UPDATES
6:00 am Israel time, Wednesday, February 11 2015
33 Days Until The Election
***The weather during the last 12 hours has been wild and woolly here in Israel. Fierce wind gusts of up to 75 kph blowing sheets of sand from the Sinai Desert and north Africa have turned central and southern Israel into a yellowish haze.
This is how central and southern Israel looked yesterday.
Driving from Nes Ziona to Ashdod last night, your humble servant was struck by the white-out conditions on Highway 4 as well as the sand being wind-pushed in drifts across one of Israel’s main traffic arteries.
Apparently the sandstorm situation is even worse across the border in Egypt where the Cairo airport has been closed.
The forecast for tonight is for the sand to diminish and be replaced by 4 days of heavy rain, and snow in the higher elevations such as Jerusalem.
***In case you missed it, two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Congressmen Peter Roskam (Republican from Illinois) and Juan Vargas (Democrat from California) introduced a new bill yesterday, the US-Israel Trade and Commercial Enhancement Act.
An integral part of the Act is that European countries would be forced to oppose the BDS movement as part of the free trade deal now being negotiated between Europe and the United States.
Roskam had this to say:
“Today, an alarming number of countries within the European Union and beyond have embraced BDS as a form of economic warfare aimed to cripple Israel’s economy and demonize its very existence. These attacks not only threaten Israel, but commercial relations across the globe. The US -Israel Trade and Commercial Enhancement Act will ensure that American free trade partners never engage in this harmful and illegitimate political protest against Israel, while also protecting US companies from foreign lawsuits targeting their associations with Israel.”
Vargas added this: “BDS is a harmful political tactic which seeks to undermine and diminish Israel’s economic strength. We need to reassure our commitment to our ally in the region by clearly defining US policy to oppose this practice and dissuade other nations from adopting BDS policies toward Israel.”
Bravo to Vargas and Roskam! Of course, the bill must be passed by the House and Senate and signed by President Obama (if he refuses to sign it, the bill can still become law with a 2/3 vote of the House and Senate).
TODAY’S BLOG:
Yesterday, your humble servant listed 5 reasons that PM Benjamin Netanyahu should address the U.S. Congress on the subjects of the Iranian nuclear program and the threat posed by Islamic terrorism. In that blog I referenced some of the remarks made by President Obama at the press conference he held with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
However, other remarks made by President Obama in the Merkel press conference and in a previous interview published yesterday indicate an Obama who is even more dangerously delusional about Iran and Islamic terrorism than we have known up to now.
Here is what Obama said in the press conference about the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei under whose leadership and guidance Iran is arming terrorists all over the globe, and under whose leadership the Iranian nuclear weapons program has nearly been completed (Obama likes to call Khamenei “Supreme Leader”):
“And if in fact what they claim is true, which is they have no aspiration to get a nuclear weapon, that in fact, according to their Supreme Leader, it would be contrary to their faith to obtain a nuclear weapon, if that is true, there should be the possibility of getting a deal.”
What Islamic universe is President Obama living in? How could anyone in his right mind conclude that between 10,000 and 20,000 Iranian centrifuges are refining uranium for any other purpose than to build a nuclear bomb? How could anyone possibly conclude that the Iranian plutonium facility at Natanz exists for any other reason than to build a nuclear bomb?
Is it really possible for anyone to be so naive as to believe that Ayatollah Khamenei believes that it is “contrary to his faith” for Iran to be armed with nuclear weapons?
And therein lies the rub.
Whereas there was a time that many of us believed that Obama was acting out of foolish naivete, it is impossible to believe that any more. Barack Obama is completely on board, even sanguine, about Tehran having the bomb.
And that is precisely why Netanyahu must go to Washington.
But unfortunately there is more that came out in an Obama interview of two weeks ago with Matthew Yglesias of Vox.com that appeared yesterday.
Read how Obama described last month’s murders of the Jews in the Jewish kosher deli in Paris, murders carried out by an Islamic terrorist:
It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.
No Islamic terrorists–just “violent, vicious, zealots”
No intent by the terrorists to single out Jews in Paris: they just “randomly shoot”
No Jews: just “a bunch of folks”
If you think this is egregious, read on to see how White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest attempted to defend Obama’s statement when pointedly asked about it by ABC reporter Jonathan Karl:
JONATHAN KARL, ABC NEWS: Well, back to the question Jim was asking about his description of the shooting at the kosher deli in Paris as being a bunch of — “randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.” I mean, this was not a random shooting of a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris. This was an attack on a kosher deli. Does the president have any doubt that those terrorists attacked that deli because there would be Jews in that deli?
JOSH EARNEST, WHITE HOUSE: Jon, it is clear from the terrorists, some of the writings they put up afterwards what their motivation was. The adverb that the president chose was used to indicate that the individuals who were killed in that terrible tragic incident were killed not because of who they were, but because of where they randomly happened to be.
KARL: They weren’t killed because they were in a Jewish deli, though, they were in a kosher deli?
EARNEST: Jon, they were not targeted by name. This is the point.
Earnest was later joined in this Jewless charade by State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki who was asked about the same Obama statement by reporter Matt Lee:
MATT LEE: Does the administration believe that this was an anti-Jewish attack? An attack on a Jewish community in Paris?
JEN PSAKI: I don’t think we’re going to speak on behalf of French authorities and what they believe was the situation there.
So we have to take the Iranians on faith, and Jews were not targeted in Paris.
But wait, there is more from the Vox interview.
Of course, as we all know, Obama will not use the phrase “Islamic terrorism” because to do so would mean that Muslims can be terrorists, and we all know that for Obama any Muslim who murders in the name of Islam is not really a Muslim. But listen to how he talks about terrorism in an interview with Matthew Yglesias of Vox.com.
MATTHEW YGLESIAS, VOX: Do you think the media sometimes overstates the level of alarm people should have about terrorism and this kind of chaos, as opposed to a longer-term problem of climate change and epidemic disease?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Absolutely. And I don’t blame the media for that. What’s the famous saying about local newscasts, right? If it bleeds, it leads, right? You show crime stories and you show fires, because that’s what folks watch, and it’s all about ratings. And, you know, the problems of terrorism and dysfunction and chaos, along with plane crashes and a few other things, that’s the equivalent when it comes to covering international affairs.
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Every day of the year, we have Islamic terrorists slaughtering hundreds of people in Nigeria, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and elsewhere; and we have Islamic terrorists raping and selling into slavery hundreds of young African and Yazidi girls; and we have gruesome beheadings, crucificixions, amputations, and burnings–but all of these pale in importance to climate change and epidemic disease.
Crime stories, fires, plane crashes, a few other things, and terrorism: it’s all the same in Obama’s mind. All of these are just items used by the media to generate headlines.
President Barack Obama is dangerous and delusional.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.