February 11, 2011, 6:49 AM
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In the midst of the political turmoil engulfing Egypt and much of the Arab world, last month's revelation that Pakistan has doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal over the past four years has been largely ignored.
Nuclear proliferation analysts from the Federation of American Scientists and the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) assess that since 2006, Pakistan has increased the size of its nuclear arsenal from 30-60 atomic bombs to approximately 110. That makes Pakistan the world's fifth largest nuclear power ahead of Britain and France.
As for delivery systems, according to The Washington Post, Pakistan has developed nuclear-capable land- and air-launched cruise missiles. Its Shaheen II missile, with a range of 2,400 kilometers, is about to go into operational deployment.
On Wednesday, Pakistan test-fired its new Hatf- VII nuclear-capable cruise missile with a 600-kilometer range.
The Obama administration has been silent on Pakistan's nuclear proliferation activities. As ISIS President David Albright said to the Washington Post, "The administration is always trying to keep people from talking about this knowledgeably.
"They're always trying to downplay the numbers [of Pakistan's nuclear warheads] and insisting that 'it's smaller than you think.'"
Pakistan's nuclear growth goes on as its economy is in shambles, its government is falling apart and a large portion of the country's territory is controlled by the Taliban.
Pakistan is the largest recipient of US foreign aid. In 2009 Congress approved a five-year $7.5 billion civilian aid package. Last October, the Obama administration proposed supplementing the aid with $2b. for Pakistan's military.
The administration requested the supplemental aid despite criticism that economic assistance to Pakistan indirectly funds its nuclear project, since Pakistan is in an effective state of bankruptcy.
Moreover, a US Inspector-General's Report published this week concluded that the $7.5b. in assistance has achieved little.
For their part, the Pakistani government and military adhere to a radically anti-American line, and Pakistan's powerful ISI intelligence service and large sections of its military continue to maintain intimate ties with al-Qaida and the Taliban.
Last month, Pakistani police arrested US diplomat Raymond Davis in Lahore after he killed two gunmen who were reportedly about to rob him at gunpoint. Pakistani law enforcement officials have charged Davis with murder and refuse to release him to US custody, despite the fact that he should enjoy the protection of diplomatic immunity. Rather than attempt to quiet passions, the Pakistani government is fanning anti-American sentiments by among other things, releasing a videotape of Davis's police interrogation.
To date, while members of Congress are beginning to threaten to curtail aid to Pakistan pending Davis's release, the administration has limited its response to this de facto act of hostage-taking by Pakistan to refusing to hold high-level exchanges with Pakistani leaders. And even this limited response has been inconsistently implemented.
For instance, while US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refused to meet with her Pakistani counterpart, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, at the Munich security conference last weekend, she did agree to meet with Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the commander of the Pakistani military. So, too, the US ambassador in Pakistan met on Monday with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.
Pakistan is a textbook example of a disaster of biblical proportions in the making. Its hyperactive nuclear expansion, weak central government, impoverished, radicalized population, and pro- Islamist military and intelligence arms are sources for major concern. That concern becomes all-out alarm in light of the Taliban/al-Qaida's control over anywhere from a quarter to a third of Pakistani territory and the widespread public support for them throughout the country.
Since taking office, the Obama administration has failed to conceive of a strategy for contending with the situation. One of the main obstacles to the formation of a coherent US strategy is the Obama administration's move to outlaw any discussion of the basic threats to US interests. Shortly after entering office, President Barack Obama banned the use of the term "War against terror," substituting it with the opaque term "overseas contingency operation."
Last April, Obama banned use of the terms "jihad," "Islamic terrorism" and "radical Islam" in US government documents.
Given that US officials are barred from using all the terms that are relevant for describing reality in places like Pakistan, it is obvious why the US cannot put together a strategy for contending with the challenges it faces there.
