The Palestinian intransigence that cost Bill Clinton his Nobel Peace Prize.

...President Obama foolishly ignored this proof of the intentions of the Palestinians and made an already bad situation worse.We don’t know if Bill Clinton’s experience will chasten Hillary Clinton’s desire for her own Peace Prize if she becomes president or if this knowledge will ever find its way into the brain of a President Donald Trump, who also appears to lust after the glory of a deal that would end this conflict. But it should.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
15 May '16..

While campaigning in New Jersey on Friday for his wife, Bill Clinton was interrupted by a pro-Palestinian heckler. “What about Gaza?” the person yelled. What followed was an interesting exchange with the clearly exasperated former president that says more to inform the current attempts by both the Obama administration and the French to revive Middle East peace talks than it does about Hillary Clinton and what she might do if elected in November.

That Clinton would be heckled about the Palestinians is not a surprise. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is one of the few issues on which Sanders has not pulled Hillary Clinton to the left. She has tried, often without success, to match Sanders’ enthusiasm for massive expansions of government power and expenditures and new entitlements. But on foreign policy, she has attempted to walk a fine line between the Democratic base’s basic isolationism and her own internationalist/interventionist instincts while noting differences with her rival on temperament and experience rather than on substance. But she has not been shy about drawing strong differences with Sanders on Israel and the Palestinians.

Though she was the “designated yeller” at Prime Minister Netanyahu during President Obama’s first term, Clinton has also tried to position herself as a mainstream supporter of Israel and sharply disagreed with Sanders’ belief in U.S. neutrality and his willingness to spread canards about Israel’s attempts to defend itself against Hamas that have at times exceeded even those of the terrorists when it comes to inaccuracy.

So if Sanders’ fans are going to hound Hillary or her chief surrogate on any clear difference between them, it’s as likely to be about her not being as willing to attack the Jewish state as the Vermont socialist. That’s what happened on Friday but what Bill Clinton said in reply to the heckler’s cracks about Clinton’s unwillingness to join Sanders in condemning Israel was significant because it brought up something that is rarely discussed in the mainstream media coverage of the Middle East: Palestinian rejectionism.

While his wife has never stopped whining about the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that she blames for their problems rather than their own misconduct, Bill Clinton’s chief post-presidential complaint has been about how Yasir Arafat robbed him of the Nobel Peace Prize he was counting on. In July 2000, Clinton hosted Arafat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in a summit at Camp David that he hoped would mark the culmination of the Oslo Peace Accords that had been signed on the White House Lawn seven years earlier. In order to secure a final resolution of the conflict, Barak went further than any Israeli leader had ever dreamed of going in terms of concessions to the Palestinians. To the delight of the Clinton administration, he was put on the table a peace offer that gave the Palestinians a state in almost all of the West Bank, a share of Jerusalem, and all of Gaza. That was essentially everything that the Palestinians wanted, the two-state solution on a silver platter with an American president prepared to back up the Israeli leader even though the plan was far ahead of what most Israelis at the time said they were willing to risk.

But instead of grabbing the opportunity with both hands, Arafat said “no.” No matter how much Clinton, who saw his Nobel hopes going down the drain, Arafat wouldn’t budge, claiming that to accept the realization of the Palestinian dream of statehood would be his death sentence. What’s more, after shocking both the Americans and the Israelis with his refusal, Arafat doubled down on the refusal by launching a terrorist war of attrition after he got home. Seizing on the flimsy pretext of outrage about Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, the Palestinians began a bloody campaign in which the Palestinian Authority police fired on the Israelis they were supposed to be cooperating with, and Hamas and Fatah terror groups competed with each in launching horrifying suicide bomb attacks on Israeli civilians. Before it was over this second intifada would take the lives of over a thousand Israelis as well as thousands of Arabs and destroy a Palestinian economy that had boomed since Oslo.

As Abbas Plays the Same Old Double Game

...But just as the peace processors ignored Arafat’s double game, they are continuing to do so for Abbas, as they laud his statement to the Dutch Jews while ignoring his speech that showed he thinks all of Israel is “occupied.” It is high time someone in Washington called him to account for this, but such realism about the Palestinians will clearly have to wait until Obama leaves the White House.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
03 November '15..

