Iran Amok

Donald Trump returned to office promising that he would never start another dumb war.  Except if it's with Iran.

Iran has been a bugaboo for Americans for years.  Having had an Islamic republican government since the revolution that swept out the vacuous and hated Shah in 1979, it is living proof that authoritarian states can, in fact, last a long time, contrary to popular wisdom.  The U.S. had supported the Shah and had even put him back in power at the request of the British to keep a socialist prime minister from nationalizing British oil interests, yet it wasn't the British Embassy in Tehran that got overrun by Iranian militants in January 1979, it was the American embassy.  That takeover was short-lived, but on November 4, 1979, two weeks after President Carter let the Shah come to America for medical treatment, militants in Tehran overran our embassy again and took its inhabitants hostage for fourteen months.  Subsequent attempts at normalizing relations with Iran backfired miserably.

Donald Trump clearly has a particular hatred for Iran, or at least for the mullahs who run the show there.  Perhaps the paranoid Trump, who believes that all other nations are out to humiliate us, had his own sensitivities offended when, at the age of 33, he saw the U.S. Embassy get seized in November 1979.  Something about it clearly wedged into the folds of his brain.  For he clearly bought Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's overheated rhetoric about Iran being close to getting the bomb, and he even in his first presidential term withdrew from the agreement that was meant to ensure that that would never happen.  The attacks Israel has launched against Iran have given Trump the excuse he needs to pursue another Middle Eastern war as part of a clearly psychological need to punish Iranians for burning all of those American flags.

Except that even some of his staunchest supporters - Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson - have a problem with that.  Carlson was even appalled when interviewing Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) on his Internet program and Cruz demonstrated his clear lack of knowledge about the very country he wants Trump to go ahead and attack.

Adding to this is the fact that Mike Huckabee, a born-again Christian, is the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, and his only qualification for that job is his experience with evangelical Armageddon prophesies.  He wants a war in the Middle East to bring about the Second Coming of Christ to restore the Garden of Eden with Christians, along with Jews who accept Jesus as the Messiah, to be saved and Muslims, along with Jews who still reject Jesus as the Messiah, to be condemned to the fiery furnace.

Meanwhile, the General Authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints will flee from Utah to the site where Mormons believe the Garden of Eden will be restored upon Christ's return - the place non-Mormons know as Kansas City.    

And wouldn't it be something it the Saints turn out to have been right all along.

I'd prefer not to find out just yet.  But it figures that I'm finally ready to travel to Europe, something I've wanted to do for 35 years, and yet one more thing might prevent me from doing so this time as well.

That thing is World War III.

Guess I'll be going to Kansas City instead.  I'm not a Mormon, but I want to hedge my bets.  Also, it's easier to get there than to the Holy Land. 

Gaza

It's been a year to the day since Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip crossed into Israel and murdered young people at a music festival that started out as being like Woodstock but ended up being twelve times worse than Altamont.  You would think that after a year of relentless bombardment of the strip, Hamas would be completely obliterated and the Israelis would be in complete control and the war would be over, as the Israelis clearly identified the enemy as Hamas, not "terror," as the U.S. did after 9/11 and chose to fight a war against a tactic more than against an organization.   

One year on, not only is the war against Hamas is still going on , but a series of  military operations between Israel and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah organization in Lebanon has begun and subsequently intensified.  What could happen if these military operations increase?  World War III, that's what.  Or worse.  How could it be worse? Add hostility from Arab-American and American Muslim populations in key swing states toward Kamala Harris and the evangelicals flocking to Donald Trump who believe that Armageddon is at hand, and, well, you can draw your own conclusions. 😱 

Iran Amok - 2024 Edition

After Israel attacked an consulate annex of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, claiming it was a building used by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that was not part of the actual embassy, Iran attacked Israel with at least three hundred drones.  The Israelis, with help from the British, the Americans and the Jordanians, shot down all but a handful of the drones with the few that got through doing little damage.

President Biden asked Prime Minister Netanyahu to "take the win" and let the Iranians call it even, but Netanyahu has said that Israel will do anything it considers necessary to defend itself.

The mullahs who run Iran and the nation's Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have regarded Israel as an enemy and as a country with no right to exist since the Islamic Republic took over in 1979 after overthrowing the Shah.  Just one more example of how American efforts to contain Soviet influence in the Cold War affect us to this very day.  If we hadn't put the Shah back on the Iranian throne in 1953 after ousting the socialist prime minister Mossadegh to appease British oil interests, we wouldn't have the Islamic Republic of Iran threatening Israel with annihilation. And we're obliged to help protect and support the Jewish state, even as the Iranians are possibly making a nuclear bomb.  Oh, that's better.   😠     

Gaza: Six Months On

If President Biden is voted out of office in November, the ongoing war in Gaza will be the reason.

