In an address to the Middle East Institute, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs William J. Burns on Tuesday said that the Obama administration does not "accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements."
"We consider the Israeli offer to restrain settlement activity to be a potentially important step, but it obviously falls short of the continuing Roadmap obligation for a full settlement freeze," he said.
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- Why Obama’s gotten nowhere with Netanyahu
- Defied by Netanyahu again, Obama expresses… appreciation!?
- US has no problem with Israel pumping money into… hands of West Bank extremists
- Is this ‘natural growth’? American immigrants flood Israeli settlements, backed by the Israeli government
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The predominant product you get from the Obama administration is lip service, with no viable action. This is true no matter what subject you look at, Obama is an empty suit. Compare what happened in Honduras with the inability to pronounce the coup activity against Zelaya a coup and therefore halt money to the coup regime, the process of attrition in regard to his office even though he is holed up in the Brazilian embassy – same process different subject. What it all boils down to is this –
REALITY
“Obama is an empty suit.”
Or a certain kind of cookie?
Where, here’s how that cookie has been crumbling:
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts11122009.html
Well, Obama’s all but lost the gay rights lobby, and the anti-war lobby, and he’s fasttracked to lose the support of anyone who’s for serious health care reform. Does he really think he can take another term in the White House with AIPAC, Pharma, Aetna and Haliburton campaign contributions alone? He’s not Republican. Someone should remind him, maybe, so he doesn’t completely embarass himself in 2012.
Sorry super tangent here.
But I believe this video is a must see.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zZhVekDq5Y&feature=player_embedded
Don’t apologize. Actually thanks for sharing that. Some things are worth breaching in as tangents.
The State Dept has been backing away from Hillary’s Bibi-love gaffe, but this is a direct repudiation.
I’m really starting to wonder about the Obama administration – who’s in charge? Does everyone get to run around making their own policy decisions and overturning others? And who the hell approved that takeover of the Shi’ite mosques?
potsherd, you have good questions; I’m wondering too. Is Obama an empty suit, merely good at reading well-measured hired words read off his teleprompter? He’s on cpan now reading off his speech for the Ft Hood memorial service–now, he’s reading off a list of commemorative blubs on the fallen, he just described one of the enlisted fallen as “a combat engineer and so a [natural] leader.” I realize this is a tiny sample
but I spent three years in the combat engineers and this is an absurd statement–the combat engineers are known as “peons” in the hierarchy of military values ; it gets a point for being cloying, but otherwise is 100% BS–does he even have time to study
the speeches he gives beforehand? And on the big issues? He sure spends a lot of time on photo ops, speeches, traveling, short meetings, followed by high flying rhetoric where his audio feat seems to be that he carefully registers each coma and semicolon.
OTH, his style really is Shrub conta, the tweed suit versus the cowboy hat. And god knows I’m glad the cowboy is gone.
Obama seems to me , at 10 months into his term ,at core a reactor, not an actor.
In 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected president, he had been criticized harshly by the abolitionists for his failure to take a clear, bold stand against slavery, for acting as a shrewd politician rather than a moral force. He’s very cautious, unlike Shub.
The abolitionist Phillips wrote after Lincoln was elected that for the first time in the nation’s history “the slave has chosen a President of the United States.” Lincoln, he said, was not an abolitionist, but he in some way “consents to represent an antislavery position.” He had the potential of a pawn who could be queened if the American people gave him the power.
Obama, like Lincoln, tends to look first at his political fortunes instead of making his decisions on moral grounds. Winding towards the end of his first year in office,
it makes me wonder what might be that canon that first fired at Ft Sumpter to allow
Obama to fill his empty suit with his higher nature?
Is it me or does Obama get more photo time in People Magazine than any other president in our contemporary history?
Hes like the celebrity president, made in Hollywood. I mean they even got pictures of him running around shirtless on the beach.
We got conned…
I’ve dwelled on the issue of pragmatism before and I use a spectrum(till I come up with something better). First you need a concept of ludecy, which is the ability to know and play the rules of the game- in this case the game of politics. If you don’t understand the game and are willing to play it you lose. Simple. The spectrum:
- game players: all that counts is the game, if you survive and gain power, you’re doing right. A bit like economic fundamentalism.
- weak pragmatism: you do have valuable aims but you’re so involved in political survival and caution you’re only pursuing them half heartedly, and you regret it.
- strong pragmatism: you know the rules, take them in account, but bloodymindedly pursue things that matter.
- principled behaviour: principles trump rules. Occasionally this will be successful. Usually you end up on the outside of the game.
Obama looks like a weak pragmatist to me, not a game fundamentalist. He did stick his neck out in the I/P issue, aligning himself with the Kadima camp, but without the necessary bloodymindedness.
“There is an old American proverb: Put your money where your mouth is”
“The insecure position of Jews, insecure within themselves, insecure among peple(sic), would make it above all comprehensible that they consider themselves to be allowed to own only what they hold in their hands or between their teeth,
Hmmm. Food for thought. Or cunnilingus?
A ‘potentially important step’? Talk about function creep. Or just a creep full stop…
Even a full settlement freeze is not enough. The existing settlements need to be removed, or at least given no support or protection by the Israeli government.
The Obama administration won’t put its money where its mouth is until people like Phil and his friends are willing to follow the money and to start raising the alarm about the Zionist theft of America.
The Neocons are coming back one by one.