Imagine an intelligence officer in Peshawar trying to report on what he sees. Imagine a defense attaché in Lahore trying to explain the problems with the jihad-infested Pakistani military to his superiors in Washington. Imagine a USAID officer trying to explain why the jihadist-mosque attending public refuses to work at US-funded highway programs.
The Obama administration's decision to ban relevant language from the official US policy discourse was ideologically motivated. And in choosing ideology over reality, the Obama administration has induced a situation where rather than construct policies to deal with reality, at all levels, US officials have been charged with constructing policies to deny and ignore reality.
AGAINST THIS backdrop it becomes fairly clear why the Obama administration's handling of the political turmoil in Egypt has been so incompetent.
Upon entering office, Obama made a determined effort to ignore the political instability percolating under the surface throughout the authoritarian Arab world. US government officials were instructed to curtail programs aimed at developing liberal alternatives to authoritarianism and the Muslim Brotherhood. The justification for this behavior was again ideological.
As the world's biggest bully, the US had no moral right to judge the behavior of tyrants like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Once the dutifully ignored long-repressed popular discontent boiled over into the popular revolts we have seen over the past month in Tunisia and Egypt as well as Yemen, Jordan, Algeria and beyond, the Obama administration rushed to get on the "right side" of the issue. To avoid criticism for refusing to contend with the problems bred by Arab authoritarianism, Obama went to the other extreme. He became the most outspoken champion of unfettered popular democracy in Egypt.
Of course, to occupy this other side of the spectrum, Obama has had to ignore the danger constituted by the most powerful opposition movement in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood's hostility towards the US's most fundamental strategic interests in the Middle East has been swept under the rug by the Obama administration and its supporters in the US media.
But then, in light of the prohibition of all discussion of the reasons the Muslim Brotherhood constitutes a threat to the US - its jihadist ideology of Islamic conquest, its genocidal Islamic-based Jewhatred and hatred of America, its support for Islamic terrorism against non-jihadist regimes throughout the Muslim world and against the West - it is not surprising that the Obama administration is embracing the inclusion of the movement in a post-Mubarak Egyptian regime.
How could the administration object to something it has chosen to ignore? The Obama administration's ideologically driven strategic ineptitude is evident everywhere.
From its slavish devotion to appeasing Iran, its single-minded insistence on withdrawing from Iraq, its announced commitment to withdrawing from Afghanistan, to its tolerance of Hugo Chavez, and its infantile reset button diplomacy towards Russia, the Obama administration's foreign policy is on a collision course with reality.
But nowhere is its premeditated incompetence more evident than in its obsession with the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River.
So it was that during his visit in Israel this week, Obama's recently retired national security adviser Gen. James Jones claimed that it is God's will that Israel withdraw to indefensible borders, and effectively blamed the political turmoil in Egypt on the absence of a Palestinian state.
As Jones put it, "I'm of the belief that had God appeared in front of President Obama in 2009 and said if he could do one thing on the face of the planet, and one thing only, to make the world a better place and give people more hope and opportunity for the future, I would venture that it would have something to do with finding the two-state solution to the Middle East."
Jones then argued, "Time is not on our side, and a failure to act [in establishing a Palestinian state] may trigger other Egypt-like demonstrations in other countries in the region."
The Obama administration is not alone in this completely irrational view. As the Arab world undergoes massive convulsions born of the legacy of authoritarianism and nourished by the pull of jihadism, all of Europe's major statesmen are lining up behind Washington in pushing Israel to agree to surrender still more land to the PLO in order to establish yet another authoritarian, jihadinfested Arab state.
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, British Foreign Minister William Hague, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and other senior officials all parroted Jones's view this week.
CONFRONTING THE Obama administration's assault on reason in the interest of ideological faithfulness, Israel is faced with very few good options. The threats Israel faces stem largely from the rising forces of jihad, Islamic terrorism and religiously justified nuclear adventurism embraced by Islamist politicians and religious leaders. That is, the threats facing Israel stem largely from the forces the Obama administration has elected to ignore and deny.
