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Jimmy Carter: A Jewish tragedy Michael Oren

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-835379

Among many other time-tested attributes, the Jewish people have a long memory. Aid us in the manner of the ancient Persian King Cyrus, and we will remember you forever fondly. Cross us as Seleucid King Antiochus IV did, and we will curse you every Hanukkah.

Our talent for remembering is particularly salient today after the death, at age of 100, of former president Jimmy Carter.

While the rest of the world is now hailing him as a statesman who, after his failed one-term presidency, rose to become an unstinting peacemaker, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and a paragon of now non-existent virtues, many Jews will have a far more ambivalent reaction.

The man whose legacy could have been cherished by future Jewish generations, with streets in Jerusalem named for him and communities created in his honor, will be at best forgotten, if not reviled. That is the tragedy of Jimmy Carter, a leader who could have gone down in Jewish history as a second Truman, will be recalled, if at all, as another Bernie Sanders.

The tragedy is compounded by the fact that the Jewish state owes Carter an immense historical debt. In an anomalous way, his insistence on including the Soviets in the Middle East peace process immediately after Egypt succeeded in evicting them convinced president Anwar Sadat of the need to act swiftly and independently of the United States.

The result came in November 1977, with Sadat’s groundbreaking visit to Israel. Carter, to his credit, leaped into the diplomatic breach, and devoted 13 presidential days to forging the Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel. Though never close to yielding a warm peace, that treaty has since withstood tectonic pressures and relieved Israel of the threat of large-scale Arab armies.

But, sadly, that achievement proved to be a one-off. The self-proclaimed champion of human rights, Carter was comfortable with Middle Eastern dictators like Sadat, Hafez al-Assad, and the shah of Iran, but endlessly critical of Israel’s democratically elected leaders, beginning with Menachem Begin.

No sooner were the Camp David Accords signed in 1979 than Carter embarked on a 40-year smear campaign against Israel.

Jimmy Carter’s Obsession with Israel Hugh Fitzgerald

https://jihadwatch.org/2024/12/jimmy-carters-obsession-with-israel?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=jimmy-carters-obsession-with-israel

Much of the world is describing Jimmy Carter as a saintly soul who went around the world building housing for the poor, monitoring elections to make sure they were free and fair, and still managing — such a humble man! — to teach Sunday School at the small church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. But those familiar with his obsessive dislike of Israel that descended into outright antisemitism have a different view of the Man From Plains. The historian Michael Oren reminds us of this side of James Earl Carter, Jr. here: “Jimmy Carter: A Jewish tragedy – opinion,” by Michael Oren, Jerusalem Post, December 30, 2024:

Among many other time-tested attributes, the Jewish people have a long memory. Aid us in the manner of the ancient Persian King Cyrus, and we will remember you forever fondly. Cross us as Seleucid King Antiochus IV did, and we will curse you every Hanukkah.

Our talent for remembering is particularly salient today after the death, at age of 100, of former president Jimmy Carter.

While the rest of the world is now hailing him as a statesman who, after his failed one-term presidency, rose to become an unstinting peacemaker, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and a paragon of now non-existent virtues, many Jews will have a far more ambivalent reaction.

Not just Jews, but all those who care about Israel, will be reluctant to join in the orgy of posthumous praise for Jimmy Carter.

Are the Years of Madness Ending? The welcomed counterrevolution is one of restoration. No one knows quite what is ahead, but all know that it is at least better already than the current nightmare. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/16/are-the-years-of-madness-ending/

Never in U.S. history has a president-elect been welcomed as the real president before his January 20 inauguration. And never has the incumbent president so willingly surrendered his last two months in office and all but abdicated—to the relief of his nation and the rest of the world.

One reason so many are welcoming Trump’s return is the universally desperate hope that his election spelled an end to a collective madness at home and its ripples abroad during the last four years. And why not?

Nations overseas had never quite witnessed anything like the lethal August 2021 American flight from Afghanistan. That utter humiliation and impotence of the U.S. military likely signaled to Russia there would be no consequences if it invaded Ukraine—and it did; to Iran that it could now unleash Hamas and Hezbollah on Israel—and it did; and to China that it could daily threaten Taiwan and send a spy balloon across the United States with impunity—and it did.

