Looks like as well as walking on water Barack Obama also resurrects people from under the bus where he’s thrown ’em. His erstwhile foreign affairs adviser and close friend Samantha Power was fired from his campaign after she called Hillary Clinton 'a monster'. But now we learn that Power is back (as she herself predicted all along) on Obama’s transition team advising the Prez-elect on matters relating to the State Department – where Hillary is apparently to be appointed imminently as Secretary of State.
Quite apart from the interesting future dynamics of this relationship, it means that Power will be bringing her views to bear upon State employees and Obama’s foreign policy. As I wrote here previously, those views include not only advocating the ending of all aid to Israel and redirecting it to the Palestinians, but also the need to land a ‘mammoth force’ of US troops in Israel to protect the Palestinians from Israeli attempts at genocide (sic) – although she subsequently claimed not to remember nor understand what she had said on that occasion -- and her complaint that criticism of Barack Obama all too often came down to what was ‘good for the Jews’.
This, an account by doctors in Mumbai, is what all who stand in the way of the Islamist conquest are up against:
‘It was apparent that most of the dead were tortured. What shocked me were the telltale signs showing clearly how the hostages were executed in cold blood,’ one doctor said. The other doctor, who had also conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: ‘Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again,’ he said.
May their memory be for a blessing.
Update: The Jerusalem Post has reported that a doctor at a Mumbai hospital has cast doubt on the torture claim. The New York Times, however, appeared to confirm that it was true.
The atrocities in Mumbai have left reporters and commentators floundering for explanations. Why India? Was this a local terrorist group or al Qaeda? Why single out Americans and Brits if they also targeted Indians in the railway station? Why attack some obscure Jewish organisation? And so on. They are floundering because they still just don’t get it. The atrocities demonstrated with crystal clarity what the Islamist war is all about – and the western commentariat didn’t understand because it simply refuses to acknowledge, even now, what that war actually is. It does not arise from particular grievances. It is not rooted in ‘despair’ over Palestine. It is not a reaction to the war in Iraq. It is a war waged in the name of Islam against America, Britain, Hindus, Jews and all who refuse to submit to Islamic conquest. The Mumbai atrocities told us very clearly a number of things.
The Islamists want to murder as many Americans, Brits, Hindus and Jews as possible. That is because they are waging all-out war against civilisation.
They singled out Americans, Brits and Indians in the financial heart of India to break the ever-more important strategic alliance between India and the west.
They went to some lengths in addition to single out a centre for observant Jews. Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife Rivka were murdered not because of Palestine but simply because they were Jews. That is because hatred of Jews as Jews is fundamental to the Islamists’ hatred of the west – and of Israel.
The Islamists showed a degree of organisation and co-ordination which are more akin to commando raids by an army than acts of terrorism.
They have the capacity not merely to commit mass murder but to cause mortal damage to a country’s economy.
If they can do this in Mumbai, they can do it in London or other British cities; the infrastructure of Islamist terror is more extensively developed in Britain, and the authorities more paralysed in the face of what they have allowed to grow in their midst, than anywhere else in the west.
The supposedly more sophisticated British National Party reverted to type last night when it fielded its ‘legal director’ (sic) Lee Barnes to take part in BBC Radio Four’s Moral Maze on which I am a regular panellist. The subject was whether people’s political views should ever disqualify them from a job, an issue that had arisen in the context of the leaking to the press of the BNP’s membership list.
Barnes, who was supposedly there to present the BNP as a mainstream political party, proceeded to behave like a thug. To make the case for BNP members’ right to express themselves, he set out to prevent anyone else from talking; he ranted and raved so badly that it was impossible for the panellists even to finish their questions to him, let alone get a word in edgeways. He also couldn’t stop himself making anti-Jewish remarks. What sent him over the edge altogether was my charge that the BNP stood outside the values of British society in refusing to uphold the right to equality of black or Asian Britons who the BNP does not regard as properly British. How dare I talk about human rights, he screamed, when I was always going on about Zionism and Israel! To which I responded that he clearly didn’t think I was British either, since in a previous exchange he had said I should be deported to Israel.