Moreover, the Obama administration's singular obsession with coercing Israel to surrender still more land to the Palestinian Authority means that America's central Middle East policy involves demanding that Israel further strengthen the unmentionable forces of jihad at its own expense. This fact was underlined this week with The Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh's revelation that most senior PA leaders have recently applied for Jordanian citizenship. Clearly the likes of Mahmoud Abbas believe they will not be the winners if their repressive regime in Judea and Samaria is seriously challenged by their popular jihadist rivals in Hamas.
Our leaders are doubtlessly tempted to simply take the path of least resistance and join Obama and his merry band of blind men as they move from lie to lie to defend their ideology from reality.
But doing so will not protect us when the dangers sown by the US's strategic dementia provoke the next conflagration.
Israel's best option is to simply tell the truth as loudly and forcefully as it can and base our policies on it. While doing so will win Israel no friends in the Obama administration or in Europe, it will prepare us for the day when the wall of lies they are building from Islamabad to Cairo to Ramallah come crashing down.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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Dear Caroline,
God bless you. Your brilliance shines bright. May you continue in your good work till reasonable men and women, with God's help, bring hope to Israel.
DNI head Clapper statement yesterday that the Muslim Brotherhood is a secular group should be enough for Israel to get all her eggs out of the U.S. basket before they are broken and scrambled.
America's continued injustice towards Jonathan Polllard under four administrations and the present administration stubbornly ignoring Israel's recent plea for his release came to mind when I read the plight of the American Raymond Davis in Pakistan.
Even God gets tired of the arrogance and injustice of bullies.
We've always treated Pakistan much better than we've treted Israel.The U.S is not stealing land from Pakistan to give to the Jews but it and the West are stealing land from Israel to appease the UNAPPEASABLE Islamic hordes.
America is being repaid for their evil plan.
Having sown the wind we are now to reap the whirlwind.
What is extremely offensive is General Jones using God as all false prophets do to push their evil agenda.
I think these fools are insanely provoking God to shut them up permanently as He has always done in the past.
Hell is about to break out on the chief offenders and their trifiling with Israel with their false peace.
The wall of lies comes down !
Ezekiel 13
'Therefore thus says the Lord God: Because you have spoken empty, false, and delusive words and have seen lies, therefore behold, I am against you, says the Lord God.
And My hand shall be against the prophets (politicians,false peace hustlers) who see empty, false, and delusive visions and who give lying prophecies....
Because, even because they have seduced My people, saying, Peace, when there is no peace, and because when one builds a [flimsy] wall, behold, [these prophets] daub it over with whitewash,
Say to them who daub it with whitewash that it shall fall! There shall be a downpour of rain; and you, O great hailstones, shall fall, and a violent wind shall tear apart [the whitewashed, flimsy wall]....
So will I break down the wall that you have daubed with whitewash and bring it down to the ground, so that its foundations will be exposed; when it falls, you will perish and be consumed in the midst of it. And you will know (understand and realize) that I am the Lord.
hus will I accomplish My wrath upon the wall and upon those who have daubed it with whitewash, and I will say to you, The wall is no more, neither are they who daubed it,
The [false] prophets of Israel who prophesied deceitfully about Jerusalem, seeing visions of peace for her when there is no peace, says the Lord God.
In the apartment house I own I found a whole stack of newspapers from late 1938 to 1939. There were day to day discussions of what to do about Germany. FDR had programs to sent wheat to the needy Germans in exchange for better treatment of Jews in Germany. Nothing in any of the naive proposals made sense. It was all delusion, now forgotten by politicians too embarrassed to remember the foolishness of the past. It took the Polish invasion to sober up the politicians.
