Wednesday, December 3, 2014
From: Gary L. Bauer
BREAKING NEWS: Seventeen states, led by Texas Governor-elect Greg Abbott, have filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging President Obama’s executive amnesty for illegal immigrants.
World Votes Against Israel
Yesterday we witnessed two shameful diplomatic attacks against Israel that demonstrate the hatred and disdain it confronts every day.
In Paris, the French parliament voted 339 to 151 to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. The pro-Palestinian resolution was strongly backed by socialist members of parliament while most center-right members opposed it.
A similar political dynamic is emerging in the United States — the left is increasingly hostile toward Israel while the right supports it.
Yesterday’s vote in France marks the fifth such vote by a European nation (Britain, Ireland, Sweden and Spain) to recognize “Palestine.” Reports indicate Belgium may do so next week.
It would be easy to say that such votes are meaningless. There can be no Palestinian state without Israel’s agreement, and Israel can never agree to the creation of “Hamastan” or another Islamic terrorist state dedicated to its destruction. And why would the world, particularly Europe, want another radical state in the Middle East?
But these votes have symbolic meaning and they send a dangerous message. Held under the guise of promoting peace, they accomplish the exact opposite. They are whetting the appetite of the Islamists, whose goal is not peace with Israel or even a piece of Israel, but the destruction of Israel.
Keep in mind that this vote is coming just a few months after a terror war was waged against Israel from Gaza. As each vote passes, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and other radicals rejoice as their “resistance” is rewarded and their target Israel becomes increasingly isolated.
Anyone who believes that promoting the two-state solution is a “peace process” has utterly failed to learn from even recent history.
In 2005, Israel made huge concessions and gave up the Gaza Strip, hoping for peace. Instead, Hamas turned it into a launching pad for even more rocket attacks. It tried to undermine Israel’s security (literally) by digging dozens of terror tunnels.
But the French politicians weren’t alone yesterday in striking a blow against Israel. In New York, the United Nation’s General Assembly, not to be outdone, voted 161 to 5 to approve a resolution demanding that Israel give up its nuclear arsenal and open its nuclear facilities to international inspection. Standing with Israel in opposition to this absurd demand were the United States, Canada, Palau and Micronesia.
If you needed any more evidence of the uselessness of the U.N., there it is. It’s not worried about nuclear weapons controlled by the Holocaust-denying mullahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Stalinist regime in North Korea. Instead, it is demanding that the world’s only Jewish state — a state committed to the ideals of freedom and democracy and surrounded by hostile Muslim nations — agree to unilateral disarmament.
Rather than recognizing “Palestine” or making unreasonable demands on Israel, fellow democracies should be voting to condemn the Palestinian Authority and cutting off the flow of tax dollars that support its corruption and terrorism.
Abbas Rejects Jewish State
What makes the French vote even more disappointing is that it comes on the heels of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas refusing yet again to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. During an Arab League meeting last month, Abbas said, “We will never recognize the Jewishness of the state of Israel.”
In response Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said:
“It is indeed a tragedy that so many of our Palestinian neighbors still repudiate the basic facts of history. They deny the more than 3,000-year-old connection between the people of Israel and the Land of Israel. . . .
“Peace cannot be based on such hypocrisy. Peace will never be built on distortions of historical truths. Peace demands that the Palestinian leadership finally recognize the nation state of the Jewish people, and peace demands that they cease all incitement against Israel and the Jewish people.”
Corporate Elites Applaud Amnesty & Endorse Their Own Demise
The Business Roundtable, made up of the CEOs of America’s biggest corporations, is in town today meeting with President Obama. A parade of corporate executives has been on CNBC, virtually all of them applauding Obama’s unilateral action on amnesty, which many constitutional scholars agree is unprecedented and unconstitutional.
I couldn’t help but wonder how men this clueless could be running major corporations. By enabling the president’s power grab on this issue, they are building their own gallows. Is it cluelessness or worse?
If a president can, by himself, make up law on immigration, why can’t he make up law on corporate taxes? He could make up laws limiting executive compensation or higher overtime pay, which he is planning to do. He can make laws on climate change. Whoops — he’s already done that. In fact, recently announced EPA rules on climate change may well be “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the American public.”
This outrageous abuse of power sets a terrible precedent that could enable a future president to regulate companies to death or force them to become subsidiaries of the federal government (General Motors). Consider America’s insurance companies. Once denounced as “villains” by Nancy Pelosi, they are booming now thanks to Obamacare — a prime example of crony capitalism or what happens when big business gets in bed with big government.
Obama Taps Carter
The word around Washington is that President Obama will nominate former Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to replace outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. Carter, a career civil servant, is reportedly well-liked at the Pentagon and widely respected on Capitol Hill.
It has been said by some that Carter is the “smartest person in the room and he knows it.” According to the Washington Post, Carter is a Rhodes scholar with “a doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford University” and “degrees in physics and medieval history from Yale.”
The Pentagon bureaucracy is notoriously difficult to navigate. But the real problem at the Pentagon resides in the White House, which has been distrustful of the military and has micromanaged the Defense Department from day one.
PBS reported that during one trip to Afghanistan, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates “was stunned to find a telephone line at the military’s special operations headquarters that linked directly back to a top White House national security official.” Gates ripped it out and told commanders, “If you get a call from the White House, you tell them to go to hell and call me.”
If confirmed, Carter will be Obama’s fourth Secretary of Defense in six years. We wish Carter well, but see no reason to believe that anything will change in the next two years to improve our national security.
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