Now look (if you can stomach it) at how he describes this encounter on his own blog where he claims that it was I who bafflingly introduced the subject of Israel – and also that he had threatened before the show that he would talk over everyone else if they didn’t give him time to answer. It obviously doesn’t occur to him that anyone who heard the show, or listens to it on the Maze website (at least when the replay facility is working again) would know that this account is demonstrably false.
And after all that effort the BNP has made to sanitise itself, too. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.
One further point about the ambiguities of the nascent Obama administration and his hiring of supposed ‘centrists’, a fact which has apparently caused many hitherto fearful and appalled opponents now to fling open their doors and windows to the new dawn with a spring in their step and a song in their hearts. What is not yet commonly understood is the emergence of what might be termed an ‘axis of appeasement’ which runs from left to right. In Britain, this became apparent straight after 9/11 and solidified as the Iraq war shaped the entire British political zeitgeist into 1930s-style defeatism. Coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum, left and right united over the issues of America, Israel and global Islamic terror.
Starting from the premise of evil American colonialism and imperialism and knee-jerk support for the third world against the west, the left demonised American exceptionalism, pre-emptive military defence of western interests, Israel and global Jewish power, all of which were blamed as the cause of Islamic terror. Starting from the premise that ‘abroad’ was a scary place it didn’t understand full of terrifying madmen who would leave us alone as long as we did what they wanted so we could pull up our drawbridge, the right demonised American exceptionalism, pre-emptive military defence of western interests, Israel and global Jewish power, all of which were blamed as the cause of Islamic terror.
The result has been that on foreign policy you can’t slide a cigarette paper between left and right, who all agree that the ‘centrist’ position to be taken by all sensible individuals is ‘engagement’, aka appeasement of those with unconscionable agendas who say in terms ‘we don’t want to talk to you -- we want to kill you’. The result is that the anti-western left, the isolationist right and peace-process zealots all come together in common cause. This is exactly what the developing Obama administration looks like.
In the New Republic, Eli Lake offers an interesting refinement of my own analysis. As Lake sees it, Obama’s Middle East take is currently deeply ambiguous. Not only has Hillary’s own historical position on the Middle East bounced around but, since in recent times at least she has been firmly pro-Israel, this would put her on a direct collision course with Israel-unfriendly NSA-designate Jim Jones and threatens to reprise the Powell-Cheney fault-line which paralysed the Bush presidency.
Those who were previously worried about an Obama presidency but who now draw reassurance from the fact that the Republican Robert Gates looks set to continue as US Defence Secretary, or the Republican Jim Jones looks set to be appointed National Security Adviser, and so on, on the grounds that Obama cannot be a radical because he is being so refreshingly bi-partisan, really do not get it. Under President Bush, within the Republican camp the defeatists came to power. The Powell-Cheney fault line -- so calamitously ignored by Bush -- eventually blew up in his face. The ‘new realist’ appeasers stamped all over the neocons, State won over Defence, Condi Rice was let loose to empower the bad guys and dump on their victims in the Middle East. And now some of these very same people are to slide seamlessly into the Obama administration. Quelle surprise.
The outcome is likely to be that the enemies of the free world will be strengthened even more, their victims even more ruthlessly abandoned and true moderates still more grievously undermined. And time now is fast running out.
On my recent travels in America, I met two types of Republicans: those possessed by the most profound, gut-wrenching fear of the supreme danger that President-elect Obama represented for their country and the world, and those who believed that he was merely a cynical opportunist who had used radical politics as a means of achieving power but who, mindful of the need not to derail his presidency and indeed to campaign for a second term, not to mention having to face up to the dual threats of economic and military armageddon, would throw all his radical associates under the bus and govern from the centre.
This later prognosis may indeed turn out to be true; as I have said before, I desperately hope that circumstances will force Obama to repudiate his past. At present we do not know whether this will happen; and so far, I have seen nothing to suggest that it will. Unlike those who see in the emerging shape of his administration evidence that he will be a pragmatic centrist, I do not think it necessarily shows anything of the kind.
