Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 6:54pm

Netanyahu Wins and Obama Loses

Kathie Lee Gifford and Matt Lauer Share an Awkward Kiss for the Twizzler Challenge

With nearly all votes counted, Likud appeared to have earned 30 out of parliament’s 120 seats and was in a position to build with relative ease a coalition government with its nationalist, religious and ultra-Orthodox Jewish allies. Such a government would likely put Israel at odds with the international community over settlement construction and its opposition to Palestinian statehood, and continue clashing with the White House over hard-line policies.

The election was widely seen as a referendum on Netanyahu, who has governed the country for the past six years. Recent opinion polls indicated he was in trouble, giving chief rival Isaac Herzog of the opposition Zionist Union a slight lead. Exit polls Tuesday showed the two sides deadlocked but once the actual results came pouring in early Wednesday, Likud soared forward. Zionist Union wound up with just 24 seats.

Go here to read the rest.  This is a stinging defeat for Obama because his political operatives went all out to defeat Netanyahu:

Israel began this week abuzz with debate over whether or not the Obama Administration is trying to interfere in Israel’s upcoming elections, and if so, how deeply the White House is involved in seeking “regime change.”

It is by now no secret that President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu don’t get along, to put it mildly.

So when a new political organization going by the name of V15 (Victory in 2015) sprang up with the sole purpose of bringing Netanyahu’s premiership to an end, it didn’t take long before Israelis were pondering the level of Obama’s association.

Reports that V15 had brought on board Jeremy Bird, national field director for Obama’s 2012 campaign, as its “secret weapon” only fueled the fire.

The Senate is currently investigating Obama’s involvement in the Israeli elections:

The US Senate has launched a bipartisan probe into the White House’s alleged funding of an NGO pushing for the ouster of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a source told Fox News.

According to the source, the US State Department apparently handed taxpayer-funded grants, worth $350,000, to the OneVoice Movement.

OneVoice allegedly forwarded the money to its subsidiary in Israel called Victory 15 (V15), which is committed to ousting Netanyahu due to the PM being an obstacle to the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, brokered by the US.

“It’s confirmed that there is a bipartisan Permanent Subcommittee inquiry into OneVoice’s funding of V15,” the source said.

OneVoice is prohibited from directly targeting Netanyahu by US law and can only do it through its Israeli partner, V15.

According to Fox News, V15 is “itself guided by top operatives of Obama’s White House,” with Jeremy Bird, who was Obama’s deputy national campaign director in 2008 and national field director in 2012, arriving in Israel to direct the group.

The victory of Likud is yet further proof, this time internationally, that Obama tends to be political death for his allies and that the methods that got him elected are not transferable to those who enjoy his support.

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Art Deco
Wednesday, March 18, AD 2015 9:00am

What hits you is the degree to which Obama and Kerry are either (a) clueless about some of the abiding features of inter-state politics in the Near East or (b) motivated by personal pique. It does not matter much whether Israel is governed by a Likud ministry (with allies) or a Labor ministry (with allies) or a grand coalition. The disposition of the Arab publics on the West Bank and Gaza, of the Arab political class in both loci, and of the murderous government of Iran remain pretty much the same. The options for addressing the first two are pretty much the same. The options for addressing the third are altered only by the degree of fortitude in Washington (which is not impressive as we speak).

Paul W Primavera
Paul W Primavera
Wednesday, March 18, AD 2015 11:24am

I personally am overjoyed that Benjamin Netanyahu won if for no other reason than it pi$$es the heck out of Barack Hussein Obama who in turn reminds me more and more of King Herod.

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Wednesday, March 18, AD 2015 3:07pm

it’s not over though “they bring a knife we bring a gun” or something to that effect. There will be lot more effort against Israel, against Netanyahu and for Iran and other islamic states.

Foxfier
Admin
Wednesday, March 18, AD 2015 6:23pm

I am startled how nasty the Dems have been about Israel of late– and how open the hostility to observant Jews has become.
Wonder if it’s creeping anybody else out.

William P. Walsh
William P. Walsh
Thursday, March 19, AD 2015 10:25am

There seems a common DNA shared by modern progressives and those of the early Twentieth Century. Yes, it is creepy.

William P. Walsh
William P. Walsh
Friday, March 20, AD 2015 11:30am

I include Hitler’s National Socialists among the mix of early progressives. Many Democrats I know are not fully aware of the extent their party has drifted during the past generation or so. As to the current Administration, I have no idea of what they are trying to accomplish with Iran and view their entire agenda with grave trepidations. It’s as if the government has been taken over by aliens.

Foxfier
Admin
Friday, March 20, AD 2015 11:45am

Drifted, or returned to a prior state?
I’m not especially well grounded in history, but a lot of the stuff I only ever heard about in Liberal Fascism (although once I asked, the information was there) is pretty dang familiar.

Seems like WWII snapped some folks into a different mode, for a while. It’s taken a long time, and some really big destruction of the knowledge of logical reasoning, for “life unworthy of life” to be mainstream. (The mutation of the rule that started as “the longer a discussion continues, the more likely it is that the Nazis will be mentioned” is a symptom of this irrationality.)

