The Aid Workers Aiding Hamas: Hillel C. Neuer, UN Watch, Aug. 19, 2016— The arrest of Palestinian humanitarian officials in Gaza from two separate international organizations…
Obama’s R-Word for Iran: Editorial, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 18, 2016— The Obama Administra
tion’s handling of the Iran ransom-for-hostages story brings to mind the classic Chico Marx line in the movie “Duck Soup”: “Who are you going to believe—me or your own eyes?”
On Big Things and Small, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton Seem More Alike Each Day: Rex Murphy, National Post, Aug. 5, 2016— I think Hollywood could have saved itself some turmoil this year, and made a few bucks in the process, if it had held off on the new Ghostbusters movie and gone for something a little more current.
Happy Talk for Anxious Allies: Elliott Abrams, Weekly Standard, Aug. 8, 2016— Donald Trump’s various remarks about pulling out of NATO and his accusation that many American allies are "free riders" have made allies on several continents nervous.
Felix Bonfils’s Photographs Of Eretz Yisrael: Saul Jay Singer, Jewish Press, Aug. 17, 2016
Hillary’s Deadly Iran Deal: Shmuley Boteach, Algemeiner, Aug. 8, 2016
The Democrats’ Challenge: White Working-Class Men: Clifford Orwin, Globe & Mail, July 30, 2016
The Truth Behind The Video Hillary Claimed Caused The Benghazi Attack: Jeff Dunetz, Jewish Press, Aug. 16, 2016
Hillel C. Neuer
UN Watch, Aug. 19, 2016
The arrest of Palestinian humanitarian officials in Gaza from two separate international organizations – charged with siphoning aid resources to support Hamas terrorism – along with allegations about at least two other entities raises troubling questions about the culture within the United Nations and non-governmental agencies that allowed such crimes to take place.
First there was the announcement by Israel’s Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) on August 4 that Mohammed El-Halabi, director of the Gaza branch of World Vision — a billion-dollar Christian aid agency — was indicted for systematically diverting tens of millions of dollars in aid money to Hamas. According to the Shin Bet, El-Halabi admitted to being a lifetime Hamas member who was dispatched in 2005 to infiltrate World Vision. El-Halabi had a good chance of being accepted because he had already worked for UNDP, the UN Development Agency — where he also helped Hamas — and because his father, Khalil al-Halabi, holds a senior post at UNRWA in Gaza which he, too, uses to support Hamas.
Once in World Vision, El-Halabi employed a sophisticated apparatus for transferring funds and resources to Hamas. Over several years, El-Halabi helped Hamas construct terror tunnels, pay their salaries, and build military bases. In addition, according to the charge sheet, in 2014 Halabi recruited a Palestinian aid worker from Save the Children, a major NGO based in the UK, to join Hamas’ military wing. After the revelations, Australia and Germany froze their funding to World Vision, and the organization suspended its Gaza operations. Save the Children, for its part, is “making inquiries into this matter.”
Then on August 9, Israel announced that it had indicted Waheed Borsh, an engineer for UNDP, for diverting UNDP resources to build a jetty for Hamas’ naval forces, and to prioritize house construction for Hamas members. Borsh also helped Hamas recover hidden weapons found by UNDP workers. In reaction, UNDP said it was “greatly concerned” over the charges, and is now conducting a “thorough internal review” of the “processes and circumstances surrounding the allegation.” A thorough internal review is indeed necessary, but of far more than particular allegations against two individuals.
All UN agencies and NGOs in Gaza — and the Western countries which provide the bulk of their money — need to ask themselves why Hamas is apparently able to infiltrate their organizations with such ease.
