Frequently Bought Together

The card:

And of course, Netanyahu's farewell gifts to Barry.

Frequently Bought Together

American Jews Divided Over Strain in U.S.-Israel Relations

They're Divided?

You got to be f**king kidding!

Let me paint you a picture. 

Evidently not. 

The only friend Israel had in the UN was us.

Wonder if these idiots are thrilled over the Iran deal too?

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Paula Greene, a retired nurse in Hollywood, Fla., said she believes a two-state solution is the best chance for a lasting peace in Israel. Scott McIntyre for The New York Times 

For Rabbi Gerald Sussman of Temple Emanu-El on Staten Island, the Obama administration’s recent confrontation with Israel was a stunning turn for a president who had enjoyed support from many members of his congregation. “The word ‘betrayed’ would not be too strong a word,” he said.

But in Los Angeles, Rabbi John L. Rosove of Temple Israel of Hollywood, who is the chairman of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, felt differently. He applauded the speech delivered on Wednesday by Secretary of State John Kerry explaining the decision by the United States not to block a United Nations Security Council resolution that condemned the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Rabbi Rosove also suggested that many American Jews were broadly supportive of the Obama administration.

“I felt Kerry was exactly right,” he said. “The people who will criticize him will take a leap and say he’s anti-Israeli, just as some American Jews are saying Obama is an anti-Semite. This is ridiculous. They recognize and cherish the state of Israel.”

The relationship between Israel and the United States, historically the Jewish state’s closest ally, has seen periods of strain and tension almost from the day of Israel’s creation in 1948. But rarely has the situation between the two countries been this stressed, with President Obama under attack not only from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but also from President-elect Donald J. Trump.

The events of the past few days have renewed a longstanding debate over whether American Jews must always stand with the Israeli government, and under what circumstances should they criticize a friend.

“There’s a very clear values clash going on,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the executive director of T’ruah, a rabbinical human rights organization. “On the one hand, we have a small but vocal minority of American Jews who believe that supporting Israel means supporting the right-wing agenda, the current government. And on the other, there is a larger percentage of American Jews who are committed to Israel and committed to democracy and want to see it as a safe place that reflects our values.”

This is a community that is hardly monolithic. For one thing, younger Jews are seen as less likely to identify themselves as religious or supportive of Israel, and do not share memories of the Holocaust or the wars with Israel’s Arab neighbors. American Jews are also overwhelmingly Democratic; Jews voted for Hillary Clinton over Mr. Trump, 71 percent to 24 percent, according to exit polls.

Yet the most influential and vocal organizations that represent Jews in Washington tend to be more conservative and supportive of Mr. Netanyahu, who has had a combative relationship with Mr. Obama, and has made little secret of his happiness over the changing of the guard that is about to take place in Washington.

Mr. Trump has signaled that his administration would upend the nation’s policies toward Israel, promoting rather than discouraging settlement construction and moving the American embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.

“These days the right wing has a louder voice in Israel, and, in some ways, it also has a louder voice in America, because the people who are most actively and publicly Jewish, sectarian Jewish, share the right wing point of view, and are very pro-settlement,” said Samuel Heilman, a sociology professor of at Queens College specializing in Jewish life. “But it’s not the mainstream point of view.”

Members of a group called Jews United Against Zionism protested this week in New York in support of the Security Council resolution that condemned the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.Kena Betancur/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 

Steven M. Cohen, a research professor at Hebrew Union College and a consultant to a recent Pew study of American Jews, said that Mr. Kerry’s speech represents the viewpoints of most American Jews. “On survey after survey, American Jews are opposed to Jewish settlement expansion. They tend to favor a two-state solution and their political identities are liberal or moderate,” he said.

Some Jews said they thought Mr. Kerry’s speech, even if delivered in harsh terms, actually reaffirmed the best hope for a lasting peace in Israel: a two-state solution. “This administration has been pro-Israel,” said Paula Greene, 65, a retired nurse in Hollywood, Fla. “Like Kerry said, you can still be friends, still be allies and still have disagreements.”

