Obama wears a Shinola watch; of course he does. "While the main reason for President Obama's visit to Detroit on Wednesday was to shine a light on the recuperating auto industry, he also made a point of stopping by the city's finest watchmaker. Since 2011, Shinola has been crafting American-made timepieces in the Motor City, helping transform its image and neighborhoods along the way. "Esquire. President Obama is waiting to help destroy Israel and burnish his progressive legacy.
"Does Mr. Obama want to be remembered as the President who criminalized Israeli citizenship," asks the Wall Street Journal
Yeah, I think that he would be perfectly fine with that. He and Israel's Prime Minister have not been two for a four-some.
Israeli diplomats gird for the possibility that President Obama may try to force a diplomatic resolution for Israel and the Palestinians at the United Nations. The White House has been unusually tight-lipped about what, if anything, it might have in mind. But our sources say the White House has asked the State Department to develop an options menu for the President’s final weeks.
One possibility would be to sponsor, or at least allow, a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction, perhaps alongside new IRS regulations revoking the tax-exempt status of people or entities involved in settlement building. The Administration vetoed such a resolution in 2011 on grounds that it “risks hardening the position of both sides,” which remains true.
But condemning the settlements has always been a popular way of scoring points against the Jewish state, not least at the State Department, and an antisettlement resolution might burnish Mr. Obama’s progressive brand for his post presidency. Wall Street Journal
Have I mentioned that I am of Irish Catholic descent?
No Shinola, Sherlock. I am as Catholic as Tim Kaine, maybe more so. I know American Catholics who hate Jews and really hate Israel. I never understood that? These days, the salt-water Irish I chat with who have come to America from Kerry, Clare, Mayo. Galway and Derry, really seem to hate Israel. To a person they are very well educated, hard working, fair-minded and generous, but they all seem tained with the Noam Chomsky contrarian mindset, so fashionably sophisticated and European.
That I follow, but can not for the life of me understand.
The Irish and the Jews have had a long and firm grip on one another's suffering, history and contribution to Western Civilization. The Israeli Defense Forces, fighting for the nation's existence, was formed on the tactics and strategies of the Irish Republican Army of 1921.
Not only were many of the Zionist military tactics in 1940’s Britain and Palestine drawn from pre-war IRA bombing campaigns in Britain but the Irgun was re-organized “on IRA lines”, according to Walton, by Robert Briscoe, father of Fianna Fail TD and Mayor of Dublin Ben Briscoe, who travelled secretly to Britain in the pre-war years to meet and advise Irgun representatives.
Briscoe Senior, himself a Fianna Fail TD for many years, had impeccable IRA credentials. He accompanied Eamonn de Valera to the USA on a lengthy fund-raising trip during the Anglo-Irish war and also was sent by Michael Collins to Germany in 1919 to procure arms for the IRA. A former Chief of Staff of the IRA’s boy scouts, na Fianna Eireann, Eamonn Martin was Briscoe’s best man at his wedding and he hated the British, describing himself in a memoir as a self-appointed professor holding “the chair of subversive activities against England”.
Another Irish Jew who strongly supported both Irish Republican and Zionist terrorism was Isaac Herzog, the former Chief Rabbi of Ireland who emigrated to Palestine in 1936 where he was appointed to the chief rabbinate, the most powerful clerical position in the Jewish world. MI5 kept him under close surveillance and asked the Irish police to keep tabs on Briscoe.
He wrote in his memoirs that he elected himself “to a full Professorship with the Chair of Subversive Activities against England,”
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These facts have been Progressively white-out-ed and erased from historical considerations. Note well, British MI-5 after WWII was run by the Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five's Marxist affections and the Soviets were no friend of Israel.
Over the years, younger Irish people ( under 75) came to believe that Palestinians never slaughtered Jews in 1920s, that the Grand Mufti was a Quaker and that the survivors of Holocaust were everything Hitler said they were in the Nuremberg Laws. They forgot that Sean MacStiophan and Menachim Begin were pals. This was the result of the Irish Government's BBC culture that sprouted post-DeValera.
However, even after Kim Philby was proven to be a Soviet mole, the Old Boy OxBridge affections for Animal Farm rooted in academia and the BBC nestled in Old Blighty and Old Erin's bogs.
Israel morphed from a harbor from the Holocaust to Nazi Germany in the memes of the elites.
Irish politicians are seem unanimously anti-Israel: Michale Higgins, Enda Kenny, Mary Robinson & etc. Yanks are as bad.
