Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

November 23, 2010 By Fausta

Did Netanyahu apologize to Ros-Lehtinen over Cuba?

As you may recall, a couple of months ago Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic was invited by the Cuban Communist regime to interview Fidel Castro. Surprisingly – as Goldberg himself noted – Castro said that Iran should stop slandering the Jews.

The timing of the article coincided with the Jewish holidays, and also came at a time when the Cuban regime is more broke than it’s ever been.

However, Castro’s statements quoted by Goldberg regarding Israel’s right to exist, and Castro’s admiration for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, renowned historian of the Spanish inquisition, did not fall on deaf ears in Israel, where Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres welcomed Castro’s remarks.

Castro’s remarks also came at the same time that dozens of Cuban political prisoners are forcibly exiled to Spain, without any easing of the dictatorship.

Considering Cuba’s support of the PLO, Lybia, Syria, Iran, and Venezuela (where increasingly, anti-Semitism is official policy), Castro’s recent remarks are opportunistic at best.

Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen called Netanyahu, who apologized. The NY Sun explains

Israel is a small, beleaguered democracy in need of all the help it can get. The exiled Cubans who have been holding out for democracy on their native island are logical allies. And vice versa. How tragic it would have been were Israel to have made a separate peace with the communist regime, all on the notion that a dictator who has for two generations oppressed his own people and joined in the war against the Jews had suddenly come down with a change of heart.

Cross-posted at Hot Air. Hat tip: Joe Lima

23973
Share

Filed Under: Cuba, Israel Tagged With: Binyamin Netanyahu, Fausta's blog, Hot Air, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

July 9, 2010 By Fausta

It’s all about the O

Obama: Israelis Are Most Likely Suspicious Of Me Not Because Of My Anti-Israel Policies But Because Of My Middle Name, Hussein

It’s kind of amazing that every single criticism of, or lack of proper enthusiasm for, Barack Obama is rooted in some sort of bitter, clingy ignorance and malice. Apparently not a single critique of him is well-founded, or founded upon anything at all, really, except hatred and mental retardation.

Particularly since this time Netanyahu wasn’t left to his own devices during a lunch date.

Related:
Congrats! You Just Beat Your High Score of Sputtering Outrage!

21515
Share

Filed Under: Barack Obama, Israel, Middle East. Tagged With: Binyamin Netanyahu, Fausta's blog, smart diplomacy

May 16, 2010 By Fausta

“Smart diplomacy”: US ‘screwed up’

Emanuel to rabbis: US ‘screwed up’
Exclusive: Officials deny US changing view on Israeli nuclear policy.

The Obama administration has “screwed up the messaging” about its support for Israel over the past 14 months, and it will take “more than one month to make up for 14 months,” White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said on Thursday to a group of rabbis called together for a meeting in the White House.

“During the elections there were doubts about President Obama’s support for Israel, and now they have resurfaced,” Emanuel said, according to one of those who participated in the meeting. “But concerning policy, we have done everything that we can that is in Israel’s security – and long-range interests. Watch what the administration does.”
…
These comments came during the second of two White House meetings with a carefully selected slate of 15 rabbis from across the US representing the Orthodox, Reform and Conservative streams.

Ensuring a friendly audience, perhaps?

The first meeting took place on April 20, shortly after Obama was widely perceived to have treated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu shabbily during their last White House meeting.

Not simply widely perceived; Obama left Netanyahu, his guest, and went to have dinner upstairs

After failing to extract a written promise of concessions on settlements, Mr Obama walked out of his meeting with Mr Netanyahu but invited him to stay at the White House, consult with advisers and “let me know if there is anything new”, a US congressman, who spoke to the Prime Minister, said.
…
Left to talk among themselves Mr Netanyahu and his aides retreated to the Roosevelt Room. He spent a further half-hour with Mr Obama and extended his stay for a day of emergency talks to try to restart peace negotiations.

As Dan said regarding the most recent meeting with the rabbis,

The rabbis left the meeting “cautiously optimistic.” The story doesn’t mention whether it was through the backdoor or the front.

The back door has been renamed to the Dalai Lama door.

Israel Matzav -blogging from Israel – posts that

the Obama administration’s goals for our region have not changed.

It’s all that “smart diplomacy” in action.

Post reedited to include a section left out.

Share

Filed Under: Barack Obama, Israel Tagged With: Binyamin Netanyahu, Fausta's blog

May 16, 2010 By Fausta

“Smart diplomacy”: US ’screwed up’

Emanuel to rabbis: US ’screwed up’
Exclusive: Officials deny US changing view on Israeli nuclear policy.

