Epstein’s Calendar - GASP! Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire SOMEWHERE!

 John R. Houk, Blog Editor

© May 2, 2023

 

WELL-WELL-WELL…

 

Somehow pedophile/human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s calendar has become a public matter. After all the judicial blocking of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell data to protect the rich and powerful, one has to wonder, “How did that happen?”

 

Epstein’s/Maxwell’s longggg list of rich and powerful – some still esteemed by both Left and Right – many hated by the Left and/or the Right – are probably gratified over Epstein’s death and the judicial gagging of Maxwell data.

 

People like me wanting justice for the Election 2020 coup do not want to hear Donald Trump did hanging around the creep Epstein (although personally I’m satisfied with Trump’s response about putting distance from Epstein after -probably too late- red flags arose on a personal level), but the Donald – at least a former womanizer before Melania – did socialize. Brian Shilhavy of Health Impact News (of whom I source often on Medical Tyranny) is a little too critical of fellow anti-Medical Tyranny proponents. Shilhavy dislikes Trump over Operation Warp Speed (a fair criticism) but also takes a poke at Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. among other issues over some links to Epstein. In full disclosure, I support Trump because Dems hate him; AND I appreciate RFK, Jr. for battling Medical Tyranny but would NEVER vote for ANY person on a Dem Party ticket.

 

Which leads me to the high probably of an old meme: Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself. Yup, I know… GASP! Naysayer finger pointing YELLING, “Conspiracy theory alert!” AND YET for all the SMOKE there has to be some FIRE. There is a host of powerful Elitists – not just the Clintons – that had a motive to SILENCE Jeffrey Epstein.

 

I will always suspect Epstein was a victim (yeah I know, how can a victimizer be a victim?) of the much downplayed and pooh-poohed Clinton Body Count (FOR THOSE WHO WONDER: HERE, HERE & HERE) to shut up potential witnesses to Clinton Crimes. Yet Epstein’s death could even be more nefarious. What if the Epstein demise was the result of a conglomerate of Elitist power-oligarchs who have the means, the wealth and the power to SILENCE a potential problem to an Elitist agenda?

 

I KNOW! GASP! CONSPIRACY THEORY ALERT!

 

Now that I have hopefully planted those seeds of wonder, let’s look at what has crept into the public domain over Epstein’s calendar. Perhaps you will wonder with me.

 

I’m cross posting ZeroHedge below, but you should also read the smoke from:

 

o   Epstein a ‘Spy’? Newly Revealed Meetings with Biden CIA Director Fuel Belief He Was ‘Blackmail’ Operative; By Kyle Becker; Becker News; 5/30/23

 

o   Noam Chomsky, Ehud Barak, Leon Botstein and a Rothschild are among the names on Jeffrey Epstein’s newly uncovered calendar; By ANDREW LAPIN; Jewish Telegraph Agency; 6/1/23 3:33 PM

 

o   Jeffrey Epstein scheduled meetings with Noam Chomsky, CIA director and others: report; By Sarah Do Couto; Global News; 6/1/23 3:54 pm

 

JRH 5/2/23

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Epstein's Private Calendar Emerges: Among Prominent Names Listed Are Biden's CIA Chief, Goldman Top Lawyer

 

BY TYLER DURDEN

May 1, 2023

ZeroHedge

 

In 2014, current CIA director William Burns had three meetings with Jeffrey Epstein when Burns was Obama's deputy secretary of state, and after Epstein had been convicted of child sex exploitation, the Wall Street Journal reports.

 

Burns and Epstein

 

Burns and Epstein first met in Washington prior to Burns visiting Epstein and his Manhattan townhouse, according to a trove of leaked documents that include Epstein's schedules which were not contained in Epstein's "black book" of contacts or flight logs.

 

Burns, who became CIA Director under Biden in 2021, met with Epstein while he was preparing to leave his position in the government, according to agency spokeswoman Tammy Kupperman Thorp.

 

"The director did not know anything about him, other than that he was introduced as an expert in the financial services sector and offered general advice on transition to the private sector," she said, adding "They had no relationship."

 

Mr. Burns, 67 years old, a career diplomat and former ambassador to Russia, had meetings with Epstein in 2014 when Mr. Burns was deputy secretary of state.
 