The result was the current global chaos perhaps not seen since the late 1930s when a confused United States was similarly a bystander to the rise of bellicose regimes and wars. The Biden administration shrugged that the Red Sea, the Black Sea, the South China Sea, the Straits of Hormuz, and the Eastern Mediterranean Sea all became dangerous to the U.S. Navy and unsafe to world shipping.

A disparate group of nuclear and near-nuclear powers—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—are either at war with Western allies or threatening war with them. Their confidence was predicated on the assumption that the U.S. after 2020 was engaged in a Maoist-like cultural revolution that warred on its own security, energy, military, universities, and social unity—and would continue with a second Biden term.

The Biden-era cultural revolution has done great damage to the United States. The U.S. border was systematically and deliberately destroyed to allow some 10-12 million illegal entrants to pour into the U.S. without legality or background checks. Never has an outgoing administration spitefully sold taxpayer-purchased border wall material for pennies on the dollar—rather than see it used for the purposes for which it was purchased.

Democrats recalibrate their resistance to Trump Hannah Trudo

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5039827-democratic-party-trump-resistance/

Democrats are not planning an all-hands resistance to President-elect Trump.

At least not in 2016 style, when lawmakers, activists, volunteers and millions of angry voters mounted a party-wide effort to curb his newfound influence in Washington.

Where so much was once unprecedented, Trump is now familiar. Ahead of January 2025, the lack of a unified Democratic rebuttal to his second term is the latest sign that the party’s just beginning to soul search, trying to figure out what went wrong before banding together to bash the GOP.

“The one thing we seem to know is the strategy of being an anti-Trump party didn’t work any better than when we became a primarily anti-Bush party,” said Max Burns, a Democratic commentator. “In that transformation, we seem to have become unclear about what our actual pro-Democrat message is.”

“It’s more like Republicans post-1960 than anything,” he said, “where the loss led to a real round of questioning about what our values are and what our strategy is.”

On the one hand, the month-and-a-half postelection period can seem like decades, as D.C.’s political class awaits the unpredictable transition of power. On the other, it’s just a blip in what many expect to be a long undertaking to redefine the Democratic Party beyond Trump’s shadow. 

Trump Redux: Defeating Identity Despots By Daryl McCann

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/the-u-s-a/trump-redux-defeating-identity-despots/

Donald Trump’s victory on November 5 was more than just a defeat for his hapless opponent. It was a defeat for the Democrat powerbrokers who foisted Kamala Harris on the American public without the former senator from California attaining a single party delegate during this year’s primary season (or, for that matter, in 2019-20). It was, similarly, a defeat for the mass media, which reconfigured her as “the voice of a new generation” once she became the Democrats’ presidential nominee, despite deriding her performance as vice-president over the previous three and a half years. Finally, and most importantly, November 5 marks the day Americans rejected the despotism of Obama-style identity politics.

Leading Democrats are now arguing over whether to blame Joe Biden or Harris for the Democrats’ worst result in a presidential election since 1988, including the loss of all seven battleground states. The Biden camp points out that Biden won six of those states in 2020 and could have hardly done worse than Harris this time. But that argument does not hold up in the light of Biden’s abysmal performance in his televised debate with Trump. Old Joe was on target to do as badly as Harris did, or worse. More than 75 per cent of American voters believed their country was on the wrong track—inflation, a doubling of the price of petrol, soaring mortgage rates, 10 to 20 million unvetted immigrants pouring across the southern border, foreign wars, boys in girls’ sports, and so on were affecting the national mood. Biden was not the man to turn things around. Not only was his administration responsible for many or all of these problems, but in the June 27 debate, Trump exposed Biden’s serious cognitive decline for all the world to see; not even the Democrat powerbrokers and their allies in the mainstream media could hide it any longer.

America’s working class is taking back control Trump-voting blue-collar workers are re-discovering their political power. Joel Kotkin

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/01/americas-working-class-is-taking-back-control/

For a generation, America’s working class, as well as much of its middle class, lost political power. Rather than build their appeal on class interests, politicians kowtowed to Wall Street, Big Tech elites, university ‘experts’ and identitarian interest groups. But, as the 2024 presidential election clearly showed, the working class still has the clout to decide who gets put into the White House. Their choice of Donald Trump was a slap in the face to the ruling class.