Take World Vision, for example. Tom Getman, World Vision’s former head of Palestinian operations, went on to represent the organization at the UN Human Rights Commission, where he fomented a rabid, theologically-based hatred of the “Zionist enterprise” and its “idolatry.” In a video interview with fellow anti-Israel activist Rev. Steven Sizer, Getman called Hezbollah terrorists and anti-Semites his “friends,” citing their spiritual advice about going after Israel. “Like our friends [Hezbollah chief Hassan] Nasrallah, and [Hezbollah’s late spiritual leader] Sheik Fadlallah – and many others in the Middle East – have said to us, the problem with you Christians is you don’t do what’s in the book.”
How can World Vision be expected to weed out Hamas agents when overtly pro-Hezbollah officials like Getman are in charge? That’s asking the foxes to guard the henhouse. The same holds true for the UN agencies in Gaza, which have a history of pandering to the Hamas regime. During the Gaza war of 2014, despite UNDP’s duties of neutrality and impartiality, the organization sided with Hamas against Israel, whitewashing the systematic exploitation by Hamas of homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals to store weapons, install rocket launchers, and hide entrances to terror tunnels.
Frode Mauring, then the UNDP Special Representative on Palestine, tweeted vehemently against Israel. He expressed sympathies for Gaza’s population, but not for millions of Israelis forced into bomb shelters to escape thousands of Hamas rocket barrages. On July 14, 2014, for example, Mauring tweeted, “Israel showed restraint in Gaza before attacking? You must be kidding.”
After the war, UNDP published a “Preliminary Assessment” prepared by the Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem, a Palestinian NGO that advances the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanction) agenda against Israel. The 30-page document failed to mention Hamas once. Discussion of damage to Gaza buildings omitted that Hamas used them for rocket launching against Israeli civilians, deliberately jeopardizing Palestinian civilians. How can we expect UNDP to remedy internal “processes” when its leaders openly broadcast a see-no-evil approach to Hamas terror?
The latest arrests ought to be a wake-up call. Palestinians deserve to be helped, but Hamas — an organization that exults in murdering Jewish children — is the opposite of humanitarianism. If the UN and NGOs fail to correct their ways, taxpayers in the US, Canada and Europe should do it for them, by demanding a permanent freeze to the funding of terror.
Editorial
Wall Street Journal, Aug. 18, 2016
The Obama Administration’s handling of the Iran ransom-for-hostages story brings to mind the classic Chico Marx line in the movie “Duck Soup”: “Who are you going to believe—me or your own eyes?” After everyone in the Administration from President Obama on down denied that a $400 million cash payment to Iran had anything to do with the same-day release of four American hostages, the State Department on Thursday said your own eyes had it right the first time.
While still not using the R-word, State Department spokesman John Kirby said of the two events: “We of course wanted to seek maximum leverage in this case as these two things came together at the same time.”
Credit here goes to Wall Street Journal reporters Jay Solomon and Carol E. Lee, who on Aug. 3 broke the story of the $400 million payment to Iran coincident with the hostage release in January. Despite Mr. Obama himself trying to knock down the Journal’s story by asserting, “we do not pay ransom for hostages,” the reporters this week established the linkage.
U.S. officials acknowledged to the Journal that they wouldn’t allow a plane from Iran Air, loaded with pallets of cash, to take off from a runway in Geneva until the hostages’ plane in Tehran was “wheels up.” State’s Mr. Kirby was finally obliged to admit this publicly. One may reasonably ask: Why did the Obama Administration persist with such an obviously preposterous cover story? Mr. Obama offered one honest answer amid his original denial. We didn’t pay a ransom, the President said, “precisely because if we did we’d start encouraging Americans to be targeted.”
There’s another reason. Mr. Obama didn’t want to sully what he obviously considers the crowning foreign-policy achievement of his Presidency with an admission that a grubby payoff to Iran’s mullahs is what got it done.
Coming clearer by the day is the reality that Mr. Obama in fact ransomed his second term’s entire foreign policy to getting the nuclear deal, which along with lifting sanctions was supposed to be the incentive for Iran to help stabilize the Middle East. Iran had its own ideas about that.