A lunch was planned that August at the office of law firm Steptoe & Johnson in Washington. Epstein scheduled two evening appointments that September with Mr. Burns at his townhouse, the documents show. After one of the scheduled meetings, Epstein planned for his driver to take Mr. Burns to the airport.

 

Mr. Burns recalls being introduced in Washington by a mutual friend, and meeting Epstein once briefly in New York, said Ms. Thorp. “The director does not recall any further contact, including receiving a ride to the airport,” she said. -WSJ

 

One month after meeting with Epstein, in October 2014, Burns stepped down from this role at the State Department to serve as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank. He ran it until he was nominated by Biden to serve as CIA director in early 2021.

Epstein Residence on Private Island

 

Epstein also had dozens of meetings with then-Obama White House attorney Kathryn Ruemmler, who went on to become Goldman Sachs' top lawyer in 2020. Epstein also planned for her to join him in 2015 on a trip to Paris, and in 2017 to visit his private island in the Caribbean.

 

According to a spokesman for Goldman, Ruemmler had a 'professional relationship' with Epstein tied to her role at law firm Latham & Watkins LLP, and did not travel with him.

 

"I regret ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein," she said.

 

According to the documents, however, they knew each other well enough... following Epstein's 2006 conviction for sexually abusing girls in Florida as young as 14-years-old.

 

He asked for avocado sushi rolls to be on hand when meeting with Ms. Ruemmler, according to the documents. He visited apartments she was considering buying. In October 2014, Epstein knew her travel plans and told an assistant to look into her flight. “See if there is a first class seat,” he wrote, “if so upgrade her.”

Kathryn Ruemmler

 

Within weeks of Ruemmler's 2014 departure from the Obama White House, Epstein planned an August lunch at his townhouse, followed by a series of meetings to introduce her to his acquaintances.

The two first met when Epstein called her to ask if she would be interested in representing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - a relationship which never panned out.

 

Epstein and his staff discussed whether Ms. Ruemmler, now 52, would be uncomfortable with the presence of young women who worked as assistants and staffers at the townhouse, the documents show. Women emailed Epstein on two occasions to ask if they should avoid the home while Ms. Ruemmler was there. Epstein told one of the women he didn’t want her around, and another that it wasn’t a problem, the documents show.

 

Ms. Ruemmler didn’t see anything that would lead her to be concerned at the townhouse and didn’t express any concern, the Goldman spokesman said. -WSJ

 

Epstein also connected Ruemmler with Ariane de Rothschild, current CEO of the Swiss private bank Edmond de Rothschild Group. Ruemmler's law firm was hired by the bank to help them with US regulatory matters, according to the bank and the Goldman spokesman.

I have been asserting that Epstein was OBVIOUSLY not a major financier since well before his Florida arrest in 2006.

These leaders are meeting him years after his conviction and incarceration.

This thing appears just *impossibly* fake. I’m sorry. It seems fake. Just fake. https://t.co/vIyjwEshZx

— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) April 30, 2023

 

De Rothschild, who married into the famous banking family, met with Epstein over a dozen times.

 

In September 2013, Epstein asked Mrs. de Rothschild in an email for help finding a new assistant, “female…multilingual, organized.”

 

“I’ll ask around,” Mrs. de Rothschild emailed back.

 

She bought nearly $1 million worth of auction items on Epstein’s behalf in 2014 and 2015, the documents show.

 

Mrs. de Rothschild was named chairwoman of the bank in January 2015. That October, she and Epstein negotiated a $25 million contract for Epstein’s Southern Trust Co. to provide “risk analysis and the application and use of certain algorithms” for the bank, according to a proposal reviewed by the Journal.

 

In 2019, after Epstein was arrested, the bank said that Mrs. de Rothschild never met with Epstein and it had no business links with him. -WSJ

 

The bank admitted to the Journal that it lied in its earlier statement, and that Mrs. de Rothschild and Epstein met as part of her normal duties at the bank.

 

Other notables in the new report include;

 

·       Leon Botstein, president of Bard College

 

·       Noam Chomsky, who was scheduled to fly with Epstein to have dinner at the pedophile's Manhattan townhouse in 2015

 

·       Anthropologist Helen Fisher, who says she 'didn't have anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein, "But I remembered it because of his spectacular house and because of the six young women."

