Mr Netanyahu's Likud party returned 30 seats in the Knesset to the Zionist Union’s 24 - and is now likely to form the next coalition government with partners on the right and the centre.
But on the eve of the polls, the Likud leader made controversial remarks about the high turnout among Israeli Arab voters, warning that they were being bussed to the polls "in droves".
COMMENT: THE NATION IS LESS SAFE WITH NETANYAHU AT HELM
NETANYAHU CLAIMS SHOCK VICTORY DESPITE RACISM ROW
NETANYAHU: 'THERE WILL BE NO PALESTINIAN STATE IF I WIN'
Mr Obama, who has not yet called Mr Netanyahu to congratulate him following his success, according to The Guardian, condemned the incendiary remarks - saying that they sought to “marginalise Arab citizens”. The US president's response came after the Israeli PM appeared in a video posted to his Facebook page where he urged his supporters to go out and vote, saying: "The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves. Left-wing NGOs are bringing them in buses."
He also ruled out the creation of an independent Palestinian state and vowed to strengthen construction of settlements in occupied east Jerusalem.
“I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state and evacuate territory gives territory away to radical Islamist attacks against Israel," he said in a pre-election interview with a website owned by his biggest backer - US casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.
In response, the White House said that it was now preparing to 're-evaluate' its policy on the Middle East process.
Obama in previous talks with Benjamin NetanyahuA statement issued by the president's press secretary, Josh Earnest, reiterated his hopes for a two-state solution in the Middle East.
“The United States and this administration is deeply concerned about rhetoric that seeks to marginalise Arab Israeli citizens,” Mr Earnest said.
READ MORE: THE REPUBLICANS' OPEN LETTER TO IRAN
READ MORE: US SENATOR DOES NOT KNOW CAPITAL OF IRAN
“It undermines the values and democratic ideals that have been important to our democracy and an important part of what binds the United States and Israel together.”
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He added: “Rhetoric that seeks to marginalise one segment of their population is deeply concerning, it is divisive, and I can tell you that these are views the administration intends to communicate directly to the Israelis.”
Mr Earnest said the president would call Mr Netanyahu “in the coming days”, insisting that the move was not a rebuke. He said that in two previous Israeli elections, Mr Obama did not call Mr Netanyahu until he was directed by the Israeli president to form a government.
It comes as the US excluded Iran and Lebanese militant group Hezbollah from its terror threat list in an annual security assessment.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
The unclassified report, which was presented to the US Senate by director of National Intelligence James Clapper in February, named Iran as a "cyber and regional threat" to the US because of its support for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, but did not include the country in the 'terrorism' section, as in previous years.
It was published by The Times of Israel, which said it had described Tehran’s assistance in preventing Isis from gaining "large swaths of additional territory" in Iraq.
The US wants to prevent Iran from producing enough nuclear fuel to make a bomb for at least a year
The report also referenced the threat to Hezbollah from Sunni extremists trying to establish networks in Lebanon - saying that they have "increased attacks against Lebanese army and Hizballah positions along the Lebanese-Syrian border" - but did not label the militant group as a terrorist organisation.
READ MORE: SUPREME LEADER AYATOLLAH ALI KHAMENEI ON SHOW FOR IRAN'S NUCLEAR TALKS
READ MORE: IRAN'S SUPREME LEADER EXCHANGES 'SECRET LETTER' WITH US PRESIDENT
Hezbollah has previously been accused of responsibility for a number of terror attacks against US or its allies, including the 1983 bombings of the US embassy and American military barracks in Beirut.
It is encouraging to see, finally, after many years, an American administration start to ratchet up the pressure on Israel. Unfortunately it is just a start and there is a long way to go.
ReplyDeleteBob,
ReplyDeleteYou are a very confused thinker. As I scrolled down the last thread your comment about a "League of Democracies" came to my attention. What sprang out was how completely and utterly confused you are - you thought Egypt under Sistani should be included in this league. Lordy, I would have thought the glaring contradictions in such a notion would even be apparent to you, but, obviously they aren't.
Sisi, Noble Ash, Sisi.
DeleteRead again moron.
heh heh, Sisi it is - typo (fruedian slip maybe? ;) The point still stands regarding 'democracy' in Egypt.
DeleteThe NYTimes is reporting that Bibi is already walking back his 'no 2 state solution' proclamation. Call me cynical but, riiiight, the rest of us are supposed to believe that Israelis are willing to stop their continued occupation and expansion. Sorry, that ship has sailed, but, the world is full of gullible folk and folk like Bob who think the Israelis deserve all they can take.