America apes every Etonian fashion from Carnaby Street and Beatlemania to a World Without Borders and the Garden of Gaza. aways a few years behind. The Brit anarchists were burning tires under viaducts, while Kurt Cobain was learning to string his own Silvertone. Long before Occupy and the Battle of Seattle, Sophisticates, love Occupy and Black Lives Matter.
I am not that sophisticated.
I know Jews, love Jews, admire Jews and hung around with Jews. From Danny Levy, Little Flower High School Class of 1970 to Phil Scharf, second violin Chicago Symphony Orchestra, to Si and Shirley Blitzstein who hired Catholic kids from Leo, Brother Rice and Little Flower at Mr. Lee's in the old Evergreen Plaza, I have known only honesty, humor, talent and American patriotism from my Jewish friends and neighbors.
President Obama is sophisticated,
His cabinet is full of sophisticates, like Valerie Jarrett who has done more for Persian hegemony in the world than Cyrus and his Celtic United Nations Ambassador Samantha Powers, who only recently took the side of Israel against the emerging nations dictators and sheiks.
That was in February, and Powers told Israel:
“When we see bias, injustice or the continuation of strife within the United Nations, it is not because the UN created all of this, it is because the UN gathers governments and gathers problems, and being in the UN doesn’t change the biases of those governments,” she said.
Power, whose visit was seen by some analysts as a sign of renewed US interest in jump-starting peace talks, admitted that the situation was not ripe for new negotiations, though the US would continue to pursue a two-state solution.
“I would expect that pursuit to continue, and right now we hope the parties will take steps to move them closer again to restart negotiations, which is not a position they are in now,” she said. “We will dedicate ourselves to that as long as we are in office.”
Power also expressed hope that students participating in the Model UN would soon be able to sit behind a “Palestine placard,” backing the importance of a two-state solution.
“You must strive to wade side by side into the toughest issues, because it is you and your children and the generations following them who will reap the benefits of the peace you’ve built, or else endure the suffering of ongoing strife,” she urged the students.
Things change. Putin is about to shell Aleppo into dust, the Presidential election is seven days away, Iran and Valerie Jarrett want to make sure President Obama rolls up the carpet on Israel before he leaves office.
Samantha Powers is an accomplished person who actually wrote her own books and President Obama is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Powers has been in the United Nations since August 2013. Perhaps she has learned to see the world differently. President Obama is the same man who took the Oath of Office in 2009 - the exact same man. Valerie Jarrett never leaves his ears.
The worst option would be an effort to introduce a resolution at the U.N. Security Council setting “parameters” for a final settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. The French have been eager to do this for some time, and one option for the Administration would be to let the resolution pass simply by refusing to veto it. Or the U.S. could introduce the resolution itself, all the better to take credit for it.
As the old line has it, this would be worse than a crime—it would be a blunder. U.S. policy has long and wisely been that only Israelis and Palestinians can work out a peace agreement between themselves, and that efforts to impose one would be counterproductive. Whatever parameters the U.N. established would be unacceptable to any Israeli government, left or right, thereby destroying whatever is left of a peace camp in Israel.
The Palestinians would seize on those parameters as their birthright, making it impossible for any future Palestinian leader to bargain part of them away in a serious negotiation. Arab states would find their diplomatic hands tied, making it impossible to serve as useful intermediaries between Jerusalem and Ramallah. It could refreeze relations with Israel even as they finally seem to have thawed.
President Obama may be the last man on earth to get the memo, but after decades of fruitless efforts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict it might be wiser for the U.S. to step back until the Palestinians recognize that peace cannot be imposed from the outside. If Mr. Obama is still seeking a Middle East legacy at this late stage in his presidency, his best move is do nothing to make it worse.
Many American Catholics who buy into the Social Justice Warrior facade detest Israel and support the Obama Palestinian gambit. Catholic Activists like Kevin Clark, a member of International Solidarity Movement went Israel and encourage American students to throw themselves in front of IDF bulldozers in Gaza. The blood of Rachel Corrie, for whom the Irish OXFAM Gaza Flotilla flagship was named, is not on the hands of Israel, but on Clark the Social Justice Warrior. This guy is bad and he has the ear of Catholic social justice sheep.
I grew up believing that deeds and not words marked the character of people.
We all can be fooled, tricked, gulled, anesthetized, or made oblivious. A few of us don't mind any of the afore mentioned conditions.
My Irish cousins forgot that Israel is not Nazi Germany. My Catholic coreligionists need to leave moral equivalency to the Unitarians and too many of the other Mainline faiths.
I know that Shinola can be a watch and a swell shoe polish. I know that Israel is our best friend on the planet. President Obama? Not so much.