Enough young people are appalled at Biden's unwavering support for Israel in the war against Hamas in Gaza, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to go after Hamas with the sort of force comparable to the use of a thermonuclear device, to deny Biden a victory in the election by going third party or staying home.  Nothing Netanyahu has done in prosecuting the fight against Hamas has persuaded the Biden White House to change their policy toward Israel because of Biden's interest in ensuring Israel's right to self-defense.

Except that Israel is gong way too much on the offensive.  This past week, members of Jose Andres' World Central Kitchen were killed by a precision missile fired by the Israeli "Defense" Force, leading many to suspect that part of Israel's strategy is denying relief workers the freedom to feed the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been turned into refugees and are barely scrounging to get by.  President Biden angrily demanded that Netanyahu open a route to food relief for charities to get through, threatening to condition further aid to the IDF, and Netanyahu acquiesced to the demand as the IDF punished those responsible for the firing of the missile .  This will help, but not much.  What Biden really needs to do is reduce aid to Israel to purely defensive weapons and get that damn temporary pier along the sea built to accelerate aid to the Palestinians. 

Biden has to make more of a tilt to trying to get a cease-fire arranged and get as much aid to Gaza as possible before he loses young people and Arab-Americans on such a widespread basis that it's impossible to win Michigan, a state with large Arab-American and Islamic populations as well as many politically active youth (particular among college kids) and a state he absolutely needs to win in November.  Alas, it may already be too late. 

Step It Up, Joe

The sudden disasters affecting Donald Trump, which I covered in my post before last, have certainly helped President Joe Biden in his efforts to win a second term and keep Trump out of the White House, but it's hardly going to be enough.  Biden faces headwinds within his own base, with young people, Muslims and Arab-Americans - who make up a large part of the Democratic electorate in the crucial state of Michigan - angry over his Israel-Gaza policy, as well as with blacks and Hispanics, and he may face more serious headwinds from progressives if he tries to add additional security to the southern border by executive order without the guarantee of a payoff in the form of getting Ukraine any aid.  And so many Democrats are getting dispirited with Biden even as Trump's base remains committed to their cult leader that the only wind at Biden's back, so far, is his own.

That stinks. 

David Ignatius of the Washington Post has a column out suggesting that President Biden take whatever action he can on Israel, Ukraine and the border - that is, respectively, stand up to Benjamin Netanyahu on his prosecution of the war against Hamas, find a way with House Democrats to circumvent House Speaker Mike Johnson and get aid to Ukraine, and issue executive orders to crack down on migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, the Squad be damned.

Some of Ignatius's column must have gotten through to the White House.  CNN reports that the United States is promoting a new United Nations draft resolution to call for a temporary cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war and is also planning to warn the Israelis against aground incursion into Rafah, where displaced Palestinians are now staying.  President Biden, still undecided as to what he can do, if anything, to shame Speaker Johnson into allowing a vote on aid to Ukraine, is announcing tomorrow sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin for being responsible for the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.   Navalny (below) was the brightest hope for a permanently democratic Russia (as opposed to the temporarily democratic Russia that Boris Yeltsin led in the 1990s), and his death has caused that hope to fade rapidly.  Biden's proposed additional sanctions would be in concert with the condemnation of Navalny's murder that has come from every major world figure.

Except for Donald Trump, who compared Navalny's torture and murder to his own legal indictments.

There are other issues Ignatius overlooked.  Biden has to find another way to promote his domestic successes, like cheaper insulin, even as he has to stop promoting economic successes that not enough voters feel ("Bidenomics" is the worst one-word slogan conceived since "Fahrvergnügen").  He also needs to remind voters that he ended the COVID pandemic in this country with his wise, prudent approach to the disease.  He should also point out that he successfully pushed through legislation to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices with pharmaceutical companies.  And there are other issues I could mention as well, like, oh, I don't know, infrastructure projects?

One of the biggest issues working in his favor is abortion, yet Biden, the second Catholic U.S. President, is reportedly uncomfortable talking about it.  He'd better start getting comfortable about it.  More Roman Catholic voters actually favor Trump over Biden than the other way around, so even as Biden shouldn't be afraid of offending conservative Catholics whose votes he doesn't have a prayer - literally - of getting anyway (like all of the Catholics on the Supreme Court not named Sonia by their mothers), he, as a Catholic, should be able to espouse a pro-legal-abortion stance as a medical issue so no one gets the idea that all Catholics are, well, the bad guys.