If you follow the money to say, for example, Goldman Sachs, what can you do about it? Who will listen to you? Somebody in government at any level? I don’t see that happening. What to do?
Its true… we face a huge uphill battle.
But lets look at the few victories we have managed to achieve.
I have to say, thanks to work from Phil and other Jews who are critical of Israel, the media is starting to finally budge in the direction of openly criticizing American-Israeli foreign policy.
Can you imagine some of the things we are seeing today just 2 years ago?
We have to stay optimistic, and eventually when the tide turns, refocus this energy on other things.
Because lets face it… there is no way Israel can get away with this much longer. I’m honestly more concerned with what happens post-I/P conflict.
Burns is a cunning Zionist to his last bone. I remember Burns (100% Jewish) and Dennis Ross (50% Jewish) assuring those 300 holimen who marched on Washington DC not long ago – to make sure that Congress would not allow Islamic Iran to become the second nuclear power after Israel.
Jewish Conference on Islamic Iran
http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/jewish-conference-on-islamic-iran/
This is how it’s done:
Only a fool would trust their promises.
Interesting, that’s almost verbatim from what was happening in 1991 – 10 billion in loan guarantees to finance russian jews moving to Israel as long as they didn’t move to settlements. I asked the American consul in Jerusalem what would happen if they took the 10 and settled the immigrants on settlements anyway, would the US ask for the money back? He got red in the face and stumbled and mumbled and hemmed and hawed and avoided my question.
Burns: “We consider the Israeli offer to restrain settlement activity to be a potentially important step, but it obviously falls short of the continuing Roadmap obligation for a full settlement freeze.”
Indeed. But in the end, a settlement is illegal no matter how many colonists it houses. The land must be returned. This also raises the question: If the world (the U.S. included) cannot even force Israel to stop expanding West Bank settlements, then how are they going to be able to get Israel to withdraw completely from the West Bank?
No one expects that they will. This is the reason that sensible people are abandoning the pipedream of a Palestinian state and turning to the single state.
Put your money where your mouth is: America is pissing away it’s money in the middle east and south asia on wars straight out of Orwell’s 1984. From surges and “awakening councils” in Iraq, to funding the Pakistani assaults on Swat and Whateverstan: all the desires and ephemera of neocon wet dreams are being funded with billions of dollars that should’ve stayed in America.
The long article below details how General Dayton is wasting millions creating “New Men” in the West Bank [mercenaries from Jordan or wherever paid to kill Hamas]. Then, after we’ve fractured Palestinian society with these paid thugs, the Jewish Estate can turn around and claim “oy gevalt there’s no one to negotiate with who can represent all the fractured Palestinians – you know those arabs just can’t get along with one another!”. Abbas is jumping ship because he’s had enough of being the designated quisling that he is.
http://conflictsforum.org/2009/%e2%80%98businessmen-posing-as-revolutionaries%e2%80%99-general-dayton-and-the-%e2%80%9cnew-palestinian-breed%e2%80%9d/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email
Must-read link, cogit!
The long article asserts that Dayton’s scheme at root is to protect Israel’s security (from a possible/probable rise in Muslim power) when US Troops start leaving Iraq en masse–
by promising the primarily Jordan-sourced Palestinian “New Men” (trained by US same as puppet Iraq men are–at the same place in fact) that their collaboration with Israel-US is a way to ultimately lead to a Palestine state. The problem is Palestinians are ever more aware that the matrix being constructed would in turn allow only
for a fake Palestinian state at best still controlled top to bottom by Israel.
What I was not aware of is the extent of the purge of Fatah men – of Palestinian Palestinians – from the force. And the exclusion of educated men – this is downright sinister.
That this force is intended to overthrow any Palestinian government that gets uppity can’t be doubted. And Lo! an uppity independent Palestinian state is beginning to arise.
Here http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spip/spip.php?article1170 is a link Phil posted to a significant speech by Mustapha Barghouti. Maybe it could be discussed here, instead of the circus tent.
Alright. You want a serious discussion.
I agree 100% with Barghouti. Unless some other party steps in with a genuine interest at being a third party mediator (off hand, I could see that maybe being Europe, but I’m not going to put money on it. There are other parties who could but I don’t believe they have the courage to do so) there is nothing left for the Palestinians to do but make a unilateral stand against the Israeli push to strip them of their sovereignty, rights, property and dignity. There is no negotiating with a nation that can break any rule, any rule whatsoever, without consequence.
I think on some level, in the long term, Obama actually did humanity a favor by teaching us that relying upon the better nature and the good intentions of the United States is just as much folly as chasing a rainbow to find the pot of gold at its end.
Yes, I think Obama cluelessly broke it while he was trying to wind it up, and now it’s irrevocably dead. Not that you would know this from his administration’s remarks as they labor upon the corpse of Humpty Dumpty. But the world now knows that Obama has rendered himself irrelevant.
But now it really becomes a question as to where will matters go next, as it now seems they will finally be going somewhere. And despite the consensus here, it would seem that the Fayyad plan, the unilateral state, has more fire under it at the moment.
And here is where I start to wonder about the Daytonistas, where they fit into this picture. Where are their loyalties? Will they be the instruments of a coup against the unilateral state? As a foreign element, it’s all too likely to see them turning on the Fatah militants. Then what? A sudden epiphany on the part of the Palestinians that maybe their disunity is only serving the enemy? A coalition of Fatah and Hamas?
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