Secretary of State John Kerry Compares Israel to South African Apartheid State

Katie Pavlich / Townhall Columnist

 

Just last week peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians fell apart once again after President Mahmoud Abbas' ongoing connection to the terror group Hamas suggests he doesn't believe Israel has the right to exist. Further, Now, as President Obama's foreign policy continues to fail in nearly every category, Israel is expressing new concerns and warning about Iran's nuclear program.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened the country's annual memorial day for the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust by issuing a stern warning Sunday to the world to learn the lessons of the past and prevent another Holocaust.

At the opening ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, Netanyahu linked the Nazi genocide to Iran's suspected drive to acquire nuclear bombs and its leaders' repeated references to the destruction of Israel and its denial of the Holocaust. Netanyahu said that just like before World War II, there were those in the world today who refused to face uncomfortable truths.

"In this place I have said many times that we must identify an existential threat in time and act against it in time and tonight I ask 'why in the years before the Holocaust did most of the world's leaders not see the danger ahead of time?' In hindsight, all the signs were there," he said.

The Obama administration seems to have put stopping Iran from going nuclear has been put on the back burner. Further, Secretary of State John Kerry is painting the Israelis as the bad guys in peace talks, warning of the Jewish State may become "an apartheid state" if a two state solution isn't reached. More on that from Josh Rogin:

The secretary of state said that if Israel doesn’t make peace soon, it could become ‘an apartheid state,’ like the old South Africa. Jewish leaders are fuming over the comparison.

If there’s no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state,” Secretary of State John Kerry told a room of influential world leaders in a closed-door meeting Friday.

Senior American officials have rarely, if ever, used the term "apartheid" in reference to Israel, and President Obama has previously rejected the idea that the word should apply to Jewish State. Kerry's use of the loaded term is already rankling Jewish leaders in America—and it could attract unwanted attention in Israel, as well.

The Obama Doctrine: Isolating our allies and promoting our enemies. What could possibly go wrong? Meanwhile, Russia has threatened to to pull out of sanction agreements on Iran.

Hamas to sue Washington Post for saying it would recognize Israel

Robert Spencer / Jihad Watch

 

As I said here yesterday, the media reports that the “Palestinian” jihadists would recognize Israel were false. Now the prospect of this suit is marvelously entertaining. After years of doing all it could to try to make Hamas look good, the Washington Post now may get sued by Hamas for…trying to make it look good.

“Hamas: We will never recognize Israel,” by Elhanan Miller, Times of Israel, April 27, 2014 (thanks to Daniel):

Breaking the silence following its joint reconciliation announcement with Fatah last week, Hamas said on Sunday that it would not recognize Israel, although it indicated it would not obstruct negotiations between the PLO and the Jewish state.

Hamas and Fatah agreed on April 23 to implement the 2011 Cairo reconciliation agreement, stipulating the formation of an interim technocrat government within five weeks, followed by general parliamentary and presidential elections in Gaza and the West Bank within six months.

At first, Hamas’s only official comment to Wednesday’s “Gaza declaration” was a laconic statement declaring Palestinian unity to be “a national achievement and an important junction in Palestinian history.”

But subsequent comments by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas saying that a unity government led by him will recognize Israel, coupled with statements to the same effect attributed to Hamas government spokesman Taher Nunu by The Washington Post on Saturday night, prompted several Hamas officials to speak up on Sunday.

“What I was quoted as telling the American paper is wrong, and I unequivocally deny it,” Nunu told the Palestinian Qudsnet news agency. “The issue of Hamas recognizing Israel is a complete nonstarter… aimed primarily at weakening the movement’s positions on Israel.”

Nunu said he would seek legal recourse against The Washington Post for its “false report.”

Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the Hamas movement, was more troubled on Sunday by calls directed at Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh to resign. PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah tendered his resignation to Abbas on Friday, pending a presidential decision.

“We do not talk about resignations, but rather about a new government that will be formed within just five weeks,” Abu Zuhri told the Hamas-affiliated Quds Press news agency. “The Ismail Haniyeh government is prepared to relinquish power the moment the new government is formed.”

With regards to recognizing Israel, Abu Zuhri proceeded to distinguish between the Palestinian government — tasked with domestic affairs — and the PLO (of which Hamas is not a part), whose role has included negotiating with Israel.

“We acknowledge that Abbas’s recognition of the occupation is his traditional position, nothing new. The [Hamas] movement position is unwavering in not recognizing the occupation in any form. In any event, negotiations are the task of the PLO; the government has no part in them,” Abu Zuhri said.

Sheikh Hassan Youssef, a Hamas official in the West Bank who told The Times of Israel last week that Palestinian reconciliation would serve the peace process, rushed to clarify on Sunday that Hamas would never recognize Israel.