And we'd hate for that to happen.

Look, Pope John Paul II found out the hard way that freeing Poland and Lithuania from communism wasn't going to convince everyone that he was a good guy, so Joe Biden, knowing that he can't please everyone, should just come out and declare his personal opposition to abortion while expressing point-blank his even greater opposition to imposing his personal beliefs on others.  Many Catholics won't like that.  Some pro-choice non-Catholics may be even more hostile to that message, as Catholic politicians who adhere to their faith in their personal lives even as they may contradict it in their political lives get no brownie points from the Vatican's critics outside the Church.  But the vast majority of voters would be pleased to find a Catholic President who is broadminded enough to accommodate other points of view on the topic of abortion, and it would go a long way toward defusing the growing anti-Catholicism I see in this country; I mean, how is it that some of the most vocal critics of Islamophobia have no problem dismissing Catholics offended by assaults on their own faith as a bunch of intolerant fools, when Islam is just as patriarchal and socially conservative as Catholicism, if not more so?

As for the need for Biden to get out and engage with the voters, I don't fear that he won't do so.  Remember, the only reason he didn't engage with the voters so much in 2020 was because of that crazy little thing called COVID.  But when he does get out, President Biden needs something he can engage voters with.  This blog, and David Ignatius's column, offer constructive suggestions on what Biden can bring to the campaign trail.  

Crossing the Line

The Senate, under the leadership of arch-conservative Republican James Lankford of Oklahoma (below), has conceived a tough immigration bill that cracks down on border crossings and offers no pathway to citizenship for migrants already here.  It also provides aid to Ukraine and Israel, fro a total of $118 billion.  Of course, progressives are against it, as it is too tough against people breaking the law by crossing the border illegally.  But the biggest opposition comes from MAGA Republicans who don't want the bill - which some say is the best possible border bill to be negotiated - to pass, and Republican Speaker Mike Johnson ahs promised to stop it.  Why?  Because it will help Joe Biden and hurt Donald Trump.

So, the GOP doesn't really want to solve a problem because keeping it alive is good politics.  

And why would they do this? Mainly because it works.  Americans who don't follow politics regularly already blame Biden for the crisis at the border, which is why Trump leads him in the polls in six swing states.  Biden has already indicated he will support this Senate bill, and he's prepared to remind voters that he wanted to sign it but MAGA Republicans in the House wouldn't send it to him.  The only trouble is that voters won't care.  Because the President takes all the blame with failed legislation he had nothing to do with stopping.  Voters don't seem to get that Biden can't do everything.  He's only the President.

The bill also ties aid to Ukraine with border reform, so if this bill does fail, Ukraine won't get any aid and Putin will get the upper hand with the war in Ukraine that the Russian leader started.  A lot of people have a little problem with that.  Because if Putin were to emerge victorious, he would likely start a new war against the Baltic States and reincorporate them into the Russian state.  The last time the Kremlin annexed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into what was then the Soviet Union, Republicans were as isolationist as MAGA Republicans are now.  Only now they're letting the Kremlin take over small countries not because they're not paying attention.  They are paying attention - to Donald Trump.  

There might be a chance for border reform, and maybe sme aid will get to Ukraine, but I wouldn't bet on it.  

Oh, and by the way, on the subject of immigration, Martin O'Malley would have done something about it . . .

Rape?

There are credible accusations against Hamas for having raped and mutilated Israeli women when they stormed into Israel this past October 7.  

Yet no one in the left seems to care.  Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) downplayed it in an interview with CNN's Dana Bash, who is Jewish.  When Jayapal pivoted to the deaths of innocent Palestinian civilians at the hands of the Israeli Defense Force, Bash admitted that was true, "but you don't see Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women."

"I don’t want this to be the hierarchies of oppressions. This is not how we’re going to defeat terrorism," Jayapal replied.

Look.  I've said it before and I'll say it again.  I'm Irish, I was raised Catholic, and I believe that Irish-American Catholics should be on the side of the Palestinians because of Ulster.  Not to mention because of nine hundred years of oppression at the hands of the English before the fictitious "Northern Ireland" was created  But when at any time during the Troubles did commandos of the Irish Republican Army rape and mutilate Protestant women?   I certainly can't think of any such examples.  

