(Scott Johnson) Former United States Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton appeared at a special event held by our local Minnesota chapter of the Republican Jewish Coalition at the Parker Rosen law firm in downtown Minneapolis last night. Announced 48 hours in advance of his appearance, the event was the most successful in the history of our small chapter. Ambassador Bolton drew a crowd to excess capacity. Included among the dignitaries who welcomed him were former Minnesota Senators Rudy Boschwitz and Norm Coleman, as well as Minnesota House Speaker Kurt Zellers. In the photo at the left Minnesota GOP deputy chair Kelly Fenton and event co-host Barbara Malzacher stand for a photo with Ambassador Bolton after his remarks. Chapter president Mark Miller deserves recognition in this context for having worked selflessly over the past several years to build up a chapter — here in Minnesota we are a minority of a minority — that could host an event like last night’s. It was great. In this crowd, John Bolton is something of a rock star. We remember his successful work in the administration of the first President Bush to overturn the UN’s vile “Zionism is a form of racism” resolution. (See pages 40-43 of his memoir, Surrender Is Not an Option .) We remember the Democrats’ remorseless campaign of defamation against him to prevent his confirmation as our ambassador to the United Nations upon his appointment by the second President Bush. (I wrote about the role of the New York Times in this campaign at the time in “Déjà vu, all over again.” ) We remember his stalwart representation of the United States at the United Nations following his recess appointment by the second President Bush. We love this guy. The occasion of Ambassador Bolton’s appearance was the Minnesota caucuses that take place tonight; Bolton is supporting Mitt Romney and spoke on his behalf last night. He invoked his solid conservative credentials, going back to his leafleting at age 15 for Barry Goldwater in 1964, to vouch for Romney’s conservatism. I was struck most of all by the seriousness of his approach to the question. He spoke at length about the peril in which President Obama’s diplomacy of weakness has placed us in the Middle East, with special reference to the 19 Americans now held for trial in Egypt and, of course, Iran. Bolton said we were close to a hostage situation with respect to the Americans held in Egypt. He stated that he thought Iran could produce a nuclear weapon before the end of the year and that the Obama administration was applying pressure mercilessly to Israel to prevent military action against Iran. Those of us who came in with worries on our mind left with a few we hadn’t come in with by the time he was done. It was a powerful, powerful presentation. He took several questions from the audience, including two along the lines of “Why not Newt?” In his answers he distinguished between executive and legislative abilities. In selecting a candidate and electing a president, he said, you want someone who can move “from A to B” when he gets “behind the big desk.” He thought that Romney’s executive abilities — here he cited the Utah Olympics — set him apart from the rest of the field. Bolton is a man who commanded the respect and elicited the warmth of this crowd, even those who did not necessarily or entirely agree with him on Romney (one of whom is my friend Barry Kelner). He is by far the most powerful advocate of Romney whom I have heard this campaign season and he is, in any event, a great American who deserves the attention of his fellow conservatives and fellow Republicans.
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John Bolton comes to town
(Scott Johnson) A few weeks ago Barry Rubin wrote an excellent column making a point that hadn’t occurred to me, but that was obviously true. Rubin observed that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is Obama’s favorite Middle East leader: For the first time in forty years, Israel is not the American president’s favorite Middle Eastern ally. Instead, that role is played by Turkey’s government. This would not be such a bad thing if we were talking about the “old” Turkey, the secular republic. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama’s favorite advisor among the regional leaders is Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Pretend all you want but Obama really dislikes—hates?—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and truth be told Netanyahu has done nothing to deserve that treatment. So what’s wrong with that? Rubin commented: The fundamental problem with Erdogan is despite being embraced by the United States, he is an enemy of the United States, the West more generally, and Israel. He is on the side of radical, anti-American Islamists who want to wipe Israel off the map. So angry and passionate is Erdogan’s loathing of Israel that the leader of the opposition mockingly but pointedly asked if the prime minister wanted to go to war with the Jewish state. How obvious should this massive change be? Let me sum it up in one sentence: A few years ago Turkey was an ally of Israel. Now it is an ally of Hamas. Rubin adds a little later in the column: “[W]hat is truly bizarre about Obama’s judgment is that Erdogan has done little beneficial to the United States and a number of things detrimental to it…” Please read the whole thing. I saved Rubin’s column in a tab to come back to at the appropriate time. Josh Rogin’s Foreign Policy post makes this the time: [I]n an interview with Time’s Fareed Zakaria, Obama named his international BFFs and the surprising list includes: German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, and British Prime Minister David Cameron. I’d love to know what these Cameron and Merkel think of Obama, but I think we can make a pretty good guess what Erdogan thinks of him. Let’s just say he thinks him useful. Via Marc Thiessen/AEI blog .