The Obama administration has “screwed up the messaging” about its support for Israel over the past 14 months, and it will take “more than one month to make up for 14 months,” White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said on Thursday to a group of rabbis called together for a meeting in the White House.

“During the elections there were doubts about President Obama’s support for Israel, and now they have resurfaced,” Emanuel said, according to one of those who participated in the meeting. “But concerning policy, we have done everything that we can that is in Israel’s security – and long-range interests. Watch what the administration does.”
…
These comments came during the second of two White House meetings with a carefully selected slate of 15 rabbis from across the US representing the Orthodox, Reform and Conservative streams.

Ensuring a friendly audience, perhaps?

The first meeting took place on April 20, shortly after Obama was widely perceived to have treated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu shabbily during their last White House meeting.

Not simply widely perceived; Obama left Netanyahu, his guest, and went to have dinner upstairs

After failing to extract a written promise of concessions on settlements, Mr Obama walked out of his meeting with Mr Netanyahu but invited him to stay at the White House, consult with advisers and “let me know if there is anything new”, a US congressman, who spoke to the Prime Minister, said.
…
Left to talk among themselves Mr Netanyahu and his aides retreated to the Roosevelt Room. He spent a further half-hour with Mr Obama and extended his stay for a day of emergency talks to try to restart peace negotiations.

As Dan said regarding the most recent meeting with the rabbis,

The rabbis left the meeting “cautiously optimistic.” The story doesn’t mention whether it was through the backdoor or the front.

The back door has been renamed to the Dalai Lama door.

Israel Matzav -blogging from Israel – posts that

the Obama administration’s goals for our region have not changed.

It’s all that “smart diplomacy” in action.

Post reedited to include a section left out.

20340
Share

Filed Under: Barack Obama, Israel Tagged With: Binyamin Netanyahu, Fausta's blog

March 26, 2010 By Fausta

Smart diplomacy today: Humiliate Netanyahu

The other day Charles Krauthammer remarked that

We have already had a year delay in talks because of Obama interjecting the settlement issue in the first place.

Remember, for 17 years the Palestinians and Israelis negotiated, ever since Oslo, directly in the absence of a freeze in settlements. Palestinians never demanded it as a precondition.

In comes Obama, and he demands a freeze of settlements. The Israelis say, why should we make preemptive concessions in advance? Palestinians haven’t made any. And the Palestinians answer and say, “Well, if the Americans are demanding a settlement freeze, we are going to demand it as well. And in fact, we won’t even speak with the Israelis until there is a settlement freeze.”

This is absurd. That’s why we have had a year of the Palestinians essentially in a boycott of these negotiations.

So, then, Netanyahu works out a fig leaf, a compromise in which he agrees to a ten-month moratorium outside of Jerusalem for a freeze. And then all of a sudden Obama re-imposes a new condition now of a freeze in Jerusalem, which no Israeli government will ever accept.

Jerusalem is the Israeli capital. Everybody understands that in a [final peace] settlement, these neighborhoods of east Jerusalem — the ones that we are speaking about and where the construction is occurring, as well as the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem — are going to be in the Jewish state under any understanding or settlement.

For example, in the Clinton parameters of the negotiations a decade ago [at Camp David], they would be incorporated into Israel.

So, no Israeli is going to accept a preemptive concession that Jews can’t live in this area of east Jerusalem. So unless Obama changes position, talks again are at a standstill because of a blunder on the part of this administration.

You would think that’s asinine enough.

Not quite.

Following that, Obama came up with yet another masterful stroke of “smart diplomacy”:
Binyamin Netanyahu humiliated after Barack Obama ‘dumped him for dinner’

For a head of government to visit the White House and not pose for photographers is rare. For a key ally to be left to his own devices while the President withdraws to have dinner in private was, until this week, unheard of. Yet that is how Binyamin Netanyahu was treated by President Obama on Tuesday night, according to Israeli reports on a trip viewed in Jerusalem as a humiliation.

After failing to extract a written promise of concessions on settlements, Mr Obama walked out of his meeting with Mr Netanyahu but invited him to stay at the White House, consult with advisers and “let me know if there is anything new”, a US congressman, who spoke to the Prime Minister, said.

“It was awful,” the congressman said. One Israeli newspaper called the meeting “a hazing in stages”, poisoned by such mistrust that the Israeli delegation eventually left rather than risk being eavesdropped on a White House telephone line. Another said that the Prime Minister had received “the treatment reserved for the President of Equatorial Guinea”.

Left to talk among themselves Mr Netanyahu and his aides retreated to the Roosevelt Room. He spent a further half-hour with Mr Obama and extended his stay for a day of emergency talks to try to restart peace negotiations. However, he left last night with no official statement from either side.