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Friday, March 20, AD 2015 12:37pm

Foxfier wrote, “I am startled how nasty the Dems have been about Israel of late…”

Years ago, Robert Redeker, writing in Le Monde, pointed out that post Cold War, the Left has replaced “sovietophilia” with “islamophilia,” and that “Palestinians and the contemporary Muslim masses replace the proletariat in the intellectuals’ imagination” as the pure, ideal alternative to Western capitalism. (Le Monde, 11/21/01). In other words, absolute anti-Zionism is post-colonial contrition coupled with a fetishisation of the “innocent” Palestinians, which, in turn, results from the ideological need to fill the post-Soviet vacuum.

Similarly, Pierre-Andre Taguieff in Le Nouvel Observateur observed that for many “Christian humanitarians, Third-Worldists and Anti-Globalisation activists,” the world is divided between the “cosmopolitan Satan,” the unholy trinity of the United States/Israel/The West on one side and, on the other, the “dominated and the oppressed.” Thus, they recycle the old anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as the rich Jew and the dominating Jew under the “varnish of progressivism.” The Jew is once more the stand-in for capitalism, imperialism, cosmopolitanism, indeed the whole economic order.

Patricia
Patricia
Friday, March 20, AD 2015 1:58pm

Boys floating on some agenda in some political undercurrent gather to drag down men with knowledge of right and wrong.

Taxpayer funded V15 of OneVoice Movement?? This must be an example of how the low/no info voter is used to make noisy ‘stands’ for the way the current flows.
Balancing the budget planks burned. Taxpayers spending it on reinforcing the D’s.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Friday, March 20, AD 2015 2:50pm

The difference in the two is plain as “night and day.”

Netanyahu loves his country. Obama hates us. And, there is a large dose of stupidity in the man and those that he has miscast to run off a cliff what was once the greatest country on the planet.

Art Deco
Friday, March 20, AD 2015 4:03pm

Drifted, or returned to a prior state?

The alt-right is awash in anti-Semitic tropes and obsessions, but I suspect most of the hostility to Israel in the occident arises from the same impulses which lie behind the hostility to law enforcement or the military. Israel is also unapologetic about defending its interests against a political formation which trafficks in grievance. I suspect that accounts for the hostility of political elites and students in much of the 3d world, who fancy that grievance-mongering must always trump.

Foxfier
Admin
Friday, March 20, AD 2015 4:37pm

The who?
A search for the term brings up mostly folks explaining how horrible they are, without many details about who is actually involved.
I know exactly one guy who can be classed as on the right who has anything that might be considered anti-Semitic– he believes that “vast Jewish conspiracy” thing. (Not that all Jews are part of it, but that there is one– I believe he believes they’re working with the Catholic One-World conspiracy, too, but it never came up.)
I know several guys (in person) who can only be classed as on the left who have an actual hostility to observant Jews, and especially to Israel.
The only folks I’ve even heard (in person) that are hostile to Israel that could be on the right are the isolationist libertarians, who are at least coherent. If one really believes that all it takes to be left alone is to hide inside your borders, then Israel defending herself would be a bad thing. Similarly, as you point out, the Victim mongers on the left have reason to hate Israel because there’s no doubt that the Jews were chosen as victims– and they fought, and survived. With some hands (or arms, rather) UP, not “let me come in and do everything for you, you poor little victim” type help.
There might be a generational thing as well, since there was a tradition of the upper classes joining into the whole Jew hate thing because it’s European.

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Friday, March 20, AD 2015 5:28pm

Obama loses also by showing himself no statesman. petty and pitiful

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Friday, March 20, AD 2015 9:47pm

The Left will start loving the Jews again about 5 minutes after the Palestinians have driven the last Isreali Jew into the sea.

William P. Walsh
William P. Walsh
Saturday, March 21, AD 2015 10:56am

Drifted, or returned to a prior state? Good question Foxfier. I suppose if it is the Democrats per se we are evaluating, they have been vacillating back and forth for a long time. The founders had a healthy skepticism in regard to democracy. Is a majority vote ever a substitute for wisdom? Perhaps I’m thinking of the changes apparent during my lifetime. Maybe it’s better to look at the progressive mindset as an ideological consistency. Whether those who consider themselves progressives also may consider themselves Agnostics, Baptists, Catholics, Jews or whatever, the fundamental assumption of the progressive policy is atheism. Indeed many of the more stalwart progressives are assertively atheist. I think the progressive’s adoption of Islamic clients is just another expression of an anti-Western bias. Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is a convincing documentation of the common roots of the Communists, the Nazis, and the dominant faction of the Democratic Party. The people are deemed stupid, a peasantry clinging to God, guns and prejudices, and a herd to be managed by their intellectual betters. The ultimate solution to problems is seen in Government not God and that on a worldwide basis. This notion is viable only in the abstract. When it is applied, it falls apart. Israel faces a clear and present reality. They know that a UN derived top-down solution will expose them to an existential threat. Obama is just an inexperienced, poorly educated and terribly indoctrinated man of straw propped up, it seems, by unseen others. And, I say that in all charity. Netanyahu is better informed, and a mensch who knows where his duty lies. May God prosper the work of his hand.

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