Obama’s UN Legacy: Whitewashing Iran’s Nuclear Cheating; Outlawing Jewish History
2016 at the U.N. – A year that will live in infamy.
President Barack Obama’s legacy at the UN will be marked by the year 2016.
The year was bookmarked by the passage of UN Security Council resolution 2231 in January, giving U.N. authority to the Iran Nuclear Deal, and resolution 2334 last week, purporting to declare illegal the presence of Jews in areas in which form a key part of Jewish history.
In the case of the Iran deal, the United States led the Security Council and voted for the resolution enshrining the nuclear deal into what passes for international law. In the case of the more recent resolution, the United States abstained, according to some incoherent reasons spouted by US Ambassador Samantha Power, but it looks like, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu charges, that Obama orchestrated it. (Yesterday, Netanyahu spokesman David Keyes charged that Israel had “ironclad information” that Obama was indeed behind the maneuver.)
In the case of 2231, the Security Council reversed a decade of policy and undermined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by removing nuclear-related sanctions from Iran without insisting that Iran stop enriching uranium first. Obama, of course, obfuscated this by saying that sanctions brought Iran to the table. That’s incredibly misleading. Iran was sanctioned because it was a nuclear outlaw. Not only a nuclear outlaw, but a nuclear outlaw that had threatened and continues the destruction of another member state.
But administration officials insisted that Iran had, during sanctions, neglected too many civilian needs, so it would use the billions to shore up its crumbling infrastructure. Iran said it would use the billions to further its destabilizing activities and has done so. The destruction of eastern Aleppo, is the latest sign that Iran was emboldened by the deal that whitewashed its crimes and convinced its leaders that they could get away with mass murder. (Amb. Power telling Iran, Russia and Syria that they should be ashamed of themselves is not any sort of punishment.)
Eleven months after exonerating Iran, Obama put Israel in the penalty box by allowing a resolution that stated, “that Israel’s establishment of settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, had no legal validity, constituting a flagrant violation under international law,” meaning of course that the Jewish presence in the Old City of Jerusalem, (which Jews were illegally ethnically cleansed from by Jordan in 1948) is against international law.
This is just a secularized version of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s September 2015 declaration that the PA “won’t allow Jew’s filthy feet” to defile the holy places in Jerusalem. Just as Abbas statement served as a call to arms beginning last year’s “knife intifada,” resolution 2334 has become a call for more terror. That call hasn’t just been made by Hamas, but also by Abbas’s “moderate” Fatah movement.
In other words with its support of these two resolutions it has given Israel’s enemies a license to kill, while limiting what Israel can do to defend itself.
There are other aspects to these twin betrayals that are worth mentioning.
Both show that international outlaws can get what they want by simply waiting. As noted above, Iran hated sanctions and hated being branded an outlaw. With Obama eager to make a deal they saw an opportunity to get their crimes expunged AND keep their illicit uranium enrichment program. Obama said simply that Iran would never agree to scrap its enrichment program if there was to be a deal. (This of course contradicted the common administration refrain that no deal was better than a bad deal.)
But Abbas, too, has benefited from changing circumstances. The Washington Post, which has spent most of the past two months warning that Donald Trump would break with traditional foreign policy, woke up to the fact that Obama has already done that regarding Israel. An editorial Friday observed that Obama had “[reversed] decades of practice by both Democratic and Republican presidents,” of “[vetoing] past resolutions on the grounds that they unreasonably singled out Jewish communities in occupied territories as an obstacle to Middle East peace.”
The editorial also correctly noted, “The Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas proved unwilling to negotiate seriously even during the [2010] settlement freeze, and it refused to accept a framework for negotiations painstakingly drawn up by Secretary of State John F. Kerry in 2014.” In other words the failure of the Obama administration to make peace can be traced to Palestinian intransigence.
But as Post editor Jackson Diehl noted back in 2009, Abbas had been reassured by his early meeting with Obama that “the United States will simply force Israel to make critical concessions, whether or not its democratic government agrees, while Arabs passively watch and applaud.” And as Prof. Jacobson noted back in 2011, that Obama sought to make peace based on the so-called 1967 borders.
This was a change in U.S. policy. First of all, the 1967 borders, prior to the Six-Day-War were the never-meant-to-be-permanent 1949 armistice lines. In fact President Lyndon Johnson, during whose administration the war occurred, believed the armistice lines to be a prescription for renewed war.
Second of all, the basis for calling the territory won by Israel in 1967 “occupied” requires a fraudulent reading of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The Fourth Geneva Convention is a point of convergence for both shameful UNSC resolutions as Dore Gold, former Director-General of Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in a conference call last week, “And we are seeing the Iranians using the Shi’ite population from Iraq and as far away as Afghanistan and Pakistan and moving them into these areas to alter the demographic balance of the Levant. That is exactly what the Fourth Geneva Convention wanted to address, and that is exactly what is being ignored today by the UN.”
Hypocritically, the Obama administration is refusing to apply the Fourth Geneva Convention to rein in Iranian aggression resulting from the nuclear deal, but using it to vilify Israel.
In short, what Obama has done is used the U.N. to give every benefit of the doubt to Israel’s enemies and to criminalize Israel for existing. This is Obama’s shameful Middle East legacy done with the connivance of the United Nations.
[Photo: Pete Souza / WikiCommons ]
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Comments
Obama is not done. He will do more to hurt the Israelis before he leaves office. The real question is “What will our elected leaders do to stop Obama if anything?”
Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where Christians are not being hunted to extinction.
It’s not the year that will live in infamy. It is Barack Hussein Obama, alongside others of his ilk such as Haman and Antiochus.
Every cloud has a silver lining – we are emerging from 8 dreary years of dismal economy, rapidly shrinking miliary, divisive racial tension, and more under pseudo Sultan Al-Chicagi’s anti-American Administration. Don’t let the door hit you in the posterior as you leave.
Ever the Community Organizer, true to form, Obama agitates. It’s what he knows. He never solves problems in his life, he exacerbates them. He has personalized political discourse to level not seen since the Civil War…..
With a friend like Obama who needs enemies.
For better or worse, one possible outcome is that this perturbation will force people to take a stand on perpetually undecided issues until a consensus is reached.
I doubt that a consensus is ever to be forthcoming. Israel exists on the idea that a religion defines a “race” of humans. That being a Jew is inconsistent with living in a community of non Jews.
Two ideas that are overtly incorrect for any supposed racial group, including Jews.
If you think racism is based on some modicum of fact, then you can conceive of a nation based on that thinking. If you see it as a social construct where shades of gray are ignored and never ask how much black is needed to be black or how much white makes a white. How many Christian chromosomes can be allowed and still be Jewish, and who decides?
I don’t care how many houses Israel bulldozes, how many nukes it has, if you can see gray, then no compromise is possible.
Jews are a nation, not a religion. Being a Jew has nothing to do with what one believes, it’s entirely a matter of citizenship in the Jewish nation. A Catholic or an atheist born to a Jewish mother is automatically a Jew; Cardinal O’Connor never even knew that he was a Jew, but he was one anyway. Meanwhile a gentile who believes deeply in the entire Torah, written and oral, but has not converted is not a Jew. Israel’s existence is predicated merely on the perfectly ordinary notion that people have the right to live in peace in their national homeland, and to exercise sovereignty there.
The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits member nations from transferring their own population into territory they occupy. It does not in any way require member states to forcibly prevent their citizens from settling in such territory. It simply doesn’t, and those who pretend that it does are simply lying.
Even if we stipulate, for the sake of argument, that Samaria, Benjamin, and Judaea are occupied territory within the meaning of the convention, not a single Israeli citizen who lives in the “territories” was transferred there, so there’s no issue to discuss.
What’s more, even if the Convention had required Israel to prevent its Jewish citizens from setting up homes in Judaea, this would not have made the “settlements” illegal. For one thing, international “law” can’t do that. It’s not law in the conventional sense; it binds only states that have agreed to be bound by it, but does not bind individuals at all. No Jewish resident of Judaea is a signatory to the Geneva conventions, so there is no sense in which those conventions can make anything they do “illegal”. Only the State of Israel itself would be bound by any such provision, and only its failure to implement such a provision could have been described as “illegal”.
“The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits member nations from transferring their own population into territory they occupy. It does not in any way require member states to forcibly prevent their citizens from settling in such territory.”
Massively disingenuous, Milhouse. The settlements are not simply some family who decides to go slumming and moves into Muslim neighborhood. But a group of Israelis who with full armed support and endorsement of the Israeli government build a walled community on land that is outside the “borders’ that Israel itself claimed as valid as late as 1966. They don’t pay property taxes to the Palestine authority either.
As with the gibberish about what is “illegal”, we as Americans did sign the Geneva convention, so from an American viewpoint, invading and settling a border nation is Illegal. Your argument is tantamount to suggesting it is legal to murder because the murderer claims that he does not consider himself part of the common moral repulsion to murder. It is America, signatory of the Geneva convention that underwrites this nation who’s sole existence alludes to belief in the manufactured idea of racism, that should be indefensible to educated men. If it is our money and our weapons and our veto, then it is our morality as well.
Um, yes, that is exactly what they are. Every single Jewish family that lives beyond the green line does so because they decided on their own to do so. Not a single family was ordered, compelled, instructed, let alone “transferred”. Many moved there against the government’s wishes. Except that most of them didn’t move into Moslem neighborhoods at all, but onto empty state land.
The green line was never a border. When it was drawn it was explicitly declared not to be a border. It was simply where the armies happened to be when the fighting stopped in 1949. It had and has no legal existence. If you mean merely that Israel has not yet asserted its sovereignty on the land beyond that line, that is true, but so what? How is it at all relevant?
Why on earth should they? What claim does the PA have to such taxes?
1. What border nation did Israel invade? These territories were never part of any other nation.
2. Not only is Israel in full compliance with the Geneva conventions, it even chooses to voluntarily applies it to Samaria, Benjamin, and Judaea, even though legally they are not occupied territory.
3. You are the one spouting gibberish about what is “illegal”. The Geneva conventions are binding only on those states that are parties to them. That includes the USA and Israel, but not any Jewish resident of the “territories”. Nothing they do can be “illegal” under the conventions, because they are not parties to those conventions.
This should finally put to bed the argument about whether Obama was incompetent or willfully trying to destroy America and her allies. Now the verdict is clear and that is how we now know with certainty that Obama knows exactly what he is doing. It is the public and Congress who are too incompetent to see what he is doing or to try and stop him.
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Lastly, after seeing how Obama has run this country, is there any question left as to why the Democrat centers of excellence (i.e., Chicago, Detroit, Philly, LA, and other failed American cities) are all in the dire financial and social conditions that they are?