Caroline, you write from the heart and I see your heart breaking at all the injustice heaped upon Israel and Jews in general. What makes the delusional world of Obama, his followers and the lies they tell intolerable are the Jewish Leftists who live only to appease. Hopefully the next US presidential election will bring an end to the arrogance and ineptitude before too much damage is done. Unfortunately with the growing crisis in the Middle East this may G-d forbid be too late for Israel unless, as you say, she must "tell the truth as loudly and forcefully as she can," and takes matters into her own hands. We have no one to depend on but ourselves and G-d's blessings.
It has now got to the stage that the US, because of its inability to recognise reality, yet is too much in a position to bully its acquiescent allies, in the EU, into doing what the US demands, is a bigger menace than the likes of Pakistan. We can now better appreciate what the slow motion, train wreck, of the 1930s was like, vis-à-vis the Nazis. Eisenhower warned of the rise of the Military Industrial Complex, yet was insufficiently astute to keep his nose out that, which became the Suez crisis. And it is unfortunate that Britain and France did not call Eisenhower's bluff, in lieu of letting the US make a complete mess of things.
The God of Israel has put His name on the land of Israel- all of it- and has promised it-all of it- to the descendants of Abraham through Isaac and Jacob as an everlasting possession. His promises remain unbroken. This is the truth that Israel needs to stand on. Every single stand against this single truth is a fist shaken in the face of God who actively to this day holds Israel at the centre of His heart. Israel needs more than ever to be like the sons of Isaachar who 'had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do' (1 Chronicles 12:32)
Dear Caroline & Crew
What great insight in these world events. It seems the leaders of United States and other western countries. Champion political correctness, it only exposes, their completely out of touch with reality. Thanks for your reality check.
God Bless
Ivan
I should add to my comment that while being a truth teller will make Israel even more unpopular in the world (so what else is new; Israel is demonised regardless so she might as well go ahead and be a truth teller) there are people scattered all over the world who believe in Israel's right to the land and if we say we stand with Israel it is up to us to be truth tellers too, in whatever way God asks of us.
For Israelis, the best thing they can do is to tell the truth about their enemies, pray for the best while preparing for the Worst - for if the worst happens, no one will come to the aid of Israel.
However, if Israel overcomes the worst, the world will sing praises of Israel, as no one wants to be allied with losers.
Amen Sue.
Another great article Caroline. It is interesting to note that it is about 2400 kilometers from the western half of Pakistan to all of Israel.
Keep up the great work!
Robert
In her essay, Column One: As the lies come crashing down, February 11, 2011, Ms Glick argues that, as a result of the Obama administration’s framing its foreign policy around ideological considerations, we now have an American strategy that had abandoned reason. At best, US foreign policy seems to move from lie to lie to defend its ideology over reason—leaving Israel unprotected when the dangers sown by this approach provoke the next conflagration.
She says that Israel’s best option is “to simply tell the truth as loudly and forcefully as it can and base our policies on it (the truth)”. This is good advice. But there are two problems: Israel may not know what the truth is and (2), if Israel does not know what is truth, then it cannot tell it to anyone.
Consider the world of Israel:
Our media is obsessed with the call for a two-state solution. A week does not go by free from the noise of it. Accompanying this noise is a drumbeat from our designated peace partners, the Palestinian Authority (PA): if the PA isn’t telling us that the Carmel Forest is ‘occupied Palestinian territory’; it is showing the world a map of the new ‘Palestine’ with no Israel anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea; or, it announces that Kever Rochel is a mosque; or, it proclaims that a new study proves that the Temple Mount does not now and has never had any Jewish ownership.
And that’s just since December 2010.
In the meantime, Kadima leader Livni has announced that only Kadima can bring peace with its surrender land for peace program; the Jerusalem Post publishes editorials and columns which argue that the two-state solution is still viable—or, is our only option; and our defense minister, Ehud Barack, gives a speech in Washington, DC, declaring that Jerusalem in ‘on the table’.
And that’s just in the last two months.
