This is just a great video contrasting the media’s treatment of Barack Obama’s decision to open a U.S. embassy in the brutal totalitarian dictatorship with Cuba and President Trump’s opening of an embassy in Jerusalem.
As you might have guessed, nobody thinks it’s a big deal to grant this concession to the Cuba tyrants, who as far as I’ve seen have changed their behavior very little since Obama did this years ago. But do something that upsets Hamas and supports the democratic Israeli state, and oh boy, you’ve got a problem.
Fifty-nine percent of Jewish Israelis have a favorable opinion of President Trump, about 20 points higher than the positive reviews given Trump by Americans, according to a new Unversity of Maryland poll.
The survey, which was described by the pollster in Politico, found that 70 percent of Orthodox Israeli Jews back Trump, but even 45 percent of secular Jewish Israelis support him while only 30 percent of them have an unfavorable view.
The pollster, Shibley Telhami, cautions that the poll was conducted as Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, a move that could have bumped his number up.
The poll also found that 73 percent of Jewish Israelis support moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and believe now is the time to do it.
Well, if Jared Kushner is going to bring make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, this is what he will have to deal with. No doubt such views are commonly held among Palestinians if their leader express then openly.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday said that the Holocaust was not caused by anti-Semitism, but by the “social behavior” of the Jews, including money-lending.
Pointing to Arthur Kessler’s book “The Thirteenth Tribe,” which asserts Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars, Abbas said European Jews therefore had “no historical ties” to the Land of Israel.
He went on to claim that the Holocaust was not the result of anti-Semitism but rather of the Jews “social behavior, [charging] interest, and financial matters.”
In [a] January speech, he said that European Jews during the Holocaust chose to undergo “murder and slaughter” over emigration to British-held Palestine.
However, on Monday, Abbas claimed that Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi regime was response for the murder of 6,000,000 Jews in the Holocaust, facilitated the immigration of Jews to Israel by reaching a deal with the Anglo-Palestine Bank (today Bank Leumi) under which Jews who moved to the British Mandate of Palestine could transfer all their assets there through the bank.
The Palestinian leader has a long history of Holocaust denial. His 1982 doctoral dissertation was titled “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism,” and he has in the past been accused of denying the scope of the Holocaust. The dissertation reportedly claimed that the six million figure of Holocaust victims was hugely exaggerated and that Zionist leaders cooperated with the Nazis.
Abbas also again preemptively rejected the peace plan that the Trump administration is working on, amid an ongoing and deep rift with the US.
Abbas told the PNC that he plans to take unspecified “tough steps” soon against Israel and the United States.
Abbas told the hundreds of delegates that he was sticking to his rejection of any US proposals for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal following the Trump administration’s recognition in December of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and a decision to move the US Embassy there in mid-May.
“This is completely unacceptable,” he said, during the opening of a four-day meeting in the West Bank. “We will not accept this deal, and we will not accept the US as the sole broker.”
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu Monday compared President Trump’s actions toward Israel to those of British Lord Balfour and Harry S. Truman, who played key roles in establishing the state of Israel, saying that moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem would be remembered by Jews “throughout the ages.” He said the U.S. Israeli alliance has never been stronger, at least in the past 40 years.
Netanyahu spoke in the Oval Office:
Mr. President, Donald, Melania: Sara and I want to thank you for your extraordinary friendship and hospitality. It’s always a pleasure to see you, both but this is the first time we meet in Washington — America’s capital — after you declared, Mr. President, Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. And this was a historic proclamation followed by your bold decision to move the embassy by our upcoming National Independence Day.
I want to tell you that the Jewish people have a long memory. So we remember the proclamation of the great King Cyrus the Great — Persian King. Twenty-five hundred years ago, he proclaimed that the Jewish exiles in Babylon can come back and rebuild our temple in Jerusalem. We remember, 100 years ago, Lord Balfour, who issued the Balfour Proclamation that recognized the rights of the Jewish people in our ancestral homeland.