For sure, he has made some solid and reassuring appointments, such as his Treasury team. But did anyone really believe that a radical president would appoint obvious radicals to key roles in his administration? Maybe he really was a centrist all along. But if not, the one thing Obama is not going to do is torpedo his presidency at the very start by displaying a radical bent. The name of the game must be not to frighten the horses, and never more so than in the two most explosive areas of all: the economy and Israel. After all, the revolutionary Alinsky school of politics in which his politics to date have been solidly anchored is entirely about stealth, iron discipline and steady incremental cultural change under the radar, so that the terms of political trade are changed forever, as summarised here. The aim is to achieve increased control at home and decreased power abroad, in order radically to change America and neuter its power. But it must be done with maximum deniability.
But hang on, people say -- what about Hillary? Doesn’t the fact that Obama wants to make her Secretary of State prove that Obama is a centrist, just like her? And what about Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, the son of a former Irgun Jewish terrorist?
As I have said before, Emanuel’s parentage is irrelevant. As The Forward notes, he was not only a player in the catastrophic Oslo appeasement process but also supported the informal ‘Geneva initiative’ which even doveish Israelis condemned as a suicide note for Israel.
And as for Mrs Clinton, Hillary the Moderate is itself a fairly recent piece of triangulated reconstitution. Not that long ago, she was significantly to the left of her husband; and it must not be forgotten, crucially, that she herself is an Alinsky disciple.
What is much more likely is that Hillary, a professed defender of Israel, would be used (as would, to a lesser extent, Rahm Emanuel) to provide deniable cover for Obama as his administration forces Israel to cut its own throat -- the centrepiece of what passes for his foreign policy to date.
For surrounding Hillary would be appointments which would be solidly anti-Israel: people who believe that Israel must be forced to jeopardise its security to bring into being a Palestinian state which they think would lance the Islamist boil – because they believe that Israel is not the victim but the cause of Islamist rage and global terror. It has been widely reported that Obama has been consulting the former Republican National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, who is a leading voice in this camp. Moreover, according to the Wall Street Journal, Scowcroft is linked to a number of like-minded Republicans Obama is thought to be considering bringing into his administration, such as Jim Jones as his National Security Adviser.
A few days ago, Scowcroft and Carter’s former NSA Zbigniew Brzezinski (an open enemy of Israel and another of Obama's advisers) penned a significant op-ed in the Washington Post. This appeared to be a first draft of the Obama plan to force Israel back into its 1948 ‘Auschwitz’ borders and bring a Palestinian state into being, in the quite remarkable belief that this
would dissipate much of the appeal of Hezbollah and Hamas, dependent as it is on the Palestinians' plight. It would change the region’s psychological climate, putting Iran back on the defensive and putting a stop to its swagger.
What planet are they on? A Palestinian state would be run by Hamas as a proxy for Iran. As such, it would be a disaster for the Palestinians -- as several of them have now realised – as well as for Israel, the region and the world.
Moreover, to allay Israel’s security concerns over handing over territory to a Palestinian government that is incapable of combating terrorism, Scowcroft, Brzezinski and Jones recommend stationing an international force, perhaps from NATO, in the disputed territories.
Ah yes: to repeat the conspicuous success NATO troops achieved in bringing peace in Srebenica, for example, or Rwanda, or Lebanon?
The Republicans, who really don’t begin to grasp just what has hit them, similarly fail to acknowledge that among their own ranks are many who, just like in the British Conservative party, share with the left the desire to neutralise American power and throw Israel under the bus. Some of those people came to power under George W Bush and set him on the disastrous path to appeasement -- which his demented detractors on the left somehow failed altogether to notice.
