Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scoobah who wrote (11686)	1/23/2006 9:24:20 AM
From: Scoobah	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32591

And the coming american hypocrisy: Hamas Issue Ties Olmert Government in Knots DEBKAfile Special Analysis January 23, 2006, 1:25 PM (GMT+02:00) Acting prime minister Ehud Olmert held a brainstorming session of Israel’s top political, military and intelligence minds Sunday, Jan. 22, on ideas for handling a Hamas victory in Wednesday’s Palestinian election. He designated the meeting classified to prevent leaks. Let Israel not be seen to be interfering in the highly-charged Palestinian legislative poll, he advised. He delayed a serious evaluation until after the election when the results are known. In fact, Olmert ducked the first major challenge of his tenure as stand-in for Ariel Sharon. His foreign minister Tzipi Livni, who doubles as justice minister, opted out all the way. In a TV interview Sunday, Jan 22, she dumped the Hamas problem together with the other poser, the Iranian nuclear threat, in the laps of “the international community.” Heedless of the Iranian president’s virulent ant-Israel posture, she argued that the threat of an Iranian bomb “did not pinpoint Israel” but the entire West. It was therefore a matter for the UN Security Council. On Hamas, minister Livni seemed to be satisfied with the Bush administration’s promise to withhold recognition from a Palestinian government with Hamas participation, as delivered by senior US envoys. A similar undertaking came from the European Union’s foreign policy executive Javier Solana. The trouble is that on the Palestinian Hamas, Olmert, like the rest of Sharon’s stalwarts in the government and Kadima party, are caught in a dilemma of their own making. Since they executed Israel’s pull-out from the Gaza Strip, Hamas has gone from strength to strength – militarily and politically - and expects a third-share at least of the Jan. 25 vote for the 123-strong Palestinian legislative council. The prospects of Abu Mazen and his feud-ridden Fatah have dipped correspondingly. As former chief of staff Lt.-Gen (Res) Moshe Ayalon told the Herzliya institute’s annual conference Monday, Jan. 23, the unilateral disengagement for no return cost Israel dear in impaired deterrent strength. The Gaza Strip has since deteriorated into “a Hamas-stan, Hizballahstan and al Qaedastan.” The empowerment of these terror groups, said Yaalon, means that in the foreseeable future, the pre-1967 borders will be neither secure nor defensible. The surge of Palestinian Qassam missiles from Gaza has already been demonstrated the truth of this assessment. But most of acting prime minister Olmert’s advisers and colleagues enthusiastically executed the withdrawal that enabled an Islamic terrorist group dedicated to Israel’s destruction to leap into Palestinian government. They are moreover heading for its continuation on the West Bank. Because of this self-programming, Olmert and Kadima failed to heed the warning given last November and December by Shin Beit director Yuval Diskin (and DEBKAfile) that a strong Hamas showing at the ballot box would be disastrous for Israel. Now, it is too late to start fashioning a policy to hold back the rushing Hamas tide. Even the last-ditch maneuver of permitting the terrorist lifer, Fatah’s No. 1 Marwan Barghouti, to broadcast an appeal to Fatah followers from his cell, will not stop the Hamas in its tracks. The prospect of a Hamas installed in Ramallah saddles the acting PM with a formidable problem for which he is unready: 1. On the backs of Hamas, Egypt’s radical Muslim Brotherhood, the group’s parent-organization, and Tehran will ride straight into positions of influence in Palestinian government in Ramallah. Only last Friday, Jan. 20, Hamas’s Damascus-based leader Khaled Mashaali had a good conversation with visiting Iranian president Ahmadinejad in the Syrian capital. 2. Hamas in government broadens the scope of the Israel-Palestinian dispute to involve the most belligerent Muslim Sunni and Shiite sects. In this sense alone, Sharon and his clique/successors performed a strategic misstep of monumental proportions. 3. Al Qaeda is not surprisingly poised to press its advantage and is racing its radical Muslim rivals in the effort to attack Israel. 4. In the aftermath of Sharon’s unilateral disengagement, every single accord - from the Middle East road map to the pre-withdrawal security and diplomatic accords the United States and Europe brokered between Israel, the Palestinians and Egypt - has unraveled. The resulting security vacuum and diplomatic blind alley were graphically described by Gen. Yaalon. Yet officials in Jerusalem persist in their flights of fancy. They echo the ludicrous demand for Abu Mazen, who has lost control of his own Fatah, to disarm the puissant Hamas, and insist that Hamas must change its spots or else the world will ostracize the Palestinians government. What world? What about the Saudis, the Russians, the North Africans, the Malaysians, and the Indonesians, to mention a few. And even supposing the US and Europe freeze donations to a Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority, as elder statesman Shimon Peres seems to believe, the Muslim world can easily afford to make up the difference from its abundant petrodollars. The only positive outcome perceived by DEBKAfile’s counter-terror and radical Muslim experts from Hamas gaining a share in Palestinian government is a temporary one: The group may opt to continue for a while the partial ceasefire of the past six months. This does not mean the organization is changing its ways or disarming, any more than Lebanon’s Hizballah, only that it will welcome a breather to promote its long-term goals. The Islamist radicals will need time to consolidate their grip on power and build a powerful military force. The price Israel will pay for this truce will be high. It is Hamas’s unopposed takeover of the Palestinian Authority’s security apparatus and its buildup with the help of Iran, Syria and the Hizballah, into an organized military force able to confront the Israeli army. By failing to stop the Hamas in time, the Israeli government is now condemned to being dragged willy-nilly into playing ball with the long-term strategic goals of a radical Islamic group committed to wiping out the Jewish state. It is hard to see how the Olmert team can do anything tangible to arrest the slide at this late date.