In the meantime,the newspaper Haaretz declares repeatedly that the Right is hopelessly suicidal, virtually drunk with plans to take Israel down the ‘the road to hell’ with its ridiculously stupid belief that there can be no peace with our designated peace partners; the police in the West Bank arrest or threaten to arrest Jews for calling the police because of Arab attacks; and the police arrest or threaten to arrest Rabbis who write approbations of a halachic work by a West Bank resident.
And this is just is the last three weeks.
Look at the problem of ‘truth’ this way: newspapers exist for several reasons, but it seems to me that the news media’s primary function is to report what is real, or true: the protests in Egypt, a car-bus accident in Haifa, an unexpected act of kindness in the Knesset. We accept what we read and/or hear as true; and indeed, a news outlet’s credibility—and ultimately (we hope), its survivability—depends to a large extent upon its reputation for accuracy and truthfulness. The words, ‘News Media’ and ‘Truth’ are, in other words, linked.
In addition, a newspaper also offers editorials. These are not ‘truth’, but opinion. I believe that they exist in order to prompt us to think. However, I would also suggest that, if a specific opinion is repeated often enough—through editorials and columns-- it can moult away from ‘opinion’. It may not become perfect ‘truth’; but it can become ‘accepted dogma’ or ‘conventional wisdom’—practically the same as ‘truth’—and before long, what was once simply an opinion can become associated with ‘truth’, or what is accepted as ‘truth’.
So if all that we see in the media about two states and the PA is repeated so often that it suggests accepted dogma, then the truth becomes this: We must have a two state solution with Arabs who hate us and want to remove us from the region, and the police are already working towards that end by threatening and harassing residents in the West Bank.
Is that the truth Ms Glick wants us to tell the world?
Judging from the arc of her argument, this is not the truth she wishes to be told. I believe that her point is that the truth is different from all of this. The problem is, given that the world’s citizens everywhere usually come to believe what they see repeated almost every day —we may be on the verge of it being too late to identify the ‘truth’; for the truth could become what the papers and media have been repeatedly telling us it is.
We seem to live in a world where the truth seems to be whatever gets repeated the most. After all, if it weren’t true, why would it be repeated so often?
Ms Glick writes about lies created by a blind ideology. It is time, she says, to tell the truth. George Orwell is supposed to have said, in a world of lies, the truth is revolutionary (this is probably a bad paraphrase or a bad attribution, or both, but it makes a point). If all we now see are lies-- two state solution; the Arabs can say anything they want and we accept it; the police can harass and threaten Jews who disturb or discomfort Arabs—could the real, actual truth cause a revolution?
That’s an interesting question—but it still seems to beg the question: what is the ‘truth’ for Israel?
I suggest three choices: first, the truth is that we should be a completely secular democracy that will be based on a two-state solution. Go ahead: surrender land. This is what a true secular democracy would do. It will legitimize the highest ideals of social justice. It will prove we are a democracy. It may even get us some peace.
Second: the truth for us is that we should be a secular Zionist state that is not based on what others want of us—or what some ideal requires--- but is based instead on maintaining control of land won in defensive wars. No other winner has given land to its sworn enemies. Israel will not be the first. The land of Israel is ours. We have spilt too much Jewish blood for this land. We will be a democracy. But we will not surrender land.
Third: we should be a religious Zionist state that believes that this land is a gift from the Creator. The land is not an inheritance, to dispose as we please; rather, it is a legacy from the Creator to be preserved for future generations, per His Word. We can be a democracy. But we cannot surrender land, and we obey the Torah.
Ms Glick argues that we should tell the truth now, loudly and forcefully, because that “will prepare us for the day when the wall of lies they are building from Islamabad to Cairo to Ramallah come crashing down.”
The question is, which truth are we talking about?
Sue,
Right on! To add: Israel needs to tell Obama where to go. Israel needs to fight. I am also sick of leftie appeasers. In universities all over America, Jewish professors and even Rabbis are not fighting back against the escalating Jew-hatred by Moslems and their stupid sympathizers.