 

·       Joshua Cooper Ramo, then co-chief executive of Henry Kissinger’s corporate consulting firm.

 

·       Harvard professor Martin Nowak

 

·       Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak

 

More on Ehud Barak, given rumors that Epstein was running a Mossad honeypot operation;

 

Mr. Ramo also was invited to a breakfast at the townhouse in September 2013 with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, another regular guest, the documents show.

 

...

 

Mr. Barak also met Epstein in 2015 with Mr. Chomsky, now 94, a linguistics professor and political activist who has been critical of capitalism and U.S. foreign policy. 

 

Mr. Chomsky said Epstein arranged the meeting with Mr. Barak for them to discuss “Israel’s policies with regard to Palestinian issues and the international arena.”

 

Mr. Barak said he often met with Epstein on trips to New York and was introduced to people such as Mr. Ramo and Mr. Chomsky to discuss geopolitics or other topics. “He often brought other interesting persons, from art or culture, law or science, finance, diplomacy or philanthropy,” Mr. Barak said.

 

When asked about his relationship with Epstein, Noam Chomsky said: "First response is that it is none of your business. Or anyone’s. Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally."

 

Noam Chomsky

 

After Epstein donated $850,000 to MIT between 2002 and 2017, and $9.1 million to Harvard between 1998 and 2008, Chomsky said in a 2020 interview that people 'worse than Epstein' had donated to MIT. He didn't disclose their friendship at the time.

 

Chomsky said that at the time of their meetings, "what was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. According to U.S. laws and norms, that yields a clean slate."

 

COPYRIGHT ©2009-2023 ZEROHEDGE.COM/ABC MEDIA, LTD

The Left's only enemy

Evidently the nation of Israel is experiencing the same Left-Right polarization that the USA is experiencing. Mahmoud Abbas stood at the UN podium and spoke egregious lie after lie (See Commentary on Abbas Lies) about Israel. The Israeli Right quite properly expressed the reality about Arabs that call themselves Palestinians; i.e. LIAR.

 

But here is some incredulity! The Israeli Left and the American Left praised the leader of the Palestinian Authority (PA – See Also Jewish Virtual Library) and Chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as a great seeking Liberty and Freedom for the non-existent group of Arabs that maintain they are Palestinians. Arabs as Palestinians did not exist until the Arab League via Egypt set up the PLO (Early Seeds of PLO: HERE and HERE) to create a reason for continuous attacks on Independent Israel to exterminate all the Jews living there. That creation date was 1964. Israel’s hard fought Independence from about SIX invading Muslim Arab armies were won in 1948.

 

Caroline Glick exposes the Leftists of America and Israel. Her theme is that American Leftists and Israeli Leftists don’t see a foreign enemy; rather they see their fellow citizens of the Right as the enemy. If the Left succeeds, Israel’s existence will be very tenuous.

 

JRH 10/5/12

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The Left's only enemy

 

By Caroline Glick

October 4, 2012, 9:27 PM

CarolineGlick.com

 

 

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's legal term in office expired nearly four years ago. But his supporters don't care. In Israel, Washington and throughout the world, Abbas's supporters extol the authoritarian leader as a great moderate. In 2002, desperately searching for a face for the Palestinians that wasn't Yasser Arafat's face, the Left pushed Abbas out from behind Arafat's shadow. Abbas, who served as Arafat's deputy for 39 years, was upheld as a great moderate and placed in the invented position of Palestinian prime minister.

 

The fact that Abbas was an inveterate Jew-hater who spent four decades in the senior leadership of a terrorist organization and whose doctoral dissertation was a long denial of the Holocaust, was brushed aside.

 

His leftist supporters don't care that he says Israel has no right to exist. They are untroubled by his 2008 rejection of then-prime minister Ehud Olmert's unprecedentedly generous offer of peace and Palestinian statehood. They don't mind that Abbas has refused to negotiate peace with Israel for the past four years. They don't care that he has signed two unity government deals with Hamas or that he seeks to gain sovereignty for a Palestinian state through the UN and so establish a Palestinian state in a formal state of war with Israel.