The shift of working-class voters to the right, particularly those who work with their hands, has been developing for almost half a century. It accelerated during the pandemic, when their work largely kept the country functioning.

Although the number of college-educated voters has expanded, at least until recently, those without degrees still constitute around 60 per cent of the electorate. These are the voters most responsible for electing Trump, the first Republican nominee ever to win among low-income voters. In 2024, he won among non-college voters by 13 points. He even won over 44 per cent of union households, a proportion not won since former trade-unionist Ronald Reagan did so in the 1980s.

Perhaps most important in the long run, Trump also did well among Latinos, winning upwards of 40 per cent of their vote as a whole, and a majority of males. Many working-class Latinos preferred the immigrant-bashing Trump, because they are the ones who compete with and live in the same neighbourhoods as illegal migrants. His support won him formerly Democratic strongholds, from Texas’s Rio Grande Valley to California’s largely Latino interior. He also made major gains among African American males.

This working-class discontent is not unique to America. Similar patterns can also be seen in the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands. Immigration has become a primary concern among these voters across the EU as well as Canada. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who wish to reduce immigration has soared. Roughly 60 per cent of Americans and a majority of Latinos support even ‘mass deportations’. Much the same shift of opinion has occurred in Europe.

If Harris couldn’t win, maybe Democrats should have nominated someone else By W. James Antle III

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/presidential/3239705/democrats-should-have-nominated-someone-else-not-kamala-harris/

The leaders of Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign are starting to acknowledge that the fundamentals of the 2024 race for the White House favored President-elect Donald Trump all along.

Joy and hope were no match for dissatisfaction with the economy, the direction of the country, and incumbent parties across the globe, dooming the Democrats earlier this month and paving the way for Trump’s return to the Oval Office.

“The headwinds were just too great for us to overcome, especially in 107 days,” Harris campaign Chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon told the Washington Post in a representative postmortem. “But we came very close to what we anticipated, both in terms of turnout and in terms of support.”

What they were unable to do, however, was win a single battleground state or the popular vote even after replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.

Harris was undoubtedly dealt a bad hand. She was also an incredibly risk-averse candidate, while her opponent, who faced the prospect of incarceration if defeated, aggressively sought out new media opportunities to target infrequent voters. She had no compelling answer to how she would be different from Biden, despite that being the central question of the campaign, even though she was serving as vice president under an octogenarian who, from 2019 to 2023, had seriously considered only serving a single term.

Many explanations of the election outcome that seek to absolve Harris of responsibility for her defeat subtly make the case against her candidacy in the first place. As Biden’s vice president, she would have to do more than other Democrats to distance herself from the incumbent administration, if it could be done at all.

Penalizing the criminal international court Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/penalizing-the-criminal-international-court/

Senate Majority Leader-elect John Thune (R-S.D.) on Thursday called the International Criminal Court’s issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant “outrageous, unlawful and dangerous.”

Thune then demanded that current Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) “bring a bill to the floor sanctioning the ICC,” warning that “if he chooses not to act, the new Senate Republican majority next year will.”

The double threat—aimed simultaneously at Schumer and the kangaroo court at The Hague—was significant for two reasons.

First, Thune has good reason to finger-wag at his Democrat counterparts, thanks to their disturbing attitude towards Israel. Professing an “ironclad commitment” to the Jewish state’s “right to defend itself” while withholding crucial arms shipments to America’s key ally and only democracy in the Middle East has made them deserving of suspicion by the likes of Thune and the rest of the unflinchingly pro-Israel Republicans.

The fact that a whopping 19 Democrat senators voted this week to advance resolutions put forth by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to block the transfer to Jerusalem of offensive weaponry necessary for its self-defense is a case in point.

Though Schumer—like President Joe Biden and other members of his party who have been critical of Israel’s prosecution of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon—opposed those resolutions, they’ve been openly hostile to the Netanyahu government since its inception; so much so that they’ve never concealed their desire for it to be toppled.

Second, there are concrete steps that the powers that be in D.C. can take against the ICC, such as the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act, passed in May by the U.S. House of Representatives. House Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday reiterated his demand that the Senate vote on it “immediately.”

Similar to Thune, Johnson pulled no punches.