For those like Presidents Obama and Clinton, who view Israel and its policies as the primary obstacle to peace in the Middle East, what the Palestinians do, say, or even think never seems to get on their radar screen. Compared to the Palestinians — both the supposed moderates of Fatah in the West Bank and the Islamists of Hamas that govern Gaza — the Israelis are relatively more powerful and so they are judged to be the ones with the ability to end the conflict and create a two-state solution. But in order for even this form of magical thinking to work, Israel requires some kind of peace partner. Cast in that role is Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, Yasir Arafat’s successor and a man that President Obama has praised as a champion of peace. But in order to believe he is such a person, observers have always been forced to restrict their study of his behavior to a limited number of moderate-sounding statements generally made in English and directed at Western and Israeli audiences. At the same time, you have to ignore the host of other damning utterances and actions that make it clear he is not interested in peace that are in Arabic and directed at his own people.

Arafat perfected that double game during the heyday of Oslo euphoria in the 1990s as Americans and Israelis clung to statements that could parsed as indicating he wanted peace while everything he said to Palestinians showed that he still intended Israel’s destruction. Abbas has learned to play the same double game with great skill. Last week, we got an example of just how he plays to different audiences when he extolled the two-state solution and his willingness to stick to Oslo when speaking to Dutch Jews. But two days earlier he told the United Nations Human Rights Council that he considered all of Israel, including land it held before the 1967 Six Day War, as “occupied” (this can be viewed at the Palestine Media Watch website). Like its silence about Abbas’s record of incitement that has helped fuel the current wave of anti-Israeli terror, the United States has remained silent about a statement that both reveals his intentions and explains his repeated refusals of peace offers.

In the decade since he succeeded Arafat (he’s currently serving in the 11th year of a four-year term as president of the PA), Abbas has cultivated a good reputation among American and Israeli left-wingers. His Dutch speech is not an anomaly in that he has told countless Western and Jewish audiences the same thing about wanting two states and giving up the “right of return,” which is synonymous with the end of Israel as a Jewish state. That’s just what Westerners who want to believe in the two-state solution want to hear. Thus armed with what they think is proof of a Palestinian willingness to make peace, they then attack the Israeli government and demand it show it grant Abbas the concessions he needs to sell a deal to his people.

It sounds good, but for every hopeful statement Abbas makes, he makes a few that indicate that his peace talk is as much of an act as the blood-soaked terrorist that he succeeded.

Case in point is his UNHRC statement in which he asked the UN body, “How long will this protracted Israeli occupation of our land last? After 67 years, how long? Do you think it can last, and that it benefits the Palestinian people?”

The term “67 years” is significant. According to those who believe a two-state solution is currently possible, it will require Israel to give up all the land it won in the Six Day War. Those who are serious about the idea understand that the Jewish state would have to be allowed to keep some of that land since hundreds of thousands of Jews now live there in exchange for parts of pre-1967 Israel. But even if you believe that is a deal the Palestinians can make, simple math tells us that the “occupation” of the West Bank and Jerusalem began 48 years ago, not 67.

Actually Bill, It’s Not Up to Israel

...So far from advancing the cause of peace, speeches like Clinton’s actually retard it. Of course, if Clinton were to go to Ramallah and tell the Palestinians that it was up to them to finally make peace, he would not be greeted with thunderous cheers, as was the case in Tel Aviv. But it would be an important wake-up call for a people that are still trapped in its own rhetoric of delegitimization. Israel has taken plenty of risks for peace.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
01 November '15..

He should have known better. Bill Clinton spent the years after he left the White House loudly and bitterly lamenting the fact that Yasir Arafat cost him a Nobel Peace Prize. Clinton hosted a peace summit at Camp David in the summer of 2000 at which Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians an independent state including almost all of the West Bank, a share of Jerusalem and Gaza in exchange for peace. Arafat said no and months later launched a terrorist war of attrition. But in spite of this, Clinton told a huge crowd in Tel Aviv last night that “it is up to you” in order to make peace in the Middle East. Clinton was an honored guest at a peace rally/commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s murder. President Obama also sent taped remarks along similar lines that were played at the event.