There are other unsettling indications that Obama may already be running a shadow foreign policy. Robert Malley, one of Clinton’s Oslo negotiators, is one of America's most outspoken apologists for Palestinian terrorism against Israel and claims that Syrian, Lebanese and Iranian attacks against Israel are all Israel's fault. The Obama campaign distanced itself from Malley last May after the Times reported that he was meeting regularly with Hamas leaders. But a few days after Obama’s election, Malley travelled to Syria, ostensibly under the aegis of the appeasement-minded International Crisis Group. Yet one of his aides told FrontPage Magazine that acting on Obama’s instructions, Malley traveled to Cairo and Damascus to tell Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Syria’s President Assad that ‘the Obama administration would take into greater account Egyptian and Syrian interests.’ And as Caroline Glick reported, Hamas terror operative Ahmad Youssef told the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper that in the months leading up to his election, Obama's advisers held steady contacts with the leaders of the terror group in Gaza, and had asked that Hamas keep the meetings secret in order not to harm Obama's chances of being elected.
If Israel is to be browbeaten into committing suicide, however, it is essential that the fingerprints of the Israel-haters are not found at the scene of the crime and that it is carried out instead by someone with impeccable credentials as an Israel supporter. That person may well be Hillary Clinton who, if appointed Secretary of State, will be expected to finish the job her husband failed to do and force a Palestine state into being.
To fully grasp this, it has to be understood that there are two kinds of people who threaten to deliver Israel to its enemies for annihilation. The first are the Israel-haters who want to see it destroyed. The second are those on the left who, while believing they have Israel’s interests at heart, believe also that its security can be guaranteed by a Palestine state. They thus see Israel’s resistance to that state as the obstacle to peace in the region, whereas in fact it would pose a mortal threat to Israel (and now also to the region and the world, since such a state would be a proxy for Iran). That’s why Clinton Mark One pressurised Israel to dismember itself under Oslo and in the process turned the Palestinians from a terrorist gang into an army with international backing. Clinton Mark Two would be Oslo all over again -- but this time trailing clouds of Iranian plutonium.
While neutralising America abroad, Alinkskyite politics mean changing the terms of trade at home to extend the power of the state and undermine western values. So it’s no surprise that Melody Barnes, head of policy at the Centre for American Progress, is apparently to be director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. As Ed Lasky comments on American Thinker:
The Center for American Progress is a Soros-funded group, of course. Here comes drug legalization, abortion on demand, and euthanasia.
And then there’s Eric Holder who has been named as Attorney-General. Holder was the Clinton administration’s last deputy Attorney General. NRO recalls that notoriously he granted a pardon to the racketeer Marc Rich
thanks to the intercession of his ex-wife, a generous donor to Clinton’s library and legal-defense fund. Holder’s role was aptly described as ‘unconscionable’ by a congressional committee.
Worse still:
In 1999, over the objections of the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and prosecuting attorneys, Holder supported Clinton’s commutation of the sentences of 16 FALN conspirators. These pardons — of terrorists who even Holder has conceded had not expressed any remorse — were issued in the months after al-Qaeda’s 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, when the Clinton administration was pretending to be the scourge of terrorism. The commutations were nakedly political, obviously designed by Clinton to assist his wife’s impending Senate campaign by appealing to New York’s substantial Puerto Rican vote...
He is convinced justice in America needs to be ‘established’ rather than enforced; he’s excited about hate crimes and enthusiastic about the constitutionally dubious Violence Against Women Act; he’s a supporter of affirmative action and a practitioner of the statistical voodoo that makes it possible to burden police departments with accusations of racial profiling and the states with charges of racially skewed death-penalty enforcement; he’s more likely to be animated by a touchy-feely Reno-esque agenda than traditional enforcement against crimes; he’s in favor of ending the detentions of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay and favors income redistribution to address the supposed root causes of crime.
Yes, maybe Obama is really a centrist. But a real centrist would simply never choose such people to be in his administration.
The most telling comment of all was made by Rahm Emanuel. As the Sunday Telegraph reported, he said of America’s financial meltdown:
‘You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.’ He continued: ‘Things that we postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.’
Yes, there’s a silver revolutionary lining in every capitalist cloud.