“The question of recognition is non-debatable as long as [Israel] occupies our land,” Youssef told the website of Hamas newspaper Al-Resalah on Sunday. He asserted that the PLO was in charge of negotiations and Palestinian foreign policy, adding that “Hamas is not responsible for its relations with Israel.”

Netanyahu compares Iran nuclear threat to Nazi menace

Pamela Geller / Atlas Shrugs

On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance day comes a terrible warning from a world leader who knows. He says what we all know but what no one will say.

On Holocaust Remembrance day, we mourn the millions upon millions who were murdered.

On Sunday evening and Monday Israelis will mark Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day with memorials across the country. The commemoration of the six million European Jews murdered by the Germans will commence with torch lighting ceremony attended by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres and other senior officials at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. Chief Rabbis Yitzhak Yosef and David Lau, as well as Lau’s father, Israel Meir Lau, himself a former chief rabbi and chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, will also be present.
 

It’s not enough to memorialize the dead.  What matters is what we do now.

“Netanyahu compares Iran nuclear threat to Nazi menace,” Times of Israel, April 26, 2014

At Remembrance Day ceremony, PM implores world not to repeat mistakes; Peres warns of resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe

he world turned a blind eye to the rising Nazi threat over 75 years ago, and today Iran is being allowed to develop its nuclear program and menace Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday as the country marked Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Declaring that Iran was determined to acquire nuclear weapons, and urging international negotiators to insist that Iran’s enrichment and other nuclear capabilities be completely dismantled, Netanyahu warned: “A deal that leaves Iran as a threshold nuclear state will bring the world to the threshold of the abyss.”

Israeli leaders gathered at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial Sunday night to remember the 6 million victims of the Nazi genocide.

On Monday morning, an air raid siren will ring out for two minutes as the nation comes to a standstill to mark Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day, as the memorial day is official known.

Six survivors of the Shoah lit torches at Yad Vashem Sunday night, and Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres spoke at the ceremony.

Netanyahu said the world had failed to act against the rising Nazi threat, despite being warned about it, drawing a line to current tensions with the Iranian regime.

“It’s not that they did not see. It’s that they did not want to see,” he said of world leaders before the Holocaust.

“Today we are facing real threats and immediate dangers,” he said. “I call on the world power to insist that Iran completely give up its abilities to make nuclear weapons.”

He added that Israel would not stand by silently.

“In contrast to our situation in the Holocaust today we have a tremendous power to protect ourselves,” he said. “Israel is stronger than ever.”

“On behalf of the Jewish people, I say to those who have sought and still seek to destroy us: You have failed and you will fail.”

The speech was a familiar echo of years past, when Netanyahu has also warned of the Iranian threat and vowed to defend the country from suffering another holocaust.

“Iran is warning openly about its intentions to destroy us and is working with all its might to carry it out,” the prime minister said at the same ceremony in 2013. “The hate against Jews hasn’t disappeared, but has morphed into a murderous hate against the Jewish state. We won’t leave our fate in the hands of others, even the best of our friends.”

Peres devoted part of his speech to the resurgence of European anti-Semitism, particularly in Hungary, where he said the Jewish community was destroyed with “brutal efficiency” 70 years ago.

“We must not ignore any occurrence of anti-Semitism, any desecration of a synagogue, any tomb stone smashed in a cemetery in which our families are buried,” he said. ”We must not ignore the rise of extreme right wing parties with neo-Nazi tendencies who are a danger to each of us and a threat to every nation.”

He added that Israel had to be strong because of anti-Semitism around the world, but “must not give up on peace.”

“A strong Israel is our response to the horrors of anti-Semitism but it does not excuse the rest of the world from its responsibility to prevent this disease from returning to their own homes,” he said. “We are strong enough to repel dangers, we should not be scared of threats and we must not give up on peace.”

Netanyahu wrote on Twitter Sunday that Iran was seeking to wipe out the Jewish people as the Nazis did some 70 years ago. He also drew a line to Gazan terror group Hamas, which he said was denying the Holocaust while trying to create a new one.

Earlier, Netanyahu dismissed a statement by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemning the Holocaust as the “most heinous crime” of the modern era.

Netanyahu told CNN Abbas was attempting to “damage control” after signing a unity deal with Hamas last week.

Among the torchlighters at the Yad Vashem ceremony was Asher Aud (Sieradski), 86.

Over six years, he was separated from his parents and siblings in his native Polish town of Zdunska Wola and then scavenged for scraps of bread and staved off a debilitating illness alone in the Lodz ghetto before he was deported to the Auschwitz death camp.

There, he avoided the gas chambers and crematoria, and after a long incarceration, he weathered the notorious death march through the snow to Mauthausen, where those who fell behind were shot dead on the spot. After the war, he passed through a series of displaced person camps before he boarded a ship to the Holy Land where he did his best to forget the past for the next half century.

