Carpe diem -- or can we all relax now?

Carpe diem -- or can we all relax now?

Melanie Phillips

Wednesday, 26th November 2008

On my recent travels in America, I met two types of Republicans: those possessed by the most profound, gut-wrenching fear of the supreme danger that President-elect Obama represented for their country and the world, and those who believed that he was merely a cynical opportunist who had used radical politics as a means of achieving power but who, mindful of the need not to derail his presidency and indeed to campaign for a second term, not to mention having to face up to the dual threats of economic and military armageddon, would throw all his radical associates under the bus and govern from the centre.

This later prognosis may indeed turn out to be true; as I have said before, I desperately hope that circumstances will force Obama to repudiate his past. At present we do not know whether this will happen; and so far, I have seen nothing to suggest that it will. Unlike those who see in the emerging shape of his administration evidence that he will be a pragmatic centrist, I do not think it necessarily shows anything of the kind.

For sure, he has made some solid and reassuring appointments, such as his Treasury team. But did anyone really believe that a radical president would appoint obvious radicals to key roles in his administration? Maybe he really was a centrist all along. But if not, the one thing Obama is not going to do is torpedo his presidency at the very start by displaying a radical bent. The name of the game must be not to frighten the horses, and never more so than in the two most explosive areas of all: the economy and Israel. After all, the revolutionary Alinsky school of politics in which his politics to date have been solidly anchored is entirely about stealth, iron discipline and steady incremental cultural change under the radar, so that the terms of political trade are changed forever, as summarised here. The aim is to achieve increased control at home and decreased power abroad, in order radically to change America and neuter its power. But it must be done with maximum deniability.

But hang on, people say -- what about Hillary? Doesn’t the fact that Obama wants to make her Secretary of State prove that Obama is a centrist, just like her? And what about Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, the son of a former Irgun Jewish terrorist?

As have said before, Emanuel’s parentage is irrelevant. As The Forward notes, he was not only a player in the catastrophic Oslo appeasement process but also supported the informal ‘Geneva initiative’ which even doveish Israelis condemned as a suicide note for Israel.

And as for Mrs Clinton, Hillary the Moderate is itself a fairly recent piece of triangulated reconstitution. Not that long ago, she was significantly to the left of her husband; and it must not be forgotten, crucially, that she herself is an Alinsky disciple.

What is much more likely is that Hillary, a professed defender of Israel, would be used (as would, to a lesser extent, Rahm Emanuel) to provide deniable cover for Obama as his administration forces Israel to cut its own throat -- the centrepiece of what passes for his foreign policy to date.

For surrounding Hillary would be appointments which would be solidly anti-Israel: people who believe that Israel must be forced to jeopardise its security to bring into being a Palestinian state which they think would lance the Islamist boil – because they believe that Israel is not the victim but the cause of Islamist rage and global terror. It has been widely reported that Obama has been consulting the former Republican National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, who is a leading voice in this camp. Moreover, according to the Wall Street Journal, Scowcroft is linked to a number of like-minded Republicans Obama is thought to be considering bringing into his administration, such as Jim Jones as his National Security Adviser.

A few days ago, Scowcroft and Carter’s former NSA Zbigniew Brzezinski (an open enemy of Israel and another of Obama's advisers) penned a significant op-ed in the Washington Post. This appeared to be a first draft of the Obama plan to force Israel back into its 1948 ‘Auschwitz’ borders and bring a Palestinian state into being, in the quite remarkable belief that this

would dissipate much of the appeal of Hezbollah and Hamas, dependent as it is on the Palestinians' plight. It would change the region’s psychological climate, putting Iran back on the defensive and putting a stop to its swagger.

What planet are they on? A Palestinian state would be run by Hamas as a proxy for Iran. As such, it would be a disaster for the Palestinians -- as several of them have now realised – as well as for Israel, the region and the world.

Moreover, to allay Israel’s security concerns over handing over territory to a Palestinian government that is incapable of combating terrorism, Scowcroft, Brzezinski and Jones recommend stationing an international force, perhaps from NATO, in the disputed territories.

Ah yes: to repeat the conspicuous success NATO troops achieved in bringing peace in Srebenica, for example, or Rwanda, or Lebanon?

The Republicans, who really don’t begin to grasp just what has hit them, similarly fail to acknowledge that among their own ranks are many who, just like in the British Conservative party, share with the left the desire to neutralise American power and throw Israel under the bus. Some of those people came to power under George W Bush and set him on the disastrous path to appeasement -- which his demented detractors on the left somehow failed altogether to notice.