 

They don't care. But most Israelis do. Due to their recognition of his hatred for Israel and due to the terrorism Abbas has condoned and financed for decades, the vast majority of Israelis do not consider him a potential partner for peace. They do not believe that either Abbas or the Palestinians as a whole are remotely interested in being appeased by Israel.

 

As a consequence, most Israelis greeted Abbas's speech at the UN General Assembly last week with indifference. In that speech, Abbas made clear - yet again - that he remains Arafat's loyal deputy. The majority of Abbas's speech involved a litany of libels against Israel, which he accused of everything from terrorism to apartheid, colonialism, racism, murder, theft, etc., etc., etc.

 

Then he moved on to his demands. In addition to reinstating his demand that Israel agree to every Palestinian demand as a precondition for negotiations, Abbas demanded that Israel release all Palestinian terrorists from its prisons.

 

No, none of Abbas's attacks had an iota of truth to them.

 

But who cares? Abbas certainly doesn't. And neither do his supporters. Their support for Abbas has nothing to do with what he says or does. It has to do with who they are and what they want. Abbas is their prop, not their partner.

 

Abbas's Israeli supporters are the core of far-leftists who brought us the phony peace process with the PLO. Two thousand dead Israelis later, and with no peace in sight, their camp is much smaller today than it was in 1993. But it is still dedicated. And it is overpopulated by members of the media.

 

TIPPING HIS hat to this group, this week Defense Minister Ehud Barak announced in a media interview that he thinks that Israel should unilaterally withdraw from much of Judea and Samaria.

 

For most Israelis, Barak's plan is self-evidently insane.

 

We left Gaza and see the consequences of that unilateral withdrawal every day as southern Israel is bombarded with missiles and rockets. We left and Gaza was transformed into a hub for global jihad, increasingly indistinguishable from Sinai. The very notion that our defense chief could suggest adopting an identical strategy for Judea and Samaria is both obscene and frightening.

 

What can he be thinking? Barak is thinking about elections, which are apparently about to be called. Barak thinks his best bet politically is to try to win the support of Abbas's ever shrinking support base.

 

Barak lost his political base when he left the Labor Party and formed his own Independence faction with other breakaway Labor politicians at the beginning of 2011. He needs Abbas's Israeli supporters to vote for him if he is to get elected to the next Knesset. Even more crucially, Barak needs Abbas's supporters in the Israeli media. So to win their support, he opted to run on a platform of expelling Jews from their homes.

 

Barak's move doesn't tell us anything we don't already know about him. He remains the political opportunist he has always been. His move is interesting because of what it reveals about the nature of Israel's Left.

 

There is no rational way to argue that Israel can gain any advantage by surrendering Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians. If Israel departs, either Abbas will gobble up the territory and demand more, or he will swallow the concession and get swallowed by Hamas, which will demand more - as happened in Gaza.

 

Either way, Israel loses.

 

But that doesn't matter for the Left. The Left continues to support Israeli withdrawals because its members know that the biggest loser of such an action won't be Israel as a whole. It will be the Israeli Right. And that is all the Left cares about.

 

The only enemy they are interested in fighting, the only adversary they wish to defeat, is their fellow Israelis. And in a bid to win their support at the ballot box - and on the evening news - Barak has decided to embrace their cause. He will fight their fight against their Israeli enemies for them.

 

The Israeli Left is not alone in its belief that its number one priority is to destroy its domestic political opposition. Throughout the Western world, the political Left is increasingly rallying around positions that are in fundamental conflict with their nation's interests as well as with the specific ideological commitments of the Left, for the sole purpose of gaining and maintaining power.

 

In recent weeks, the Left in the US has exposed its motivations and purpose in profoundly troubling ways. If Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel is the core of the Zionist revolution, freedom of speech is the foundation of America. Without Jewish settlement, there is no Israel. Without freedom of speech, there is no America.

 

IN RECENT weeks, US President Barack Obama and all of his senior aides and supporters have launched an assault on freedom of speech. They have attacked previously unknown figures because they dared to exercise their freedom of speech to produce an anti-Islamic film and broadcast it on YouTube. The White House pressured Google (which owns YouTube) to take the movie down. Obama's media supporters have gone along with this shocking assault on bedrock American principles.

