A few days ago, Joe Biden, the US Vice President, said in a pre-taped interview with ABC’s George Stephanoupolos:
“Look, Israel can determine for itself - it’s a sovereign nation - what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else… What we believe is in the national interest of the United States, which we, coincidentally, believe is also in the interest of Israel and the whole world… Look, we cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do.”
Does this mean that Obama’s administration has finally realised that Israel was right about Iran all the time and the policy of appeasement of Iran has gruesomely failed? Why has Israel suddenly become “a sovereign nation” with no pressure from the United States and “coincidentally” with the same interests as the US “and the whole world”? Shouldn’t Israel be recognised as a sovereign country, as any other state is, without any special permission and dispensation from the United States?
By now, the US administration and even many Muslim countries have realised that they need Israel to do their dirty work for them in order to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon! Later, without any doubt, they will vigorously deny their desire to subdue the Iranian nuclear ambition and will scream at Israel with wild accusations of aggression etc, just as they did after Israel stopped Iraq’s nuclear ambitions in 1981.
Biden’s statement was made after the election in Iran failed to produce a change in the political leadership in Iran and the president of Iran rejected any negotiations toward ending Iranian development of a nuclear weapons program. At the same time, he has expanded his irrational verbal assault and threats toward the United Kingdom and Europe.
Almost immediately, the State Department spokesman Ian Kelly began a damage control offensive, rebuffing suggestions that Biden could be seen as giving the Jewish state a green light to attack Iran: “I certainly would not want to give a green light to any kind of military action,” Kelly said, although he repeated Biden’s point that Washington considered Israel a “sovereign country” with a right to make its own military decisions. “I wouldn’t read into it any more than what you see... as I said, that we respect Israel’s sovereignty.”
At the same time: Egypt has vigorously denied that Israeli submarine crossed through the Suez Canal in the Red Sea last month and now it is able to reach the Persian Gulf off Iran in a matter of days; Saudi Arabia has rejected reports that it agreed on use of Saudi airspace by Israeli fighter jets on a mission to bomb nuclear targets in Iran.
On the final analysis the US administration and many Muslim countries would love and even quite eager to see Israel striking at and destroying the Iranian nuclear and ballistic rocket programs, but the President Obama and other players want to keep their hands clean and maintaining ambiguous position toward a military attack on Iran in order to be able to rebuke and assault Israel politically later after attack. What a disgraceful double-flip hypocritical policy!
About author: Steven Shamrak, born in the Soviet Union, lives in Melbourne Australia. He is a qualified civil engineer and software specialist, and was an active participant in the nascent Moscow Zionist movement before he arrived in Australia 25 years ago. Believing that "a sense of pride, nationhood and connection to all Jewish land" is missing from Jewish hearts, he spends his spare time Educating Jews and non-Jews about Jewish history in the Middle East.
He worked as a construction engineer at the Moscow Olympic Games project and as a computer consultant in Australia. For several years, he has been publishing an Internet editorial letter about the Arab-Israel conflict since August 2001 and has a website http://www.shamrak.com.
IN THESE PSYCHO-POLITICAL circumstances it would be very gutsy to aim to win instead of insecurely trying to conciliate an in-your-face uncooperative "peace partner."
We blabber about "occupation" without asking by which line Arabs demarcate areas where a sovereign Jewish existence might possibly be accepted. Is it the 1949 line? 1947? None at all? Does "occupation" refer only to territories we have held since 1967 or also where Jews settled in 1870?
Judge Richard Goldstone has presented his report on Gaza and, among other recommendations, suggested that Israel conduct its own inquiry. Israeli government officials, assuming he meant an investigation like his into Israel's misdeeds, declined, noting that that they have and continue to investigate their army's behavior on a constant basis.
But after reading most of the report, another possibility presents itself. It rapidly becomes clear to any reader not driven by a thirst for "dirt" on Israel, that Goldstone's work represents a new low in the tragically deteriorating world of international justice. It fails on every count, from its handling of evidence, to its legal reasoning, to its unstated but pervasive assumptions of Israeli guilt and Palestinian innocence, to its astonishing conclusion (from someone who knows the gruesome details of Bosnia and Rwanda), that Israeli behavior was so bad it might well constitute "crimes against humanity."
As a result this report takes the army with the best record in the history of warfare for protecting enemy civilians and accuses it of targeting them. Goldstone makes Kafka's Trial seem fair.
what could one expect from a committee created by the ineptly titled UN Human Rights Council, which is dominated by rogue regimes like Iran, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Cuba and Liberia? Some of the leaders of the member-states would qualify as candidates for prosecution as war criminals. The council's principal common denominator remains an obsessive hatred of Israel, which they condemn more frequently than all the other 191 member-states combined.
In fact, since its inception in 2006, 26 of the 32 resolutions condemning human rights violations passed by the council were directed against Israel. It should also be noted that this UN "human rights" body declined to investigate the monstrous brutalities inflicted on civilian populations in Chechnya, Sri Lanka and Sudan. Indeed it went so far as to bizarrely thank the Sudanese government, the perpetrators of the Darfur massacres, for its "cooperation."
R.P.BenDedek is from Brisbane Australia and is the author of 'The King's Calendar: The Secret of Qumran' at http://www.kingscalendar.com His academic articles set forth Apologetics for and results of his discovery of an "artificial chronological scheme" running through the Bible, Josephus, the Damascus Documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Seder Olam Rabbah.
He writes photographic 'Stories from China' and social editorial commentaries, both at KingsCalendar, and as a contributing newspaper columnist. He currently teaches Conversational English in China and in addition to his English Lessons at KingsCalendar, he has created specific sites for Students of English.
