We're now in the Trump era. Time to drop the euphemisms. Time for consequences. Obama is not motivated by personal "pique" at Netanyahu. Anti-Zionism is not personal; it is ideological, and it is widely popular among the Democrat leftist base. Whereas anti-Semitism has shrunk to 3% of the white population in America, the ADL estimates that it is 22-36% among blacks and Latinos. It is much higher than that among leftists.
Obama has chafed at the need to put on a mainstream front. Now he is baring his leftist teeth. The effect is more mean than frightening, and it will not have the outcome he wants.
Obama hates Israel, as he hates America. He is the spiritual son of his Marxist father and of the openly anti-Semitic and anti-white Reverend Wright, as Obama told us from the first. To the left, Israel and America are evil imperialists. Obama has always wanted to cut Israel and America down to size.
Make no mistake: Obama has handed a useful club to Israel's enemies. Nonetheless, his leftist idea that he can effectively shackle the United States and Israel with international law is a progressive pipe dream. Neither Trump nor Israel's Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is intimidated by the United Nations.
Obama is a small man with large dreams of destruction. His malicious attack at the U.N. will rebound. The permanent damage will be to Obama's own image. The Wall St. Journal editorial called it "a defining act of Obama's Presidency." Senator Tom Cotton was more blunt:
The literal wording of the U.N. resolution would push Israel to its 1949 armistice lines, which are militarily indefensible, and end Israel's viability. It would expel Israelis, and all Jews, out of ancient Jerusalem and their holiest site, the Western Wall, and lead to the expulsion of 600,000 Israelis from their land and homes. It will never happen, but Obama is inviting international courts and the anti-Israel EU to sanction and boycott Israel. In today's toxic world of leftist judicial activism, that would happen.
No longer needing Jewish votes, Mr. Obama was free, finally, to punish the Jewish state in a way no previous President has done.
No effort to rescind the resolution … will succeed because of Russia's and China's vetoes.
Instead, the resolution will live on as Barack Obama's cat's paw, offering support in every European capital, international institution and U.S. university campus to bully Israel with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
Andrew McCarthy argues that the U.N. resolution is legally indefensible (not that legality has ever stopped Obama), as these territories are not "occupied," but "disputed" under international law. The word "occupation" is Arab propaganda. McCarthy is apoplectic:
It is Islamist-leftist dogma that Israel's millennia of attachment to its homeland count for nothing. Adding a final shameful chapter to a foreign-policy record that already runneth over with them, Barack Obama on Friday abandoned America's commitment to Israel's security, and to the vindication of democracy over sharia-supremacist aggression. In an act of cowardly venom…The resolution undertakes to render our ally indefensible.
I don't believe that this resolution will live on. The victor in a struggle between the U.N. and President Trump is foreordained. Trump will beat Obama's attack, not just this one time, but in the years to come, on many fronts, as Obama is free to act openly as a socialist agitator (that's what a community organizer is, folks). That Obama chose Israel as a first battleground is one more example of how tone-deaf he is to the American heart.
President-Elect Trump has surrounded himself with a powerhouse of cabinet ministers and advisers, the most successful men to ever serve a president. They have set themselves to take on ISIS and Iran. Palestinian maneuvering at the U.N. is small potatoes and will be dealt with appropriately.
The U.N. will find their U.S. funding cut by Congress. The Palestinians will find they are worse off than before, that Obama's support will bring them worthless victories and real-world grief.
Many senators are calling for consequences to the United Nations, none more eloquently than Senator Tom Cotton (hat tip: Power Line):
President Obama is personally responsible for this anti-Israel resolution. His diplomats secretly coordinated the vote, yet he doesn't even have the courage of his own convictions to vote for it. ... This resolution ... targeting Israel for building homes in Jerusalem, its own capital, while not specifically addressing Palestinian incitement of and financial support for terrorism. ... [T]his resolution surpasses even the infamous "Zionism is Racism" ... in its irrational obsession with the Jewish state.
Obama thinks he handed the Palestinians a killing weapon. Instead, he has guaranteed that Trump will take on the Palestinians sooner. Trump will drain the diplomatic swamp that has normalized Palestinian hate. Knowing this, Obama tried to pre-empt Trump's intended change of course with this U.N. resolution.