It is all well and good to praise the search for peace. It is quite another to tell them that it is up to them to decide whether there will be peace. Because if there is anything that the last 22 years have taught us it is that it clearly not up to the Israeli people.

According to Clinton:

I always thought the role of the United States was to provide whatever help necessary to ensure Israel’s security, maximize the benefits of peace and minimize the risks. But the decision is yours.

The next step in the magnificent story of Israel… the next step will be determined by whether you decide that Rabin was right, that you have to share your future with your neighbors, that you have to stand for peace, that the risk for peace isn’t as severe as the risk of walking away from it. We are praying that you will make the right decision.

Yet, as Clinton knows, Barak repeated the offer the next year, and Ehud Olmert sweetened it in 2008. Both times the Palestinians against refused. Then Benjamin Netanyahu offered withdrawals from most of the West Bank and committed himself to a two-state solution and still the answer was no. Before that, Ariel Sharon withdrew every soldier, settler and settlement from Gaza hoping to create an opening for peace and instead set the stage for the creation of an independent Palestinian state in all but name there that is an Islamist terrorist dictatorship. Each time Israel took the kind of risks for peace that its friends and critics had been urging it to do yet got neither peace nor credit for the sacrifice.

To be fair to Clinton, there’s little doubt that he cares about Israel and the Israeli people have always appreciated his genuine affection and returned it. That’s more than can be said for Obama, who, at best, regards Israel with condescension, restricting his praise for a mythical Israel of the past that didn’t face the real country’s terrible war and peace dilemmas.

But in spite of Clinton’s intimate knowledge of the peace process, he still clings to the notion that somehow it is within the power of the Jewish state to force an end to a century-long conflict with the Palestinians.

The signing of the Oslo accords on the White House lawn was a high point of Clinton’s presidency and sealed his relationship with Rabin. Clinton’s honoring a man who was tragically murdered is entirely appropriate. But the problem here is the implicit assumption that it was assassin Yigal Amir’s bullet that killed the peace process or the Israelis who peacefully demonstrated against their government for empowering terrorists and not the third man in the famous picture with Clinton and Rabin: Arafat.

(Video) Dear John, Bill, and Catherine. Oslo Accords, been there, done that.

LOTL..
18 June '13..
H/T Greg Lauren/IsraelUnseen.com..

As the ongoing stream of visitors once again proffer ill-advised and unbidden advice, perhaps it's time to take a short look back at their and their predecessors prior contributions.

The twenty years from the signing of the Oslo Accords, 1993-2013, brought the State of Israel and it's people 1,537 murdered and tens of thousands injured and crippled. Thus the Oslo Accords became known instead as the Oslo War, which from the year 2000 and onward itself accounts for 1,235 of the above total. The first video below presents a montage of these terrible years in a way that no words can convey. The background track is "The Ballad of Oslo's Children" from our friends at LatmaTV, and is presented and translated in the 2nd video below.


Yaron Lahav



LatmaTV

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook.

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A Surprise? Clinton and Palestinian Culture: Not So Fast

Seth Mandel..
Commentary/Contentions..
01 August '12..

Over at the Atlantic, Garance Franke-Ruta contrasts Mitt Romney’s opinion of Palestinian “culture” (or, rather, how the media interpreted his comments) with that of Bill Clinton. With a hat-tip to National Journal’s Matthew Cooper, who dug up the quote, Franke-Ruta publishes a comment Clinton made in a speech last year in Riyadh that would seem to put him at stark odds with Romney on their evaluations of Palestinian culture.