The Petulant President could not be bothered to listen to the Visiting Prime Minister:

Newspaper reports recounted how Mr Netanyahu looked “excessively concerned and upset” when he pulled out a flow chart to show Mr Obama how Jerusalem planning permission worked and how he could not have known that the announcement that hundreds more homes were to be built would be made when Mr Biden arrived in Jerusalem.

Mr Obama then suggested that Mr Netanyahu and his staff stay at the White House to consider his proposals so that if he changed his mind he could inform the President right away. “I’m still around,” the daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot quoted Mr Obama as saying. “Let me know if there is anything new.”

And no DVDs for you, Bibi.

Pundette links to Jennifer Rubin, who believes Obama’s Humiliation of Israel May Only Be Getting Started (emphasis added)

The Jerusalem Post is reporting that Obama wants an answer to his demands by Saturday so he can then present them to a meeting of the Arab League going on in Libya so that ineffectual body can endorse the so-called proximity talks in which the Palestinian Authority refuses to directly negotiate with Israel.

Yup. You read it right.

Until Saturday. You know the Sabbath,

to answer an unspecified set of demands that will allow Washington to go to the Arab League and receive that organization’s backing for ‘proximity talks’ so that maybe the Palestinian Authority may someday, sometime decide to negotiate with Israel.

But back to Rubin,

All of which points to the fact that the crisis between Israel and the United States, which many observers had thought was blowing over in the wake of the trumped-up controversy over the announcement of a Jerusalem housing project during a visit by Vice President Joe Biden, is far from concluded. In fact, it appears that Obama is just getting started.

What does the president hope to achieve? Having asked and gotten a building freeze in the West Bank from Netanyahu last year, the Palestinians still won’t sit and talk peace directly with Israel. Why should they when every time Israel makes a concession, the Arabs can now count on Obama demanding more, even to the point of making an issue of something like building in existing Jewish neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem, which had never previously been a sticking point for the Americans. Since Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has already rejected an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza, and part of Jerusalem as recently as late 2008, does Obama think Netanyahu — or any Israeli leader — can offer more? Does he truly believe that for the first time in their history, the Palestinians will take “yes” — since Netanyahu has also already agreed to the principle of a two-state solution — for an answer?

Perhaps, the 13-point ultimatum is just another attempt to topple Netanyahu’s coalition. But there is no reason to believe that Netanyahu’s partners — and the vast majority of the Israeli people — will not support him, especially when the issue at stake is the unity of Jerusalem. It is unlikely that Israelis will clamor for surrender to Washington in light of the fact that the man making these demands is an American president whom they rightly regard as hostile to their nation. But after Israel says “no” to Obama, does Obama dare escalate his diplomatic offensive against Israel further, even as his administration’s efforts to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear capability appear stalled? Obama has nothing to gain in continuing on this path, but then again, there was no point in starting this ruckus and choosing to humiliate the only democracy in the Middle East in the first place. Is Obama capable of stopping before this train wreck of a policy creates even more mischief in the region, as well as for Democrats seeking Jewish support this year?

Paul Mirengoff doesn’t think Obama can influence the Israeli public,

Thus, the Haaretz poll actually confirms that Obama lacks the standing with Israeli Jews that he likely needs seriously to influence Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. As important, he lacks the standing he likely needs to convince the Israeli public that the U.S. takes the threat Iran poses to Israel seriously enough.

The poll Paul’s referring to was taken before President Obama abused Prime Minister Netanyahu yet again.

Nile Gardiner notices how

The ritual humiliation of the Israelis is an absolute disgrace, and yet another example of how the Obama administration views its allies with indifference, contempt, and at times outright hostility. It is extraordinary how far the Obama team has gone out of its way to grovel to state sponsors of terrorism, such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Muammar Gaddafi, while kicking America’s friends in the teeth.

For now, U.S., Israel Reach Basic Agreement on East Jerusalem Housing, by which

As part of the “list of understandings” reached between the Obama administration and Netanyahu, Hefez said that while “The construction policy will not change. . . . Israel is prepared to make additional steps in order to advance peace talks” with Palestine.

Of course, you would be right to ask, “what additional steps are the Palestinians prepared to make in order to advance the peace talks?”

About the only thing Israel can do to please Obama would be to change its name to Venezuela.

————————————-

Richard Fernandez touches on the bigger issue in his post The Gathering Storm.

Go read it.