 

The Left's support for Obama's bid to repress freedom of speech in relation to the movie was not an isolated incident. Today the enlightened leftists of New York and Washington are apoplectic because a federal judge required New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority to post paid advertisements by the Stop the Islamization of America human rights group calling for Americans to support Israel against jihad.

 

The content of the ads is self-evidently reasonable. They read, "In any war between the savage and the civilized man, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad."

 

SIOA's founder Pamela Geller submitted the ads to the MTA last year in response to a rash of anti- Israel ads calling for the US to end its support for the Jewish state. Those ads were published on New York buses and subways and on public transportation around the US.

 

The MTA rejected SIOA's ad but the group sued. Citing the US Constitution, the court required the MTA to post them. When after a year's delay the ads were finally posted last week, the US Left in the media and beyond had a collective fit.

 

From The New York Times to radical rabbis to pro- Islamic Christian pastors to The Washington Post, everyone is wringing their hands. In a televised debate with Geller, the anti-Israel evangelical pastor Rev. Jim Wallis condemned the ads, told Geller she was going to get Christians killed, (by what or whom, he never said), and demanded that Geller silence herself. As he put it, "Stop talking."

 

It is important to be clear. The American Left doesn't have a problem with free speech, per se. And they aren't concerned - as Wallis would have you believe - that calling jihad savagery is going to get people killed, (by not-at-all savage jihadists).

 

The problem with messages like Geller's is that talk about jihad distracts people from what the Left wants them to be thinking about.

 

Like the Israeli Left, the American Left doesn't want Americans to think about the actual threats to the US emanating from the Islamic world. They want the public to think about what for them is the only real threat to their values and their ability to win and wield power.

 

That threat doesn't emanate from the Islamic world where women are treated worse than farm animals, homosexuals are hanged in public squares, Christians are forcibly converted and assaulted, churches are burned to the ground, the annihilation of the Jewish people throughout the world is an ardent desire, and "Death to America" is a political program.

 

For the American Left, the primary threat to their way of life comes from people who oppose abortions and gay marriage and gun control. It comes from people who oppose unionization of government workers and nationalization of healthcare.

 

And it comes from people like Geller who state the obvious about jihad.

 

The reason that Islam is supposed to be immune from criticism is that for American leftists as for Israeli leftists, the only important battle is the one against domestic foes. And just as the abysmal results of leftist policies have left the Israeli Left with no choice but to shoot the messengers, so too the American Left must deal with policy failure by silencing the opposition.

 

In Israel, leftist appeasement of Palestinian terrorists has led to a horrific death toll and the obvious absence of peace. So the Left must silence those who have the temerity to oppose that failed policy. The Right's most visible members are the religious Zionists, who are disproportionately situated beyond the 1949 armistice lines, and so the Left must destroy them through expulsions, no matter what the cost to Israel.

 

In America, the Left's most conspicuous failure is its claim to promote women's rights, equality and civil liberties in the culture war, even as it defends the Islamic world's addiction to female genital mutilation, forced marriages, honor killings and executions of homosexuals for the "crime" of being gay. So the Left must silence critics of jihad and Islamism, and hope no one will notice its hypocrisy.

 

The upshot of all of this is that the Left must be denied its ability to dominate national discourses. Because Abbas and the pathologically Jew-hating society he leads is a threat to the Jewish state, while religious Zionists are not. And the assaults on American embassies throughout the Islamic world are not due to Internet movies, but to the savagery inherent in jihadist Islam.

 

In these perilous times we cannot permit ourselves to be led astray by those who insist we are our worst enemies.

 

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

__________________________

© 2012 Caroline Glick

 

About Caroline Glick

There is a Better Future in Annexing Judea-Samaria and Gaza

John R. Houk

© June 1, 2012

GOP nominee for President rated President Barack Hussein Obama’s foreign policy as an across the board “F”.

   

Of course BHO’s minions in his campaign defend BHO’s foreign policy choices:

Asked to grade Obama, Romney responded: “Oh, an F, no question about that,” adding that it applies “across the board.”

Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana and ex-ambassador to India, said Romney is “misguided and misinformed.” Romney is out of step with experts in his own party who “have recognized President Obama’s accomplishments” in foreign policy, Roemer said in an e-mailed statement. (Presidential Campaigns Duel Over Candidates’ Jobs Records, by John McCormick and Alison Vekshin; Bloomberg; May 31, 2012 11:03 PM CT)

If you look at reality rather than Obama propaganda you know Romney is correct. There is nothing misguided or misinformed or out of step with fellow Republicans in the “F” grade for Obama.