When I read the quote, I immediately recognized it: I once heard Clinton deliver the same line–only it was to a Jewish audience, and it was meant to make the opposite point he was making to the Saudis, a point that comports much more with what Romney said. (Classic Clinton there, by the way.) First, what Franke-Ruta quotes, via the Arab News:

He said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have done a remarkable job in the West Bank. “It is just an example of what would happen for the Palestinian people if they are given a chance to govern,” Clinton said. “Palestinians are a hard-working and an incredible community. They have done remarkably well outside their country. I have never met a poor Palestinian in the United States; every Palestinian I know is a college professor or a doctor.”

The problem in Israel, he said, is what happens in multiparty democracies around the world. “If you take a poll today, two-thirds of Israelis will support peace and a peace agreement,” Clinton said. “However, it is hard to get an Israeli Parliament that reflects the people’s views on this one issue. But we all have to keep pushing.”

This was a clever rhetorical trick here. Clinton doesn’t say the problem is in Israel, he just switches immediately to the problem in Israel, leaving the impression this is Israel’s fault without explicitly saying so. (Also, his comment about Israelis being unable to elect a Knesset that shares the popular view on the peace process is nonsense; the Israelis have such a government now.)

Honig - The nudnik’s oft-kibitzed refrain

Sarah Honig
Another Tack
06 October '11

http://sarahhonig.com/2011/10/06/another-tack-the-nudnik%E2%80%99s-oft-kibitzed-refrain/

Indubitably the worst kind of nudnik is a kibitzer and the worst kibitzer is the incorrigible chronic sort who just won’t let go, who is so full of himself that he utterly fails to realize what a tiresome, preposterous broken record he has become.

Bill Clinton, US ex-president and darling of all too many of his country’s inveterate Jewish liberals, doubtlessly knows that the Yiddish- derived “nudnik” denotes a nag, a pest and an all-around nuisance. At about the same time as “nudnik” became entrenched in American colloquialism, the Yiddish verb “kibitz” likewise entered the lexicon and its current dictionary definition is “to intrusively offer unwanted, meddlesome advice to others.”

Nudnik Clinton kibitzes with habitual relish, as if his assertions are valid and as if his judgmental pronouncements still count.

No matter how hard we try to consign him to the hindmost recesses of our memory, he keeps popping up with another exasperating rerun of the irksome old routine. In his latest kibitz-fest he lashed out at Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, insisting that the reason no Israeli-Palestinian peace has yet blossomed is the fact that obdurate Israelis had voted for Netanyahu.

Peace - it's not what might have but what couldn't have been

Soccer Dad
11 November '10

Last week, Former President Clinton wrote an op-ed making the fanciful claim that there would have been peace in the Middle East had Yitzchak Rabin not been murdered. I showed from the historical record that his claim was not accurate.

But there's another assumption that's faulty here. Implicity Clinton is blaming Israel. But by making Yitzchak Rabin the one indispensible person for peace to succeed he ignores that Rabin's positions and those of current Prime Minister Netanyahu are actually pretty close. It's a point that Yaacov Lozowick makes in two recent posts. In one he writes:

Mitchell Plitnick and many of his co-activists seem to accept the Palestinian narrative: the peace process was supposed to end with Israel on the 1967 border, Jerusalem divided, and some Israeli accommodation of the refugee problem. This, however, is counter factual. No Israeli government before 2000 ever accepted those positions (Yitzchak Rabin was openly against them); and while arguably some official Israeli negotiators may have come close since 2000, they were never authorized to do so by the Israeli electorate.

In the other he writes, more generally:

But perhaps it might be reasonable for self-proclaimed Israeli champions of peace to recognize that on Jerusalem, their anointed saint the martyred Rabin held the same position Netanyahu does.

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Clinton on Rabin; Dalia Rabin on Rabin

Yisrael Medad
My Right Word
04 November '10

In a New York Times op-ed, Bill Clinton praises Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo process.

A decade and a half since his death, I continue to believe that, had he lived, within three years we would have had a comprehensive agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Rabin's daughter, Dalia, was less sure:

Interviewed in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot on October 8, Dalia Rabin said, “Many people who were close to father told me that on the eve of the murder he considered stopping the Oslo process because of the terror that was running rampant in the streets and that Arafat wasn't delivering the goods. Father after all wasn't a blind man running forward without thought.