ReplyDeleteDeuce, due to illness I've been gone for a couple years, but it seems that you have morphed from a skeptical voice of reason to a frothing-at-the-mouth Jew hater in the interim. I hope it's covered by your insurance.
ReplyDeleteAsh, people who believe the NYT are not gullible, they are very sophisticated.
Makes me long for the old days of Desert Rat spanking Bob.
Yea, you’ve been gone. I’ll figure out who you are soon enough.
Deletegood to see another voice here Greybike. I wasn't suggesting people were gullible for believing the NYT article about Bibi walking back on his no 2 state solution but rather on the gullibility of folk believing Bibi actually would accept a 2 state solution. I don't think he, or most Israelis, are willing to give up the West Bank.
DeleteYou got Deuce down right, Greybike.
DeleteAnd Deuce feels he is the only one that understands the sufferings of others.
I will remind Deuce that I was taken to task by Quirk, drawn and quartered, dismembered by him for even bringing up as a subject of discussion the idea of putting American troops into Syria in order to keep the warring parties apart, as a humanitarian effort to prevent more killing. At that time the death toll was 100,000. Now it is over 200,000.
I think, though, Quirk might have been right. We might just have ended up being shot at by everyone.
I just bring this up to say to Deuce, get off your damn high horse. You aren't the only one that thinks about suffering.
Our new minder from Israel.
ReplyDeleteI'm not familiar with this country of which you speak. I'll have to bide my time commenting on something else. :)
ReplyDeleteGuy has been on blogger since mar 2015 and signs on through a series of anonymous sites but all from here:
ReplyDeleteIP Address 79.178.35.# (Bezeq International-Ltd)
ISP Bezeq International-Ltd
Location
Continent : Asia
Country : Israel (Facts)
State/Region : Tel Aviv
City : Tel Aviv-Yafo
Lat/Long : 32.0678, 34.7647 (Map)
The Anti-Semite slam was always so effective a bet, especially when all the facts are against them but old habits die hard and they can’t let it go.
ReplyDeleteNOt a slam, statement of fact.
DeleteYou advocate for the destruction of the Jewish state.
What happens to the people there?
No worries…
Dead Jews are so much more photogenic.
But your mask is off, so why not just be honest?
One standard for the filthy Jews, no standards for your pals
But the good news Deuce?
Jews understand you better than you understand yourself.
Your hatred is consuming you.
Let’s see, is there an argument there?
DeleteNo.
I agree with WiO and Greybike, whoever he/she is.
DeleteWhat was that guy's name? Matusela?
ReplyDeleteale Mats was from Toronto (well Thornhill or Richmond Hill or sumtin - just North of Toronto).
DeleteThis guy pops up, usually use anonymous. He gives himself away when he uses his own voice. This is the first time he has made a threat.
DeleteIf he does it again, Ill shell out the $250 to find out who he is.
DeleteDeuce, I'm not certain that that was a threat. (I'm also not confident that it wasn't, however.)
Deleteneither am I, it was clever and nuanced, meant to be that way.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteSays Who?
ReplyDeleteVOA News
Last updated on: March 19, 2015 2:22 PM
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the United States and Israel are each other’s greatest allies and have no choice but to work together.
In an interview with NBC Thursday, Netanyahu said there are so many areas in which the two nations must collaborate that they have no other alternative.
Netanyahu has not spoken with U.S. President Barack Obama since the resounding win Tuesday by his conservative Likud party in Israel’s parliamentary election, but he expects the two leaders will be in touch soon.
----------
What a load of crap. The US needs Israel like it needs a broken ankle. For what?
The fact is, without the US, Israel has no allies. The magic is gone.
DeleteReally?
DeleteMaybe the magic is still working…
After all Obama aint no ally to israel.
You have said that many times..
And yet?
America, well the majority of REAL Americans have never been closer to Israel….
LOL
Of course, however the ones that are doing all the loving are praying for your big snuff party from the sky so you all can have your gone to Jesus moment. Jewish luck - all Christians - no virgins.
DeleteYou are simply wrong, Deuce.
DeleteThere are many like myself, fully supportive of Israel, and no end timer.
It is you who have become so infatuated with the Iranians, of all people, claiming they are 'fighting for civilization' (what a hoot) it is you that are the odd man out.