We should support the Palestinians.  But we should not support Hamas.  There's a difference.

While You Were Watching CNN

With so much attention focused on Israel and on Jordan (not the country, the jerk from Ohio), CNN (and other TV news outlets too, in fat) have ignored just about everything else going on in the world.  Here's a brief rundown of things that have happened in the past week or so:

• The Nobel Economics Prize was awarded to American economist Claudia Goldin, citing her "for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes."
• The conservative National Party of New Zealand, led by Christopher Luxon, won the most seats in the New Zealand general parliamentary election.  A coalition government with the far-right NZ First Party is likely.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin (below) claimed that Ukrainian losses in its counteroffensive against the invading Russian army have been devastating.  Kyiv denies this.  Russia has also launched a new offensive in eastern Ukraine. 

• Federal judge Tanya Chutkan issued a gag order against Donald Trump in his insurrection trial, saying that Trump "does not have the right to say and do exactly what he pleases," adding, "This is not about whether I like the language Mr. Trump uses,” Judge Tanya Chutkan said. “This is about language that presents a danger to the administration of justice." 
• Fashion model turned journalist Gail O'Neill died unexpectedly last Tuesday (October 10) at the age of 61. 
• "Three's Company"star Suzanne Somers, who broke through as an actress fifty years ago in American Graffiti as "the blonde in the Thunderbird," died this past Sunday on the eve of her 77th birthday of breast cancer. 
• The Supreme Court of India declined to legalize same-sex marriage in that country. 
• The Philadelphia Eagles, the last undefeated team in the NFL's 2023-24 season, lost to the New York Jets, 20-14.

By the time you read this, a Speaker of the House may have been elected. Or not. But that's for another post.

The Hamas War

I never thought that a group of terror commandos could actually launch a full-scale land, sea and air attack on a country, but that's exactly what Hamas did to Israel over the weekend.  The TV news networks covered the war - which Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu (below) made an official declaration of against Hamas,  something I never thought was possible, as Hamas isn't a country - over the weekend at the expense of everything else.

I know what Netanyahu is going to do - frame opposition to his polices as tantamount to opposition to the war, as if to say that is you are either with him or you're with Hamas.  That way, he can continue to pursue his judicial "reform" agenda to consolidate his power.  Except that he spent so much time on that endeavor that he missed warning signals that an attack on Hamas was probably.  This war shouldn't strengthen Netanyahu.  Rather, it should weaken him. 

Of course, it will strengthen him.  In 2004, the revelation of a memo showing that Osama bin Laden was determined to attack inside the United States before 9/11 was a blow to George Walker Bush's reputation as he was going into a re-election campaign, but did it finish his Presidency?

Why don't you ask President Kerry that? 😠

On a more personal note, I have a lot of friends expressing support for Israel.  But I also have a few friends expressing support for the Palestinians and Hamas, saying that Israel is getting its just deserts for 75 years of oppressing the Palestinian people.  Just as Al Franken once said that his father had believed Jews should support civil rights because of the Holocaust, I, as an Irish Catholic, had long supported the Palestinian cause because of the Troubles in Ulster.  But this is different.  The Irish Republican Army at its worst never perpetrated anything against the British as horrific as what Hamas has just done in Israel.

COVID Continues

I keep typing "when will the pandemic end" in Google searches to get an answer to that very question about COVID, but no one seems to know.  And in fact, the latest news about COVID is not reassuring.

A lot of progress has been made in shutting down the virus in a good deal of the U.S., and despite a lagging vaccination rate, the number of fully vaccinated Americans goes up each day - 46.4 percent as of the end of last week.  It has been going up by a couple of tenths of a percentage points each day for the past several weeks, and while that may not sound like that big of an increase, it's still an increase and a steady one at that.  However, the so-called Delta variant of the virus threatens everything, even though the mRNA vaccines are still effective against them (provided you get two doses of either).   And in countries where vaccination rates lag, the situation is particularly dire. 

In Australia, for example, the federal and state governments have been effective at testing and tracing, as seen in testing sites like the one above, but their vaccine rollout has been a flop - only 23.9 percent of Australians have been partially vaccinated as of the end of last week with only 4.7 percent of Australians fully vaccinated.  And it's late June, which means it's winter down there - winter, of course, being an easier time for the virus to spread.  (True, it's only 60 degrees Fahrenheit down there at this time of year, not freezing cold like winter in the American Northeast or continental Europe, but its still chillier overall.)  So it should come as no surprise that the Sydney area is under a two-week lockdown because of the rapid spread of the delta corona, as I call it.   The Aussies have also given up on its main vaccine, the ill-fated AstraZeneca shot, switching instead to Pfizer and Moderna. 