But for others, even those who support a two-state solution and object to Israeli settlement policy, the decision by the United States not to shield Israel at the United Nations — which is widely viewed among many American Jews as hostile to Israel — was a mistake. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, a Democrat with a large Jewish constituency, called the Security Council action unnecessary and inappropriate, adding: “I don’t think you can solve a problem with a friend by flogging them publicly.”

The Security Council’s 14-to-0 vote a week ago condemned Israel’s construction of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as a “flagrant violation under international law” and an obstacle to peace in the region. The United States chose to abstain rather than use its veto, as it has done in the past to quash resolutions it considered anti-Israel.

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish movement in North America, said it was “a miscalculation in our minds. I think a majority of American Jews would agree, no matter how one feels about settlements, that the idea that the U.N. is an honest broker when it comes to Israel is laughable.”

For Shira Greenberg, a public school teacher in Florida, Mr. Obama’s rebuke of Mr. Netanyahu confirmed her worst assumptions about the president. “Throughout the whole Obama administration, people were trying to guess where he stood,” she said after morning services at her conservative synagogue on Thursday. “At this point, it’s pretty clear.”

And at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, a large and politically divided congregation, Rabbi David Wolpe said Mr. Obama had “pulled the rug out from under people who said the president’s intentions toward Israel was positive and strong.”

The public display of rancor is unsettling. “Nobody in the community can be happy when you have this public spat between the prime minister and the president, and the kind of language the prime minister has been using about the president,” said Daniel C. Kurtzer, who has served as the United States ambassador to both Israel and Egypt.

David Zwiebel, the executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America, which represents ultra-Orthodox Jews, said that there is a general sense among Orthodox Jews, who tend to be more conservative, “that the outgoing administration is outgoing and should be outgoing, and it’s time for an approach that is more openly supportive of Israel.”

For all the controversy created by the vote, few Jewish leaders think there is any chance that Mr. Kerry and Mr. Obama might, in the next three weeks, strike the deal that has eluded negotiators for years. That said, some supporters of a two-state solution applauded Mr. Kerry for trying.

“I think it’s a question of legacy,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of J Street, a liberal Jewish lobbying group. “And you have to have the long view on this issue. Donald Trump will be president for X years. And then there will be someone else and the chances are it will go back to where we are today. And Bibi will lose someday,” he said, referring to Mr. Netanyahu. “Someday down the line this is the way it’s got to go.”

American Jews Divided Over Strain in U.S.-Israel Relations

Liberals...they really are this stupid

The Cub Scouts issued a statement recently stating birth certificates would be the determining factor to grant “legal status” to its members, adding that the Cub Scouts is a group for boys.

How callous, how thoughtless... the Cub Scouts are just for boys?

LGBT advocates have said the Boy Scouts are not known to have required birth certificates to determine gender status in the past stating there is nothing  in the rule book that says anything about a birth certificate.

Maybe, back in the day, people knew the difference between a boy and a girl.

Liberals...they really are this stupid

Why Putin Envies Trump

Why Putin Envies Trump

Kerry Attacks Israeli Government, Defends UN Resolution

Lame-duck Secretary of State John Kerry blasted the Israeli government at the State Department on Wednesday, and attempted to defend the Obama administration’s decision to let an anti-Israel resolution pass at the UN Security Council last week.

Kerry delivered his remarks in the midst of a diplomatic fight with Israel, in which President Barack Obama stands accused of working with Palestinians secretly to undermine Israeli security, overturning decades of American foreign policy precedent in the process.

Kerry began by reassuring “President Obama has been deeply committed to Israel and its security.” He then declared: “The two-state solution is the only way to achieve a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.” He resisted, he said, the idea that support for Israel meant accepting any Israeli policy.

Responding to Israel’s claim that the U.S. had abandoned the two countries’ shared values in allowing the resolution to pass, Kerry said, “I am compelled to respond today that the United States did vote in accordance with our values,” claiming the UN vote “was about preserving the two-state solution … Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state … that is what we are trying to preserve, for our sake and theirs.”