March/April 2015
ReplyDeleteNo Friends but the Mountains: The Fate of the Kurds
Terry Glavin
It is out of the Middle East’s current nightmare that the old dream of a united Kurdistan is drawing new breath. Kurdish independence, if not in whole then at least in some combination of its disconnected parts, may well be the one thing worth salvaging from the region’s killing fields. A firmer alignment on the part of the US with Kurdish interests would certainly salvage something from the shambles of American foreign policy in the Middle East, too.
But if the Kurds’ time has at long last arrived, their own pragmatism and a distinctly utopian strain of politics are combining to confound even their most fervent overseas champions. It’s not at all certain that anything like statehood is what the Kurds immediately want or need, and in any case, President Obama’s opaque and haphazard approach to the Middle East, having already cost him the confidence of so many of his key administration officials, has also cost him the trust of the Kurds.
Numbering perhaps twenty-five million people throughout their homelands in the mountainous region that lies astride the borders of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria, the Kurds are arguably the most populous people on earth without a nation-state to call their own. It is also of interest, given the detachment of US policy toward them, that they have been far more favorably disposed to the United States than any people in the region outside of Israel.
Still, their old expression “the Kurds have no friends but the mountains” has regained such value among them lately that it is worth noticing where it comes from, why it persists, and why the Kurds now have Americans foremost in mind when they say it.
The last time the Middle East was in a disarray comparable to the current bedlam was during the chaotic aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which was to establish the borders of Syria and Iraq, the Kurds were offered their own country. The promise of a sovereign and democratic Kurdistan was then broken by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which circumscribed the territorial sovereignty of Turkey.
What followed was a macabre progression of persecution, ethnic cleansing, and wars of extermination waged to recurring and varying degrees, sometimes consecutively and sometimes concurrently, by each of the four nation-states (Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey) where the Kurds ended up as captive populations. The Kurds responded by mounting protracted uprisings and insurrections, sometimes even fighting as proxies for one or the other of those same countries during their occasional wars with one another.
The greatest Kurdish misfortune at the moment, however, is to be situated at the intersection of an increasingly bloody and dystopian Arab world, the outward-reaching ruthlessness of Khomeinist Iran, and the belligerent Islamist nationalism of Recep Erdogan’s Turkey. As if to compound the Kurds’ burden of bad luck, Sunni-Shia hatreds are sending seismic shocks through fault lines that lie directly beneath their feet. Most Kurds happen to be Sunni Muslims.
The United States remains committed to its policy of a unified Iraq, but within the Kurdish leadership itself there are forces in play that have produced a panoply of strategies that do not depend on any US effort in the cause of cross-border statehood.
At one end, Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) dominates Iraqi Kurdistan and controls the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government. Its history includes a stint as a de facto Soviet client against Iran and another brief stint as a Khomeinist proxy during the Iran-Iraq War, for which the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein later viciously punished the Kurds, slaughtering tens of thousands in his Anfal campaign, most notoriously in his nerve-gas bombing of Halabja.
DeleteOver the years, the KDP has evolved into a populist and nationalist party. It has eclipsed the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan of Barzani’s lifelong adversary Jalal Talabani, who was Iraq’s first democratically elected president in 2005. The KDP’s lukewarmness toward pan-Kurdish independence comes from a wariness about the compromises its success would require vis-Ã -vis Iraqi Kurdistan’s neighbors, not least the Kurds’ belligerent Turkish adversaries in Ankara.
At the other pole is an array of parties and armed groups inspired by Abdullah Ocalan, the charismatic insurrectionist whose Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) led an armed uprising that spiraled out of control during the dark days following Turkey’s military coup in the early 1980s and carried on intermittently until 2013.
Because the PKK is outlawed in Turkey, NATO countries list the organization as a terrorist entity, and indeed some of the PKK’s early conduct would fit the description of “terrorism.” This complicates matters as well for the Syrian Kurds, whose dominant Democratic Union Party and Local Protection Force (YPG) guerrillas are intimately linked with the PKK. Ocalan also enjoys the loyalty of a militant constituency in Iran’s Kurdish underground.
Just as Massoud Barzani now has more important things to worry about than the challenge of carving out an independent Kurdistan from the four states that enclose the Kurdish homelands, Ocalan’s thinking has also radically evolved over time. He is no longer the Dear Leader figure of a classic and brutal Marxist-Leninist third-world liberation movement, and has lately taken on the persona of a kind of Kurdish Nelson Mandela.