We remember seven years ago, President Harry S. Truman was the first leader to recognize the Jewish state. And we remember how a few weeks ago, President Donald J. Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Mr. President, this will be remembered by our people throughout the ages. And as you just said, others talked about it. You did it. So I want to thank you on behalf of the people of Israel. And I also want to — I look forward to our discussions on both challenges and opportunities . . .
Mr. President, I’ve been here for nearly four decades with talking and seeking to build the American-Israel alliance. Under your leadership, it’s never been stronger, and the people of Israel see your position on Jerusalem, they see your position on Iran.
Wow. What a difference an administration makes. From the Obama administration efforts under former UN Ambassador Samantha Power to placate the Palestinians and attack the Israelis, we now have a UN Ambassador, Nikki Haley, who minces no words and has no fear about calling out the Palestinians for their double-dealing and lack of seriousness about peace.
Apparently, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas made some kind of hostile, conspiracy theory-laden speech of the type he usually gets away with and that stoke Palestinian and world hostility toward Israel.
Haley, who is turning out to be one of President Trump’s best picks among a group of senior advisors and Cabient members that includes many of them, wasn’t having any of it:
In his speech, President Abbas declared the landmark Oslo Peace Accords dead. He rejected any American role in peace talks. He insulted the American president. He called for suspending recognition of Israel. He invoked an ugly and fictional past, reaching back to the 17th Century, to paint Israel as a colonialist project engineered by European powers . . . A speech that indulges in outrageous and discredited conspiracy theories is not the speech of a person with the courage and the will to seek peace.
I’ve said this many times before, but it’s well worth repeating. It is galling that so many of my fellow Jews who say that one of the most important issues to them is the survival of Israel nevertheless disdain Republicans, who have for half a century have been Israel’s most reliable itisupporters.
Republicans usually lack the adherence to the moral relativism of Democrats and understand that there is good and evil in the world, and that good and evil can be defined. And they get that Israel is the former, and her enemies the latter.
I doubt any presidency is more committed to Israel than that of President Trump and his born-again vice president, Mike Pence, who visited the country this week. And yet, of course, most Jews would have the Suha Arafat-hugging Hillary Clinton in the White House instead of Trump.
And it makes me so happy, and also a bit sad, that many of the strongest, most emotionally-invested supporters of Israel I encounter are not Jews, but Christians.
“Mr. Pence’s address was one of the most Zionist speeches ever given by a non-Jew in the Knesset,” wrote Meir Rabbi Soloveichik in the Wall Street Journal. “The vice president is a devout evangelical Christian, and he said that in the birth of the modern state of Israel, we see nothing less than a fulfillment of the biblical promises of God,” wrote Soloveichik, who leads Congregation Shearith Israel in New York and is director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. “The speech was a milestone in American-Israeli relations, and a window into the heart of many American Christians who, like Mr. Pence, observe Israel’s emergence with wonder and reverence . . . The existence of multitudes of gentiles who are also Zionists has no precedent in the Jews’ millennia-long history.”
Pence received a rapturous reception in Israel’s Knesset and was embraced everywhere he went. And for good reason. The Israelis, surrounded and constantly forced to fight enemies, know who their friends are, even if relatively comfortable and unthreatened American Jews do not.
“The miracle of Hanukkah is the miracle of Israel.”
Of course, most of my fellow Jews oppose him, and many despise him. But Donald Trump is the first president of the United States who has a significant portion of his family that is Jewish and who has a love and respect for Israel in his heart.
That’s right. All the conventional, in-the-box thinking you’re hearing about how President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – which, de facto, it already is – and move the embassy there actually increases to prospects for an eventual negotiated settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians. Even supporters of the move who… Continue Reading
A promise delayed is a promise not kept. From the White House: While President Donald J. Trump signed the waiver under the Jerusalem Embassy Act and delayed moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, no one should consider this step to be in any way a retreat from the President’s strong… Continue Reading
President Trump Tuesday offered up the dubious proposition that the Palestinians are ready for peace with Israel. As far as I’ve observed, the Palestinians are always ready to make a deal, until it comes time to make a deal. And they suggest they are ready to live with Israel, but teach their children to throw… Continue Reading
