New Opportunity

The UN is not Israel's friend. In fact, it isn't even an neutral arbiter of the conflict between Israel and the palestinians. Over the past 60 years, the UN has done everything possible to cripple the Jewish state, to falsely sanction and condemn it for "human rights" violations, to act against its interests, its leaders, and its very existence. The UN is corrupt and hypocritical, so its actions come as no surprise.

Benny Avni reports:

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon seems intent on using his last year in office to significantly increase UN pressure on Israel.

Last week, he told the Security Council that “human nature” can explain the recent wave of Palestinian attacks on Israeli citizens. He raised the ire of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who accused Ban of giving a “tailwind” to terrorism.

Stung by the criticism, Ban penned a New York Times op-ed saying that “nothing excuses terrorism.” But that sentence was absent from the Security Council speech, in which, as in the op-ed, the main clause was this: “As oppressed people have demonstrated throughout the ages, it is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism.”

Ban repeats the widely repeated leftist canard that Israel is an occupying force. No matter that the palestinians never had a state of their own prior to the creation of the State of Israel or that Jews have inhabited the region for thousand of years. There was never a palestinian state to occupy. No matter that those arabs that lived in Israel prior to the 1948 war left at the behest of their leaders with promises that once the infant state of the Jews was destroyed, they could return in glory. No matter that dozens of Arab states have killed or forced Jews to leave in an concerted effort to achieve what the Nazis called Judenrein, while Israel provides a home for 1.7 million Arab Muslims, almost 20 percent of its population! No matter that the palestinians have elected a terror group, Hamas, to lead them in Gaza, and a terror sympathizer to lead them on the West Bank. No matter that the palestinians regularly launch rockets at civilian population centers in Israel, bomb commercial businesses, and stab innocent civilians. No matter that they teach anti-Semitism from Kindergarten onward, and refuse to acknowledge Israel's right to exist. No matter that they are monumentally corrupt, stealing billions in Western aid for their own people to buy armaments and enrich their leaders, and regularly violate the human rights of its own "citizens" (think: throwing people off building who are accused of "spying" for Israel).

According to Ban Ki-moon and the majority of the lunatic Left, Israel is the "oppressor." But is there a subtext. Avni suggests the following:

In his last year, then, he [Ban Ki-moon] must have some major diplomatic breakthroughs, but those are hard to come by. Last year, Ban almost managed to arrange an unprecedented trip to North Korea, which he could’ve presented as a major success. But word of the planned trip leaked to the press in Seoul, and Pyongyang slammed the gates shut.

Joining the anti-Israel pile-on is the next best thing. And chilly relations between Netanyahu and President Obama lead many at the United Nations to believe, fairly or not, that loud attacks on Israel’s policies are no longer a major affront to Washington.

State Department spokesman John Kirby declined to criticize Ban this week. “We certainly respect” his right to express an opinion, Kirby said. (Was his right ever in doubt? After all, he owns one of the world’s loudest megaphones.) Kirby condemned terrorism against Israelis and said it has no excuse, but added that “the situation is unsustainable” and “of course, our position on settlement activity is well known and clear.”

No wonder Ban writes that attacking Israel’s “shortsighted and damaging policies” now comes even from its “closest friends.”

Throughout his failed presidency, Barack Obama has continually tried to coerce Israel into a "peace" settlement with a murderous people who want to destroy it. He has publicly denigrated Israel's leaders and policies. By word and deed, he has tacitly given permission to those anti-Semitic elements of the Left and its trained hamsters in the media to come out of the closet and publicly condemn Israel. The BDS movement, a disgusting offshoot of the Left, exemplifies the new boldness with which legitimate organizations (universities, NGOs, academic societies) have been hijacked by delusional Israel haters.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama is continuing his anti-Isreal moves. As Caroline Glick writes: "Part of the reason Obama is acting with such urgency and intensity [against Israel's interests] is that he knows that regardless of who is elected to replace him, the next president will not be as viscerally hostile to Israel or as emotionally attached to Islam as he is."

But it may be that Obama is not running out of time. Over the past few months, unsubstantiated rumors have surfaced to suggest that Barack Obama's next gig, after his disastrous presidency, just might be as Secretary General of the UN. Since some critics view Obama as a "citizen of the world," the UN position would be appropriate. After all, the UN Secretary general doesn't do much but talk, accomplishes little or nothing, oversees a corrupt over-budgeted organization, and is ineffective in most things. Obama will be right at home.

