Why Obama waited 8 years to take on Netanyahu | Mondoweiss |

The speech was tragic for a simple reason. Everything Kerry said was known to him and President Obama eight years ago. The speech repeated warnings that President George H.W. Bush and his secretary of state made to the Israelis 25 years ago, when the illegal Jewish settlement project was a mere stripling of 25. And though the UN Security Council resolution of last week condemning settlements is a victory for Palestinians, and may well precipitate a crisis inside Israeli politics, it is not as if Obama succeeded in his 8-year quest to make a Palestinian state. No, he and Kerry failed.

That is the great political puzzle that these last-minute gyrations compel us to try and understand. Obama has finally done what he wanted to do and taken on Benjamin Netanyahu and exposed his extremism. Why did he wait so long? The answer is simple: the Israel lobby was against any real action. Jewish Americans of my generation and older opposed any pressure on Israel. So there was no pressure (till now, and Trump).

Here is a fact that proves my point: John Kerry’s closing act as secretary of state is a 72-minute speech devoted to a problem that was removed from the Democratic Party platform just five months before. Remember- Clintonites insisted that the words settlements and occupation appear nowhere in the party platform.

As Elise Labott said last night on CNN, Obama did not push the settlements/Palestinian state issue before the election out of deference to Hillary Clinton. Labott was saying, without saying it, that Clinton was so dependent on the Jewish establishment and large Jewish donors, that she could not “undermine [the] party’s fundraising capabilities” (as the National Journal says) by saying a word against Israel.

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Just as an NPR host two days ago allowed the Anti-Defamation League to label Keith Ellison’s statement about the Israel lobby a “bigoted” claim of a “Jewish conspiracy.” Just as Chris Hayes said last night on MSNBC that paleo-conservatives’ claims of the existence of a Zionist lobby smack of anti-Semitism. I suppose it is anti-semitic for me to point out that the executive vice president at Hayes’s company, Comcast, is a Jewish-American who has shown ardent support for Israel, raising money for Israel’s soldiers right along MSNBC favorite Ed Rendell. Or that an executive vice president at Time Warner, which owns the other liberal cable network, is a Jewish-American who wrote speeches for Benjamin Netanyahu.

In email, Clinton calls for a ‘Potemkin’ peace process

The Podesta emails keep dripping out of Wikileaks . As Haaretz notes flatly, “Many of the leaked Clinton campaign emails deal with Israel.” Yes: the emails demonstrate the centrality of Israel as an issue for the Clintonites, and the agony they went through over President Obama’s Iran deal. Last week we picked up the emails showing the Clinton team’s knee-jerk responsiveness to prodding by megadonor Haim Saban : Clinton must not “rebuke” Netanyahu over his opposition to Obama over the deal, but send positive signals re Israel, including opposition to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement- statements that could then be sent out to “thousands” of donors to help them understand where Hillary is on Israel.

Here’s the context. In a March 2015 email, right after Netanyahu’s victory in the Israeli election, Clinton foreign policy aide Jake Sullivan passed along a Times article in which Netanyahu offered a mild apology for his racist election-eve warning to Jewish voters that Palestinians were coming out to the polls “in droves,” and in which he flipflopped on his promise that no Palestinian state would be established on his watch.

Russian Hackers and the Clinton 2.0 Presidency by Oui @BooMan on July 30th, 2016

Most critical among them is: how could a major American political party do such a terrible job of securing its servers from infiltration?  Buzzfeed’s Sheera Frenkel wrote a piece a few months ago quoting cybersecurity experts warning that both parties had woeful security protections.  The latest Wikileaks e-mails reveals one blundering bloke ridiculing Frenkel for her claims.  Now who looks the fool?

Of course, Wasserman-Schultz had to go.  But she should’ve gone long ago.  The fact that she remained confirms that the primary system was rigged for Hillary.  It also speaks volumes about how a Clinton presidency would behave in similar circumstances: batten down the hatches, circle the wagons, protect our own at whatever cost.  See outsiders, even those in your own party, as the enemy.

[Source: Tikun Olam]

My previous diaries …
○ MSM Misses Another Headline On Holocaust Remembrance Day
○ Misogyny

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