enough, that is the assessment not of a right-wing pundit, but the very government auditors and trustees charged with fiscal oversight. The CBO, the OMB and the Trustees of Social Security have all sounded the alarm as the metrics that underpin government solvency rapidly unwind.

The financial health of the federal government aside, Levin points to a series of poor -- and, in all likelihood, unconstitutional -- decisions that have stolen powers from the states, localities and people and instead placed them in the hands of central planners in Washington.

More "Deleted" Lois Lerner Emails Revealed...

No, not by the feckless boobs John Boehner and Darrell Issa.

But by Judicial Watch, again. There's copy of the dump here.

It's long past time to impeach John Koskinen.
 

CURRENT OBAMA PLAN TO CLOSE GUANTANAMO BAY HAS ONE TINY FLAW: It’s Illegal

Not that appears to have ever stopped this particular president. That said, Molly O'Toole at DefenseOne describes yet another bizarre White House plan to endanger Americans.

White House officials say they’re getting close to delivering a plan to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as Congress has demanded for years. There’s one problem: a key part is illegal — at least for now.

Current U.S. law forbids the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to prisons on U.S. soil — and yet there are some prisoners who cannot be sent anywhere else, Deputy National Security Advisor Lisa Monaco said Saturday.

“We are going to whittle down this group to what I refer to as the irreducible minimum, who would have to be brought here to a secure location, held under the laws of war, continuing under military detention, and that’s the only way we’re going to be able to close Guantanamo,” Monaco said at the Aspen Security Forum. These prisoners would be prosecuted in the military justice system or federal courts and subjected to a “supermax cell,” Monaco said. “Ultimately, that’s the way we’re gonna do it.”

“We gotta work with Congress,” she said, “but right now we aren’t even able to put that facility together because of the legal restrictions.”

Not only is it currently illegal to bring Guantanamo prisoners to the U.S. for prosecution or detention, the federal government is forbidden to spend any money to “assist” in doing so. This means no funding to build a U.S. prison to hold them, or improve an existing one, or even to perform an in-depth study on related options. This has left national security leaders to plan the future of U.S. detention while trying to avoid the appearance of spending taxpayer-funded time on options for moving detainees to U.S. soil.

Say, I've got an idea: let's have Lois Lerner and John Koskinen do all the planning for this patently illegal operation and the cover-up which is sure to follow. They appear to have all of the necessary experience.
 
 
Hat tip: BadBlue News.
 

HOUSE CONGRESSIONAL LEADERS: Top 5 Reasons IRS Commissioner John Koskinen Must be Impeached

In the wake of the Obama administration scandal that saw the IRS illegally targeting conservatives and pro-Israel groups for daring to oppose Democrat policies, little has been done. The administration appears to be in full cover-up mode, with "crashed" hard-drives, missing emails, and lost backup tapes.

Hoping to jumpstart scrutiny of the IRS's plainly illegal activities, House representatives Jim Jordan and Ron Desantis offer a powerful argument that IRS chief John Koskinen should be immediately terminated by the President. And, if Mr. Obama refuses, that Congress should impeach the head of the troubled agency. Writing at the Wall Street Journal, Jordan and Desantis offer five clear reasons for their recommendation (emphases mine):

Destruction of evidence. Lois Lerner, at the time the director of the IRS’s exempt-organizations unit, invoked the Fifth Amendment on May 22, 2013, when appearing before Congress; her refusal to testify put a premium on obtaining and reviewing her email communications. On the same day the IRS’s chief technology officer issued a preservation order that instructed IRS employees “not to destroy/wipe/reuse any of the existing backup tapes for email, or archiving of other information from IRS personal computers.”

Several weeks later, on Aug. 2, the House Oversight Committee issued its first subpoena for IRS documents, including all of Ms. Lerner’s emails. On Feb. 2, 2014, Kate Duval, the IRS commissioner’s counsel, identified a gap in the Lerner emails that were being collected. Days later, Ms. Duval learned that the gap had been caused in 2011 when the hard drive of Ms. Lerner’s computer crashed.

Despite all this—an internal IRS preservation order, a congressional subpoena, and knowledge about Ms. Lerner’s hard-drive and email problems—the Treasury inspector general for tax administration discovered that the agency on March 4, 2014, erased 422 backup tapes containing as many as 24,000 emails. (Congress learned of the discovery only last month.)

Ms. Duval has since left the IRS and now works at the State Department, where she is responsible for vetting Hillary Clinton’s emails sought by congressional investigations of the Benghazi attacks.

Monday, July 27, 2015

Democrat on powerful Foreign Affairs Committee goes on record opposing Iran deal, but DNC head can’t make up her mind

At least one Democrat has stopped goose-stepping with Barack Obama toward a nuclear Iran.

Calling the recently announced Joint Comprehensive Plan for Action (JCPOA) between Iran and the P5+1 powers “historic … for all the wrong reasons,” Rep. Juan Vargas (D – Calif.), who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote that he will vote against the nuclear agreement in an op-ed published Saturday in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Vargas argued that instead of providing limited sanctions relief and cutting Iran’s “path to a nuclear bomb,” the deal gives Tehran a “rapid payday” of up to $150 billion and “[legitimizes] its path to nuclear-threshold status.” The congressman noted that Iran never explained its past nuclear work to international inspectors and continues defying demands to do so.

