As of this writing it seems that Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud is poised to head the next government of Israel in conjunction with some small conservative parties.
This electoral result will cause much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments in the State Department and the White House which, along with other "progressive" regimes, apparently, shamelessly and shamefully, had been involved in efforts to defeat Likud.
The result in Israel brings to mind, again, an observation I have made from time to time (here, for example) that most often when the media is reporting an electoral outcome as too close to call, that means that the progressive cause or candidate will lose. We have seen it at home, e.g., in the various efforts to defeat Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and abroad, e.g., Scotland's independence, and we certainly saw it in the reporting on the Israeli election.
I hope it true that Bibi will remain Israel's PM for the sake of Israel but especially for the sake of America and the West. We need somebody who will stand up and ring the fire bell.
When a man is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind. Israel cannot get it wrong once and they know it.
ReplyDeleteYou have put your finger right on the button. Israel cannot take chances of any type when so many hands are raised against them. It is possibly the cardinal point that enrages the lefty/liberal/progressive airheads - the fact that Israel can and will ignore any and all entreaties if they perceive that their safety & security may be compromised.
DeleteAs an aside I read on the BBC website today that the Israel election result is going to bring forward the reality of an independent 'Palestinian' state. Ho ho ho.
Is anyone keeping score? How many candidates have lost after getting Obama's support? Oh wait a minute -- "Barak" is the Luo word for albatross.
ReplyDeletehe was about to lose, but then Chuck Norris stepped in....
ReplyDelete- reader #1482
Considering the money and operatives Obama had working against Bibi,
ReplyDeletein a bizarre way you could tab this one as another Foreign Policy failure for the Administration.
Though a clear win for America, her Allies, and We The People...not that Obama gives a rats butt about those 3 groups.
Oh...and it looks like Bibi will actually be picking up several seats in Parliament giving whatever coalition he puts together that much more influence.
ReplyDeleteTo close to call my @ss.
All I have to say is:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5TqIdff_DQ
James the Lesser
PS Mad there is something very satisfying about this one.
My hypothesis is that the lefties against Israel are anti-theists... they cannot take at face value the religious claims made by Israel's neighbors regarding the territory of Israel.
ReplyDeleteThey immediately perform a cursory psychoanalysis of the form: "If I were saying what these sworn enemies of Israel are saying, why would I be saying it?" and the answer that likely springs to their mind would be: "Because I really want something else, because having a religious devotion like that doesn't make sense to me, therefore it must not be what they are actually thinking deep down inside."
*that* gets us crap like "jobs in the middle east will solve this problem".
Why? Because that's what would solve the problem of "being a hippy Obama supporter".
- reader #1482
Poor Obama. He's got the Anti-Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to Anti-gold.
ReplyDelete~M.
Over at the Belmont Club, Wretchard has called it the 'mierdas' touch.
DeleteYesterday's reelection of PM Netanyahu was the best news in quite a while, wasn't it?
ReplyDeleteCan you imagine the pouting and sulking on part of jarret et al? Curses, foiled again.
Wonder what this vindictive bunch of arrested development aging hippies will pull by way of revenge?
All those chicongo communist MOB operatives who flooded Israel, all of Axelrod's termites, all that bussing around of arab scam voters; alas to no avail.
Thank you for confirming my long held belief. Was unaware until your mention that VIVAK is the name of her employer, thank you for noting it.
ReplyDeleteFor months, have been posting that this bizarre symbiotic - symbionese? - relationship stinks of her being 'a case officer for Iranian intelligence and he's just her local agent'.
Now I have a name, VIVAK, to put with my dark theory, which until shown otherwise, I assume to be true, given the travel of the last six destructive years.
Thank you most kindly.
Paul Vincent Zecchino
Manasoviet Key, Florida
18 MAR, '15
Yesss! Making Lefty heads explode in at least 5 time zones.
ReplyDeleteKen & Paul. Don't you mean VEVAK?
ReplyDeleteI don't believe the narrative that is being put out now about Bibi turning hard right and unexpectedly winning. This would not be the first time the MSM put out a bogus pre election story--Bibi's way behind-- hoping to throw an election by keeping despondent voters at home figuring why vote, our guy has lost. This election wasn't even close by standards despite busing efforts by Obama's team.
ReplyDeleteIn this case the bogus pre-election story has been followed by the bogus post-election story.
DeleteThe Left can never lose honestly. If they ever lost honestly they might have to reexamine their ideas, and that's impossible.
Bibi wins. obama loses yet again. obama is a feckless fool to be sure.
ReplyDeleteThere is a column in the NYT that calls Bibi's win sordid, shameful and divisive. The author was looking in the mirror at the time. Projection.