He went on to claim the Obama administration has been “Israel’s greatest friend and supporter,” adding that “No American administration has done more for Israel’s security than Barack Obama’s … Time and again, we have demonstrated that we have Israel’s back.”

Sure he has!

Here's just one example:

Obama tells Israel: Go back to 1967 borders

Oh...and that Iran deal. Israel just loves it!

You don't dress like this... unless you mean it.

(Responding to that claim earlier this week, former Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz — a prominent supporter of Obama and of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as a critic of Israeli settlements — said: “I didn’t realize what [Obama] meant is that he would have [their] back to stab them in the back, and he just stabbed them in the back.”)

Kerry did not mention the Iran nuclear deal, which the Israeli government called a “historic mistake” that merely postpones Iran’s emergence as a nuclear power rather than preventing it. Nor did he mention numerous disagreements between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that had emerged over eight years — including the Obama administration’s numerous snubs and its repeated attempts to frustrate Israeli war efforts against the Hamas terror organization in Gaza.

Kerry recounted his many visits to Israel, including historic and religious sites, and the Holocaust memorial of Yad Vashem. He said that had sensitized him to the security concerns of ordinary Israelis. But he said that the “fundamental reality” was that “Israel can either be Jewish or it can be democratic, but it cannot be both.”

Kerry seemed to be referring to exaggerated and debunked population statistics that predicted Arabs would overtake Jews in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. As Caroline Glick and others have pointed out, Palestinian demographic statistics have been inflated for political reasons, and if Israel were to annex the West Bank today, Jews would still likely be two-thirds of the population.

Map of the Middle East.

https://www.google.com/maps/@25.9058761,25.7970691,4z

Check out the 'huge' swath of land they call Israel. If Israel didn't exist does anyone truly believe there would be no such thing as terrorism and everything would be warm and cozy in the Middle East?

Kerry said “both sides” played to each other’s worst fears and stereotypes, placing Israel and the Palestinians on equal moral footing, even though the Palestinian Authority officially promotes terrorism and antisemitism. There is no analogous rhetoric — at least not on an official level — in Israel, whose population is one-fifth Arab and where Arabs have equal rights.

Later, Kerry complained about Netanyahu’s democratically-elected government — which the Obama administration did its best to defeat in 2015 by using American taxpayers’ money to fund left-wing political efforts during the Israeli election — “His current coalition is the most right-wing in Israeli history, with an agenda driven by the most extreme elements.”

Kerry admitted that settlements were not the primary cause of the conflict. “Of course they are not.” He also admitted that peace would not result if all of the settlements were removed, and acknowledged that “certain settlements would become part of Israel” in a peace agreement.

He did not attempt to square those statements with the text of last week’s UN resolution.

Last Friday, the U.S. abstained from UN Security Council Resolution 2334, allowing it to pass, after vetoing a similar resolution in 2011. Resolution 2334 declares the Israeli presence in areas won from Jordan in the defensive Six Day War in 1967 — including the Old City of Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) — to be illegal. Effectively, it denies Jewish claims to historical and religious sites that have been holy to, and inhabited by, Jews for millennia.

A similar resolution in 1979, UN Security Council Resolution 446 — from which then-President Jimmy Carter also abstained, allowing it to pass — declared that settlements in the West Bank “have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.” However, Resolution 2334 goes further, specifically including “East Jerusalem” as a “settlement,” and calling settlements “a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace” (emphasis added).

Yet Kerry claimed, falsely, that there was “absolutely nothing new” in UN Security Council Resolution 2334.

The original framework for negotiations over the future of the West Bank is regarded as UN Security Council Resolution 242, approved in 1967, which called, in principle, for “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” The term “territories” was deliberately included without the direct article, i.e. “the territories,” to allow for future negotiations over the precise boundaries. Israel regarded the old boundaries — which were not international borders, but mere armistice lines at the end of Israel’s 1948-9 War of Independence — as a provocation to future attacks by Arab states. In one area, the 1949 armistice lines left Israel merely nine miles wide between the West Bank and the Mediterranean coast.