Of all the atrocities he endured, Aud said the strongest memory is the one that was most traumatic — parting from his mother at the age of 14.

It was September 1942. The Nazis had rounded up the Jewish community inside the local cemetery and were preparing to deport them. His father and older brother had already been taken and he was left with his mother and younger brother, Gavriel.

“I remember looking down and I happened to be standing on my grandmother’s tombstone,” he recalled. “The Germans walked among us and anytime they saw a mother with a child, they tore the child from her arms and threw them into the back of trucks.”

That’s when he realized life as he knew it was over.

“I looked around and I just said ‘mother, this is where we are going to be separated,’” he said.

Soon after they were marched through two lines of German soldiers. “I didn’t even feel it when the Germans hit me but every time they struck my mother and brother it was like they were cutting my flesh,” he said.

Israel is home to some 200,000 survivors, over a quarter of whom live in poverty, according to a report released last week.

On Sunday, government ministers approved a plan to fund an additional NIS 1 billion to expand benefits to survivors.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

The post Netanyahu compares Iran nuclear threat to Nazi menace appeared first on Pamela Geller, Atlas Shrugs.

Latest Obamacare Challenge for Dems: Where's My $2,500 Savings?

By Greg Richter

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As the midterm election approaches, vulnerable Democrats have a new worry that may be difficult to spin: Where did the promised $2,500 savings in health insurance premiums go?

As a candidate in 2008, Barack Obama repeatedly said his healthcare plan would reduce the typical family's annual premiums by up to $2,500 per year. Often, he did not include the caveat "up to," simply saying the "typical" family would save about $2,500 a year on premiums.

But now, a month past the signup deadline for coverage, comparisons for the typical family's then and now premium costs are difficult to come by. The Obama administration isn't issuing such numbers. At best, it has said the costs are "lower than projected," reported most recently by the Los Angeles Times.

But those lower-than-projected numbers refer to expectations when the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, not when Obama made the promises of reduced premiums in 2008.

Websites such as WebMD note that costs are reduced for some people, but that's because younger, healthier people are actually having to pay higher premiums.

"There are literally no comparisons to current rates. That is, [the Department of Health and Human Services] has chosen to dodge the question of whose rates are going up, and how much. Instead they try to distract with a comparison to a hypothetical number that has nothing to do with the actual experience of real people," former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, told Forbes.

In reality, premiums are "skyrocketing,' according to a Forbes report, and those increases are blamed on implementation of the Affordable Care Act. At the same time, consumers also are facing higher deductibles under Obamacare plans.

This presents a problem to Democrats on the midterm campaign trail. Already, two Democrats were left speechless, then laughed when asked by a constituent where his $2,500 in savings went. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Rep. Tim Walz, both of Minnesota, both turned to each other in hope of an answer to that town hall question in February.

With the continued unpopularity of the law, the "Where's my $2,500?" question may become a millstone around the necks of Democrats in tough re-election bids.

Brietbart's Wynton Hall called it the 2014 equivalent of President Ronald Reagan's famous line: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

Beware the Royal Spawn of Chelsea By Craig Andresen

Poor Barack Hussein Obama.

At some point in the future when he becomes a grandparent, nobody in the media will be able to gush over his being our nation’s first black presidential grandchild.

How sad.

First of all, that honor should go to Thomas Jefferson citing his affair with Sally Hemings, a Monticello slave at the time and DNA evidence compiled in 1998 regarding the fact that Heming’s youngest son, Eston Hemings, shared male ancestry with our third president.

While that has been disputed by some, there can be NO dispute over who our first black president was.

One, pasty white, Bill Clinton as deemed by the liberal media back in the day and now, with the mainstream media literally OOZING vapidness from every pour regarding the recent news of Chelsea Clinton’s impending birth canal expulsion, any future Obama offspring would come in a distant third but, while on the topic…

The child of Chelsea may well not even be the 2^nd black presidential grandspawn given Horny Bill’s propensity to be as monogamous as a rabbit on Viagra in a hutch full of hot=to-trot bunnies regardless of his poor aim in relation to his presidential humidor, Monica Lewinski.

There could well be more Clinton offspring out there of child bearing age for all we know.

Now, I know there are some out there who believe, perhaps with some validity, that the Obama’s adopted but… 

Click link to read full article:  http://www.thenationalpatriot.com/2014/04/28/beware-the-royal-spawn-of-chelsea/

 NEVER FORGET

לעולם לא תשכח ללשכוח אומר שזה יכול לקרות שוב.