Share

Filed Under: Barack Obama, Israel, Middle East. Tagged With: Binyamin Netanyahu, Fausta's blog, smart diplomacy

Tweets by @Fausta
retirees_raise-2015_300x250

Pages

  • About
  • Email

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Previous Posts

  • Mrs. Maisel goes full Alinsky on Mrs. Schlafly
  • Venezuela: Did the Minister of Defense back out at the last minute?
  • You need to unfriend me
  • Go ahead and Kiss the Girl, if you dare
  • Ashamed

Recent Comments

  • John on Mrs. Maisel goes full Alinsky on Mrs. Schlafly
  • Today’s hot topics: Democrats’ collusion shift, tax-return rift, Venezuela drift, and more! – PoliticalWitchDoctor.com on Venezuela: Did the Minister of Defense back out at the last minute?
  • Today’s hot topics: Democrats’ collusion shift, tax-return rift, Venezuela drift, and more! - AmericanTruthToday on Venezuela: Did the Minister of Defense back out at the last minute?
  • Did Venezuela’s Minister of Defense Back Out At The Last Minute? on Venezuela: Did the Minister of Defense back out at the last minute?
  • Roseanne Not Back, Khan not Invited, Operaman’s back, Jobs back, Fausta’s back (but not here yet) Thoughts under the fedora – Da Tech Guy Blog on Venezuela: Did the Minister of Defense back out at the last minute?

Archives

  • 2019
    • December 2019
    • May 2019
    • January 2019
  • 2018
    • December 2018
    • October 2018
    • July 2018
    • June 2018
    • April 2018
    • March 2018
    • February 2018
    • January 2018
  • 2017
    • December 2017
    • November 2017
    • October 2017
    • September 2017
    • August 2017
    • July 2017
    • June 2017
    • May 2017
    • April 2017
    • March 2017
    • February 2017
    • January 2017
  • 2016
    • December 2016
    • November 2016
    • October 2016
    • September 2016
    • August 2016
    • July 2016
    • June 2016
    • May 2016
    • April 2016
    • March 2016
    • February 2016
    • January 2016
  • 2015
    • December 2015
    • November 2015
    • October 2015
    • September 2015
    • August 2015
    • July 2015
    • June 2015
    • May 2015
    • April 2015
    • March 2015
    • February 2015
    • January 2015
  • 2014
    • December 2014
    • November 2014
    • October 2014
    • September 2014
    • August 2014
    • July 2014
    • June 2014
    • May 2014
    • April 2014
    • March 2014
    • February 2014
    • January 2014
  • 2013
    • December 2013
    • November 2013
    • October 2013
    • September 2013
    • August 2013
    • July 2013
    • June 2013
    • May 2013
    • April 2013
    • March 2013
    • February 2013
    • January 2013
  • 2012
    • December 2012
    • November 2012
    • October 2012
    • September 2012
    • August 2012
    • July 2012
    • June 2012
    • May 2012
    • April 2012
    • March 2012
    • February 2012
    • January 2012
  • 2011
    • December 2011
    • November 2011
    • October 2011
    • September 2011
    • August 2011
    • July 2011
    • June 2011
    • May 2011
    • April 2011
    • March 2011
    • February 2011
    • January 2011
  • 2010
    • December 2010
    • November 2010
    • October 2010
    • September 2010
    • August 2010
    • July 2010
    • June 2010
    • May 2010
    • April 2010
    • March 2010
    • February 2010
    • January 2010
  • 2009
    • December 2009
    • November 2009
    • October 2009
    • September 2009
    • August 2009
    • July 2009
    • June 2009
    • May 2009
    • April 2009
    • March 2009
    • February 2009
    • January 2009
  • 2008
    • December 2008
    • November 2008
    • October 2008
    • September 2008
    • August 2008
    • July 2008
    • June 2008
    • May 2008
    • April 2008
    • March 2008
    • February 2008
    • January 2008
  • 2007
    • December 2007
    • November 2007
    • October 2007
    • September 2007
    • August 2007
    • July 2007
    • June 2007
    • May 2007
    • April 2007
    • March 2007
    • February 2007
    • January 2007
  • 2006
    • December 2006
    • November 2006
    • October 2006
    • September 2006
    • August 2006
    • July 2006
    • June 2006
    • May 2006
    • April 2006
    • March 2006
    • February 2006
    • January 2006
  • 2005
    • December 2005
    • November 2005
    • October 2005
    • September 2005
    • August 2005
    • July 2005
    • June 2005
    • May 2005
    • April 2005
    • March 2005
    • February 2005
    • January 2005
  • 2004
    • December 2004
    • November 2004
    • October 2004
    • September 2004
    • August 2004
    • July 2004
    • June 2004
    • May 2004
    • April 2004
    • March 2004
Content Copyright Fausta's Blog

Site Developed and Managed by 300m.com