There are other unsettling indications that Obama may already be running a shadow foreign policy. Robert Malley, one of Clinton’s Oslo negotiators, is one of America's most outspoken apologists for Palestinian terrorism against Israel and claims that Syrian, Lebanese and Iranian attacks against Israel are all Israel's fault. The Obama campaign distanced itself from Malley last May after the Times reported that he was meeting regularly with Hamas leaders. But a few days after Obama’s election, Malley travelled to Syria, ostensibly under the aegis of the appeasement-minded International Crisis Group. Yet one of his aides told FrontPage Magazine that acting on Obama’s instructions, Malley traveled to Cairo and Damascus to tell Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Syria’s President Assad that ‘the Obama administration would take into greater account Egyptian and Syrian interests.’ And as Caroline Glick reported, Hamas terror operative Ahmad Youssef told the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper that in the months leading up to his election, Obama's advisers held steady contacts with the leaders of the terror group in Gaza, and had asked that Hamas keep the meetings secret in order not to harm Obama's chances of being elected.

If Israel is to be browbeaten into committing suicide, however, it is essential that the fingerprints of the Israel-haters are not found at the scene of the crime and that it is carried out instead by someone with impeccable credentials as an Israel supporter. That person may well be Hillary Clinton who, if appointed Secretary of State, will be expected to finish the job her husband failed to do and force a Palestine state into being.

To fully grasp this, it has to be understood that there are two kinds of people who threaten to deliver Israel to its enemies for annihilation. The first are the Israel-haters who want to see it destroyed. The second are those on the left who, while believing they have Israel’s interests at heart, believe also that its security can be guaranteed by a Palestine state. They thus see Israel’s resistance to that state as the obstacle to peace in the region, whereas in fact it would pose a mortal threat to Israel (and now also to the region and the world, since such a state would be a proxy for Iran). That’s why Clinton Mark One pressurised Israel to dismember itself under Oslo and in the process turned the Palestinians from a terrorist gang into an army with international backing. Clinton Mark Two would be Oslo all over again -- but this time trailing clouds of Iranian plutonium.

While neutralising America abroad, Alinkskyite politics mean changing the terms of trade at home to extend the power of the state and undermine western values. So it’s no surprise that Melody Barnes, head of policy at the Centre for American Progress, is apparently to be director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. As Ed Lasky comments on American Thinker:

The Center for American Progress is a Soros-funded group, of course. Here comes drug legalization, abortion on demand, and euthanasia.

And then there’s Eric Holder who has been named as Attorney-General. Holder was the Clinton administration’s last deputy Attorney General. NRO recalls that notoriously he granted a pardon to the racketeer Marc Rich

thanks to the intercession of his ex-wife, a generous donor to Clinton’s library and legal-defense fund. Holder’s role was aptly described as ‘unconscionable’ by a congressional committee.

Worse still:

In 1999, over the objections of the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and prosecuting attorneys, Holder supported Clinton’s commutation of the sentences of 16 FALN conspirators. These pardons — of terrorists who even Holder has conceded had not expressed any remorse — were issued in the months after al-Qaeda’s 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, when the Clinton administration was pretending to be the scourge of terrorism. The commutations were nakedly political, obviously designed by Clinton to assist his wife’s impending Senate campaign by appealing to New York’s substantial Puerto Rican vote...

He is convinced justice in America needs to be ‘established’ rather than enforced; he’s excited about hate crimes and enthusiastic about the constitutionally dubious Violence Against Women Act; he’s a supporter of affirmative action and a practitioner of the statistical voodoo that makes it possible to burden police departments with accusations of racial profiling and the states with charges of racially skewed death-penalty enforcement; he’s more likely to be animated by a touchy-feely Reno-esque agenda than traditional enforcement against crimes; he’s in favor of ending the detentions of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay and favors income redistribution to address the supposed root causes of crime.

Yes, maybe Obama is really a centrist. But a real centrist would simply never choose such people to be in his administration.

The most telling comment of all was made by Rahm Emanuel. As the Sunday Telegraph reported, he said of America’s financial meltdown:

‘You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.’ He continued: ‘Things that we postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.’

Yes, there’s a silver revolutionary lining in every capitalist cloud.

Carpe diem, eh?

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