(Read full post)

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Clinton: nostalgic for a past that never was

Soccer Dad
04 November '10

In the weeks following the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin, Israel handed over control of six cities to the Palestinian Authority. The New York Times reported at the time.

For Mr. Abu-Ghdeib, a local wallpaper dealer who had enlisted in the police, the building carried added significance, for it was there that he had been imprisoned by the Israelis.

"I shook the door of the cell where I was held," he said today. "It made my hair stand on end. I saw the place where they had beaten me. I had dreamt of freedom, and today I feel free."

Mr. Abu-Ghdeib, who had been jailed in Nablus and elsewhere in the 1970's for taking part in weapons training and a grenade attack on Israeli soldiers, joined the several hundred Palestinian police officers, whose arrival today from the self-rule enclave of Jericho was met by ecstatic throngs.

Tens of thousands of people spilled into streets covered with brightly colored banners and pennants in the largest outpouring of jubilation since Israel began withdrawing its troops last month from West Bank cities and villages under an agreement signed in September. Most of the pullout will be complete by January, ending Israeli rule over much of the West Bank.

And two weeks later:

Under a final cascade of stones, Israeli troops withdrew today from Ramallah, completing a pullout from six West Bank cities and their neighboring villages in preparation for Palestinian elections next month.

"Out!," shouted youths as a column of Israeli jeeps moved away from a police station downtown, trailed by scores of cheering Palestinians. As stones pitched by the crowd arched toward the receding vehicles, Palestinian officers entered the station, raised a flag and greeted the throng from the roof, waving their rifles.

The scene was similar to others played out this month across the West Bank, and it set the stage for Palestinian elections planned for January 20.

Under an Israeli-Palestinian accord signed in September, Israeli forces have left six cities and more than 400 villages and towns in recent weeks, ending 28 years of control over much of the West Bank.

Then a few weeks later the terror started:

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Is This The Next Scenario For Middle East Talks?

Daled Amos
27 October '10

In her blog, Laura Rozen writes On the Mideast, waiting for superman.
Can you guess who superman is?

Another Washington Middle East hand who consults closely with the administration said he too has started to hear growing rumors in recent days of a possible official administration role on the Middle East peace process for Indyk. Under the arrangement that was described to that Middle East hand, the NSC's Dennis Ross would capitalize on his decent ties with Israel's Bibi Netanyahu to be a main administration point of contact with the Israelis, Indyk would capitalize on his good ties with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (universally referred to as Abu Mazen) to be a channel to the Palestinians, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be in charge.

Indyk, who has served in a consulting role to the team of Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell, professed Tuesday in response to a query that it was the first he had heard of any such plan.

Meantime, the New America Foundation's Steve Clemons said he is convinced that the man who can help Obama bring peace to the Middle East is former President Bill Clinton. That is the spouse of Obama's Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

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Bill Clinton’s soul in jeopardy

Fresnozionism.org
08 October '10

Recently I accused Bill Clinton of being stupid (or at least ignorant). One of the comments on that post corrected me: not stupid, the writer said. Corrupt.

Could this be true? I decided to look for the money.

Washington Post, December 2007:

The royal family of Saudi Arabia gave the Clinton facility in Little Rock about $10 million, roughly the same amount it gave toward the presidential library of George H.W. Bush, according to people directly familiar with the contributions.

Hmm, that’s a start.

Clinton has a foundation, which supports his library plus many charitable operations worldwide. In 2008, the Obama administration required the foundation to release its donor records as a condition of Hilary Clinton’s nomination as Secretary of state. It turns out that Bill’s foundation had received contributions totaling at least $492 million from various sources, including these:

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Mr. Clinton, Spend Your Time Relieving Disasters Not Creating Them

JINSA
Report #: 1,030
08 October '10

Bill Clinton was on his way to a terrific post-presidency. Working with George H.W. Bush on international aid, and more recently with George W. Bush on Haiti relief, Mr. Clinton was having an impact both on national and international well-being. What led him to open his mouth about Israel is unfathomable.