If nothing else, the UN appointment would allow Obama—a man whose many foreign policy failures will haunt future generations and will become an ignominious legacy—to embrace the despicable anti-Israel position of Ban Ki-moon and provide a new opportunity to carry it forward with renewed vigor.

UPDATE-1:
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For those Democrats who might argue that Barack Obama is old news and that Hillary Clinton will be a friend to Israel, her emails (released under court order) tell a far different story. Rabbi Schmuley Boteach writes:

Earlier this week, I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s interactions with Sid Blumenthal and her troubling praise of his son, Max Blumenthal’s anti-Israel agenda. Mr. Blumenthal, one of her most trusted advisers, sent her dozens of anti-Israel articles, ideas and advice during her time as Secretary of State. But the stream of anti-Israel advice received by Ms. Clinton was much more comprehensive. Now, we see emails between Ms. Clinton and other advisors and the results are equally appalling.

In the entire forced dump of her emails, you will be hard-pressed to find a single note that is sympathetic toward the Jewish state from any of the people she trusted. The negative, poisonous approach Ms. Clinton established demonstrates that a huge segment of her close advisers and confidants were attacking Israel, condemning Netanyahu, and strategizing how to force Israel to withdraw from Judea and Samaria at all costs.

This was occurring in the backdrop of Israel’s recent Gaza withdrawal, which led to the takeover of the Strip by Hamas. There is almost zero mention of the huge risks to Israel’s security in withdrawing, as Ms. Clinton and the Obama Administration did everything they could to pressure Israel to capitulate to their demands.

Hmmm. Looks like Hillary is less than a true friend to Israel.

But wait. What about Bernie Sanders? YNet comments:

Mr. Sanders represents the leftist fringe of American liberalism. This constituency is notorious for its one-sided criticism of Israel and tolerance for the BDS movement. Although Bernie Sanders does not openly condemn Zionism, as a US senator he has repeatedly refused to support resolutions that empathize with Israel’s predicaments. Furthermore he has publicly criticized Israel for "overreacting" in the struggle against the Islamist Hamas movement.

These phenomena are ominous. They presage a future where Israel’s key ally might be led by a president who stakes out an even more neutral position in the conflict thrust upon Israel - even when Israel faces Islamists trampling women’s rights and basic religious freedoms.

By currying the favor of anti-Israeli powers in the region, the presidency of Barack Obama has greatly strained relations between the United States and Israel. A Sanders presidency is liable to perpetuate and accelerate this trend.

Obama, Clinton, and Sanders are creatures of the Left—and the Left is obsessively anti-Israel. More ominously, the Democratic party has veered hard to the left. Just another reason why every person who supports Israel—a tiny, liberal democracy that exists in a cesspool of intolerance and violence that is the Arab middle east—should reconsider his or her support for the Democrats.

UPDATE-2:
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David Bernstein writes about anti-Semitic bias in a hotbed of lunatic Left thinking—the American university. He writes about the concerns of an Oberlin College alumna who talked about her experiences at the college:

I noted that I found most remarkable her assertion that multiple students had dismissively referred to the Holocaust as “white on white crime,” as if the “progressive” students there found it impossible to conceive of horrific racist violence outside the parameters of paradigmatic examples of racist violence in the United States. What’s remarkable about the incidents recounted, which range from gross insensitivity to blatant anti-Semitism, is not that such attitudes exist, nor that they are necessarily serious compared with what other minority students may face at college, but that, if the Facebook post in question is true, some of the most purportedly progressive students, those who are the most acutely sensitive to and active against other forms of racism, ignore anti-Semitism, belittle it and, in some cases participate in it.

Is Bernstein really surprised by this? At the risk of committing a microagression, it's often true that the most rabid hard-left students have trouble stringing together two or three coherent thoughts. In many cases, they simply parrot the positions, narratives, and phrases offered up by hard-left professors (in some academic disciplines, the phrase "hard-left professors" is a tautology) or other campus "activists.".

My guess is that a professor or activist at Oberlin called the holocaust "white on white crime" in an effort to somehow reduce its importance compared to, say, the claim that "brown people" in the United States are victims of "white privilege" and can therefore be excused from any expectation of accomplishment because the system is "rigged" against them. If I was still and professor and wrote the last sentence, I'd likely be condemned by the poor beleaguered left wing students hiding in their safe places so they don't have to listen to any ideas that might cause them to question the leftist garbage they are taught.