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Who is Obama’s favorite Middle East leader?
On Monday, both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post each published opinion articles attacking President Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Obama and Venezuela;s Hugo Chavez. (Photo source: Huffington Post) The LAT article, by former Dick Cheney adviser John Hannah, was entitled: “ The U.S.: MIA in the Mideast .” It makes the case that despite Obama’s success in the war against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, overall his foreign policy of “retreat” has destabilized the region: In private conversations I’ve had with Middle Eastern officials, the sense of unease and dread expressed are only more severe. Fairly or not, these leaders appear to have taken Obama’s measure and found him wanting. Their bill of indictment includes retreat from Iraq and, soon, Afghanistan; betrayal of longtime U.S. allies, especially Mubarak; indulgence of enemy regimes in Tehran and Damascus; overblown promises to end the Palestinian conflict; and a persistent failure to mount the type of credible military option that these leaders believe is necessary for addressing the region’s most urgent threat — Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons. The hardening conviction that the U.S. is disengaging from the Middle East should be cause for real concern. Hannah also attacks “the administration’s lack of strategic vision, its instinct for retreat and its complicity in the unraveling of a benevolent imperium that has for decades underwritten the region’s security.” He notes that a perception of U.S. weakness is “one that left unchecked will breed uncertainty, instability and even war.” The Washington Post article, by columnist Jackson Diehl, declares: “ Obama’s foreign initiatives have failed .” Like Hannah, Diehl questions the conventional political wisdom, which sees foreign policy as a strong card for Obama to play in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death. Diehl concludes that Obama’s major foreign policy initiatives–pushing Israelis to the negotiating table, disarming the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and engaging anti-American dictators–have all been failures: Veterans of the Middle East “peace process” shook their heads in wonderment as what at first appeared to be a rookie error evolved into a two-year standoff between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu…. The New Start nuclear arms agreement with Russia merely ratifies warhead reductions already underway in Russia, while imposing a modest cut on the U.S. arsenal. More ambitious multilateral initiatives by Obama — to control nuclear materials, for example — have made little progress, despite an elaborate summit the president hosted in 2010…. Khamenei spurned the U.S. outreach. Relations with Putin warmed for a time but now have grown cold again. In Egypt and across the Middle East, the president’s popularity is lower today than when he gave the Cairo address. That’s largely because, in pursuing “engagement,” Obama has mishandled the biggest international development of his presidency: the popular revolutions against autocracy. Diehl ends by observing that despite presiding over an effective counter-terrorism effort against Al Qaeda, “his signature initiatives have flopped.” Granted, these two articles appeared in the opinion pages of the LAT and the Post , respectively. The inclusion of these perspectives would have been more praiseworthy in the news section. Still, in an era when mainstream media outlets are reluctant even to publish opinions that run counter to the left’s narrative on foreign policy, these articles are refreshing–and on the mark.
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Credit Where It’s Due: Washington Post, Los Angeles Times Both Slam Obama’s Foreign Policy Record
(Scott Johnson) During my visit to Tulsa last month I noted a story in the local news involving the search of a used car dealership as the result of a lawsuit alleging that it received about $20.2 million from Hezbollah members or Hezbollah-controlled entities to purchase and ship used cars. I subsequently wrote a little more about the civil lawsuit filed in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York; the lawsuit attacks a complex cocaine and automobile smuggling enterprise in the United States and West Africa. The enterprise handles hundreds of millions of dollars each month and some of the profits are routed to Hezbollah through the Lebanese Canadian Bank. Terror finance expert Jonathan Schanzer’s New York Post column explains what’s happening here: Last month, the US government filed suit against a number of American and Lebanese businesses that allegedly helped bankroll the Lebanese terrorist group. The civil indictment in Manhattan blew the lid off a vast criminal network that included money-laundering, cocaine deals and more — including 30 US car dealerships that helped the group launder cash. As one investigator quipped, Hezbollah is the “Gambinos on steroids.” The indictment charges Hezbollah kingpin Ayman Joumaa with smuggling more than 100 tons of Colombian cocaine with the Mexican Zetas drug cartel, yielding hundreds of millions of dollars for the terror group. Indeed, the feds show that Hezbollah relies on a carefully constructed system of criminal enterprises from America to Africa to the Middle East. Since its 1982 birth, Hezbollah has worked hard to portray itself as a “resistance” organization, fighting