A few weeks ago in New York, Mr. Clinton said too many Russian immigrants to Israel, and particularly too many Russians in the Israel Defense Forces, had made Israel unwilling to make territorial compromises on the West Bank and thus sunk his chance to broker "peace" at Camp David II in 2000. He invoked the universally respected Natan Sharansky - former Soviet refusenik and prisoner, Israeli politician, human rights activist and author - to bolster his claim. Sharansky took the unusual step of publicly rebuking Mr. Clinton.

The charge was rubbish anyhow. Mr. Clinton himself, as well as his aides, made it clear at the time and again later that the Camp David II talks foundered when Yasser Arafat walked out on Ehud Barak's offer of 95 percent of the disputed territory plus political accommodation in Jerusalem. Mr. Clinton had added the promise of American support and funding for resettlement of Palestinian refugees and their descendants in places other than the State of Israel. Arafat couldn't accept the terms.

Actually, Mr. Clinton acknowledged as much this week at the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, where he said the current talks were focused on what had, essentially, been his proposal in 2000. "They're not even pretending now that they are not basically going to go back and take the modernized version I authored in 2000 that Israel accepted [emphasis added]... They blew 10 years and complicated the problem demographically by not doing this in 2000. It must be done," he said.

(Read full report)

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‘Smart’ Bill Clinton manages to look like an idiot

Fresnozionism.org
06 October '10

Some things just make me tired. After everything that’s happened, we are still hearing this kind of crap from supposedly intelligent, informed (and important) people:

Former US president Bill Clinton said Tuesday that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would take away much of the motivation for terrorism around the world.

He described the long-running conflict as the key problem in the region and said resolving it would have a knock on effect [sic] that could result in Syria ending its support for the Lebanese militant group Hizbullah and Iran turning back its controversial nuclear program.

“It will take about half the impetus in the whole world — not just the region, the whole world — for terror away,” he told an audience of Egyptian businessmen from the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt. “It would have more impact by far than anything else that could be done.”

Does he — can he — believe that the Iranian nuclear program is in any way related to the situation of the Palestinian Arabs? Can he have missed the clear intention of the Iranian regime to control the region and its oil resources, and by the way, to destabilize the regime of Mubarak or his successor in Egypt?

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Bill Clinton: Israeli Surrender Will End Threat Of Terror

Daled Amos
06 October '10

Bill Clinton is on a roll.

Last month:

Russian immigrants to Israel have emerged as a central obstacle to achieving a Middle East peace deal, according to former President Bill Clinton. He voiced fears that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which increasingly consists of soldiers hailing from this community, might not be fully willing to oppose Israeli settlers as a result.

This month:

Former United States President Bill Clinton said Tuesday that forcing Israel to surrender Judea and Samaria to the American-backed Palestinian Authority would take away much of the motivation for terrorism around the world.

He described the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict as the key problem in the region and said resolving it would have a knock on effect that could result in Syria ending its support for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Iran turning back its controversial nuclear program.

"It will take about half the impetus in the whole world — not just the region, the whole world — for terror away"...

Clinton is really going all out to push for the Mideast peace initiative that Hillary is spearheading.

(Read full month)

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Clinton’s KuBa conceit.

Sarah Honig
Another Tack
01 October '10

Rare is the American president with true strategic comprehension of the convoluted intricacies of the Mideast’s assorted disputes, especially the one arising from the implacable Arab refusal to accept a sovereign Jewish state in what they consider their lebensraum (one of Hitler’s favorite terms claiming entitlement to “living space” for his superior race)

The wisdom or imbecility of any given US president is inevitably as good as that of the aides who whisper in his ear. But some have unquestionably displayed greater capacity for preposterousness than others. It may be a mere accident of history or the result of left-wing proclivities, but the greatest inanities have of late emanated from Democrats – the present White House resident and his two living Democratic predecessors, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Barack Obama’s grasp of the Mideast is so skewed and so predisposed to support the Arab/Muslim narrative that he liberally subscribes to its copious falsehoods as part of his multicultural, moral-relativist, postmodern aggrandizement of the Third World. His fawning Cairo address in 2009 was just the preview of coming attractions.

