Elliott Abrams wants John Kerry to STFU about Palestine

At a time when many of us are trying to understand the motivation of terrorists, and the relevance of the Israel/Palestine conflict to terrorism (including possibly in California), Secretary of State John Kerry is being trolled on this question by the neoconservative Elliott Abrams. I wish I could say that Abrams, a former Bush aide who is an ardent supporter of Israel (and was convicted of lying to Congress a generation ago), didn’t have influence. But actually he is helping to set the red lines of discussion in Washington. 

Kerry’s first recent offense came in October, when he linked extremist violence to Israeli settlement building. In this appearance at Harvard on October 13, you will see that he went directly from the greatest challenge of our generation being international terrorism, to the need for Palestinian statehood. He began by saying that young people in North Africa, the Middle East and southern Asia need better government or they will be tempted to become suicide bombers.

I think.. the challenge of – violent extremist, religious radical extremism, is the challenge of our generation, of all of us together. And we’re going to have to do a lot more to help countries to help themselves. Now, that became a bad word in the 1980s and ’90s in America – nation building. It’s still a bad word probably in a lot of places.

But I got news for you. If we don’t do a better job of taking our values and our interests and marrying them and engaging with the rest of the world to give greater capacity to international multilateral efforts, it’s going to come back to haunt people. And so I’m very clear about sort of where we are. If you support a two-state – I’ll bet – how many people in this room support a two-state solution in Israel? …

So here’s the deal. What’s happening is that unless we get going, a two-state solution could conceivably be stolen from everybody. And there’s been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years. Now you have this violence because there’s a frustration that is growing, and a frustration among Israelis who don’t see any movement. So I look at that and I say if that did explode – and I pray and hope it won’t and I think there are options to prevent that – but we would inevitably be – at some point we’re going to have to be engaged in working through those kinds of difficulties. So better to try to find the ways to deal with it before that happens than later.

The occupation of Palestine as a grievance fostering international terrorism is a verboten idea for Israel supporters; and Elliott Abrams promptly landed on Kerry, writing two days later at the Council on Foreign Relations site that the comments were “morally obtuse and factually wrong” and that Kerry was blaming the victims. The idea that settlement growth is endangering the alleged two-state solution is

a false claim and he should know it. If that is not what Kerry meant, he should be far more careful when he speaks about such an explosive topic–and at such an explosive moment…

[T]he false linkage to settlements is of a piece with the Obama administration’s continuing obsession with that subject–despite all the evidence. It’s remarkable that the Secretary of State, who has spent so much time with Israelis and Palestinians and has visited Jerusalem repeatedly, has not bothered to learn the basic facts. He is instead parroting Palestinian propaganda..

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu slammed the remarks, saying there had been no massive increase in settlements, and the State Department walked back Kerry’s comments a bit, and so did the White House.

Then came the November 13 slaughter in Paris, with 129 victims of orchestrated suicide attacks; and on November 17, Kerry spoke to the US embassy to France and distinguished between those attacks and the January attacks in Paris.

There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo [in January], and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration. It was to assault all sense of nationhood and nation-state and rule of law and decency, dignity, and just put fear into the community and say, “Here we are.” And for what? What’s the platform? What’s the grievance? That we’re not who they are? They kill people because of who they are and they kill people because of what they believe. And it’s indiscriminate. They kill Shia. They kill Yezidis. They kill Christians. They kill Druze. They kill Ismaili. They kill anybody who isn’t them and doesn’t pledge to be that. And they carry with them the greatest public display of misogyny that I’ve ever seen, not to mention a false claim regarding Islam. It has nothing to do with Islam; it has everything to do with criminality, with terror, with abuse, with psychopathism – I mean, you name it.

Five days ago, Elliott Abrams wrote a piece called “Unspeakable Kerry” in the Weekly Standard, accusing John Kerry of anti-Semitism for his “unforgivable” comments on the Charlie Hebdo killings. He pointed out that a coordinated attack that January day killed four at a kosher supermarket.

The more shocking message he delivered was that the November killings in Paris are more terrible than those of January. Why? Because the earlier killings, of cartoonists and Jews, were .  .  . were what? First he said the previous attacks “had a legitimacy in terms of” and then stopped himself. Even Kerry realized that what he was about to say was indefensible: that they had a legitimacy in terms of the beliefs of the attackers, who were offended after all by nasty cartoons of Muhammad. And as to the Jews, well, perhaps the attackers were offended by the mere existence of Jews, or perhaps in Kerry’s misguided view they were deeply moved by the real or imagined plight of Palestinians.

Ali Gharib at Lobelog seized on this point, and brought up the motivation of Amedy Coulibaly, the 32-year-old Frenchman who killed four hostages at the kosher supermarket before he was killed by police:

I was struck by Abrams’s line that “perhaps in Kerry’s misguided view [the attackers] were deeply moved by the real or imagined plight of Palestinians.” One doesn’t need to look to Kerry’s view at all in this case: the assailants were very clear. Coulibaly had called into a French television station and told them so: “[H]e explained also why he did this: to defend oppressed Muslims, he said, notably in Palestine,” a journalist at the television station recounted. “And finally he explained that he’d chosen the kosher store “because he was targeting Jews.” The logic there is terribly anti-Semitic and reprehensible to its core, but that was indeed the logic. To entirely ignore how the gunmen themselves described the attacks in order to make nasty imputations about a politician with whom he disagrees on a reasonable rhetorical point, even if many of us might find that point incorrect, is misguided to say the least.