On Tuesday the Russian foreign ministry ostentatiously announced that four of its Tu-22M3 bombers had flown from an Iranian airfield to hit anti-Assad forces in three Syrian provinces. The long-range bombers then returned to Russia.
Russia doesn’t need the Iranian air base to bomb Syria. Russia and Iran were making a political point about their budding alliance in the Middle East. They did this, moreover, after persuading Secretary of State John Kerry to persuade Mr. Obama to share with Russia U.S. intelligence on bombing targets in Syria. Mr. Obama sided with Mr. Kerry despite Pentagon objections. Oh, and Vladimir Putin is now sending tens of thousands of Russian soldiers to newly built installations near the border with Ukraine. Perhaps this is the Russian’s way of thanking Mr. Kerry for the intel.
Mr. Obama, meanwhile, spent August denying that a ransom was a ransom. Since the January “leverage” moment, Iran has taken three more Americans as hostage and is now demanding the return of $2 billion in funds that U.S. courts have ordered held for the victims of Iranian-sponsored terrorism. The eyes of the world can simply stare.
ON BIG THINGS AND SMALL, BARACK OBAMA AND
HILLARY CLINTON SEEM MORE ALIKE EACH DAY
Rex Murphy
National Post, Aug. 5, 2016
I think Hollywood could have saved itself some turmoil this year, and made a few bucks in the process, if it had held off on the new Ghostbusters movie and gone for something a little more current. There’s a great story sitting on the scriptwriting tarmac, just waiting for the proper writers to put a little creative wind under its wings. It may be seen as a cross between The Price is Right and a State Department version of Casino Royale.
The plot: shady individuals in the U.S. government load up a huge cargo plane with pallets of stacked hundred-dollar bills — close to $400 million in total — and fly them off to Switzerland, where they are covertly exchanged for Swiss Francs, Euros and other currencies, then sent on to Iran. All this under a shroud of secrecy and in the darkness of night. The cargo plane with the mountain of laundered cash lands in Tehran and moments later, another plane takes off with some American hostages, who are now free to return to the United States.
A spokesman for the U.S. State Department (I see Charlie Sheen in this challenging role) claims that there is “no connection” between the release of the hostages and the $400 million delivered to the very same airport where the hostages were waiting to be flown out. And he flatly rejects a statement from one of the hostages who said that they were kept on the tarmac in Tehran for “hours and hours,” while their handler told them they were “waiting for another plane (and) if that plane doesn’t come, we never let (you) go. ” The cash arrives in Tehran; the hostages leave Tehran. No connection. Pure coincidence.
In real life, this would be very, very hard to believe, but as a movie, it’s as credible as any. The problem is that it’s not a movie. It’s this week’s real news. So when U.S. President Barack Obama, wearing the smile of a cat belching on its way past an empty goldfish bowl, tells Americans and the world that the cash and the hostages have “nothing to do” with each other, some people — at least those over the age of 10 who are not employed by MSNBC — are a little troubled.
They are probably the same cynical skeptics who raised an overworked eyebrow when Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went on national television to tell America that FBI Director James Comey found all her statements to be “truthful,” right after he invalidated nearly every statement she had ever made about her private email server. We should remember that on the matter of truth and how to escape its embracing tentacles, cloud its appearance and erase its presence, Clinton has trained at the dojo of the great sensei himself, the Houdini of equivocation and denial, Bill Clinton. But for Hillary Clinton, it may also be the case that her capacity for taking what has just been said and claiming that it actually meant the opposite derives from a past trauma.
Could it stem from the post-traumatic stress from the time she “was under sniper fire in Bosnia?” After all, battle stress from non-existent bullets fired by non-existent snipers can leave a secretary of state unnerved. This could easily lead her to imagine, for example, that an unseen video triggered the Benghazi attack that left four Americans dead, when all the world knows otherwise — that terrorists saw an under-defended American embassy on an anniversary of 9/11 and stormed it, leaving its ambassador and four others murdered.