Unfortunately, as always with COVID, it's worse than you think.  Israel has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world.  As many as 57 percent of its population has been fully vaccinated as of last week.  Also, it's not winter there now.  And yet the Israelis have had to re-impose face-covering mandates as a result of a wave of delta corona infections  - some of them among the fully vaccinated.  The World Health Organization, meanwhile, has gone so far as to recommend that even the fully vaccinated continue to wear face coverings indefinitely.  And in some parts of the world where national and local governments have dropped face-covering mandates, private establishments continue to require them, making fully vaccinated people wonder why they bothered getting vaccinated in the first place.

Or getting unvaccinated people to ask why they should get vaccinated at all.  Back in the U.S. of A., many experts and politicians, like Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, are calling for the federal government to give final approval to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines instead of the emergency approval they're currently authorized under in order to boost vaccine demand among those hesitant to get it.  I say, do it - the results are in, they work!

Until all of this gets taken care of,  the question  "When will the pandemic end?" may have no answer.  And when it does have one, you probably won't like it very much.

The New Prime Minister of Israel

Israel's new prime minister, Naftali Bennett, is a right-wing nut who has a problem with the very idea of a Palestinian state and even the very idea of Palestine.  He's leading a coalition of far-right, far-left, moderate and Arab parties sustained by one vote in the Israeli parliament.

He has his work cut out for him in getting things in Israel moving again after two years of political paralysis.   No one in his coalition agrees with each other about anything.  But there is ample reason for hope that Israel can gets its act together, for one reason: Benjamin Netanyahu is gone.

And hopefully, he, like Trump in the U.S., can be prosecuted and imprisoned for corruption charges before he has a chance to regain power. 

And the very fact that he can come back should keep this coalition in power for awhile. 

Middle East Mess

Israel might be President Biden's Achilles heel.

The heavy-handed removal of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem and the police raid on the al-Aqsa mosque has started what amounts to a war between two peoples and between a country and territories it currently "occupies."  And while President Biden tiptoes to reach some sort of cease-fire to bring the violence to an end even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu milks the crisis for all it's worth, Democrats grow increasingly hostile to Israeli air attacks on the Gaza Strip.  Meanwhile, Republicans are hoping to galvanize support for them by standing in solidarity for Israel against Hamas rocket attacks.  

This isn't just a foreign-policy problem.  This is a battle in which civilization is at stake.  And President Biden can't make a wrong move without thinking it could cause greater trouble in the region.

This is a time bomb that could detonate into an explosion of biblical proportions.

The Artlessness Of the Deal

Let's play historical make-believe for a moment.  Suppose that Great Britain, officially a Protestant nation as the reigning monarch is the head of the Church of England, wanted to improve relations with the great Catholic powers of Europe in the late 1860s.  The British and the French had defeated Russia in the Crimean War but were still wary of Russian expansion.  The newly united Italy, along with France, Spain, and Austria-Hungary, have long resisted peace deals with Great Britain because of its domination of heavily Catholic Ireland, and they've set an Irish state as a condition of deals with the British. But, let's suppose, let's say that Napoleon III, the Emperor Of the French, and the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Franz Joseph, are particularly worried about the growing threat from Russia and rush to make a deal for a treaty of amity and commerce with the British, and  the prime minister of Great Britain hails it as a major breakthrough between his country and the Catholic heads of state on the Continent.  And the cause for Irish autonomy is left behind.

Well, except for the names and a few other changes - to paraphrase Neil Diamond's reference to the story of the frog who dreamed of being, and then became, a king - if you talk about what happened this week with the Middle East, the story is the same.   Israel achieved a joint peace deal with the Arab states of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates because pf a common fear of Iran, and the Palestinians - still living under Israeli domination - have been left with nothing. A peace deal with the Palestinians was a condition from the Arab states for normalizing relations with Israel, but now they're ready to leave the Palestinians behind over some geopolitical paranoia.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hails it as a major breakthrough, and the monarchs of the two Arab countries are quie pleased.  And someone's going to make money off this.

Here is a picture of the signing of the Israeli-Bahraini-Emirati peace deal at the White House, which allegedly brokered the deal.

Second from right is the frog who would be king. :-p 

O Jerusalem!