Just as Mandela was imprisoned for eighteen of his twenty-seven years behind bars on Robben Island off the South African Coast, Ocalan has been imprisoned since 1999 on Imrali Island, in the Sea of Marmara, off Istanbul. Ocalan’s politics have lately drawn from such diverse sources as the works of the late American libertarian-socialist philosopher Murray Bookchin. Ocalan’s movement in Turkey has adopted a focus on a form of nonviolent democratic decentralization. And it’s working, at least in its emphasis on democratic control of municipal and regional governments and avoiding direct confrontations with Erdogan’s government in Ankara.
But the main thing that preoccupies Kurds across the political spectrum now is a more immediate and necessary focus on the priority of survival. This isn’t a historical anomaly. It is only rarely that the Kurds have enjoyed any reprieve from their calamities.
There was the tiny, briefly lived, Soviet-backed Republic of Mahabad, in the Kurdish region of Iran, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, but when the Soviets withdrew from Iran the Kurdish separatists were massacred by Iranian government forces. During the 1979 revolution that overthrew the shah, the Iranian Kurds sided with Ayatollah Khomeini in the hopes of restoring some autonomy for themselves, but the Khomeinists went on to crush the Kurds, executing thousands. Iran’s Kurds remain brutally suppressed, capable of only the most intermittent and small-scale guerrilla resistance.
ReplyDeleteIn Turkey, several Kurdish rebellions erupted through the early twentieth century, and each in its turn was brutally crushed (to merely speak the Kurdish language in public was until only very recently a crime punishable by a prison sentence). A truce between Ocalan’s PKK and Ankara has been mostly holding since April 2013, following a three-decade uprising and counterinsurgency that took the lives of at least thirty thousand people. Thousands of Kurds were summarily executed or “disappeared.” At least one hundred thousand were imprisoned. Another million were uprooted while the Turkish government busied itself destroying an estimated three thousand Kurdish villages, many of them obliterated in bombing runs by the Turkish Air Force.
Until the events of this past summer, Iraqi Kurdistan had enjoyed the longest and most fruitful period of Kurdish freedom. A Kurdish safe haven began to flower in northern Iraq in 1991, owing to the Anglo-American enforcement of a no-fly zone in the denouement of the Gulf War. Following the “shock and awe” of 2003, every hope that the administration of George W. Bush held out for Iraq was realized in full in Iraqi Kurdistan.
While the rest of Iraq has descended into fratricidal Sunni-Shiite bloodletting, the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has continued to set down deep roots, almost entirely at peace, despite Baghdad’s efforts in disruption and containment. But everything changed last June, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State (also called ISIS or ISIL) arose out of the ruins that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had made of his country and the bedlam that Baghdad’s Shiite-run death squads and Sunni suicide bombings had made of Iraq.
After Baghdadi broke with al-Qaeda and declared himself the successor to the Prophet Muhammad and leader of the world’s Muslims, his brutal caliphate was soon in control of a third of Syria and a third of Iraq. By September of 2014, he was commanding a jihadist army variously estimated at up to thirty thousand front-line fighters, perhaps a third of them foreigners, all equipped with heavy weapons, practically limitless ammunition supplies, and fleets of tanks and armored Humvees looted from Iraqi and Syrian military bases. Baghdadi’s Islamic State was also flush with perhaps a half a billion dollars’ worth of stolen currency, on top of daily black-market oil revenues exceeding $3 million.
A US-led multinational coalition of Arab League and NATO allies formed to carry out airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq, but Erdogan’s Turkey, still a NATO member in good standing, thumbed its nose at this policy. Erdogan was routinely honored in White House pronouncements as a key US ally even while he persisted in supporting the most unsavory, anti-American, and anti-Kurdish Islamist proxies. Erdogan appears to be as determined as ever to keep his own boot firmly planted on the necks of Turkey’s Kurds and the Kurds of northern Syria.
The United States’ decision to intervene against the Islamic State was prompted by the rapid advance of Baghdadi’s fighters across the Nineveh Plain toward Erbil, the KRG’s headquarters in Iraq. There were also tens of thousands of Kurdish Yazidis—followers of an esoteric, pre-Abrahamic monotheism—who were trapped and encircled on Mount Sinjar. They’d begun to die of exposure and thirst, and Obama ordered some last-minute humanitarian airdrops for them.
But it was mostly due to the efforts of Kurdish YPG guerrillas from nearby Syria that the Yazidis were saved from the massacres and enslavement that had already carried off so many thousands of them in the preceding days. The American intervention was a hesitant, reluctant, eleventh-hour affair that came only after public opinion polls had begun to show that even his Democratic Party base was giving Obama a failing grade on this moral and political crisis.