against the alleged injustices of Israel, the United States and others, earning it wide respect across the Middle East. But today the group’s operatives — at home and abroad — are thugs who profit from drugs, fraud and more. This contradiction could help erode support among Hezbollah’s pious Shi’ite followers. In fact, the US government has for years warned of the growing Hezbollah drug and crime operations in the lawless “Tri-Border Area” of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. In 2002, the problem hit closer to home. Two men were convicted of operating a multimillion-dollar cigarette-smuggling operation out of North Carolina, which funneled money back to Hezbollah. Since then, US officials have grown increasingly alarmed by Hezbollah’s activities in the Western Hemisphere. In 2010, a Tucson Police Department memo warned of growing ties between Hezbollah operatives and Mexican drug traffickers, including the growing use of improvised-explosive devices and car bombs. Other evidence pointed to Hezbollah involvement in the tunnels Mexican cartel’s use to smuggle drugs into the United States. Last Jan. 26, the US Treasury designated a wide network of Hezbollah-linked drug figures, including Joumaa and nine other people, plus 19 entities. In February, Washington listed the Lebanese Canadian Bank as a “primary money-laundering concern.” It all culminated in this latest indictment that Manhattan prosecutors unsealed last month. Hezbollah denies the “false accusations about its involvement, directly or indirectly, in money-laundering or drug-trafficking.” But the facts speak for themselves.
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Hezbollah comes to the US, cont’d
(Scott Johnson) This must be part of that Arab Spring we’ve been hearing so much about. The Elder of Ziyon site draws attention to the report posted at Point of No Return : Cries of “Out with the Jews!” [and] “Kill the Jews!” greeted the arrival at Tunis airport of the Hamas chief in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh. StandWithUS (France) reports : A few hundred people gathered on 5 January at the Tunis-Carthage airport to welcome Haniyeh. As they waited for him they sang antisemitic chants and slogans to the glory of Palestine and the liberation of Gaza. They carried Palestinian flags, the flags of the Ennahda movement, and the black flags of the Salafists. Ismail Haniyeh was arriving in Tunisia from Turkey for a two-day visit. EoZ adds that the YouTube comments “include quite a few Tunisians who are deeply embarrassed about this.” For mote on the Turkey angle, please see Barry Rubin’s column ‘Why is an anti-American Islamist Obama’s favorite Middle East leader?” Let’s go to the tape.
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Tunisians greet Haniyeh
Appearing as a panel member on the syndicated Chris Matthews Show on Sunday, Washignton Post columnist David Ignatius predicted that President Obama would be more aggressive in taking on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a second term, as he cited the
On Sunday's Meet the Press on NBC, as guest Rick Santorum criticized President Obama because he refused to support a democracy movement in Iran that might have weakened the anti-America radical Muslim government of Tehran, but, by contrast, supported a democracy movement in Egypt directed against a pro-America government – which resulted in an election that recently handed more power in Cairo to radical Muslims – host David Gregory accused the GOP presidential candidate of being “patently contradictory.” (Video below) As he moved into the foreign policy portion of the interview, Gregory brought up a recent speech in which Santorum accused President Obama of engaging in “appeasement” against America's enemies,
The New York Times learned Thursday that its biases have consequences. In a letter from his senior adviser Ron Dermer obtained by the Jerusalem Post, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu scornfully declined the Gray Lady's offer to write an op-ed due to the paper's long history of anti-Israel sentiments: The opinions of some of your regular columnists regarding Israel are well known. They consistently distort the positions of our government and ignore the steps it has taken to advance peace. They cavalierly defame our country by suggesting that marginal phenomena condemned by Prime Minister Netanyahu and virtually every Israeli official somehow reflects government policy or Israeli society as a whole. Worse, one columnist even stooped to suggesting that the strong expressions of support for Prime Minister Netanyahu during his speech this year to Congress was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby” rather than a reflection of the broad support for Israel among the American people. As NewsBusters reported Thursday, that columnist would be Thomas Friedman. Dermer continued: Yet instead of trying to balance these views with a different opinion, it would seem as if the surest way to get an op-ed published in the New York Times these days, no matter how obscure the writer or the viewpoint, is to attack Israel. Even so, the recent piece on “Pinkwashing,” in which Israel is vilified for having the temerity to champion its record on gay-rights, set a new bar that will be hard for you to lower in the future. Not to be accused of cherry-picking to prove a point, I discovered that during the last three months (September through November) you published 20 op-eds about Israel in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. After