Now that Trump has opened the U.S. Embassy in Israel - or at least a makeshift version of it - in Jerusalem, Palestinians are rioting in the occupied territories over official American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital when Palestinians want it to be a capital of their eventual state.  The United States wants to continue to achieve a peaceful solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the Palestinians want nothing to do with American mediation any more because they don't see us as an honest broker.  And they probably wouldn't trust us even if a Democratic President moved the U.S. Embassy back to Tel Aviv sometime in the future.   

Multilateral mediation? The Arab states have their own internal problems, and the Europeans have more sympathy than power to being a Palestinian state about.  Short of a herculean effort by the United Nations, there doesn't seem to be much of a prospect for that.

Jerusalem will never be a neutral city or a free city-state, because both the Israelis and the Palestinians at least agree on a position against that.  I don't understand why any future Israeli-Palestinian border can't just go right through the city and effectively create two cities of Jerusalem.

After all, we have two Kansas Citys.

To respond to the complaint that Kansas City has no religious significance, I need only point out that Kansas City is near the place along the Missouri River where Mormons believe Jesus will return.

Not making that up.

And if there's a world war over the Middle East, expect Moroni to blow his horn signifying the Second Coming. 

No word on what Robert Jeffress would think of that.

Happy Nuke Year

Donald Trump sees Russia's Vladimir Putin interested in making more nuclear weapons, so it's game on for Team USA!  As President, he plans to ramp up production of nuclear arms in this country, and may the greater participant emerge victorious!

Well, so, much for the détente a Trump Presidency promised. 

Of course, if Armageddon does start, it won't start in the Baltic region or Ukraine, but in the Middle East, where the actual Battle of Armageddon was fought.  And Israel will be ground zero.  After the Obama administration abstained and let a United Nations resolution against Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory pass, most Republicans and some Democrats slammed the abstention.  Trump has promised to rectify that and appoint as his ambassador to Israel a far-right Zionist named David Friedman and putting the U.S. clearly on the side of Israel and against everyone else.     

For his part, Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu has said that the U.S. and other countries can disagree with Israel on the settlement issue, but that the United Nations Security Council is not the place to discuss it.  Well, what is the place? Seems like that would be the perfect  place to discuss it, because stopping the settlements would help produce security to the Middle East.  

It is called the "Security Council."

Oh yeah, Trump has dismissed the U.N.'s existence.  I suppose the United Nations will expel the U.S., and move to Geneva, freeing Trump's companies to turn that building on the East Side into condos.

To be served by the new Second Avenue Subway, which could also double as a bomb shelter. :-O

Peace In the Valley

When President Obama proposed starting a peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians that used the June 1967 borders as a starting point, every single Republican in Washington was ready to bash him over it - not because they were against it, but because Obama was for it. Bill Clinton was for using the 1967 borders as a starting point, as was George Walker Bush when he endorsed a Palestinian state. Obama proposed land swaps to crate a final border that, under this plan, would bear little resemblance to the 1967 lines. So what's the problem?

I suspect it's because of politics. Not in the United States, but in Israel. Netanyahu governs with only tacit support from the Israeli Labor party, with much of his support coming from right-wing parties in the Knesset. He can't be seen as conceding to anything the Palestinians support - like what Obama has proposed. He's done a good job of avoiding that perception, re-iterating his steadfast opposition to Obama's proposal both to the President himself and to Congress.

Netanyahu has never been a forceful advocate for any kind of peace plan that can benefit both sides, so I don't expect much from Obama's initiative. However, it's healthy that the prime minister of Israel and the President of the United States can agree to disagree . . . and still talk.

Flotilla Flap

The recent Israeli commando raid on a flotilla of private ships approaching the Gaza Strip may be an even more dangerous threat to stability in the region than anything Iran has done recently. Some of the ships were bearing Turkish flags (the flotilla represented seven hundred people from fifty countries) and were reportedly bringing humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza, and Israel's ham-fisted reaction to the possibility of arms being shipped to the territory has caused a serious rift between Israel and Turkey, despite the friendly and cordial relationship between the two countries. Israel defends its naval blockade of the Gaza Strips as vital to its national security, but isn't there a better way to do this than impugn the rights of private vessels on the high seas? If there are any arms on ships heading for Gaza, Israel has the right to intercept them. It does not have the right to raid these ships in international waters. If there were an weapons on these ships, maybe the Israelis should come out and provide evidence of that.

An Irish ship - undoubtedly bearing a crew of sailors who now a thing or too about colonial oppression - has vowed to run the blockade. This is getting interesting, but in an unsettling way.