THE LESS said about Carter the better. Suffice it just to note that yesteryear’s self-professed honest broker, who had subsequently slandered Israel as an apartheid state, happens to be the closest ideologically to Obama and most like him in terms of abysmal failure as the leader of the free world.

Then comes affable Clinton, who manages to endear himself to all and sundry as a more pragmatic product of the Democratic Party machine and even a good friend of Israel. For all we know he may have convinced himself that he’s indeed the Jewish state’s outstanding chum. His utter immodesty surely leaves little doubt in his mind that he knows better than us what’s best for us. But does arrogance endow him with exceptional insight?

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Israel Reduced to the Size of a Jail Cell

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
25 September '10

"I said, ‘Natan, what is the deal [about not supporting the peace deal. He said, ‘I can't vote for this, I'm Russian... I come from one of the biggest countries in the world to one of the smallest. You want me to cut it in half. No, thank you.'"

I responded, "Don't give me this, you came here from a jail cell. It's a lot bigger than your jail cell."

President Bill Clinton

It is truly astounding that Bill Clinton, who in the 1970's was visiting Moscow and conducting Anti-American rallies on behalf of the Kremlin, had the gall to tell, Sharansky, who had risked his life as a political dissident during the 1970's fighting the Kremlin, that he should be satisfied that his new country is bigger than the old jail cell where the Soviet authorities had stuck him.


Just be happy that we're allowing you to keep half of the 8,500 square miles, instead of a few meters in a prison cell. That was the message from the red-faced leader of the free world. And under it, the subtext that if you don't like it, a prison cell might still be waiting for you. Perhaps somewhere under the Hague by the diktat of the ICC.

This isn't the first time that Sharansky had heard that particular message. In 1978, while Bill Clinton was starting his political career, Sharansky was being sentenced by a Soviet court to 13 years of forced labor in the Siberian Gulag. In his response to the court, Sharansky declared; "For more that two thousand years the Jewish people, my people, have been dispersed. But wherever they are, wherever Jews are found, every year they have repeated,'Next year in Jerusalem.' Now, when I am further than ever from my people... facing many arduous years of imprisonment, I say, turning to my people... 'Next year in Jerusalem.'"

According to Clinton, Russian Jews are the biggest obstacles to peace, followed by Mizrahi Jews who escaped Muslim rule. Naturally these are the groups in Israel who are the least naive about what happens when you surrender to tyrants. While many of the Israeli lefties, the grand-children and great-grandchildren of native Israelis whom Clinton interacts with, the cultural elite who live in Tel Aviv and rarely set foot outside it unless they're paying a visit to Paris or Brussels, have forgotten the reality that lurks in the hills of the Shomron.

And what of the country that Clinton and his successors have tried to reduce until it is hardly more than a jail cell.

(Read full article)

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Clinton’s Slander Against Israeli Democracy

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
24 September '10

Bill Clinton’s comments on the number of Russian immigrants and settlers in the Israel Defense Forces do indeed, as Jennifer said, sound xenophobic. But Clinton’s slander is far more dangerous than mere xenophobia. For when he says the increased presence of “children of Russians and settlers, the hardest-core people against a division of the land… presents a staggering problem,” what he’s implying is that these soldiers cannot be trusted to obey a government order to evacuate territory — or in other words, that Israel is no longer a democratic state where the government controls the army. And nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s true that for the last decade, roughly one-third of newly minted infantry officers have been Orthodox Jews, almost triple their 12 percent share in the overall Jewish population. It’s also true that Russian immigrants and their children, representing about one-sixth of the Jewish population, constitute one-fourth of all combat soldiers.

But all this was equally true five years ago, when Israel withdrew from every inch of Gaza, dismantled its 21 settlements and evacuated four West Bank settlements to boot. Yet of the approximately 50,000 soldiers involved in the disengagement, a mere 63 refused to obey the evacuation order — about a tenth of a percent. That’s less than the number of leftists who have refused to serve in the West Bank — though they, too, are a tiny minority.