DeleteFormer Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had revealed that she’d opposed Obama’s stubborn anti-interventionism as far back as 2011, when full-on support for Syria’s pro-democracy rebels might have made a difference. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had said much the same thing. So had former CIA chief David Petraeus.
Robert Ford, Obama’s ambassador to Syria, resigned because he couldn’t support the official White House fiction that there had never been any anti-Assad forces worth backing. Obama’s senior adviser on Syria, Frederic C. Hof, jumped ship for strikingly similar reasons. Meanwhile, Assad crossed Obama’s “red line” on chemical weapons by merely switching from sarin gas to chlorine gas, without consequence, and his regime’s air force kept on bombing its own cities as the Syrian death toll inched closer to two hundred thousand.
When heavily armed Islamic State fighters swarmed out of Syria, Iraqi soldiers abandoned their posts without a struggle, and the Kurdistan Regional Government’s outgunned Peshmerga (“those who face death”) were routed. It was only when the eyes of the world were on Mount Sinjar, and the Islamic State’s heavily armed fighters were within a couple of hours of Erbil, the KRG capital, that Obama acted.
All this has been something less than a confidence-building exercise among the Kurds, perhaps especially among the Syrian Kurds of Rojava, the long, narrow, and broken band of de facto Kurdish autonomy that runs along the Turkish frontier from the smoking tombs of Aleppo in the west to the Tigris River and the semi-autonomous KRG of Iraq in the east.
The Rojava Kurds see enemies on all sides—the Assad regime, Baghdadi’s Islamic State, Erdogan’s Turkey. Even so, the Kurds’ PKK-backed YPG guerrillas have mounted the most effective resistance of all the region’s non-state actors to both the Assad regime and to the Islamic State’s marauders. While the YPG guerrillas were fighting with black-market weapons, moreover, the United States was giving them every indication that they were doomed to fight on alone, helpless and friendless.
DeleteThat deadening sense of betrayal had already caused the implosion of the Free Syrian Army, even though the FSA was nominally backed by the United States. The Kurds knew exactly what the FSA fighters were feeling. A resignation to the prospect of American abandonment prevailed among a cross-section of Kurdish leaders I spoke with last September in Iraq, Turkey, and Northern Syria. It came out perhaps most clearly during a conversation with a Kurdish guerrilla commander at a remote hilltop post in Rojava’s Jazeera Canton, in the northeastern quadrant of Syria’s Kurdish rebel zone.
The young commander, Adam Derike, had only a few days earlier led a successful assault on an Islamic State column an hour south of where we met. He said he had no expectation that the Syrian Kurds would get help of any consequence from the United States or from any of the Western democracies. “The Islamic State is fighting humanity. We take our orders from the people, and we are fighting for humanity,” he said. “But all the time, if you are fighting for humanity, you are fighting alone.”
Even when the US-led airpower coalition began hitting Islamic State targets in Syria, it was only after the Arab League’s coalition members said they were signing up to hit targets there, and not in Iraq, where Obama had initially intended to confine the coalition’s airstrikes. And the US approach to the Syrian catastrophe, while having shifted away from stubborn abstentionism, is most likely too discredited to be rescued by a mere “reset.” After three years of unrestrained war on his own people, and his heavy reliance on Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah, Assad has reduced Syrian society to a Hobbesian nightmare of “fighting-age males” engaged in mercenary combat on behalf of a multitude of Islamist militias. Syria in 2014 resembles nothing so much as Afghanistan in 1994.
Iraq, too, is already so far gone that it is difficult to envision anything resembling a functioning unitary state arising from the ashes for at least another generation, and only then with massive “international community” intervention. As in Syria, the IRGC and its Shiite militias are the heaviest hands at work there.
Obama’s extreme reluctance to do anything that might jeopardize his foreign-policy priority of rapprochement with Tehran is a key factor the Kurds are taking into account in their attempts to anticipate American reaction to any initiatives they might undertake on their own behalf.
Abdulsalam Ahmad, co-chair of the Kurdish provisional government of Rojava, told me that Syria’s Kurds would welcome an invitation to participate in the US-led coalition. “We have put up strong resistance to ISIS, and for this we should be part of the American alliance to fight ISIS. But the Americans are not listening.”
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/no-friends-mountains-fate-kurds
This comment has been removed by the author.
Delete.
ReplyDeleteDeuce, due to illness I've been gone for a couple years, but it seems that you have morphed from a skeptical voice of reason to a frothing-at-the-mouth Jew hater in the interim.