To: Scoobah who wrote (11686)	1/23/2006 11:16:04 AM
From: lorne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32591

Steve.... You said...."As if on cue, here comes the jew hating, america degrading Jimmy Carter:"..... CARTER UNMASKED "Jimmy Carter's reputation for idealism has been one of the great swindles of American politics for two decades." -- The New Republic The Real Jimmy Carter by Steven F. Hayward wndbookservice.com The Nobel Prize is just the beginning: Jimmy Carter is enjoying a new day in the sun, with left-wing historians taking a "fresh look" at his disastrous presidency and trying to bamboozle Americans into thinking that it was actually successful. This ongoing Saint Jimmy campaign would be laughable if it weren't part of a larger strategy to whitewash the records of failed Democrats and justify Carter's outsize influence on today's Democratic party. Although the voters decisively dispatched Jimmy Carter in 1980, his legacy lives on in potent form today and is likely to survive his death. But now in The Real Jimmy Carter Steven F. Hayward demolishes the Carter myth once and for all. Hayward knows a real leader when he sees one (he's the author of The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980 and Churchill on Leadership) and in this book he provides a wealth of devastating new information that proves that Carter was and is one of the worst American leaders in history. He explains why Carter's presidency really was as bad as we thought at the time, or worse. Turning to today, he details how Carter's lasting and dominant impact on the Democratic Party -- the party of John Kerry and Hillary Clinton -- has been calamitous, and why his supposed status as a "model" ex-president is the reverse of the truth (unless your idea of a model statesman is Jesse Jackson). Steven F. Hayward reveals: How Carter's political persona amounts to little more than an odd combination of Machiavelli and Mr. Rogers Why the editor of the Atlanta Constitution called Carter "one of the three or four phoniest men I ever met" How Carter has again and again shown himself bereft of a solid intellectual foundation for his political views Carter as a politician: his habits of exaggeration, disingenuousness, and outright deception -- belying his claim to occupy the moral high ground Carter's weak, vacillating position on school desegregation as a member of a Georgia school board in the 1950s Carter's 1970 run for Georgia governor: after conducting an appallingly cynical race-baiting campaign, he immediately proclaimed that the time had come for the South to repudiate its racist ways Why Carter the renowned liberal moralist once declared that "Lester Maddox is the embodiment of the Democratic Party" and "George Wallace and I are in agreement on most issues" Jimmy's loopy side: who's the only person elected to the presidency to have filed a UFO-sighting report with the Air Force? You guessed it Why the national media ignored Carter's race-baiting and made him one of the darlings of the Democratic party in the early 1970s How, despite claiming to be "above politics," Carter used the traditional weapons of power as Governor: patronage appointments, attempts to maneuver his supporters into key legislative posts, and more False: Carter's claim, made during his 1976 presidential run, that he was a nuclear physicist Abortion: how Carter's 1976 position on this issue vividly displayed his ability to stand on both sides of an issue How Carter's 1976 election as president was not a fluke of the post-Watergate moment, but the fruit of his own carefully planned five-year effort Why even Carter's notorious use of foul language in his mid-campaign Playboy interview may have been the result of careful calculation Carter: born again? Disquieting evidence that he was not as much "one of us" as evangelical Christians assumed in 1976 The massive blunder Carter committed as President -- that was repeated by Bill Clinton in 1993 President Carter's foreign policy: "McGovernism without McGovern" The Camp David accords: why Anwar Sadat exclaimed, "I'd just spent two years throwing the Soviets out of the Middle East, and now the United States is inviting them back in" The Carter executive order that Barry Goldwater blasted as "the most disgraceful thing a president has ever done" Inside the Carter White House during the disasters of the Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua, the energy crisis and the Khomeini Revolution and hostage crisis in Iran The "malaise speech": why Carter made it, and the effect it had on his failed presidency Global 2000: the doom-and-gloom study that Carter released shortly before leaving the presidency -- how most of its predictions have turned out to be wildly wrong Why the Carter Administration believed that the old Cold War strategy of containment was no longer necessary How Carter made direct contacts with Soviet officials to try to subvert President Reagan's anti-Communist policies Revealed: the shocking extent of Carter's clandestine efforts to sabotage the first Gulf War in 1990 The Clinton Administration: how it became Carter's virtual second term, despite Slick Willie's disdain for Carter How Carter's perspective has become dominant among contemporary liberals and his Democratic Party successors Carter's Nobel Prize: how a Nobel official inadvertently revealed that it was actually meant as a slap in the face of the American people Carter the meddling ex-president: how, in the words of Time magazine's Lance Morrow, some of his "Lone Ranger work has taken him dangerously close to the neighborhood of what we used to call treason" Bank robber Willie Sutton's assessment of Carter: "I've never seen a bigger confidence man in my life, and I've been around some of the best in the business" Steven Hayward demonstrates again and again that Jimmy Carter's failures weren't just accidents of history. They're rooted in the character and ideology of the man himself. This wouldn't concern anyone except Rosalynn and Amy if it weren't for the fact that Carter continues to insert himself in the nation's business, both at home and around the world. But The Real Jimmy Carter proves that the Emperor from Plains has no clothes -- and never has.