No one says it better than Caroline Glick who as actually criticizing Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak for insinuating that Israel unilaterally should give up Judea-Samaria to bring peace to Israel.

Glick points out that land for peace didn’t work for Barak when he was Prime Minister in 2000 after bending to pressure to leave South Lebanon in 2000. Hezbollah not only turned South Lebanon into a mini-fiefdom but eventually became the de facto rulers of Lebanon under the strings of Iran and Syria.

Glick points out that Prime Minister Sharon’s decision to unilaterally pull out of Gaza in 2005 forcing Israeli settlements to pull up roots was also an utter failure in the land for peace thinking. Hamas rooted out the PA and turned Gaza into a mini-Fiefdom constantly shooting rockets into Israel’s civilian urban areas.

Now Glick is focusing Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s idiotic comment; however as you read her article you will note the extreme failure of President Barack Hussein Obama’s in the Middle East relating to Israel, Iran, Syria and pushing the existence of a sovereign Palestine on the land of Israel’s heritage.

If Israel’s policy were to go along with Ehud Barak’s suggestion it would not bring peace to Israel. Rather it would bring a murdering bunch of Arab terrorists who have adopted the name Palestinian on Israel’s border. The murdering thugs would not subscribe to peace! Rather the thugs would be dedicated to destroying Israel and the mass genocide of Jews.

Although politically distasteful, it actually would make more sense to remove all Arabs that refuse an allegiance to Israel and permanently annex Judea-Samaria (West Bank) and Gaza. I have no doubt a war would result from such an action; however I also know at this point Israel would still win a regional war. The Jewish State of Israel could even easier shut down borders from terrorists with such an official expanded territory because sovereign nations such as Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt again could be held responsible for allow Islamic terrorist attack on Israeli soil. After all the whole reason the old Arab League created the Palestine Liberation Organization was a tactic to keep violence against Israel in perpetuity while the surrounding Arab or Muslim nations could not be held directly culpable for attacking Israel.

The failure of Obama and past American Presidents – Democrats and Republicans – is a failure to look at the big picture for the future. Now as Obama allows Iran to go nuclear in creating Weapons of Mass Destruction the scenario for a military enforced peace via annexation becomes less and less workable.

There is no doubt in my mind that a sovereign Palestine State will be yet another puppet for Iran to manage. We all know Iran’s feelings toward the Jewish State of Israel.

JRH 6/1/12

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The reign of the fantasists

By Caroline Glick

June 1, 2012, 1:39 AM

CarolineGlick.com

Defense Minister Ehud Barak has done it again. Speaking on Wednesday at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, Barak warned that if Israel can't cut a deal with the Palestinians soon, it should consider surrendering Judea and Samaria in exchange for nothing.

Even the diehard leftists in the media had a hard time swallowing his words. After all, when Barak was premier, he oversaw Israel's unilateral surrender of south Lebanon in 2000. Barak promised that by giving Hezbollah south Lebanon, Israel would force the Iranian proxy army to disarm and behave like a Western political party.

Whoopsie.

Then of course, there is the Gaza precedent.

Ignoring the lesson of Lebanon, Barak's successor Ariel Sharon reenacted his unilateral surrender policy in Gaza in 2005. Like Barak, Sharon promised that once Gaza was cleared of all Jewish presence, it would magically transform itself into a Middle Eastern version of Singapore.

Whoopsie.

Both Barak and Sharon promised that their unilateral surrender policies would do more than merely transform Hezbollah and Hamas into liberal democrats. They said that by cutting and running, Israel would earn the love of the international community, and winning the love of the likes of Washington and Brussels, they said, was the most urgent item on Israel's agenda.

Apparently Barak was referring to the same imperative when on Wednesday he said that Israel needs to act fast because, "We are on borrowed time. We will reach a wall, and we'll pay the price."

So yes, Hezbollah has taken over not just south Lebanon, but all of Lebanon. And true, there is no one in the Palestinian Authority today who is willing to accept the continued existence of Israel in any borders. But that just means we need the West to love us even more. And the only way to get the West to love us is by imperiling our very existence by handing our heartland over to people who wish to destroy our country.

