Who is insulting whom?
Before turning to the Los Angeles Times’s latest lies and distortion of history in this morning’s edition, let us focus on a genuinely offensive gesture, not a dime-store, made–up, left wing emotional “insult.”
Attempting to pay back Israel with an American insult for “insulting” Vice President Biden by announcing new housing plans on the day he arrived Jerusalem last week, petty President Obama this morning ordered Middle East envoy George Mitchell to unpack his bags for a planned trip to Israel. In the stiffly formal diplomatic universe, this is ranked as a punch to the nose.
The anticipated announcement, ahem, came from the U.S. Embassy in Israel, which is in — all together now — Tel Aviv.
Isn’t Jerusalem the capital of Israel?
Yes, but only since Moses’s time, 3400 years ago. You know how slowly good news travels.
Fifteen years ago, when the modern state of Israel was a scant 47 years old, the U.S. Congress finally approved a plan to shift the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.
But President Clinton, President Bush and President Obama, all concerned about offending the sensitive antennae of Arabs, have found excuses for changing the subject. It is irrelevant that Mr. Clinton was a so-so friend of Jerusalem, that Mr. Bush was the best American friend Israel ever had, and that Mr. Obama, with Muslim instincts, has no use for Israeli Jews.
When Blaming the Jews Is Exactly on Target
A central reason that moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem hasn’t, and likely won’t ever, happen, is that lifetime secular Jewish Congressmen — spineless Henry Waxman, spineless Howie Berman, bumbling Brad Sherman and Jane (Am I Really Jewish?) Harman come to mind — are Jews only for commercial purposes. As utterly wishy-washy as wrist-watching gay activists, they don’t believe anymore than bin Laden or Arafat that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.
President Truman is remembered fondly by some Jews for making a politically courageous decision to support Israel’s statehood bid in 1947 with the United Nations, and then to formally recognize the Jewish state in the spring of 1948. But he, too, preferred to play the chicken-hearted game of peekaboo with Arab terrorists rather than stand like a principled man and place the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem.
In view of Mr. Obama’s notoriously thin skin and short temper fuse, if I were Bibi Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, I would dial Bekins and move the Israeli Embassy to Philadelphia, the historic U.S. capital. Better yet, why not Los Angeles, where the weather, the people and the entire cultural atmosphere are far more pleasing?
Democrats largely have failed in the 65 years since FDR because in crucial situations they have become slavishly captive to their emotions rather than their minds — this is what distinguishes them from Republicans. This also is why Mr. Biden said — laughably, upon reflection — that he was falling-down insulted last Tuesday when Israel announced it was building 1600 new housing units in the Orthodox East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo.
Twisting, Revising and Rewriting History
What was insulting? For the past seven days, Mr. Obama and his sycophants have been thinking over a response.
If you want an authentic big-boy insult, consider the daily picture of the White House, regardless of the occupant, spitting in Israel’s eye by bowing to the whims of the Arab terrorists and maintaining its Embassy out of town, far out of Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv.
Finally, we come Editor Fig Newton’s op-ed pages in today’s L.A. Times and the cholent dish of an editorial headlined “Stumbling over settlements.” On thin days at 2nd and Spring, the liberal little boys at the Times pen Israel Disgusts Me editorials. Invariably, the Arab-kowtowing theme is “How dare Jews build new settlements in Israel when Arabs want the Land for themselves.”
Three corrections to that policy:
No. 1: Frankly, if the little boys at the Times asked me, I would tell them I am laying claim to Chicago’s North Side. My wife grew up there. Have I ever lived there? No. But why not make forge the claim? Neither have the Arabs claiming East Jerusalem ever lived there? But, hey, that must seem like an inconsequential technicality to the boys at the Times.
No. 2: If you have driven through the Downtown intersection of Culver Boulevard and Duquesne, you have noticed Joey Miller’s practically ready, handsome new mixed use housing/retail project adjacent to the Post Office. To the relief of Community Development Director Sol Blumenfeld, Mr. Miller has not built settlements. By darn, he has built condos. By the silkiest coincidence, condos are what Jews in East Jerusalem will be building in the Orthodox, or as seculars like to say “ultra-Orthodox,” neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo. Condos, boys, not settlements. Is there something wrong with that? Twenty years ago, The New York Times, the big brother of the L.A. Times, ever attuned to Arab sensitivities and fiction-spinning, began pejoratively referring to all new Jewish development in Israel as “settlements.” The Times did not worry about push-back from Jews. Jews do not blow up people or buildings. Arabs do. And so the Times caters to the terrorists with a clean conscience — plus one wary eye.
No. 3: Fig Newton’s editorial writers, seculars all, were in such a rush to complete their schooling, dash out to the hustings and preach the left-wing gospel to the unwashed that they forgot to learn in their Israel studies that Jerusalem pre-dates 1967. Jerusalem pre-dates Tel Aviv, formed in 1909, Washington, organized in the early 1800s, and even Redondo Beach. Since Biblical times, boys, Jerusalem has been the capital of Israel — pre-dating Arabs, Muslims and KPFK. In this morning’s Times editorial, designed to whack Jews over the head for having the chutzpah to build in what the Times dishonestly calls “traditionally Arab East Jerusalem,” the following misleading sentence appeared: “It’s the plan itself, under which Israel intends to build housing for Jews on land that was captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War and subsequently annexed to Israel.” Not only are Fig’s boys curtsying to terrorists by labeling what the world knows as the Six-Day War “the 1967 Middle East War,” they gravely mischaracterize Jerusalem. It is, and hopefully always will be, the undivided capital of Israel. Jordan, a made-up country created arbitrarily from whole cloth less than 100 years ago, was one of the five Arab armies that invaded Israel on May 14, 1948, the day Israel became a state. “Captured from Jordan”? That is like re-capturing your living room from home invaders. “Annexed to Israel”? Do you need to annex your living room to your home once police catch the home invaders? Fig’s boys earn an “F” for slyly inflicting today’s deceptive history lesson on unsuspecting readers.