Both numbers are minuscule for a very good reason: most Israelis of every political stripe accept the principle that in a democracy, the army takes orders from the government regardless of the soldiers’ own political views. That’s as true of “Russians” and settlers as it is of secular leftists — as both the disengagement and several subsequent evacuations of illegal settlement outposts show. If Clinton offered no evidence for his libelous insinuation to the contrary, it’s because there isn’t any.

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Bill Clinton admits he 'considered' releasing Pollard at Wye

Carl
Israel Matzav
20 September '10

Former US President Bill Clinton has admitted for the first time that Prime Minister Netanyahu came to the 1998 Wye River Conference thinking he had Jonathan Pollard's release in hand, and that Clinton did consider releasing Pollard.

Former US president Bill Clinton said in a recent conversation with a prominent US Jewish leader that when Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu went to the Wye River Plantation talks in 1998 with Yasser Arafat, he thought that he would return to Israel with Jonathan Pollard, according to Israeli diplomatic sources.

According to these sources, this is the first time Clinton has acknowledged that Netanyahu went to the talks thinking he had Pollard’s freedom in hand.

In the end, a deal to release Pollard as part of the agreements with Arafat was scuttled when then-CIA director George Tenet threatened to resign if the deal went through.

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Bill Clinton (Unintentionally) Explains it All to Us: Why the Ruling Ideology in the West is Making the World Worse by Trying to Making It Better

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
24 May '10

Bill Clinton, former U.S. president, spoke at Yale University and said some interesting things. There is a positive side to his remarks about international affairs—especially in terms of good intentions (a very American characteristic)—but he also revealed some of the very dangerous thinking that’s making the world worse, not better.

The globe, he said, is now “too unstable ... too unequal and ... completely unsustainable.”

I’m tempted to point out that there have been plenty of times, actually far more of the time, when the world was even more unstable and unequal. But let that go.

What’s Clinton’s solution?

“A non-zero sum game is when both parties can win….If you want it to change, you have to find a way for everyone to win.”

This is noble and very rational. It is also, in some respects, insane. No, not everyone can “win” because each individual, group, and nation defines for itself what winning means. And there are contradictions, which lead to what we call conflict and war.

On one level, what Clinton is saying is that America has to get everyone to redefine their own thinking and think like “us.” This is one of the oldest American conceptions around the world, one which liberals traditionally liked to ridicule. (One famous example was making fun of a Republican senator who said during China's pre-Communist era that this country would progress ever upward until it reached the level of Kansas City.)

And after all, if we are so “multicultural” why can’t we understand that people in, say, Bosnia or on the island of Ireland, or in Pakistan, or a hundred other places have totally different beliefs and goals?

On another level, Clinton is implying that prosperity will solve everyone’s problems, that if you stuff enough material goods into the craws of all they will be happy. That’s another concept that liberals have historically ridiculed and identified with conservatives.

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Bill Clinton Explains How Middle East Utopia is Just Around the Corner, Just Tell Israel and Palestinians How to Make Peace

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
19 April '10

It’s truly amazing what some people say about the Middle East without anyone noticing the inaccuracies and contradictions. An interview former President Bill Clinton gave to the ABC news’ program “This Week” is a wonderful example of this situation.

I will now show, point by point, how ridiculous is almost everything he said and the large amount of things he left out. Still, Clinton—who was an okay president—is savvy enough to make one terrific argument which shows he really does understand the shortcomings of Obama Administration policy.

Of course, as a fellow former president, a Democrat, and husband of a certain secretary of state, Clinton isn’t going to trash the current government’s stances. But his statements force him into saying some very silly things. I will give you one point for each of them you spot. Read each paragraph, think of one or more major problems with it, and then read my analysis.

"If [Obama] decides to [issue his own peace plan], I will support it,” said Clinton, suggesting that such an action would be like what he did at the Camp David meeting and later in the Clinton peace plan, both in 2000.

What’s wrong with this?

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