dividing the op-eds into two categories, “positive” and “negative,” with “negative” meaning an attack against the State of Israel or the policies of its democratically elected government, I found that 19 out of 20 columns were “negative.” Dermer concluded: Your refusal to publish “positive” pieces about Israel apparently does not stem from a shortage of supply. It was brought to my attention that the Majority Leader and Minority Whip of the U.S. House of Representatives jointly submitted an op-ed to your paper in September opposing the Palestinian action at the United Nations and supporting the call of both Israel and the Obama administration for direct negotiations without preconditions. In an age of intense partisanship, one would have thought that strong bipartisan support for Israel on such a timely issue would have made your cut. So with all due respect to your prestigious paper, you will forgive us for declining your offer. We wouldn't want to be seen as “Bibiwashing” the op-ed page of the New York Times. Maybe someone should remind the folks at the Times that Israel is America's strongest ally in the Middle East. Or mightn't that matter? (H/T Hot Air )
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Netanyahu Refuses to Write Op-Ed for New York Times Due to Paper’s Anti-Israel Bias
When anti-war liberals are pressed about whether they are anti-military, they normally claim to support the troops while disagreeing with the war the troops are under orders to take part in. But, as he introduced Thursday's Last Word show, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell certainly sounded like he was attacking the U.S. military as he not only absurdly suggested that it was the U.S. military, rather than the President,
(John Hinderaker) Tom Friedman isn’t the worst of the New York Times columnists–not while Paul Krugman is around–but he is the most overrated. If Friedman has ever had an original thought, he has chosen not to share it with his readers. Unfortunately, the thinkers he recycles keep going downhill. Now he has come to the bottom of the barrel, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. In his current column, Friedman blasts Newt Gingrich for his “invented people” riff and Mitt Romney for saying he would move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a long-time Republican Party Platform plank. These criticisms are par for the course for Friedman, a loyal Democrat. But he goes on to bash, simultaneously, all of Congress, the “Israel lobby,” and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government: I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away, not because they are hostile but because they are confused. I can’t explain the weird obsession that so many on the Left have with the “Israel lobby.” In some cases, it is transparently driven by anti-Semitism; Mearsheimer and Walt appear to fall into that category. But that diagnosis doesn’t seem to apply to Friedman. Maybe in his case, like so much that one reads in his columns, it is just a reflexive repeating of something he heard someone else say. But one hardly needs a nefarious “Israel lobby” persuading Congressmen–let alone bribing them, as Friedman claimed–to support Israel. Israel enjoys broad support among the American people, and it is natural to see that support reflected in Congress. This graph from Gallup shows how Americans have answered the question, “In the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?” from 1988 to 2011: Support for Israel is strongest among conservatives, but the poll data suggest that it is likely the broadest bipartisan consensus that Americans share on any contentious issue. As for the claim that Congress has been “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby,” Jennifer Rubin notes the blowback from Capitol Hill. Friedman’s thinking on this entire subject is hopelessly confused, as shown by his casual smear of Newt Gingrich: That thought came to mind last week when Newt Gingrich took the Republican competition to grovel for Jewish votes — by outloving Israel — to a new low by suggesting that the Palestinians are an “invented” people and not a real nation entitled to a state. Stop to consider that for a moment. Gingrich and other Republicans are “grovel[ing] for Jewish votes” by supporting Israel? How much does Friedman know about the demographics of America west of the Hudson? As of 2010, there were 6,190 Jews in Iowa out of a population of more than three million–0.2% of Iowa’s population. How many of those do you suppose are Republican caucus-goers? A few hundred? Then there is New Hampshire, where Jews represent 0.8% of the population; Republican Jews, a smaller proportion still. Or South Carolina, where a little over 11,000 Jews are sprinkled among a population of more than 4.5 million. And finally–I can’t resist this one–ask John Thune what he thinks about Israel. Thune represents South Dakota, home to a grand total of 395 Jews, which rounds to 0.0% of the state’s population. Friedman is unable to think outside the crude boundaries of stereotype, but it is obvious that the GOP presidential contenders are not “groveling for Jewish votes.” Rather, they are reflecting the strong support of conservatives generally, and Christian conservatives in particular, for Israel. It isn’t easy to display such comprehensive ignorance of a topic in the space of a 900-word newspaper column, but Tom Friedman has pulled off the trick.
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Tom Friedman Goes Mearsheimer and Walt