Unlike Their Membership, Teacher Union Leaders Are Far Left Ignoring the rank and file. by Larry Sand

https://www.frontpagemag.com/unlike-its-membership-teacher-union-leaders-are-far-left/

The teacher union leadership is in a collective snit after it became clear that Donald Trump would be reelected as U.S. president. American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten stated in a press release on Nov. 9, “At this moment, the country is more divided than ever, and our democracy is in jeopardy. Last night, we saw fear and anger win.”

National Education Association boss Becky Pringle was somber, posting on Facebook, “We woke up today to a world that feels darker than it did yesterday. I hear the fear about the safety of our families and communities. I feel the profound anxiety for the future of our country. I see the worry, anger, and heartbreak. But despair is not the answer.”

Pringle’s post was widely contested in the comments section, however. Typifying the pushback, educator Laurie Speed posted, “I wish that you would not assume that all of your members are liberals. Many voted for Trump, and they are feeling optimistic. I wish NEA were bipartisan. The education of our children is important to both parties. As educators, we can set the example for our students to follow regarding how to collaborate with others whose opinions differ from ours.”

Speed nails it! Ignoring its rank and file, teacher union leadership is far left, and has been for years. When NEA president Reg Weaver spoke at the Democratic Convention in 2008, his opening words were, “I am here today on behalf of 3.2 million NEA members to tell you why we support Barack Obama for president of the United States.”

It sounded as if every member of the NEA was backing Obama. Then, in his last sentence, he left no doubt. “That, my friends, is why the 3.2 million members of the National Education Association are organized, energized, and mobilized to help elect Barack Obama as the next president of the United States of America.”

Yet, the same Reg Weaver stated a few years before that one-third of NEA membership is Republican, one-third Democrat, and one-third “other.”

Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence

https://jihadwatch.org/2024/11/tulsi-gabbard-director-of-national-intelligence?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tulsi-gabbard-director-of-national-intelligence

Tulsi Gabbard has just been appointed as the Director of National Intelligence. She has criticized the Biden administration for not being sufficiently supportive of Israel since October 7, 2023. She has spoken out about Islamic terrorism. She is a Hindu — she was sworn in as a congresswoman on a copy of the Bhagavad Gita — and that may mean she is aware of what the centuries of Muslim rule meant for the Hindus of India.

She was once a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, and even ran for president in 2020 in the Democratic primary. But since then she has had a road-to-Damascus conversion, and become a Republican. More on Tulsi Gabbard can be found here: “Trump selects Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence,” by Marc Rod, Jewish Insider, November 13, 2024:

…Gabbard, a military veteran, has been critical of the Biden administration for being insufficiently supportive of Israel since Oct. 7. She has been vocal against Islamic terrorism and has expressed strong support for the Jewish state, including at a speech at a Christians United for Israel conference during her time in Washington.

To see how far she has come, consider that in the past she voted against a House resolution condemning the December 2016 United Nations Security Council Resolution opposing Israeli settlements. In 2019 she refused to condemn Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) for antisemitic comments about U.S. support for Israel and voted for a resolution sponsored by Omar that aimed to defend the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. But Gabbard has since then clearly expressed her opposition to the BDS movement and voted for anti-BDS legislation. And in 2020, she even supported Bernie Sanders, a severe critic of Israel, to be President. But that was a world away from Tulsi Gabbard today; the former Democrat has been appearing at rallies for Donald Trump.

By 2022, she had moved rightward. In October 2024 she stood by Donald Trump at a rally and announced that she was joining the Republican Party. She explained that she found she agreed with the Republicans on the most important issues, including immigration. She described the Democratic Party as “unrecognizable” from what it had been twenty years before , and she attacked the “elitist cabal of warmongers” and “woke” ideologue” in the party.

She has said that anti-Israel college protesters are “antisemitic” and have become “puppets” of a “radical Islamist organization.” On October 7, 2024 she posted on Instagram that “Hamas’s horrific attack against Israel one year ago today that took the lives of approximately 1,200 Israelis at a music concert and in their homes, is a stark reminder of the ongoing short and long term threat of Islamist terrorism that continues to spread around the world today. Their goal is to establish a global Islamist caliphate, where all must live under their sharia law. Many leaders in the west have promised to defeat this threat and failed, because they refuse to acknowledge that it must be defeated ideologically and militarily.”