Given the high value Barak and his comrades place on winning the love of the West, it is worth considering what motivates the West - or more to the point, the US, which leads the Western world.

Unfortunately, the situation is not pretty. US President Barack Obama's policies are just as irrational as the ones that Barak is urging Israel to implement in order to win Obama's support. And Obama's rationales for adopting these policies are just as divorced from reality as Barak's are.

The place where this irrationality is displayed most prominently today is in Obama's policy regarding Iran. As Michael Singh rightly noted on Wednesday in the New York Daily News, under Obama, US policy towards Iran is based on the view "that at the root of the Iran nuclear crisis is US-Iran conflict, and that the root cause of that conflict is mistrust."

THIS VIEW is pure fantasy. No Iranian leader has ever given the US any reason to believe that this is the case. To the contrary, every Iranian leader since the 1979 Islamic Revolution has made clear that the regime is dedicated to the destruction of the US and Israel.

The Iranians do not wish to destroy the US and Israel because they distrust them. The likes of Ayatollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Khamenei, President Ahmadinejad and all of their comrades wish to destroy Israel and the US because they hate us. They hate us because as they see it, both nations represent forces that are antithetical to their revolution's goal of Islamic world domination.

Rather than accept this fundamental, but unpleasant truth, Obama and his advisors base their policy of engaging Iran on fairy tales about nonexistent fatwas that purportedly ruled out the development of nuclear weapons. As Vice Premier Moshe Ya'alon put it delicately this week, the Iranians are "laughing all the way to a bomb."

Ya'alon explained, "During talks with world powers, the Iranians have managed to enrich 750 kilograms of uranium to 3.5 percent, and 36 kilograms of uranium to 20 percent."

And while the Iranians were enriching all that uranium, according to satellite imagery published on Wednesday by the Institute for Science and International Affairs, they were destroying buildings at the Parchin nuclear site.

The buildings in question were suspected of being used to conduct high explosive tests pertinent to the development of nuclear weapons.

And yet, despite Iran's obvious bad faith, and despite the fact that the much-touted sanctions against Iran have done nothing to slow the pace of its sprint to the nuclear finish line, the Obama administration insists on clinging to the fantasy that it can convince the Iranians that they can trust the US and therefore convince them to give up their nuclear weapons program.

Lacking any substantive means of defending this Tinkerbell-fairy-dust policy towards the most pressing threat to international security today, the only thing the Obama administration can tell increasingly distressed Israeli leaders is that we should trust them. They know what they are doing.

Allowing Iran to go nuclear isn't the only price Obama has been willing to pay to fulfill his fantasy of solving Iran's conflict with the US by building trust. He is also willing to destroy any chance of Syria becoming a responsible actor on the international stage.

Obama's willingness to sit on his thumbs for 14 months as Syrian President Bashar Assad has killed as many as 15,000 of his countrymen owes in part to Obama's desire to win the trust of the ayatollahs in Tehran. Since Assad is Iran's client, any US move to overthrow him would weaken Iran. And since as far as Obama is concerned Iran doesn't have anything against the US, but simply suffers from a chronic lack of trust in Washington, it would be wrong to harm Tehran's interests by overthrowing the ayatollahs' Syrian lackey.

Obama's Syria policy is not only a product of his fantasy-based policy towards Iran. It is also a consequence of his fantasy-based policy towards Turkey. Rather than intervene early in the conflict and support pro-Western forces in Syria as an alternative to Assad's tyranny, Obama outsourced the organization of the Syrian opposition to Turkey's Islamic Prime Minister Recip Erdogan.

In Obama's fantasy world, Erdogan is a great ally of the US. The fact that Erdogan has redefined Turkey away from the West and towards Tehran and the Muslim Brotherhood; rendered incoherent NATO's strategic mission; ended Turkey's strategic alliance with Israel; used advanced US arms to kill Kurdish civilians, and threatens war in the eastern Mediterranean over natural gas deposits that do not belong to him is irrelevant. All that matters is the fantasy that Erdogan is America's friend. And since Obama embraces this fantasy, he subcontracted the formation of the Turkish opposition to Erdogan.