Gharib points out that Abrams painted Chuck Hagel as an anti-Semite just three years back, comments that helped to damage the future and former Defense Secretary.

One other point. In this latest piece, Elliott Abrams says that ISIS is Islam:

[Kerry] repeated the ludicrous line that what ISIS is doing “has nothing to do with Islam.” We are dealing with a group that calls itself the Islamic State and recruits Sunnis from Muslim communities across the world. The group then imposes its version of sharia on territory it conquers. Its every statement and its entire raison d’être are permeated with its view of what true Islam requires.

This comment can be flipped on its head and applied to Israel: It calls itself the Jewish state and recruits Jews from around the world. In fact, Abrams has said that Jews must stand apart from the society they live in except when they are in Israel: “Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live.” And meantime Israel has theocratic tendencies and it massacres and persecutes Palestinians in the name of the Jewish people.

Below is my photo of the notorious Ofer Prison in the occupied territories, from Highway 443 on the way to the Tel Aviv airport. To visitors from all over the world, Israel puts its flag with the Jewish star atop a facility famous for the detention of Palestinian protesters. Is this really what Jews want to be known for? Shouldn’t American Jews be pushing for Israel to become a secular society?

Ofer prison by night
Ofer prison by night
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The killings in January of the Jews at the kosher market are not substantially different from the killings in Paris a month ago, except that somehow because Jews = Israel is considered a kosher equation but Parisians = French policy in the Middle East is treif. I say that both are treif and Kerry’s white washing of the killings at the kosher market are wrong. (okay white washing is not right, because he didn’t quite say that, he kind of said it, so he kinda white washed instead of really white washing.) But this idea that killing Jews in Paris is kosher but killing Parisians out at the cafes is wrong, is wrong.

Kerry,s latest sin.

“WASHINGTON – In a speech harshly critical of Israel, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned on Saturday that current trends in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are leading to a one-state reality.

Addressing the Saban Forum in Washington, D.C., Kerry also warned of the Palestinian Authority’s collapse and called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to prove that his support for the two-state solution isn’t just a slogan but a part of Israeli policy.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.690205

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.690205

No pay wall on this article and nietanyahu,s rebuff is also available at the same link.

To those who deny that neoconservative influence exists as a major force within the democratic party(in particular the donor class) should ask themselves why the WH and the State department feel compelled to back down in the face of attacks from this guy yet someone like Cheney is an open target.

Cheney doesn’t represent clan/tribal interests in the same way that Abrams does. Cheney is an idiot and a warmonger, but he believes in the American empire. He attempts to speak on behalf of the nation.

Abrams doesn’t believe in the American empire in the same sense. He pragmatically supports it, but only because he sees that as beneficial to his favorite state, Israel. He doesn’t care as much whether it hurts or helps America, except to the extent that America will be able to carry out its hegemonic role in the Middle East to further cement Israel’s position.

Why is Abrams being taken seriously, even having been disastrously wrong on every major foreign policy issue in the last two decades? Money and power, basically. It’s why Obama is sycophantic to someone like Jeff Goldberg, who has the ears of the machers in the Zionist-Jewish community, who in turn have the purse strings to decide candidates.

It’s not just the democratic party, look at how the Singer/Adelson types make supposed mainstream candidates like Rubio, Cruz and Bush dance in circles. People who say we shouldn’t talk about this because it invokes stereotypes about Jews, I say, we’ve tried that approach. It was part of the reason why there was no real opposition to Iraq.

It’s why the Iran deal wasn’t killed, because this issue was being talked about much more openly(which led to hysteric attacks about “anti-Semitism” if you remember). These things matter. We have to be open about the fact that American policy in the Middle East is to a large extent driven by clannish/tribal interests rather than a dispassionate approach.

This recent grovelling is yet another item on a long list of evidence to support that.

In a cited link in the article the father of the Californian killer says that his son was obsessed with Israel so the father tells his son; “nobody wants the Jews… In 2 years there will be no Israel”.
It is amazing to what extent these people got carried away with Israel – no less than a historic-level phenomenon. And this soothing prediction about the fate of Israel while in reality just so many Islamic countries, including the father`s origin (Pakistan, if I remember right), are in tatters.
I don`t think, given what is at stake here, that there is any rational explanation for this. Especially at this time where the Israel case and the so called “Palestinian plight” is in respect infinitesimal in magnitude compared to what goes on in the Muslim world and in Arabia. It defies any logical reasoning and in some peculiar sense it actually magnifies the Jewish/Israel sage – a very small country that is attributed such a global centrality or seen so important by many (not just Muslims but also European detractors of Israel) is not something of the ordinary.
It will only be with hindsight that the Israel phenomenon will be understood – depending of course also on how matters will evolve. But the most fascinating question here is; Can small Israel, given the looming demise of Europe, the actual collapse of the Islamic world and the close relations it has with many ”big guys” of the world become what the ancient Hebraic prophets predicted for it? If so then something truly big, almost metaphysical, is taking place right in front of our eyes!

I wish they had the intelligence to realize that people are sick of the word “anti-semitism” which has been misused, and abused, to shut criticism, and make those criticizing feel intimidated.
People with half a brain know what anti-semitism is really like, and it is time American leaders like John Kerry showed these zionist minions that he is not intimidated, nor will be stop being honest about Israel’s massive failures. When will the State Department every speak up for John Kerry, and say accusing him of anti-semitism is the most ridiculous thing coming from a so called professional journalist/writer? If the zionists in the US want to feign outrage whenever someone criticized Israel’s numerous crimes, let them, it is all part of their attempts to make people STFU.