But why acknowledge the many confusions and contortions contained in her statements, when she could simply dismiss the truth? As Clinton herself so plangently put it, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” This is the same tact taken by Obama when he declared of his health-care policy — on numerous occasions, I might add — that, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan; if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor; if you like your hospital, you can keep your hospital.” These were all lies — explicit, unqualified, and direct lies — every time they were spoken.
On big things and small, Obama and Clinton seem more alike each day. Perhaps that is why Obama is so invested in seeing her take over from him. They both share an exceptional insouciance when it comes to asserting that what is the case is actually not the case, and what is not the case is the case. Considering this affinity, and their sovereign dexterity in exchanging reality for fiction, it is no wonder he sees her as the “most qualified person in American history to be president.” Exactly. Just like the planeload of cash that had nothing to do with the release of the hostages.
Elliott Abrams
Weekly Standard, Aug. 8, 2016
Donald Trump’s various remarks about pulling out of NATO and his accusation that many American allies are "free riders" have made allies on several continents nervous. I spent last week in Japan (yes, pretty far away from Cleveland), where his name arose in every single meeting I had—with academics, at NGOs, and in sessions with government officials. At a time when the Chinese military is growing rapidly, might the United States actually reduce its own commitments? Would the "pivot to Asia" be replaced by a flight from responsibility?
In my prepared speeches, I explained the "pendulum theory" of U.S. foreign policy to the Japanese. This is the view best described in Maximalist, the 2014 book about foreign policy since Truman, written by my Council on Foreign Relations colleague Steve Sestanovich. As he described it, American foreign policy has swung like a pendulum from doing too much to doing too little. Maximalists (he lists Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, and George W. Bush) have sought "a big package of countermeasures" against threats; retrenchers (he lists Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Obama) have wanted to "shift responsibilities to friends and allies, to explore accommodation with adversaries, to narrow commitments and reduce costs."
In this view, the United States nearly always swings too far, and then the public becomes restive and unhappy, and events and public opinion combine to swing the pendulum the other way. If we do too little, dangers grow visibly and produce a reaction: "We must do more." Perhaps there is an overreaction, and a few years later the pendulum swings again: "We must pull back."
I told the Japanese we have reached the end of one swing of that pendulum now, with Obama's policies and the cuts in defense spending reached under him—of course, with the consent of Congress. The latest polls (by the Pew Center) find that "public support for increased defense spending has climbed to its highest level since a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks." And I argued the pendulum would swing under Hillary Clinton, who has generally supported a more muscular foreign policy than Obama (remember her push in 2012, along with then-secretary of defense Leon Panetta and then-CIA director David Petraeus, for more support of the Syrian rebels—advice that Obama rejected), and even under Trump, whose slogan is "Make America Great Again."
But the Japanese pay close attention to American politics and have heard Trump say, over and over, that he wishes to disengage from the world in various ways, from building walls to stopping immigration to pulling out of commitments like NATO and NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. How could I be sure he would not do precisely what he says he will do?
The best answer I could conjure up was Jimmy Carter and Korea. Campaigning for president in January 1975, Carter told the Washington Post that if elected he would order the withdrawal of all U.S. ground forces from Korea. In June 1976, he restated this intention in a speech to the Foreign Policy Association in New York City. During the transition process in late 1976 Carter told the incoming secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, and incoming assistant secretary of state for Asia, Richard Holbrooke, that the pace of withdrawal might be studied but canceling the withdrawal was not an option, and in January 1977 President Carter issued orders to begin the withdrawal. In a press conference on May 26, 1977, President Carter said this:
We have, however, considered very carefully the question of our troops to be withdrawn from South Korea, the Republic of Korea, ground troops. This is a matter that's been considered by our government for years. We've been in South Korea now more than 25 years. There has never been a policy of our government evolved for permanent placement of ground troops in South Korea. . . . I think it's accurate to say that the time has come for a very careful, very orderly withdrawal, over the period of four or five years, of ground troops.