Vargas further pointed out that the JCPOA threatens to spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East by allowing Iran to become a nuclear-threshold state. In addition to failing to stem Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Vargas criticized the deal for failing “to halt Iran’s aggressive imperialism in the Middle East.” He also observed that Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah, praised the deal because it “will also reinforce the position of [Iran’s] allies.”

...Declaring that the vote is “not a partisan issue,” but “an issue of national security,” Vargas urged his Congressional colleagues to oppose the deal.

Conversely, the chairperson of the Democrat National Committee, a Jewish representative named Debbie Wasserman Schultz (whose district is heavily Jewish) just can't seem to make up her mind. It's all so confusing.

BECAUSE WE’RE NOT BROKE ENOUGH: Obama Poised to Give College Education Grants to Prisoners

I have this queasy feeling in my stomach that upon leaving office, Barack Obama will mass-pardon tens of thousands of federal prisoners. The odious Slate Magazine hinted at this last year (don't click, the site is definitely not sanitized for your protection).

But I just have this strange vibe, which only grows stronger when I read something like this.

More prisoners may soon have access to federal subsidies to pay for college under a new Obama administration initiative, ending a 20-year ban on Pell grants for state and federal prisoners.

The move could come as soon as this week. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Attorney General Loretta Lynch are scheduled to visit ... the Maryland Correctional Institution in Jessup on Friday, to make “an important announcement related to federal aid.”

On Monday, Duncan said that restoring Pell eligibility for those potential students is one way his agency hopes to "increase college affordability" [Ed: quotes added for comic effect]...

...The Obama administration has increased total federal aid available to students by more than $50 billion and increased tax benefits and credits by an additional $12 billion, part of a total of about $150 billion a year in grants and loans for higher education...

Sure, when your country is the brokest nation on Earth and the brokest nation in history, why not?

Fueled by rampant intervention into the student loan business by the government, the costs of college have exploded ("Instapundit" Glenn Reynolds wrote an outstanding book on the topic entitled The Higher Education Bubble, a startlingly ominous description of the problems surrounding a college degree that costs more than many homes).

So let's go further in debt paying for college for felons, when our kids are left high and dry, with outrageous tuition bills and a federal debt that is destined to crush them.

But that's entirely consistent if you use Obamalogic: felons and illegal aliens are more virtuous than your children; and Iran can be trusted with ballistic missiles and nukes while you shouldn't be able to own a handgun.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.
 

30 Blocks of Government Incompetence

By Jim Quinn

There were two accidents on the Schuylkill Expressway last Monday morning. You know what this meant. I had the pleasure of traveling to work on the scenic 30 Blocks of Squalor. The 30 blocks from 69th Street in Upper Darby to 39th Street in West Philly is a tribute to government incompetence, failed government policies, shoddy union labor practices and fiscal mismanagement.

This entire thirty block trek could be completed in 5 to 10 minutes if the hundreds of union government drones in the Philadelphia Streets Department would get off their fat asses and timed the lights. The blocks are identical in distance. They don’t need advanced degrees in physics or calculus to set the lights to go green every ten seconds in order. They were timed in the 1970s and 1980s. Would smoothly flowing traffic be such a bad thing? Do they not care or are they really this incompetent? The first light at 61st Street was red when I arrived. It turned green and before you could touch the gas, it immediately turned yellow and red again. I wondered how long they’d allow this to go on. My guess would be days.

I’ve noted in previous 30 Blocks screeds that Philadelphia put a thin veneer of blacktop on the entirety of Chestnut Street about two years ago. I’ve also detailed the dozens of water main breaks that occur on a regular basis under the streets of Philadelphia, causing tens of millions in property damage. This is how corrupt incompetent government drones run the show. They gloss over the long-term real structural problems with a thin veneer of cheap half assed faux solutions that provide the false appearance of fixing something.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

The irony of the expulsions from Gaza

By Caroline Glick

Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza 10 years ago was a strategic disaster. But it could have been much more devastating if the ideologues behind it had had their way.

Formally, the withdrawal was supposed to do two things. It was supposed to strengthen Israel’s diplomatic position vis-à-vis the US and Europe by demonstrating Israel’s commitment to Palestinian statehood, and it was supposed to enhance Israel’s security by redeploying the IDF along more defensible lines.

Neither argument for the withdrawal was particularly plausible. But due to the media’s lockstep support for it, neither was seriously challenged.

The truth is, these justifications were never anything more than a smoke screen to hide the true purpose of the withdrawal from the public. The real purpose of the withdrawal from Gaza was to deal a strategic blow to Zionism and the Jewish character of the state.

The destruction of those communities – and the expulsion of the 350,000 Jews who live in them – was also not an end unto itself. For the leftist ideologues who invented the idea of unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza, destroying the settlement enterprise is a necessary precondition for destroying religious Zionism.

And religious Zionism has to be destroyed in order to destroy Zionism.

This true purpose of the Gaza withdrawal was made clear by leftist ideologues in the months that preceded the withdrawal.