Trump will be the first president to stop pushing the Palestinian's anti-Semiticcause. The Palestinian jihad against Israel was launched by Hitler's Third Reich. Adolf Eichmann himself traveled to the Mideast to focus the Moslem Brotherhood's jihadi rage on Jews. Decades before there were "occupied territories," Yasser Arafat was trained by ex-Nazi officers to destroy Israel.
Obama will find he has not even slowed down building in the so-called settlements. If not for the propaganda war against Israel, they would be called neighborhoods and suburbs of Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Planning and Construction Committee told reporters they are not intimidated and will be voting for 5,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem this week. They look forward to a friendly Trump administration that will not give them grief if they start a nice little building boom in East Jerusalem.
It will also be interesting to see how Obama's U.N. move plays out politically in America. Liberal Jewish organizations have been behaving bizarrely over Trump's victory. In a shocking repudiation of their traditional political neutrality, 11 groups including the biggies the ADL, the Reform movement, and Hadassah, recently joined a fringe Soros BDS group to boycott the community Chanukah Party because it was at Trump's D.C. hotel.
It is entirely possible that this U.N. resolution will reverse that momentum. It will force Jewish Democrats into a bipartisan coalition with Trump. It seemed there were no limits to liberal Jews' willingness to betray Israel and Jewish interests (think Iran deal) in the service of the Democratic Party, but Obama may have found the limit.
Israel's survival cannot be harmed by Obama's puny malice. This is how Israel responded at the U.N.:
Israel's (U.N.) Ambassador Danny Danon held up a Bible in that sanctuary of idolatry and spoke of the holiday of Chanukah, about to commence this calendar year on Christmas Eve. He reminded his listeners that over two thousand years ago another King had banished the Jewish people from the Temple in Jerusalem, and tried to sever Jews from their religion and their heritage.And he continued: "But we prevailed. The Jewish people fought back. We regained our independence and relit the Menorah candles…We overcame those decrees during the time of the Maccabees and we will overcome this evil decree today."
“Never let a crisis go to waste,” President Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel once famously advised Democrats.
Republicans look increasingly determined to now use that advice against Obama.
The president’s refusal to veto a United Nations resolution condemning Israeli settlements, documented in detail by WND on Friday, is now causing such a backlash, the move could stunningly backfire on the outgoing commander in chief.
Following Friday’s vote, there were immediate calls for the U.S. to defund the organization. By Monday, there was a rising tide of calls to use the vote as a reason for the U.S. to leave the U.N. altogether.
“We need to ditch this organization run by crazies and create one run by free nations,” former Rep. Steve Stockman told WND.
Former Rep. Michele Bachman, R-Minn., told WND, “The U.S. should expose the O.I.C. (Organization of Islamic Cooperation) agenda at the U.N., which is institutional genocide by consensus against the Jewish state of Israel, and against the Jewish people generally. Then the U.S. should let it be known the U.S. will no longer be part of the O.I.C./U.N. agenda.”
She essentially predicted the U.N. must clean up its act or face the ultimate price: “We will refuse to pay any further U.N. costs, may remove ourselves from membership and consider removal of the U.N. building from the current U.S. site in New York City.”
The former congressman told WND, “The growing outrage over the vote has provided conservatives our turn to take advantage of a crisis, because (with the incoming Trump administration) now we have a chance to kill the wasteful spending on a wasteful concept called the U.N.”
The Texan also said, “Obama severely overplayed his hand by allowing this unprecedented slap at Israel. He revealed his true feelings. Obama had to show his anti-Semitic and pro-global government views before he walks out the door.”
Those sentiments were just part of growing chorus calling for a dramatic response to the Obama administration’s refusal to veto the resolution demanding the Jewish state “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.”
As WND reported, immediately following Friday’s vote, Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., urged Congress to reduce or eliminate U.S. funding of the U.N.
But the snowball was just getting started.
By Saturday, Cruz tweeted, “No US $ for UN until reversed.” On Sunday, Graham told CNN that not only will he introduce a bill to significantly reduce or even eliminate U.S. funding of the U.N. unless the UN Security Council repeals the resolution, “there is going to be a break. And I am going to lead that break.”
By Monday, the calls for withdrawing the U.S. from the U.N. were growing.
Roger L. Simon, CEO Emeritus of PJ Media, wrote, “[I]t would be useful to negotiate the entire institution out of existence, or at least impoverish it to the degree it will have to decamp from Manhattan and leave that pricey Turtle Bay real estate for better purposes.”