Lo and behold, the opposition Erdogan established was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. And now, according to a report by Jacques Neriah from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the Syrian opposition is dominated not only by the Muslim Brotherhood, but increasingly by al-Qaida. So whereas a year ago the US had an opportunity to build and shepherd into power a multiethnic, pro-Western Syrian opposition, in the throes of his fantasies about Iran and Turkey, Obama squandered the opportunity. As a result, today we are faced with the grim reality that the world might be safer leaving Assad alone than intervening to overthrow him.

THIS BRINGS us back to Barak, and the Israeli establishment that cannot rid itself of the notion that we need to give away the store to the Palestinians to win the support of the "international community," that is, to win Obama's support. But towards the Palestinians as well, Obama has embraced fantasy over reality. This week the State Department had the bureaucratic equivalent of an apoplectic fit when it learned that US Sen. Mark Kirk inserted an amendment into the State Department funding bill that will require the department to provide Congress with two pieces of information: the number of Palestinians physically displaced from their homes in what became Israel in 1948, and the number of their descendants administered by the United Nations Relief Works Agency, UNRWA.

The Palestinians claim that there are some five million refugees. They demand that Israel allow all of them to immigrate to its territory as part of a peace deal. UNRWA and the Palestinians claim that not only are the Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 to be considered refugees, their descendants are also to be considered refugees.

Estimates place the number of Palestinians alive today who were physically displaced from Israel at 30,000.

All Kirk wants is the information. And for his effort to bring some facts into the discourse about the Palestinian conflict with Israel, the State Department came down on him like a wall of bricks. In a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides wrote that Kirk's "proposed amendment would be viewed around the world as the United States acting to prejudge and determine the outcome of this sensitive issue."

As far as the State Department is concerned, until the Palestinians and Israel reach an agreement, the US must keep faith with the international community by supporting a policy regarding Palestinian refugees that is both factually absurd and deeply hostile to Israel.

This policy is in perfect alignment with the US policy on Jerusalem. In late March we learned that in the interests of not prejudging the outcome of nonexistent negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians over eastern Jerusalem, the US refuses to recognize Israeli sovereignty not only over eastern Jerusalem, but over any part of Jerusalem. The fact that Jerusalem is Israel's capital is of no interest. The fact that US law requires the US government to recognize that Jerusalem is Israel's capital and to locate the US Embassy in Jerusalem is irrelevant. To appease the international community, the US won't even recognize Israeli sovereignty over western Jerusalem.

So according to Barak and his associates, to prevent Israel's isolation by securing US support, Israel ought to ignore the lessons of the Lebanon withdrawal, the phony peace process with the PLO, and the withdrawal from Gaza and move full speed ahead with policies that will make it impossible to defend the country.

As for the US, to win the support of Europe, Iran and Turkey, Obama has adopted policies that enable Iran to become a nuclear power, make Assad the most attractive leader in Syria, empower the most anti-American forces in Turkey and pressure Israel to renounce its right and ability to defend itself.

Standing alone never looked so good.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

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There is a Better Future in Annexing Judea-Samaria and Gaza

John R. Houk

© June 1, 2012

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The reign of the fantasists

© 2012 Caroline Glick

About Caroline Glick:

I grew up in Chicago's ultra-liberal, anti-American and anti-Israel stronghold of Hyde Park. Hyde Park's newest famous resident is Barack Obama. He fits right into a neighborhood I couldn't wait to leave.

I made aliyah to Israel in 1991, two weeks after receiving my BA in Political Science from Beir Zeit on the Hudson -- otherwise known as Columbia University. I joined the Israel Defense Forces that summer and served as an officer for five and a half years.

From 1994-1996, as an IDF captain, I served as Coordinator of Negotiations with the PLO in the office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. In this capacity I was a core member of Israel’s negotiating team with the Palestinians.

After leaving the IDF at the end of 1996, I worked as the assistant to the Director General of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

I then returned to geo-politics serving as Assistant Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in 1997-1998.

From 1998-2000 I went back to the US where I received a Master's in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in June 2000. Although I spent most of my free time hiking in New England, it did not escape my attention that the vast majority of the faculty at the Kennedy School were not particularly fond of America -- or of Israel.

In the summer of 2000 I returned to Israel and … READ MORE