Hmm. If Greybike is actually from Israel perhaps he can bring something new to the table. WiO seems to have run dry and Bob is merely a parrot. The term Jew-hater is worrisome though. You, or at least I, don't see the term thrown around much. Usually, you see terms like anti-Semite or Nazi but now I've seen the term 'Jew hater' used twice in two days. (I responded to WiO's use of it a couple streams back.) Perhaps, it is one of the new talking points put out by the Lobby.
.
Quirk is a limp rag, an empty condom, a vodka brain, a dick, a dick head, and a petty fraud artist......
DeleteMuch better to be a parrot....
;)
So far, however, I have not heard Quirk claim that "Iran is fighting for civilization".
ReplyDeleteHe is redeemable!
.
DeleteIran = ISIS = Turkey = Saudi Arabia = Israel.
All regional hegemons seeking greater regional hegemony.
.
Now THERE'S a DEEP equation by a stunned MORON playing the FOOL.
DeleteCulture counts, you dumb shit, and there is only one entity on your list that has a culture worthy of the noble name 'culture'.
A true culture supports the rights of women, children.......
Have you crossed over to Canada and are you smoking 'dope' with Noble Ash, who cain't reed gud?
You know why they call it 'dope' don't you ?
And for God's sake ISIS is hardly a "regional hegemon" at this point, barely hanging onto to Tikrit as they are.
What's the name of the stuff you and Noble Ash are smoking ?
Using a term like "regional hegemon" is supposed to make a person sound like he knows what he is talking about unless it is used by a FOOL like Quirk. Then it makes a person sound like a FOOL.
DeleteLike Quirk.
DeleteYou have a reading comprehension problem compounded by some derivative of Tourette syndrome.
DeleteQuirk said:Iran = ISIS = Turkey = Saudi Arabia = Israel.
All regional hegemons seeking greater regional hegemony.
Pay attention: ....”seeking” The word is important in the sentence.
Then you go off with your normal foolishness calling him a fool. Hopefully, you were drinking but I doubt it.
Finally I have it - proof positive that the perfesser's son, Noble Ash, cain't reed gud -
ReplyDeleteIdaho BobThu Mar 19, 11:35:00 AM EDT
How many moslem states are there in the UN General Assembly ?
Sure, let the General Assembly decide.
US out of the UN, UN out of the US.
We need to form a new League of Democracies.
This would include India and Israel.
Maybe, if Sisi lasts, even Egypt, who knows ?
But the UN is totally worthless.
................
AshThu Mar 19, 01:00:00 PM EDT
Bob,
You are a very confused thinker. As I scrolled down the last thread your comment about a "League of Democracies" came to my attention. What sprang out was how completely and utterly confused you are - you thought Egypt under Sistani should be included in this league. Lordy, I would have thought the glaring contradictions in such a notion would even be apparent to you, but, obviously they aren't.
Reply
Replies
Idaho BobThu Mar 19, 06:38:00 PM EDT
Sisi, Noble Ash, Sisi.
Read again moron.
Delete
Reply
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Noble Ash, A PROVEN IDIOT !!!!!!!!!!
BwaBwaBwaBwahahahahahha !!!!!
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThere is something about the Koran that seems to escape you altogether.
DeleteSomething about 1400 years of history that you continually miss.
"The ones in the middle east are the worst, Uncle Bob"
And that's from a woman whose country has suffered something on the order of 80 to 100 million dead over the centuries at the hands of those savages.
But then, I don't understand suffering.
The Moslem males do indeed believe they are Superior.
DeleteWomen are worth 1/2 the male.
They are to rule the earth.
They are commanded by Allah his very self to do so.
It is a duty to die for Allah in this noble effort of subjugation of everyone else.
It is an honor.
In comparison to this, the old claim of the Jews to be a chosen people pales in comparison.
And all peoples feel they are the chosen people.
The Jews, of all people, are over it.
Let me help and give you a hint: Anyone that puts up with you is “suffering”.
DeleteBob should read the,Chomsky interview that recently ran at the NYT on, of all things, white,power.
DeleteAh, the wife is announcing that March Madness has started.
ReplyDeleteGod is indeed merciful.
