RUTHFULLY YOURS

Barack Obama’s foreign policy will go down in U.S. history as one of the most dangerously inept ever. Created by equal amounts of ignorance, arrogance, and partisan politics, the president’s policies have left behind a world in which rivals and enemies are on the march, while allies and friends are endangered and alienated. He deserves the opprobrium with which future history should load him.

But focusing on individuals and their personal flaws can prevent us from seeing the larger bad ideas that transcend any one person or party. We justly remember British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain as the architect of the 1938 Munich conference that paved the way for Hitler’s aggression. And indeed, Chamberlain’s flaws of character––most important a vanity about his personal powers of persuasion that blinded him to Hitler’s brilliant diplomatic misdirection about his true intentions––contributed to that debacle. But we should also remember the delirious public joy that greeted Chamberlain when he returned to England, and the global acclaim he received for avoiding war with Germany. Millions of people thought Chamberlain had heroically succeeded because many shared the assumptions and ideas that drove his decisions.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress on March 3rd is a historic occasion. He is speaking directly to the elected representatives of the American people about the existential threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iranian Islamic theocracy. This threat is not only to the Jewish people, but to the entire free world. In that sense, Mr. Netanyahu is channeling Winston Churchill, whose warnings about the dangers of the rising threat of Nazi Germany were ignored and even mocked until the United Kingdom was on the brink of destruction. Churchill’s prescient words following Neville Chamberlain’s Munich appeasement apply equally today to the current negotiations with Iran and the concessions the Obama administration is considering: “And do not suppose that this is the end. This is the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup.”

President Obama is channeling Neville Chamberlain. He appears to want peace with Iran at any price. Even the usually liberal Washington Post stated in an editorial last month that “a process that began with the goal of eliminating Iran’s potential to produce nuclear weapons has evolved into a plan to tolerate and temporarily restrict that capability.”

For example, at the start of the negotiations, the United States sought to leave Iran with no more than 1,500 operational centrifuges. Now, according to leaked reports, Iran may be permitted to retain as much as 6500 operational centrifuges. A former CIA deputy director who served under President Obama, Michael Morell, stated recently: “If you are going to have a nuclear weapons program, 5,000 is pretty much the number you need.”

In 1967, Benjamin Netanyahu skipped his high school graduation in Pennsylvania to head off to Israel to help in the Six Day War. That same year Obama moved with his mother to Indonesia.

When Obama suggested that Israel return to the pre-1967 borders, described by Ambassador Eban, no right-winger, as “Auschwitz borders,” it was personal for Netanyahu. Like many Israeli teens, he had put his life on hold and risked it protecting those borders.

In the seventies, Obama was part of the Choom Gang and Netanyahu was sneaking up on Sabena Flight 571 dressed as an airline technician. Inside were four terrorists who had already separated Jewish passengers and taken them hostage. Two hijackers were killed. Netanyahu took a bullet in the arm.

The Prime Minister of Israel defended the operation in plain language. “When blackmail like this succeeds, it only leads to more blackmail,” she said.

Netanyahu’s speech in Congress was part of that same clash of worldviews. His high school teacher remembered him saying that his fellow students were living superficially and that there was “more to life than adolescent issues.” He came to Congress to cut through the issues of an administration that has never learned to get beyond its adolescence.

“Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace, but rather submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people’s desires.” — Anjem Choudary, British Islamist.

“Britain is the enemy of Islam.” — Mizanur Rahman, Muslim cleric at Palmers Green, north London.

“Brothers and sisters, we would not be here had it not been for the fact that the kafir [non-Muslims] had gone to our lands and killed our people and raped and pillaged our resources… Stop putting freedom on this pedestal.” — Aysh Chaudhry, Muslim trainee lawyer at London-based law firm, Clifford Chance.

“The firm is committed to establishing an inclusive culture where people with diverse backgrounds and views work effectively together and feel confident to develop their potential.” — Spokesperson for Clifford Chance law firm.

Nancy Pelosi apparently teared up she was so upset by Netanyahu’s speech. Well, I confess that I teared up too, clearly for other reasons.

Benjamin Netanyahu gave an amazing speech- one which did his late father Benzion Netanyahu and his heroic brother Yonatan, the hero of the Entebbe rescue proud.

Benzion Netanyahu, was a world renowned scholar of Judaic history and activist in the Revisionist Zionism movement, and editor of “Betar” who lobbied in the United States for the creation of the Jewish state. His field of expertise was the history of the Jews in Spain, and he served as an editor of the Hebrew Encyclopedia and was a professor at Cornell University. He spent a significant portion of his life in the United States. He was a friend, companion and secretary to Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky.

Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu, was the commander of the elite Israeli army commando unit Sayeret Matkal. He was the only Israeli soldier killed in action during Operation Entebbe in Uganda.
I wish they could have heard the speech to Congress. I like to think they did. I also wish that Nancy Pelosi’s wonderful father, Rep. Tom D’Alesandro, who was mayor of Baltimore and congressman from that state would have heard that speech. He was very sympathetic to the Jewish plight in Europe and lobbied both FDR and Truman in support of Israel. Thomas D’Alesandro Stadium in Kyriat Haim used for football matches is named for him.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walked into the House of Representatives the applause was deafening. Watching the broadcast on C-SPAN, one could hear the audio feed constantly clipping in and out because the microphones were overloaded. The decibel level was bursting from an enthusiastic Congress cheering a man who had come to speak for the West, to speak for democracy, and to speak against the terrorism and barbarity of Iran.

Some members of Congress weren’t as embracing of Netanyahu’s speech as most — Nancy Pelosi in particular exhibited a sort of physical discomfort and immediately bolted for the exit after the speech. Even though Mrs. Pelosi said after Netanyahu’s oration that she “was near tears throughout the prime minister’s speech — saddened by the insult to the intelligence of the United States”, any impartial observer could see that the speech given on March 3rd in the House of Representatives will echo through history as an important moment in the defense of democratic nations, as a declaration against genocidal mania, and as a principled defense of societies birthed by the values of the enlightenment.

Hillary Rodham Clinton isn’t the only one apparently baffled by newfangled technologies such as email (see nearby). In a withering ruling on Monday, a federal judge scored the Environmental Protection Agency for its contempt for its legal obligation to disclose documents and then lying to the courts about its stonewalling.

In 2012 the right-leaning Landmark Legal Foundation made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for emails related to regulations and the forthcoming election. As many suspected at the time and we now know, the White House commanded the agency to delay major anticarbon rules so the details couldn’t be debated in front of voters, thus undermining political accountability for the economic damage.
The EPA spent years attempting to deny Landmark a meaningful response, starting with the receipt of the FOIA request. The agency’s FOIA officer waited weeks before informing the offices of then EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and her deputies of the obligation to retain documents. The agency subsequently refused to search either the official email accounts of top officials or the alias personal email addresses they used to conduct government business—“for reasons still unexplained,” Judge Royce Lamberth observes in a 25-page finding against the agency.

Hillary Clinton hasn’t even begun her expected presidential candidacy, but already Americans are being reminded of the political entertainment they can expect. To wit, the normal rules of government ethics and transparency apply to everyone except Bill and Hillary.

Last week we learned that the Clinton Foundation had accepted donations from foreign governments despite having made a public display of not doing so. The Family Clinton had agreed not to accept such donations while Mrs. Clinton was serving as Secretary of State, with rare exceptions approved by State’s ethics shop.

But, lo, the foundation quietly began accepting such gifts from the likes of Qatar and Algeria after she left the State Department—though everyone in the world knew she was likely to run for President in 2016. The foundation didn’t announce the donations, which our Journal colleagues discovered in a search of the foundation’s online data base.

President Obama thought so little of Benjamin Netanyahu ’s speech to Congress Tuesday that he made clear he hadn’t watched it and said the text didn’t “offer any viable alternatives” to the Administration’s pending nuclear deal with Iran. We’ll take that presidential passive-aggression as evidence that the Israeli Prime Minister’s critique was as powerful as Mr. Obama feared.

For all the White House’s fretting beforehand about the speech’s potential damage to U.S.-Israel relations, Mr. Netanyahu was both bipartisan and gracious to Mr. Obama for all he “has done for Israel,” citing examples previously not publicly known. But the power of the speech—the reason the Israeli leader was willing to risk breaking diplomatic china to give it—was its systematic case against the looming nuclear deal.

Point by point, he dismantled the emerging details and assumptions of what he called a “very bad deal.” The heart of his critique concerned the nature of the Iranian regime as a terror sponsor of long-standing that has threatened to “annihilate” Israel and is bent on regional domination.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress was a devastating indictment of the P5+1′s entire approach, and it reminded and reunited Democrats and Republicans, as did Sen. Robert Menendez’s speech to AIPAC Monday, on what is at stake and why the deal under contemplation can never come to pass.

As a preliminary matter, it is evident that had the president not thrown a fit, Netanyahu’s speech might not have garnered quite so much attention. But to be honest, the fuss mostly remained in the media. When the chips were down, it appeared that all but far-left lawmakers and Congressional Black Caucus members attended. That, incidentally, is a problem on the left, which has become virulently anti-Israel, as has the left in Europe and elsewhere (hence the BDS movement’s prominence on left-wing campuses and European capitals).

The speech was not aimed at the president, who is immune to reason, nor to the negotiators who suffer from a variation of Stockholm Syndrome, whereby they come to identify with their bargaining opponents more than the country they represent. It was aimed at American public opinion and uncertain Democrats on whose good judgment Netanyahu must rely to derail a disastrous deal. By flattering the president and Democrats, Netanyahu gave them an out to agree with him without crossing the president or appearing to give in to Republicans. He said so bluntly it was starting: This is a bad deal. No deal is better. And he explained exactly why.