Op-ed:  

Words said to fuel the racial divide...words NOT said when they needed to be

By: Diane Sori

“All the evil in the world originates from the Jews and the Zionist barbarism.” - Hani Ramadan speaking before the Congress of the Union of Islamic Organizations (UOIF) last week in France.

And NOT a word of condemnation from Barack HUSSEIN Obama.

“Palestinians will not recognize Israel as a ‘Jewish’ state.” - Mahmoud Abbas' words last week to members of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee.

And NOT a word of condemnation from Barack HUSSEIN Obama.

"You can sleep with them. You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want. The little I ask you is not to promote it on that... and not to bring them to my games."- Supposedly said (at the time of this posting verification was still pending) by the NBA Clippers owner Donald Sterling to his ex-girlfriend V. Stiviano who is the defendant in a lawsuit brought by the Sterling family alleging that she embezzled more than $1.8 million, and who told Mr. Sterling that she would `get even."'.

"When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk."..."Racial comments reportedly made by the owner of a pro basketball team are "ignorant" and "incredibly offensive."..."The United States continues to wrestle with the legacy of race and slavery and segregation, that's still there, the vestiges of discrimination." Some of the many words said by Barack HUSSEIN Obama during a news conference while traveling in Malaysia where he discussed the Sterling incident.

An in your face double standard of words...or lack thereof...with echoes of embedded hate and rummages of anti-Semitism concerning truly important issues...words of true hate NOT addressed. Par for the course from the man who has set American race relations back a generation or more... from a man who sides with our ally Israel's enemies...with the enemies of Jews and of all civilized men...every chance he gets.

And don't get me wrong...the words spoken by Donald Sterling...if indeed proven true and NOT another Cliven Bundy altered, cut, splice, and paste job by the leftist media (The New York Times in Bundy's case)...are indeed vile, bigoted, and hateful, and he should be called to task and dealt with according to the rules of the NBA.

However, what my problem is that here we have the President of the United States adding more fuel to the smoldering fires of still trying-to-heal racial wounds just like he did with his words, "If I had a son he would look like Trayvon Martin," words said just six days after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the death of Martin. Words said at a time when the anti-Zimmerman/pro Martin rallies were dying down, anger was abating, and the oh so important to Obama photo-op interviews were tapering off. But then along he comes with words said just to stir the pot of racial discourse and to get his face back on camera yet again. 

And now it's happening once more as Barack HUSSEIN Obama, in his capacity as president, went to Malaysia to work on negotiations for a trans-Pacific trade accord, to discuss Malaysia’s civil liberties and human rights record, and to preside over a town-hall-style meeting with young people from around Southeast Asia NOT to embroil himself in a racial incident that has NOT yet proven to be true. But his words...from a half a world away...did get him his all-important press coverage here at home, did stir the ever simmering race-baiting pot again, and did allow both white and black 'haters' to chime in with their bigoted remarks...all before the words on the tape were proven to be that of Donald Sterling and NOT a set-up revenge attack by a woman accused of embezzling a large sum of money from his family.

Putting the cart before the horse as they say and done so for NO other reason than to cause trouble where trouble might possibly NOT exist. But even if those words were indeed uttered by Donald Sterling, the President of the United States needed to stay out of this as Sterling has a right to be a racist and to say what he thinks whether it's perceived by some as hateful or NOT as the First Amendment gives him the right to say those words for they are NOT words that promote violence against the government nor against an individual.

And the point here is that as president, Obama should have immediately addressed the vile, hateful, vulgar words said by Hani Ramadan in Paris and by Mahmoud Abbas in the Gaza Strip. Why... because first, Ramadan's words are words straight out of Adolph Hitler's playbook and are contributing to the rise of anti-Semitism throughout the world and second, Abbas' words mean that all the time, effort, and millions of US taxpayer dollars spent NOT only on the 'anything but peace talks' themselves but also on aid to the 'so-called' Palestinians have been for naught as Abbas' words prove he NEVER had any intention of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state...a rightful must-have for any peace deal to be reached.

And where are Obama's words as countless Christians throughout the Middle East and Africa are being murdered and slaughtered in mob violence committed by militant muslim groups. Their churches are bombed, their shops destroyed, and their homes looted as laws are being passed making them second-class citizens, thus forcing the majority of them to leave the countries of their birth. And NOT a word has crossed Obama's lips even though he publicly claims to be a Christian but we know he is NOT. His infamous words "I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction” have come back to haunt as this truth speaks volumes about his silence.

Bigotry is bigotry and hate is hate but there are and will always be degrees of both whether that is right or wrong. But deliberately stepping into the fray just to cause even more hate...even more discourse...just shows the true character of the man who has done more harm to the blacks in America...has done more harm to 'We the People' in general...than the likes of...thankfully unsuccessful...eugenics proponent Margret Sanger ever could.

And that is the saddest thing of all.