The British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has warned that Iran’s nuclear programme presents an immediate threat to Israel and the rest of the world. So much is no more than the blindingly obvious. Predictably, Iran rejects this view. But look at the evidence it uses to back up its lies:
‘If an opinion survey is done in Britain, a majority of people will reaffirm that the Zionist regime, Israel, is the main threat to the region,’ Iran’s official news agency quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Hasan Qashqavi as saying.
What is published and said in Britain has a resonance way beyond these shores. It is closely studied by its enemies, who understand what the myopic west still doesn’t grasp -- that the principal battlefield in this war is the mind. The hatred of and prejudice against Israel openly displayed day in, day out by the British media and intelligentsia is being used to strengthen a regime committed to a second genocide of the Jews and the destruction of the west. The British elite has become a key weapon in the arsenal of the enemies of the free world.
In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick makes the point about the piracy in the Gulf of Aden that I made here back in April and repeated on Question Time this week– that a major reason this menace has got out of hand is the spineless response of Britain and other western nations which have tied up their own hands through international law and ‘human rights’ doctrine. A Wall Street Journal article a few days ago made exactly the same point, noting that the British Foreign Office instructed the British Navy not to apprehend pirates lest they claim that their human rights were harmed, and request and receive asylum in Britain.
Glick broadens it out to the wider moral bankruptcy which is bringing western civilisation down:
The west’s perverse interpretations of human rights and humanitarian law, which bar it from handling one of the most acute emerging threats to the international economy, is a consequence of the West's abdication of moral and legal sanity in its dealings with international terror. In the 1960s and 1970s, when international terrorism first emerged as a threat to international security, the West adopted international treaties and conventions that tended to treat terrorism as a new form of piracy. Like piracy, terrorism was to be treated as an attack on all nations. Jurisdiction over terrorists was to be universal. Such early views were codified in early documents such as the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft from 1970 that established a principle of universal jurisdiction over aircraft hijackers...
And yet, over the years, states have managed to ignore or invert international laws on terrorism to the point where today terrorists are among the most protected groups of individuals in the world. Due to political sympathy for terrorists, hostility toward their victims, or fear of terrorist reprisals against a state that dares to prosecute terrorists found on its territory, states have managed to avoid not only applying existing laws against terrorists. They have also refrained from updating laws to meet the growing challenges of terrorism. Instead, international institutions and ‘enlightened’ Western states have devoted their time to condemning and threatening to prosecute the few states that have taken action against terrorists....
One of the reasons the international community has failed so abjectly to take reasonable measures to combat terrorism is because international terrorism as presently constituted is the creation of Palestinian Arabs and their Arab brethren. Since the 1960s, and particularly since the mid-1970s, Europe, and to varying degrees the US, have been averse to contending with terrorism because their hostility toward Israel leads them to condone Palestinian Arab terrorism against the Jewish state.
Until and unless the west comes to understand that its insane hatred of Israel – the country that serves as the west’s own forward salient against global terrorism – has been given traction by the international law and ‘human rights’ doctrine to which it so slavishly adheres, it will continue to write its own suicide note.
A postscript from Thursday’s Question Time show. At one point, in a discussion about the ‘baby P’case Philip Hammond, the Tory shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, referred to Britain’s ‘broken society’, the phrase the Tories are using to describe Britain’s social problems. Both Jim Murphy, the Scottish Secretary, and Tavish Scott, the Scottish LibDem leader, promptly jumped on him from a great height and accused him of party political point scoring.
What an extraordinary reaction. Of course Britain is broken. You only have to go to areas where committed fathers are non-existent and children are abandoned to emotional and moral chaos to see the complete breakdown of civilised norms of the kind that surfaced in the baby P case. You only have to note the huge amount of teenage pregnancy, the record levels of drug use and the evisceration of knowledge under way in our schools to see a society with multiple fractures.
There wasn’t time or opportunity for me to say this on the show, but it is simply grotesque to suggest that Iain Duncan Smith, whose work in researching and exposing this moral and social breakdown destroying individual lives and crippling our society has been the inspiration for the Tories’ ‘broken society’ theme, is making through it some kind of cheap party political point. It is the left that is largely responsible for this destruction and despair. For it then to try to stop people drawing attention to it by sneers and smears is doubly reprehensible.