ReplyDeleteThe Times hasn't been this angry since Bush v Gore or even when the USSR imploded.
DeleteThanks commenters, finally, something important I had missed that explains the why and how long, with terrible implications, and FYI according to wiki, It is also now known as VAJA, and previously as VEVAK . Persian, or Farci, the letters stand for. Works in with my theories, until better knowledge comes along also.
ReplyDeleteJack
Ah, how easy foreign policy would be, were it not for all the foreigners with whom it must deal!
ReplyDeleteBeware of the revenge of the narcicist in chief.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI have a solution for solidifying Israel's security. We get the citizens of that country to vote to make themselves our 51st state, since many of them already have dual US citizenship. After that, the 51 states elect Bibi as their president.
ReplyDeleteOnce the State of Israel becomes part of our union, any attack by an imposter like Obama would be equivalent to an attack against Wyoming, or New Jersey, or Arizona.
Further, the Union then takes back all the real estate that Israel had to give up, such as Sinai and Gaza, paid for in Israeli blood, followed by deporting all the Arabs back to their countries of origin--primarily Jordan and Egypt.
That's kind of how we got Hawaii and Alaska to join the fold, isn't it?
Jim Carlson
Add in Judea and Samaria without any conditions as to who owns what.
Delete@Whitewall: I've also heard Taiwanese wistfully talking about becoming a US state. But I don't think it will happen, and much as I like and respect both Taiwan and Israel, I wouldn't support such a move. I even taught English in Taiwan long enough (and started my family there) that at one point, I went in to renew my residence permit and the officer on duty officially informed me that if I so chose, I had the right to apply for Republic of China citizenship.
DeleteFrankly, I'd be a little queasy about admitting more states even if Canada, Mexico, and Central America (if the latter two could get their collective acts together) came knocking on our doors. Maybe if Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands sought statehood, I'd be OK with it, but those people have already been citizens for a while.
I basically feel that a world full of actual nation-states that are both patriotic about themselves and respectful towards others is both possible and desirable. Such a world may even have a more free exchange of people for either temporary work/residence or immigration. But I'm an out-and-out skeptic towards too large a supranational entity; even if it is my own country. People being what they are, too much power does indeed corrupt.
Once, when in Taiwan, I was in a restaurant and overheard a conversation a couple of tables away (odd acoustics in the place, for the other party was not overly loud). A man jocularly suggested [in Mandarin] that the Taiwanese should seize a bunch of American hostages, stick them in a safe place, treat them decently, then surrender as soon as the US Navy approached: "Then they'd be stuck with us."
Kepha, right now, I wonder why anyone would want to join the USA for any reason. I see where our best allies and friends just delivered a humiliating diplomatic smack down to our Dear Leader over the AIIB which has been established by China as a direct challenge to American monetary dominance. The Obama Adm. fought this alliance with everything it could muster. Thirty some countries told Obama to go pound sand. Who can blame them.
Delete"Once, when in Taiwan, I was in a restaurant and overheard a conversation a couple of tables away (odd acoustics in the place, for the other party was not overly loud). A man jocularly suggested [in Mandarin] that the Taiwanese should seize a bunch of American hostages, stick them in a safe place, treat them decently, then surrender as soon as the US Navy approached: "Then they'd be stuck with us." "
DeleteI wonder if they had seen "The Mouse that Roared". O and his boys will everything in his power to mess with Israel now, It's like they are a bunch of high school girls punishing some poor girl who had transgressed the groups "coolness". Sometimes I wonder if all the things O and his crowd have done including the Iran agreement if it ever happens will as so much dust that just blows away in the winds of history.
James the Lesser
Dip,
ReplyDeleteI have a serious question. It appears clear that Obama will not just abandon Israel, but throw Israel under the bus and embrace Iran.
Yes, I believe this fully.
So, how do we as citizens impact Washington, D.C. I am running out of ideas and do not want the inevitable.....that being our country doesn't just abandon Israel, but in worst circumstance....shoots down Israeli jets, IF they have to move forward to prevent another Holocaust.
I lived in Germany a long time ago. I was taken by a German woman I tutored in English, who as she came to know me.....laid, what seems now like prophecy, at my feet, when she explained how Germany came to fall under Hitler's spell and then.....Frau Gunn, any country could become what Germany became.
Watching this our country betray Israel, took me back to visiting Camps in Germany and how that woman long ago, told me to watch out for AMERICA.
Any ideas of how to affect the minds in D.C. and to show forth support for Israel, as the rest falls apart..????
East Texas Rancher
One small hope I have is that the massive stock market bubble that is building as we speak will pop before Obama can do anything really destructive. Clinton was able to get out of town just as the internet bubble popped and 9/11 came in response to his neglect of defense.