Deuce, please accept my apology for the Jew hater comment, that was over the top. I have no connection with Israel or Jews other than having had a Jewish girlfriend back in the early 70's. As a soldier in the Cold War I have every respect for our allies in the Middle East and there aren't many. I became aware of you guys while I was lurking at Wretchard's Belmont Club site years ago when I had a free moment at work. When you bailed from there I followed you, DR, Bob, Trish, Alan,WIO (or was he pigs for Allah), Ash and a few I don't remember to the EB. My point was that it used to be hard to determine what was in your heart because you seemed to be more concerned with being a moderator of an open discussion, wherever it led rather than a cheerleader of a cause. It's still entertaining, in a way. I suppose that this is what happens when a family grows old together.
ReplyDeleteRufus, I seem to remember that back before Obamacare, you were cheering national healthcare saying you had a friend/relative that had health problems she couldn't afford to address. I hope she has finally been made right. I thought at the time, she might catch a bus to Massachusets and have the problem solved. BTW, peak oil doesn't seem to be the same critical concern it once was, eh? I' still a fan of cellulosic fuel.
Thank you for the clarification. Apology accepted. Welcome and this is an all in free fire zone. I am sincere in asking you to stick around.
DeleteI can be a little too quick on the draw. I’ll work on it. Promise.
DeleteWhat happened to this?
Delete<
Deuce ☂Thu Mar 19, 03:35:00 PM EDT
Guy has been on blogger since mar 2015 and signs on through a series of anonymous sites but all from here:
IP Address 79.178.35.# (Bezeq International-Ltd)
ISP Bezeq International-Ltd
Location
Continent : Asia
Country : Israel (Facts)
State/Region : Tel Aviv
City : Tel Aviv-Yafo
Lat/Long : 32.0678, 34.7647 (Map)
Reply
It hardly jives with this:
DeleteI have no connection with Israel or Jews other than having had a Jewish girlfriend back in the early 70's.
I was wondering about that too, Rufus.
DeleteSomeone logged on and went to comment at the same time period. That is a fact.
DeleteHere is the login portion:
DeleteDomain Name (Unknown)
IP Address 184.91.184.# (Unknown Organization)
ISP Unknown ISP
Location
Continent : Unknown
Country : Unknown
Lat/Long : unknown
Language English (U.S.)
en-us
Operating System Macintosh MacOSX
Browser Safari 1.3
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 8_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12D508 Safari/600.1.4
Javascript version 1.5
Monitor
Resolution : 768 x 1024
Color Depth : 32 bits
I can do a search in a different program that identifies some of the information that is hidden.
DeleteThis came up repeatedly at different times over the same period:
DeleteDomain Name (Unknown)
IP Address 79.178.35.# (Bezeq International-Ltd)
ISP Bezeq International-Ltd
Location
Continent : Asia
Country : Israel (Facts)
State/Region : Tel Aviv
City : Tel Aviv-Yafo
Lat/Long : 32.0678, 34.7647 (Map)
Language English (U.S.)
en-us
Operating System Microsoft WinNT
Browser Firefox
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:36.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/36.0
Javascript version 1.5
Monitor
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It came up on three different computers , two macs and one PC, all from Israel
DeleteThere was a six hour difference between here and the entry point. Isreal is six hours ahead of us.
DeleteAll of them were signed in using US English
DeleteMicrosoft web crawler came in, one US Southern University, a US military base and nothing else unusual
DeleteIsrael Pays Students For Pro-Israeli Social Media Propaganda
DeleteThe move was publicised in a statement from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office, the Associated Press reported. Students will receive scholarships to "engage international audiences online" and combat anti-Semitism and calls to boycott Israel, it was alleged.
According to Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, the most recent proposition is being spearheaded by Danny Seaman, who was slammed by the media for writing anti-Muslim messages on Facebook.
Students will be organised into units at each university, with a chief co-ordinator who receives a full scholarship, three desk co-ordinators for language, graphics and research who receive lesser scholarships and students termed “activists” who will receive a “minimal scholarship”, the Independent reported.
The intertubes is a murky place. Hopefully Grey Beard, errr, GayBike, will continue to entertain us with its unique voice.
DeleteIt pleases me immensely that we are irritating the living shit out of them.
DeleteThe whole thing just pisses me off royally.
ReplyDeleteWhy is it that 90% of the conflicts in the world are the goddamned muzzies versus whoever is near by ??
I am going to go watch March Madness.
For my sanity.
bobal Sat Sep 06, 09:21:00 PM EDT
DeleteAfter an eight year law suit with most of my relatives, I've finally found some sanity on line.
The graying city mayor agrees to meet a few hours before he heads to the battlefront. He is haggard after living in exile since June, when the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, swept into his city — al-Sharqat, Iraq, a hour's drive north of Tikrit.