He noted, “this ‘peaceful’ organization that has had no effect whatsoever on ending war spends most of its working hours bashing the state of Israel. In 2015 alone, the U.N. General Assembly adopted 20 resolutions singling out Israel for criticism – and only 3 resolutions on the rest of the world combined.”
Referring to the group mentioned by Bachmann, and its heavy influence on the U.N., Simon said the O.I.C. “includes most of the disgusting theocratic kleptocracies that exploit or enslave their people, abjure human rights, discriminate against women and hang gays from telephone polls, and lead the way – now with the help of Obama’s USA – in the aforementioned bashing of the only democracy in the Middle East.”
The most scathing criticism and loudest call for withdrawing the U.S. from the U.N. came from FrontPage Magazine’s Daniel Greenfield, who wrote, “We are not making the world a better place by being members of this anti-American organization which vacillates between being evil and useless.”
“The Jewish state is the U.N.’s scapegoat for anything and everything,” Greenfield continued. “These days, the United Nations is a forum for Islamist powers and the rotting remains of the Communist front to continue its war against the free world while seducing weak-minded nations into going along.”
Calling upon the U.S. to “pull the plug” on what he called “a failed experiment,” Greenfield called the organization “just a slush fund for redistributing our money to a vast U.N. bureaucracy and anyone willing to bribe it for benefits.”
Greenfield summarized, “The United Nations does not promote its own ideals. Or ours. Instead, it sanctimoniously violates them. Providing every brutal dictatorship with equal representation hasn’t ushered in an age of human rights. Allowing Islamic terrorists and the radical left to denounce their enemies hasn’t made the world better. And throwing $3 billion a year at the towering U.N. swamp on Turtle Bay only wastes our time and money.”
On Monday, President-elect Donald Trump called the U.N. “sad” following its anti-Israel resolution. He tweeted: “The United Nations has such great potential but right now it is just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time. So sad!”
Netanyahu slammed the UN for its “silence” in the face of Arab massacres and expulsions of Jews from the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, events that, he wrote, explain why no Jews were living in those territories when Israel was founded in 1948.
Some of the holiest sites in Judaism are located in those areas, including the Western Wall and Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City; the Cave of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs in Hebron, which was home to the oldest continuous Jewish community in the world until the Jews of Hebron were massacred and expelled; the Tomb of Rachel in Bethlehem; and Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus or biblical Shechem.
Netanyahu accused the UN of having “no legal justification for its decisions” on the status of the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. Instead, he argued, the UN possessed “only ignorance and malice” in its designation of those territories.
He explained the British Mandate for Palestine, later adopted by the UN and still legally binding, called for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
The anti-Israel resolution that just passed in the UN Security Council is based on the argument that Israel is "altering the demographic composition" of Judea and Samaria.
The United Nations has consistently ignored the fact that Jews were ethnically cleansed from these territories in 1948, which is why there were no Jews in the area until after 1967.
Some context: In 1929, Arabs carried out a massacre in Hebron against the Jews who were living there, including women and children, while the British police stood by.
In 1948, during Israel's War of Independence, the Jewish residents of Gush Etzion were expelled and murdered. The Arab Legion from Jordan destroyed the Jewish villages of Kalya (near the Dead Sea) and Atarot (north of Jerusalem). The Arab Legion also ethnically cleansed the Jews who were living in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, and then blew up all of the synagogues there.
Not a single Jew remained in any of the territories conquered by the invading Arabs in 1948. The reaction of the United Nations to this reality? Silence.
Another important reminder: The terms of the British Mandate awarded national rights to the Jewish people – and only the Jewish people – in the Land of Israel. The Mandate, which expanded upon the Biblical and historical connection of the Jewish people to its land, was ratified in 1922 by the League of Nations. It was later adopted by the United Nations and until today it is a binding document under international law that defines the international legal status of the Land of Israel.
The text of the resolution repeatedly and wrongly refers to the West Bank and eastern sections of Jerusalem as “Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.” The Western Wall and Temple Mount plaza are located in eastern Jerusalem. In actuality, the Palestinians never had a state in either the West Bank or eastern Jerusalem and they are not legally recognized as the undisputed authority in those areas.
Jordan occupied and annexed the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem from 1948 until Israel captured the lands in a defensive war in 1967 after Arab countries used the territories to launch attacks against the Jewish state. In 1988 Jordan officially renounced its claims to the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem.
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