Kerry said that it was wrong to allow the continued expansion of Israeli settlements, and the “proliferation” of settlement outposts that are even illegal under Israeli law. He objected to a proposed law in the Israeli Knesset that would extend Israeli military law to cover seizure of civilian land — a law that proponents argue is aimed at bolstering Palestinian property rights — and launched into a comprehensive attack on Israeli policy toward the settlements. “No one who is thinking serious about peace can ignore the reality of what the settlements pose to that peace,” he said.

Kerry ignored the fact that the Netanyahu government observed a “freeze” on new settlements, at Obama’s behest, but the Palestinians still refused to negotiate. Nearly his entire address was devoted to Israel’s perceived misdeeds. Kerry made a few perfunctory criticism of Palestinian terrorism and incitement, but reserved his passion — and vitriol — for perceived Israeli misdeeds.

The Obama administration, he said, had warned Israel that the Palestinians intended to take the settlement issue to the UN Security Council, but that Israel did not listen. Accordingly, he said, the U.S. did not oppose the resolution, he said, because it would not be expected for any nation “to vote against its own policies.” He did not explain the numerous ways in which the resolution violates previous U.S. policies, especially the idea that the Security Council was not the forum for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that the status of the West Bank and Jerusalem would be subject to future bilateral negotiation.

Like others who have defended the Obama administration, Kerry cited past examples of cases in which the U.S. — including under Republican presidents — had allowed resolutions that Israel had opposed. But he did not acknowledge the way in which UN Security Council Resolution 2334 went further than previous resolutions and undermined an existing peace process.

It was settlements, not the UN Security Council resolution, Kerry argued, that isolated Israel from the world.

Kerry also rejected as untrue that the Obama had been the “driving force.” The U.S. did not “draft or originate this resolution, nor did we put forward,” he said. He did not say whether — as Israel has charged — the U.S. had encouraged the resolution and coordinated with the Palestinians and with several UN Security Council members on producing a resolution to be posed in the president’s lame-duck days. While the U.S. did not agree with “every word,” Kerry said, the U.S. “could not” veto the resolution.

The speech had been billed as Kerry’s attempt to introduce a “plan for Mideast peace.” But Kerry was mostly focused on a blistering attack on the Israeli government and on Israeli policies.

He said that the two sides “have not yet been able to resume talks,” ignoring the fact that Israel has been open to talks for years, which the Palestinians have refused.

Kerry concluded by recounting a potted history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as perceived by each side — at least, as he perceived the two sides’ perspectives. He downplayed Palestinian terrorism and Israeli attempts to achieve peace.

He outlined basic principles for a peace agreement creating two states, including territorial compromise based on the “1967 lines” (the 1949 armistice lines), with land swaps to “reflect practical realities on the ground.” He said that Palestinians and Israelis should provide “full, equal rights for all of their citizens,” and that the issue of Palestinian refugees should be resolved in a way that preserved Israel as a Jewish state, including financial compensation and resettlement elsewhere. He said that peace required a non-militarized Palestinian state, with a full end to Israeli military occupation, and normalization of Israel’s relations with its neighbors.

Controversially, Kerry’s peace plan also includes Jerusalem as the capital of “the two states” — an outcome that Israel has not accepted, except in the peace terms offered at Camp David in 2000, which the Palestinians rejected.

Kerry ended by reminiscing about the late Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who passed away earlier this year. He recalled Peres standing on the White House lawn during the signing of the Oslo peace accords — and ignored the fact that UN Security Council Resolution 2334 violates the American promises that allowed Israel to make those compromises. Those guarantees included the understanding that the U.S. would protect Israel at the United Nations from unilateral changes imposed by its enemies.

Update: According to CNN correspondent Oren Liebermann, Israeli networks did not carry Kerry’s speech live. If Kerry was aiming to reach the Israeli public, Liebermann said, he “missed the mark.”

Kerry Attacks Israeli Government, Defends UN Resolution