JIM KAVANAGH—No slouch in that regard, Obama was first American President to give bunker-buster bombs to Israel—secretly, precisely because he had publicly said Israel had to curtail settlement construction in exchange for such gifts and didn’t want it to be known that he was capitulating. He was also the first American President to demand that “Palestinians must recognize that Israel will be a Jewish state”—a new, gratuitous, and excessive demand, insisted upon by Netanyahu.
ISRAELI EXCEPTIONALISM
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JOHN WALSH—It is no exaggeration to say that the Singapore Summit is the biggest step toward peace on the Korean Peninsula since President Dwight Eisenhower lived up to his 1952 campaign promise to “go to Korea” and end Truman’s deeply unpopular war, which had claimed millions of Korean lives, 1 million Chinese lives and tens of thousands of American ones. Ike ended that genocidal war, which had slaughtered 20% of the population of North Korea primarily due to bombing and chemical weapons. An armistice was negotiated quickly and so the killing stopped, but a formal treaty of peace proved politically impossible. (Ike, the peacemaker, was criticized by the media for being inarticulate and stupid and for spending too much time on the golf course. And he had a mistress. Sound familiar? But he brought peace.)
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MSNBC resident russophobe and warmonger Rachel Maddow tears up on camera over plight of migrant children
9 minutes readP. GREANVILLE—Since Trump came to power, Maddow has led the choir in seeking his toppling, using, as do all Democrats, the spurious Russiagate scandal as the battering ram. Maddow is obviously capable of shedding tears for Latin babies caught in the insane anti-migrant policies of the US government (which Trump has exacerbated but not created, Obama deported a huge number on his watch) but pays little regard to children in Gaza, or Libya or Syria, where US criminal interventions rage on with no sign of letup. Not to mention that a nuclear war between the superpowers would cause a helluva lot more suffering than she’s already supposedly decrying
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MOON OF ALABAMA—The Syrian government accused the U.S. of having attacked the building. One U.S. source claims to CNN that the Israeli air-force attacked the site. I doubt that this is true. The U.S. has previously attacked Syrian government aligned forces in the area. It obviously continues to use ISIS to disrupt Syrian army operations. But as the U.S. needs Iraq it can not admit that it hit Iraqi forces. That would practically guarantee that the incoming Iraqi government would tell it to leave. It might have asked Israel to provide a cover for the strike.
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GARY LEUPP—The president in his insight appointed his son-in-law Jared Kushner Senior as Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor, it being understood that “if he can’t bring peace to the Middle East, nobody can.” A daunting task for a 37-year-old Orthodox Jew who, at the NYT put it in February 2017, “has no experience in government or international affairs. His up-close exposure to the Arab world amounts to little more than trips to a handful of Persian Gulf countries and a star-studded jaunt to Jordan.