This was a disastrous proposal, sure to create tension in Asia and leave our allies in the lurch. There was broad opposition. Not only the government of South Korea but also that of Japan was strongly opposed. Members of Congress on the armed services and foreign relations committees told administration officials that the withdrawal was a dangerous error. The U.S. intelligence community and military (led by the top U.S. Army officer in Korea, Gen. John Vessey, who later became chairman of the Joint Chiefs) added their opposition. Within the administration itself, many officials agreed with Holbrooke that the policy had to be reversed. Direct opposition to the policy grew, and there were many leaks of studies and assessments that concluded the withdrawal would be dangerous. In April 1979 the Joint Chiefs formally stated their opposition to withdrawal from Korea.
In July 1979, Carter reversed himself. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski read to the press a statement from the president: Last February it was announced that withdrawals of U.S. ground combat forces from Korea would be held in abeyance pending the completion of a reassessment of North Korea's military strength and the implications of recent political developments in the region. That reassessment has been completed, and these policy issues have been discussed with our key allies in Asia, with principal defense and foreign policy advisers, and leaders of the Congress. Circumstances require these further adjustments in the troop withdrawal plan: Withdrawals of combat elements of the 2d Division will remain in abeyance. . . . The timing and pace of withdrawals beyond these will be reexamined in 1981.
After January 20, 1981, of course, Carter was no longer in a position to reexamine anything but his election defeat and the foolishness of his initial decision for withdrawal from Korea. So, I told the Japanese, Trump might find exactly what Carter found: that the world is a very dangerous place and that some of his own ideas turn out to be likely to make it more so. Like Carter, he might find that the combined weight of American allies, his own military and intelligence advisers, and key members of Congress forces him to reconsider even ideas that seemed obvious and certain to him when campaigning. Carter was stubborn, and it took him two and a half years to reverse himself; Trump might be the same way, but there could still be a happy ending. Carter was stubborn in part because he'd been a Navy officer and thought he had relevant expertise; perhaps Trump would be more—and more quickly—impressionable when top CIA officials and ranking generals tell him that some of his ideas are pretty much nuts…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
CIJR Wishes All Our Friends & Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
Felix Bonfils’s Photographs Of Eretz Yisrael: Saul Jay Singer, Jewish Press, Aug. 17, 2016—Travelogues and other reports written in the second half of the 19th century, most famously Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, establish the presence of thriving Jewish communities throughout Eretz Yisrael, particularly in Jerusalem. See, for example, my Jewish Press article “Mark Twain, Eretz Yisrael, and the Jews (June 18, 2015) for a full discussion on this subject.
Hillary’s Deadly Iran Deal: Shmuley Boteach, Algemeiner, Aug. 8, 2016—Let’s focus for a moment on two major headlines that appeared on the same day last week. The first claimed that Donald Trump was continuing to feud with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of murdered American war hero Humayun Khan. The second said that President Obama last January sent the Iranian regime $400 million in cash, which in all likelihood will be used to fund terrorism.
The Democrats’ Challenge: White Working-Class Men: Clifford Orwin, Globe & Mail, July 30, 2016—U.S. party nominating conventions have evolved into festive coronations. Yet the gaiety at this week’s Democratic gathering was forced, and the coronation beset by grumbling. Some deemed the new queen insufficiently progressive, others, spooked by recent polls, feared she was a loser.
The Truth Behind The Video Hillary Claimed Caused The Benghazi Attack: Jeff Dunetz, Jewish Press, Aug. 16, 2016—It’s been proven many times over that the YouTube video about the life of Mohammed had absolutely nothing to do with the Benghazi attack that killed four American heroes. It has also been proven that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama knew from the start the story they were telling America about the video was a lie. But the true story of the video that went viral thanks to Clinton and Obama has never been told until now.