ReplyDeleteAli Dodah al-Jabouri has a reason for fight: Islamic State militants killed his brother and 18 other relatives. But as part of a prominent Sunni Arab tribe, he is joining an unusual alliance with Iraqi Shiite militias backed and armed by Iran.
He was once fought Iran in a long and costly war an officer in Saddam Hussein's army. Now, he is changing his business suit for a military uniform to take part in the assault on Tikrit in the Sunni heartland. Tikrit is well known as the birthplace of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein, but the fighting force is predominantly Shiites. Sunni tribes are a token force.
Jabouri says that the Islamic State is a common enemy, and that Tehran gained his loyalty because Iran has put boots on the ground and offered support while the Americans dithered.
"The Americans gave us nothing," he says. "No one helped us when ISIS came — not American, not Turkey. But Iran helped us, with guns, tanks and rockets."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2015/03/19/394099648/in-tikrit-offensive-shiite-militias-form-unlikely-alliance
Delete" ... But Iran helped us, with guns, tanks and rockets."
:) We gave'em guns, tanks, and rockets.
DeleteAnd, they turned around and gave'em to ISIS. :)
Then, we had to spend six months finding the damned things and blowin' em up.
:)
Ah, hell with it; you'll go stone nuts paying much attention to Iraqi politics, and bitching. :)
A Sunni politician telling the world that the Iranians are "Saving the Day".
DeleteGives lie to Robert Draft Dodger" Peterson's meme that there cannot be any form of Iraqi reconciliation.
Maliki was a Pox. If Abadi tries just a little to do right by the Sunnis, those old tribal chiefs will come around.
DeleteWhen Tikrit, Mosul and about five other cities are all rubble and the graveyards are full to overflowing, then there will be 'reconciliation'.
DeleteTemporarily.
The Kentucky Wildcats have taken the court !!
ReplyDeleteThey are undefeated so far this year.....
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ReplyDeleteWhy Bibi won?
It's the demographics stupid.
Israel is changing and has been changing for some time, religion and changing demographics are the drivers.
Netanyahu can take such actions with political impunity in Israel because Israel is a different country from what it was when Shamir faced defeat in 1992 or even when Netanyahu met his similar defeat in 1999. As Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar pointed out in The National Interest in 2012, Israeli politics has been transformed by two major developments, one religious and the other demographic. Whereas the ultra-Orthodox political parties once constituted a swing faction between dovish and hawkish political camps, now it is firmly aligned with the hawkish view that Israel should never pursue a two-state solution. Surveys show that a growing majority of young people identify with the religious parties, and this trend will increase throughout the population as it ages. Vast majorities of these people—themselves a growing population segment—utterly reject the idea that Israel should give away any of its occupied lands.
In the realm of demographics, Israel received nearly a million immigrants during the 1990s, about 85 percent from the former Soviet Union. These people were largely secular, but like the growing religious contingent projected a strong right-wing political sensibility.A 2009 survey revealed that “in general, the immigrants’ attitudes are less liberal and less tolerant in almost every realm and concerning every topic examined.” Fully 77 percent of former Soviet immigrants in the survey supported policies to encourage Arab emigration from Israel. This population group represents about 20 percent of Israeli voters but is almost monolithic in its devotion to aggressive West Bank policies and opposition to liberal thinking.
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/dont-blame-bibi-demographics-are-wrecking-us-israeli-ties-12446?page=2
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DeleteEvery nation is in a constant state of change, and its politics are constantly reflecting that. And if Israelis want to keep the West Bank, with all the implications that generates in terms of its treatment of Palestinians, then that’s where the nation’s leaders will take it. And if its regional isolationism requires its foreign relations to be based upon pure power equations, then that’s the fate it will have to embrace.
But it isn’t in America’s interest to follow Israel into such a condition of isolation in defense of Israeli policies that are becoming increasingly exposed and which are generating growing condemnation around the world, including among young Americans and even young Jewish Americans.
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Alas, the Koran doesn't change.
Delete:(
Kentucky is extremely tall, fairly agile, but not really not all that much fun to watch, so far.
ReplyDeleteLead Hampton by about 20 points at half time.
As these basketball players get bigger and bigger, and taller and taller, the court seems to get smaller and smaller.
DeleteAs ratass The Universally Recognized EB Blog Liar continues writing and writing, his writing becomes dumber and dumber.
ReplyDeleteBack to the ball game......