Eyebrows have been raised in some quarters over the fact that on BBC One’s Question Time last night, I scorned the Tories’ position on the economic crisis. Some people seem to think that because I oppose the Labour Party on so many things, I am a Tory. I have news for them. I am not, and have never been, a Tory. I suppose I regard myself as an old fashioned liberal moralist from the progressive wing of politics; my great quarrel with the left is that it has hijacked the words ’liberal’ and ‘progressive’ and turned them into their antithesis, abandoning and betraying the very people at the bottom of the pile about whom they pretend to care so much, junking truth, morality and freedom for lies, injustice and power and destroying our society (and threatening the free world) in the process. The more one tries to reassert truth, morality and social justice, the more one is demonised as the ‘far right’ or ‘insane’. But that’s another story.
To the matter in hand: the Tory position on the recession. What I said last night was essentially this. Gordon Brown’s profligate spending and borrowing has made the global economic crisis even worse in Britain, for sure. But the paradox is that, while in normal economic times the kind of fiscal stimulus recommended by Keynes (pictured) for abnormal times sends an economy over the cliff, such fiscal stimulus is needed to stop a recession/depression turning into the dreaded deflation, which has to be avoided at all costs. This argument is laid out well here by Roger Bootle, managing director of Capital Economics and economic adviser to Deloitte.
Brown got it wrong until now – and indeed should be removed from office for having behaved so recklessly with the public finances. But his view that a fiscal stimulus is necessary now to deal with this unprecedented economic emergency is probably correct ( I say probably because, to be honest, no-one knows how people will behave in response not just to current financial circumstances but also, most crucially, to what they believe is going to happen in the future). The key thing is to encourage people to spend, because if they don’t we will slip into the quicksands of deflation.
If Brown’s fiscal stimulus turns out to be merely yet more tax credits, he should be jumped on from a great height since this will increase pauperisation and dependency. What is needed is tax cuts for those in work on modest incomes. The danger is that Brown will simply increase state spending and use the crisis to pursue his agenda of redistribution and control. But the Tories, having got it wrong until now, have proceeded to reverse themselves and got it wrong again. They went along with Brown’s reckless spending programmes in times of plenty solely as a piece of political positioning, because they were terrified of being called ‘heartless’ public service cutters and thought the only way to regain power was by hanging onto the coat-tails of the left. Yet those times of plenty were precisely when they should have been calling for ‘prudence’ and cutting spending to put reserves aside for a when times got hard. They did not – until now, when they have ditched Brown’s spending increases on the grounds that adding to the national debt is an act of recklessness – even though it is probably necessary for these present circumstances and only these present circumstances. Their current position therefore seems to be deflationary and likely to make the situation even worse.
In short, there is a difference between the short term and the long term, between times of plenty and times of recession, between the era of Mrs Thatcher and an era of low inflation. It’s horses for courses – but the Tories are all over the field. Brown needs to be effectively opposed. The problem is the Tories just don’t have the credibility to do it.
Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and is a
panellist on BBC Radio Four's Moral Maze. Her most recent book is 'Londonistan', published by
Encounter and Gibson Square.
For a complete set of Melanie's articles click here
The atrocities in Mumbai have left reporters and commentators floundering for explanations. Why India? Was this a local terrorist group or al Qaeda? Why single out Americans and Brits if they also targeted Indians in the railway station? Why attack some obscure Jewish organisation? And so on. They are floundering because they still just don’t get it. The atrocities demonstrated with crystal clarity what the Islamist war is all about – and the western commentariat didn’t understand because it simply refuses to acknowledge, even now, what that war actually is. It does not arise from particular grievances. It is not rooted in ‘despair’ over Palestine. It is not a reaction to the war in Iraq. It is a war waged in the name of Islam against America, Britain, Hindus, Jews and all who refuse to submit to Islamic conquest. The Mumbai atrocities told us very clearly a number of things.