DeleteI suspect Obama may see a similar fate but wants to stick it to the Jews before he leaves town. I learned about anti-Semitism from my black nursemaid as a small boy. She was a wonderful woman but hated Jews like LA blacks hate Koreans. I think it is jealousy of the small businessmen and women who sell them things they cannot buy from other blacks. That is things other than dope and guns.
Michael, I don't wish further economic misery on my countrymen--much as my low opinion of our current POTUS and his likely becankled successor are known around here.
DeleteAs for anti-Semtism among blacks, my own uncle (alov hasholom--I am Jewish on the paternal side; mostly Scandinavian on the maternal) ran into it while a NYC high school vice principal back in the Silly 'Sixties and the beginning of the Sillier 'Seventies. After the ideological and emotional investment he'd made in the Civil Rights movement and the education of his charges (mostly black and Hispanic), it broke his heart.
I, however, will note that I've also seen among blacks a kind of respect and appreciation for the Jews, too.
My read on the O's hostility to Israel is not so much old-fashioned anti-Semitism ("the Jews are Christ-killers!"; "They're an intrusive, alien people from Asia!"), but part of the Leftist, anti-colonialist paradigm with which he was raised. He's fine with Leftist Jews and those lukewarm attitude towards Zionism, I suspect; but when he looks at Israel, he sees intruders from white Europe imposing themselves on a noble, pacific, non-Western people at a time when sensible white Europeans were abandoning colonialism as fast ad they Winds of Change could blow--and that the Israeli majority is made up of Mizrahim who, in numerous cases, arrived in Israel as destitute as those Falastin Arabs who fled Al-Nakhbar in 1947 arrived in Jordan or Syria, simply doesn't register with the O. That part of the Israeli story isn't part of the anti-colonialist, Left-wing narrative. Besides, the Israelis made the fatal Cold War mistake of ending up on the bad side of the Soviet Union as well. Last of all, Uncle Kepha frankly suspects that the O isn't able to think outside the memes and paradigms he's received.
The O will not forgive Bibi for winning the election, and do whatever nastiness he can over Netanyahu's saying to his Israeli constituency by saying that a Falastin Arab state cannot be. To people like the O, the cause of the Falastinian Arabs is the cause of all peoples colonized by evil, white Western intruders, among whom are numbered the Israelis.
ReplyDeleteFurther, an Israeli-Falastin Arab peace is the holy grail of American diplomacy. It is probably not attainable--at least not until the both sides between the Yarden and the Med figure out they may have some important common interests besides mutual destruction--but every American statesman, politician, or political cone officer in the Foreign Service probably dreams that one day he will be the broker of such a deal. Bibi Netanyahu gets in the way because he is probably too realistic about the Falastin Arabs (perhaps because so many Mizrahim, who remember what it was to be Dhimmi, voted for him/), too committed in the hard-headed sense to his own side and people, and has too much of that East-of-the-Vistula, your-real-friend-will-argue-with-you mentality for post-modern Washingtonians to stomach.
Granted, my time with State was short and inglorious. However, from more senior colleagues who had served in their country, I got the sense that Israelis were not all that popular in the Foreign Service community. Some former fellow [Christian] seminarians I've kept in touch with who had gone to Israel for study tours have communicated with me a frank admiration for what they read as Netanyahu's "Israeli forthrightness", so I put the two and two together and suspect that, rather than actual anti-Semitism, lay behind my former State colleagues' dislike of the Israelis.
I read somewhere that the Obama election machine is hard at work in Canada trying to unseat Harper and Co.
ReplyDeleteDavod
Well the opposition has a kindergarten style candidate there, so it would fit right in.
DeleteGraham
Hate to say it, but perhaps Netanyahu should've thrown the election.
ReplyDeleteHear me out.
Obama doesn't like to appear 'uninclusive', and I'm sure it pains him that Israel wont 'just' accept Iran as a nuclear armed state.
That said, if Israel had a change in leadership, it *might* distract Obamites into a delay to 2017 on this nuclear suicide rush. At that point, hopefully a new potus who takes foreign policy seriously could look at the issue.
- reader #1482
There is a nice biography of the Iranian president at Weekly Standard.
DeleteIt shows how foolish and shallow the Obama people are but you knew that.
Hillary Clinton says "We have a Fun Deficit in America."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-03-19/hillary-clinton-let-s-go-camping
And yet, and yet ...
http://20committee.com/2014/11/17/lingering-okbomb-questions/
Arkie
Another good piece on Obama's strategy. >
ReplyDeleteTroubling doesn't cover it.